5 Books for Setting Up a Hermetic Paradigm for Occult Beginners

What Are These 5 Essentials?

I want to start with one of the most classic corners of most practicing occultists’ libraries.

This old big classic: “Modern Magic: 12 Lessons in the High Magical Arts” by Donald Michael Kraig. This was one of those key ideas, those classic concepts. Many of us still remember Donald—spirit rest his soul—who was an incredible contributor to the magical path. He wrote not only this classic but also gave us “Modern Sex Magic” and “Modern Tantra,” as well as several other pieces. His lucid writing has always been something that was dear to many of us that knew him.

In this piece—especially if you’ve not had a lot of experience with some of the magical ideas from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—you will find an extensive process of guidance through that. If you’re looking at getting the foundations of magic down, this is definitely the book. It explores what he defines as outer order and inner order, but really expresses how to move from elemental magic—how to make the tools, how to charge and consecrate the tools—various magical skills on the path of the practice. Moving on the way to conjuration and conjuration rituals and what those would be like, developing psychic practices. This is a foundation tool that I think every serious ceremonial practitioner should have at least read or browsed through or owned inside of their magical practice.

It’s one of those things that’s going to give you a very nice foundation in general occultism and occult thinking that will benefit you all the way forward. It gives you a nice introduction to things like the Kabbalah, the Tree of Life, what to do specifically in magic, grim journals, all those essentials—creating and forging sigils. I remember having a discussion at one point with Don about some of this in one of the earlier editions, and I was talking to him about the NLP principles. I was very happy to see that when the remake was out in this final edition, he did add a section on NLP and NLP magic specifically at the end.

So definitely one of my old classic recommendations. It should be in each of our cornerstones—the respect for the man, for what he has contributed to our arts. Definitely something that you should have if you don’t already.

Moving on to that, there are two other essentials when you’re starting to build up this internal magical correspondence and psychology around this. One of the ones that supports this theory, and goes a little bit deeper, would be the classic “The Tree of Life” by Israel Regardie. “The Tree of Life” is one of the best treatises in the area of the theory and practice of high magic, from traditional philosophy to theology, and theology to the Kabbalistic correspondence—the purposes of the circle, to the nature of astral light, man in the microcosm.

This is a deep dive for the serious practitioner. He also explores—and this is the only place where I would have some caveat because you’ve already heard my sharing of the work of the Abramelin—because he does speak about the work of the Abramelin the Mage. But some of the principles that he highlights there, I think, are still universal and can still be practiced. From discussion to ideas of scrying to astral projection, this is again one of those solid pieces that’s really going to fulfill your magical practice.

The next book in our collection is then also by Israel Regardie, which is the classic “The Garden of Pomegranates.” When you’re starting to set up in your active imagination the entire journey of the Tree of Life and you want to build in the correspondences—especially of the pathways—it is important to have a good understanding. Now, this is the classic one: scrying on the Tree of Life. So there are two editions of that, I believe, in the modern times. Inside of this, he gives a massive detailed correspondence list of the meaning of every single pathway, every single sphere, of the Hebrew letters, the tarot cards.

He also gives complete path workings around each of those pieces that you can then explore in yourself to start opening up those ideas. My recommendation, however, is still that you do not follow those things bit by bit. This is the result of someone else’s active imagination work on those systems, but that you simply use the core ideas and correspondences to it in order to build that up. But if you’re looking to install and configure the Tree of Life in your own nervous system, this is definitely one of those classics. Especially if you combine this with “Kabbalah, Qliphoth and Goetic Magic” from my grimoire series, you will have a nice kind of pathway system for both parts of the tree. You need to set that up for yourself.

Moving on with that, one of the other core ideas that we need to configure inside our nervous systems as magicians is naturally the planets. As far as magical planetary systems go, there has not been a better one for me than the classic “Planetary Magic” by Denning and Phillips. This is one of those core concepts. They are classics, they’re brilliant writers, and this is really a core idea. The book opens up with a massive, massive detailed correspondence list of every possible association to the planets—from the meanings to the gods and archetypes that are utilized, sigils, angels, themes—all kinds of things. Working through the music with such a massive list of possible correspondences that you can use in working with it.

Then that is followed by perfect detailed rituals to move from just attuning to the planet, to invoking the planet, to creating elixirs around the planet, to working with specific deities inside of it. This is a very core, powerful idea for opening yourself up to planetary magic.

And then I’d like to combine these with a pretty new one. Steven Ashe—someone who either has been a guest of the show, depending on when you’re watching this, or will be a guest of the show—is an incredible author. A newcomer very much to the scene in publication or Hermetic arts, but that takes absolutely nothing away from his genius as an artist and as an explorer of the unconscious mind.

I’ve read a lot of really good books around planetary magic and the ideas of these planetary archetypes, but few give such a massive depth of detail in terms of exploring and really understanding the planetary archetypes. So if you’re trying to really refine these archetypes and understand how they work, he gives a massive, obvious journey of Hermetic philosophy in the opening components of this. He explores things from the Emerald Tablet to the Corpus Hermeticum and the entire principles of Hermeticism. But then finally enters—more than half of the book—deep dive explorations into each of the planetary archetypes, how they fit in, what their role is, how they correlate to each other, what their symbolisms are, what they mean.

Alchemical exploration at the same time, deep alchemical arts and paintings to help us understand that process at a deeper level. These together, I think, are really essential when you want to establish that Hermetic paradigm and understand how to utilize that system to your true advantage. So you can set up this inner infrastructure—if you will—of psychic correspondences.