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Ani.Mystic: Encounters with a Living Cosmos
Gordon White’s sequel to his acclaimed Star.Ships is a book of adventure and encounter, of optimism and healing. Encounters with a Living Cosmos is, explicitly, a magician’s book, a dreaming book, one which aims to fundamentally shift the discourse within the western magical tradition. Gordon explains, ‘the sole preoccupation of this book is exploring and uncovering animism as a dangerous category of European thought…’
Gordon begins by giving the standard definition of animism as ‘the belief that the world is made up of persons, only some of whom are humans,’ before taking us with him ‘to its farthest epistemological hinterlands.’ In dialogue with teachers of Indigenous knowledge, spirits, angels, star people, saints, plants, and beast masters and mothers, Gordon weaves a new story of trans-species collaboration and custodianship.
To get to that point, he interrogates and dismantles a series of materialist-naturalism, the notion of invasive species, the nature-culture divide and the binaries of domestic vs wild and forest vs garden, and the concept of ‘animism’ itself. We are then shown what it means to think with Deep Time, with Country and in Ceremony. Solutions and best practice are drawn from dialogue with the cultures he partakes in and the disciplines of magic and permaculture.
Our journey begins in an airport hotel bar in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, and the story unfolds through encounters with forest spirits, shark gods and cities of the dead. From stone altars in Micronesia, ancestral Maori pâ, and Aboriginal songlines to lecturing on UFOs at the Guggenheim in New York and avenging angels in London, the journey gathers momentum. We experience songlines, fire storms and rain dragons in Tasmania, and are finally brought into ceremony with Ayahuasca in Peru.
Gordon is transformed through his encounters with a living cosmos, and in the Telling. In walking in the magician’s footsteps, the candour of his heartbreaks and triumphs, we are invited to come into right relation ourselves, toward the cosmic aim of mutual flourishing.
Gordon begins by giving the standard definition of animism as ‘the belief that the world is made up of persons, only some of whom are humans,’ before taking us with him ‘to its farthest epistemological hinterlands.’ In dialogue with teachers of Indigenous knowledge, spirits, angels, star people, saints, plants, and beast masters and mothers, Gordon weaves a new story of trans-species collaboration and custodianship.
To get to that point, he interrogates and dismantles a series of materialist-naturalism, the notion of invasive species, the nature-culture divide and the binaries of domestic vs wild and forest vs garden, and the concept of ‘animism’ itself. We are then shown what it means to think with Deep Time, with Country and in Ceremony. Solutions and best practice are drawn from dialogue with the cultures he partakes in and the disciplines of magic and permaculture.
Our journey begins in an airport hotel bar in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, and the story unfolds through encounters with forest spirits, shark gods and cities of the dead. From stone altars in Micronesia, ancestral Maori pâ, and Aboriginal songlines to lecturing on UFOs at the Guggenheim in New York and avenging angels in London, the journey gathers momentum. We experience songlines, fire storms and rain dragons in Tasmania, and are finally brought into ceremony with Ayahuasca in Peru.
Gordon is transformed through his encounters with a living cosmos, and in the Telling. In walking in the magician’s footsteps, the candour of his heartbreaks and triumphs, we are invited to come into right relation ourselves, toward the cosmic aim of mutual flourishing.
- GenresPhilosophyOccult
343 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 28, 2022
43 people are currently reading
62 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 29, 2023
While there are good ideas, stories and anecdotes to be found here, there are several books I would recommend for similar content before this one. I did not care for White's delivery. The vibe felt off. It didn't help that the text was riddled with typos and grammatical errors. This is not to say someone else might better vibe with the text, but it wasn't the one for me.
May 20, 2025
This book has had similar impacts on my magical and ecological restoration projects, in a similar way that Robin Artisson's Letters From The Devil's Forest, had. It reoriented me to deeper truths I know, from both my paranormal and experiences in the natural world - but of which, I forget, as I operate within a world where the main accepted perception is a materialist-naturalist one. I also forget, because these are just not topics I can usually go very deeply with, within my social circles. I thought this book was incredibly well researched, funny, and full of delightful personal anecdotes. I loved how Gordon, thinks about animism, ceremony, place, and colonization. I've been very inspired by Robin Wall Kimmerer's books, and have really been veering towards animism for a long time, and this book tied up a lot of loose ends and understanding voids, for me.
