Book of Shadows

Occult Book Reviews

Here are some of my reviews of occult books that I've read. If you're looking for books to begin with, this might give you a place to start, or help you judge the quality of the books you find. I will continue to update this page as I continue to read more books.

Hands-On Chaos Magic by Andrieh Vitimus

You might have noticed that the book I cite the most often is Hands-On Chaos Magic by Andrieh Vitimus, so I thought it was about time I actually wrote a review of the book itself. I feel like I'm finally "done" with it, at least for now.

This book is a how-to magic manual, beginning with the basics of trance, banishings, energy work, and Shadow work, covering sigils and talismans and sympathetic magic, and progressing all the way to invocation, evocation, entity creation, and astral projection. It presents its information in a way that is straightforward and comprehensive.

This book heavily emphasizes experimentation and figuring out what works for you, personally (hence the "hands-on" part of the title). Each chapter of the book contains exercises that you can use to practice and try things out. (i.e. What happens when you take an energy ball and change it so that it's made of earth, air, fire, and water? What does each kind of ball feel like? How are they different? Do they effect the environment in any way? What happens if you leave a talisman with one kind of energetic or emotional "charge" in a space with the opposite energy? etc.) The idea is that, if you practice all the exercises and experiments as you read the book, you will become more and more proficient at magic as you go along. It encourages you to personally try out different methods using trial-and-error and personal taste. I didn't exactly do it that way. I haven't literally done every exercise in the book, but I also think I don't really need to with where I'm at. One of the key elements of chaos magic is practicing based on results, so you do what works for you. This book usually suggests using mantras, but I know mantras don't work for me, so I don't use them.

And that brings me to why I really recommend this book — it is a practical, non-denominational guide to magic. I can't stress how useful that is. Books on magic tend to be either about Wicca (or something based on Wicca), or intensely specific to a particular occult tradition. This one is not. It doesn't even go into long tirades about the general philosophy of chaos magic. Instead, it approaches the practice of magic from the "do what works, screw everything else" direction peculiar to chaos magic, but cuts all the bullshit. That means that there are no ceremonial trappings and correspondences, no long verses, no Wiccanate circle castings or ritual procedures, no particular gods and goddesses, no pages and pages of Hermetic philosophy — just magic, by itself. That makes it really useful, no matter what tradition you plan on following, or whether you just don't know yet! If this book doesn't lay a basic foundation for everything you could possibly know about magic, it'll at least provide you with some good information or a place to start. The techniques presented in this book can be utilized for anything in the occult sphere — spiritual and ritualistic high magic meant to connect you with the divine, down-to-earth and/or secular low magic meant to make your life better, left-hand-leaning or right-hand-leaning magic, magic for any purpose with any intent, simply magic in practice. And, despite everything it covers, it doesn't feel too bloated or too dense!

I don't think this book is perfect, by any means, but I do think it is worth reading if you're interested in magic. To tell the truth, it's refreshing to find any book on magic that isn't based in Wicca, that barely has any component that obviously comes from Wicca. Not that Wiccan magic is bad, but it so completely dominates the general material on magic and on discourse about this topic, that it feels like there isn't anything else! A few years into my own study of magic, I realized that there were a lot of things about Wiccan practice that I really didn't like, that weren't really what I came for. And it took ages to get away from that! If you start learning magic from this book, you'll understand the way magic works without needing a particular ritual framework unless you really want one. There's also the added benefit that this book doesn't require working with any sorts of deities if you don't want to (spirits are treated more like tools to be utilized than anything else).