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God Is a Man of W...
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Book cover for Dionysos: Exciter to Frenzy
Hekate's history as a unifier of opposing principles, her involvement in the Orphic Mysteries and her role of consort to Dionysos-Sabazios as the goddess Bendis[iv] (or Brimo).
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Neil Gaiman
“One day every soldier in the empire has to shower in the blood of your sacrificial bull. The next they don't even remember your birthday.”
Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Susanna Clarke
“Houses, like people, are apt to become rather eccentric if left too much on their own; this house was the architectural equivalent of an old gentleman in a worn dressing-gown and torn slippers, who got up and went to bed at odd times of day, and who kept up a continual conversation with friends no one else could see.”
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Clive Barker
“To dream in isolation can be properly splendid to be sure; but to dream in company seems to me infinitely preferable.”
Clive Barker, Weave World

Steven Pressfield
“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.”
Steven Pressfield

Robert Anton Wilson
“The hoodlum-occultist is “sociopathic” enough to, see through the conventional charade, the social mythology of his species. “They’re all sheep,” he thinks. “Marks. Suckers. Waiting to be fleeced.” He has enough contact with some more-or-less genuine occult tradition to know a few of the gimmicks by which “social consciousness,” normally conditioned consciousness, can be suspended. He is thus able to utilize mental brutality in place of the simple physical brutality of the ordinary hooligan.

He is quite powerless against those who realize that he is actually a stupid liar.

He is stupid because spending your life terrorizing and exploiting your inferiors is a dumb and boring existence for anyone with more than five billion brain cells. Can you imagine Beethoven ignoring the heavenly choirs his right lobe could hear just to pound on the wall and annoy the neighbors? Gödel pushing aside his sublime mathematics to go out and cheat at cards? Van Gogh deserting his easel to scrawl nasty caricatures in the men’s toilet? Mental evil is always the stupidest evil because the mind itself is not a weapon but a potential paradise.

Every kind of malice is a stupidity, but occult malice is stupidest of all. To the extent that the mindwarper is not 100 percent charlatan through-and-through (and most of them are), to the extent that he has picked up some real occult lore somewhere, his use of it for malicious purposes is like using Shakespeare’s sonnets for toilet tissue or picking up a Picasso miniature to drive nails. Everybody who has advanced beyond the barbarian stage of evolution can see how pre-human such acts are, except the person doing them.

Genuine occult initiation confers “the philosopher’s stone,” “the gold of the wise” and “the elixir of life,” all of which are metaphors for the capacity to greet life with the bravery and love and gusto that it deserves. By throwing this away to indulge in spite, malice and the small pleasure of bullying the credulous, the mindwarper proves himself a fool and a dolt.

And the psychic terrorist, besides being a jerk, is always a liar and a fraud. Healing is easier (and more fun) than cursing, to begin with, and cursing usually backfires or misfires. The mindwarper doesn’t want you to know that. He wants you to think he’s omnipotent.”
Robert Anton Wilson

155002 Magick and Occult Books — 188 members — last activity May 28, 2026 05:47AM
Just a place for occultists and magick practitioners can share their books, and discuss topics of that nature. Run by an alternative culture blog and ...more
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If you love horror literature, movies, and culture, you're in the right place. Whether it's vampires, werewolves, zombies, serial killers, plagues, or ...more
1865 SciFi and Fantasy Book Club — 43394 members — last activity 43 minutes ago
Hi there! SFFBC is a welcoming place for readers to share their love of speculative fiction through group reads, buddy reads, challenges, ...more
16548 Beyond Reality — 2050 members — last activity Sep 16, 2026 07:09AM
Welcome to the Beyond Reality SF&F discussion group on GoodReads. In Beyond Reality, each of our members may nominate one SF and one fantasy book per ...more
37633 Classic Horror Lovers — 1527 members — last activity Sep 12, 2025 07:27AM
Do you like your horror on the aged side? This group is for readers who love older/classic horror stories and books. Generally, horror published befor ...more
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