If you care to keep reading, this is a bit more about how this book synchronized with things I'm focusing on in my life:
A funny thing about my stumbling across this book, is that I had wanted to buy some nicer occult books from Miskatonic, I wasn't looking for anything in particular. However, I've been engaging in custodianship on public lands behind my house, having planted over 250 trees and shrubs within the last year. I did not plan to get this far with this project...I didn't exactly plan anything, I just researched a bit and started doing. It was a reaction to seeing how out of balance the western world is, and how out of balance I felt. The desire was to just do something that would be positive, but it was also wholly selfish, because I loved doing it. A goal I had was to attract amphibians - specifically frogs. In the 8 yrs I had lived at this house, I had never seen or heard one, in the area. It was odd, behind the house was mixed wetlands. I thought I'd have to bring tadpoles myself, but to my surprise, a green frog showed up on its own accord, by mid-late summer. I had done a ceremony to attract the frogs, and I had left out buckets to spawn mosquitos. I had just thought the process would take years.. it took months. I recalled this experience as I read on pg 206 "Doing the good you know can be miraculous if your knowledge of the good includes miracles. Sioux elder and author, Vine Deloria Jr, once told members of the society for ecological restoration 'that traditional Indian knowledge says that brings never become extinct. They go away, but they have the power to come back. I predicted that, in their restorations, if they were preparing the area right, the plants they thought were extinct would begin coming back unaided after 4-5 yrs. Plants would come back first, then animals and then the birds.' During the conference break, members who were further along in their restoration projects came up to Deloria and told him that is exactly what they observed".
Indeed, despite using the Merlin app regularly last year, we didn't record too many different types of birds - but this year, an astounding cornucopia of birds I have never seen, heard or knew about, have shown up around our property. Yes, these things could be written off as that they were here and avoided my notice, or other such things, but I have been regularly gardening for 8 yrs! What changed last year was my intention and shifting priorities.
As the multiplying of goodness goes, this project has drawn in positive things in my husband and my life, that I could not have foreseen. Suddenly we were getting to know our neighbors, people were offering to help, we got involved with a city canopy advocacy group.
This book was just absolutely the perfect thing for me to read at this place in my life.
If you care to keep reading, this is a bit more about how this book synchronized with things I'm focusing on in my life:
A funny thing about my stumbling across this book, is that I had wanted to buy some nicer occult books from Miskatonic, I wasn't looking for anything in particular. However, I've been engaging in custodianship on public lands behind my house, having planted over 250 trees and shrubs within the last year. I did not plan to get this far with this project...I didn't exactly plan anything, I just researched a bit and started doing. It was a reaction to seeing how out of balance the western world is, and how out of balance I felt. The desire was to just do something that would be positive, but it was also wholly selfish, because I loved doing it. A goal I had was to attract amphibians - specifically frogs. In the 8 yrs I had lived at this house, I had never seen or heard one, in the area. It was odd, behind the house was mixed wetlands. I thought I'd have to bring tadpoles myself, but to my surprise, a green frog showed up on its own accord, by mid-late summer. I had done a ceremony to attract the frogs, and I had left out buckets to spawn mosquitos. I had just thought the process would take years.. it took months. I recalled this experience as I read on pg 206 "Doing the good you know can be miraculous if your knowledge of the good includes miracles. Sioux elder and author, Vine Deloria Jr, once told members of the society for ecological restoration 'that traditional Indian knowledge says that brings never become extinct. They go away, but they have the power to come back. I predicted that, in their restorations, if they were preparing the area right, the plants they thought were extinct would begin coming back unaided after 4-5 yrs. Plants would come back first, then animals and then the birds.' During the conference break, members who were further along in their restoration projects came up to Deloria and told him that is exactly what they observed".
Indeed, despite using the Merlin app regularly last year, we didn't record too many different types of birds - but this year, an astounding cornucopia of birds I have never seen, heard or knew about, have shown up around our property. Yes, these things could be written off as that they were here and avoided my notice, or other such things, but I have been regularly gardening for 8 yrs! What changed last year was my intention and shifting priorities.
As the multiplying of goodness goes, this project has drawn in positive things in my husband and my life, that I could not have foreseen. Suddenly we were getting to know our neighbors, people were offering to help, we got involved with a city canopy advocacy group.
This book was just absolutely the perfect thing for me to read at this place in my life.
August 29, 2022
This didn't have the immediate impact, for me, that star.ships had. But like that book, I'll be picking this up again, and again, and making notes and reading through the books in his 'not a bibliography'. More than worth it.
December 2, 2022
Beautiful. For as dense and specific as the language is in this work, it is entirely refreshing and very much worth the effort to accommodate such nuance. I'll read this again, first for the sake of such clarity of animist thought-practice, and next for the sense of community it affords.
October 26, 2022
Good
An interesting take on things. Worth reading with the field by mctaggart. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
An interesting take on things. Worth reading with the field by mctaggart. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews