Not a syllabus. The books I’ve actually read and would put in your hands, sorted by where they land in the work. Levels: 🚪 entry · 🔥 core · 🜍 deep. Every title here is one I’ve walked — if it’s on the shelf, I vouch for it.
📖 On the links: buy through my Bookshop — it supports an independent bookstore (and this work) instead of feeding the river to Amazon. (Curated per-section lists are on the way; for now the shop link holds the whole shelf.) The living teachers mostly teach through courses, substacks, and podcasts — where there’s no book, or it’s not on Bookshop, I link the actual doorway instead.
The Worldview — the empirical floor
All neuroscience, on purpose. This is the empirical floor under everything else on the shelf: symbol and system are one because the brain is a prediction engine that builds the world from priors — not woo, just where the current science already stands. Its two companions live in the Deeper Cuts below — Hermeticism is the metaphysical floor, Technomysticism the synthesis of the two. Together they’re the whole worldview.
Anil Seth — Being You: A New Science of Consciousness 🔥 — The cleanest account of the predictive brain: you don’t perceive reality, you build it from priors. The empirical floor under the whole “attention-technology” claim in Foundation I. No woo, and it lands you where the mystics already were.
Lisa Feldman Barrett — How Emotions Are Made 🔥 — The constructionist case one level in: you don’t detect feelings, you construct them. Read it next to Seth and the symbolic systems start looking like instruments for working the construction engine.
Siddharth Ramakrishnan — The Neuroscience of Tarot 🚪 — A neuroscientist doing our exact move on one system (foreword by Mary K. Greer). Proof the bridge is being built in public — and a gentle on-ramp for the science-allergic.
Dr. Tara Swart — The Source: The Secrets of the Universe, the Science of the Brain 🔥 — A neuroscientist’s case that the brain can be deliberately retrained toward what you attend to — the applied, practical end of the predictive-brain argument, and the empirical cousin of every “rewiring” claim on this shelf.
The Grammar I — Archetype (the nouns)
C. G. Jung (with von Franz et al.) — Man and His Symbols 🚪 — The door. Jung wrote it for non-specialists, illustrated, near the end of his life, precisely so you wouldn’t have to start with the Collected Works. Start here. Genuinely.
C. G. Jung — Memories, Dreams, Reflections 🔥 — His own descent, in his own voice. Not theory — the lived account of a man taking the unconscious seriously. The book that makes Jung a person instead of a syllabus.
Robert A. Johnson — Owning Your Own Shadow 🚪 — Tiny, plain, and it’ll rearrange you. The best short intro to shadow there is — the bright-shadow reframe from Foundation II, in about a hundred pages.
Debra Maldonado — Like a Spark From Fire 🔥 — From the founder of the program I trained in (CreativeMind, with Dr. Rob Maldonado). The Jungian persona/shadow architecture and the Vedantic ground that runs under Foundation II — straight from my own teacher.
The Grammar II — Alchemy (the verbs)
Marie-Louise von Franz — Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology 🜍 (not on Bookshop — Amazon) — Jung’s closest collaborator on what the alchemists were actually doing. Where solve et coagula and the nigredo get their full room.
C. G. Jung — Psychology and Alchemy 🜍 — The deep end. The full argument that alchemy is the projected map of the soul. Don’t start here — arrive here.
Jeffrey Raff — Jung and the Alchemical Imagination 🜍 — Where alchemy, Hermeticism, and Jung’s psychology fuse into one practice: active imagination as the opus, the imaginal treated as a real place you can work in. The operative end of the alchemy shelf — and the bridge up to the Deeper Cuts.
The Practices — Tarot
Rachel Pollack — Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom 🔥 — The canonical depth-psychological tarot text. If you own one tarot book, this is it. The majors as the journey, the way Foundation IV frames them.
Sallie Nichols — Tarot and the Archetypal Journey: The Jungian Path from Darkness to Light 🜍 — The majors read straight through the Jungian lens, card by card (the in-print reissue of her classic Jung and Tarot). Dense, rich, exactly our dialect.
Mary K. Greer — Tarot for Your Self 🚪 — The practical workbook — how to actually work with cards rather than just read meanings.
Mariana Louis — Tarot and the Psychology of the Soul: Exploring the Archetypal Mirrors of the Psyche 🔥 — Foundation IV‘s teacher in long form: the archetypal-tarot method as a book — the cards as mirrors of the psyche, read through Jung and synchronicity. The fullest articulation of the frame this whole place reads tarot in. (Her live work: the Archetypal Tarot School, persephonessister.com.)
The Practices — Astrology
My deepest shelf — and the most personal. Heavy on traditional/Hellenistic technique, the Jungian bridge, and the dark feminine, because that’s where my own study actually went.
Demetra George — Asteroid Goddesses 🔥 — The re-emerging feminine mapped into the chart (Ceres, Pallas, Juno, Vesta, and the dark-feminine asteroids). Where the astrology shelf meets the descent goddesses.
Demetra George — Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice, Vol. I — Assessing Planetary Condition 🜍 — The traditional-technique deep end, part one: how to judge whether a planet is strong or struggling. The technical backbone.
Demetra George — Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice, Vol. II — Delineating Planetary Meaning 🜍 — Part two: turning that assessment into actual meaning. Technique becoming interpretation.
Chris Brennan — Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune 🜍 — The definitive modern text on the ancient system — fate, fortune, and the techniques the whole tradition was built on. The reference.
Karen Hamaker-Zondag — Psychological Astrology: A Synthesis of Jungian Psychology and Astrology 🔥 — The Jung↔astrology synthesis named outright — the chart read as a map of the psyche. The bridge book for this project’s astrology half.
Liz Greene — Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil 🔥 — The Jungian-astrology classic on the planet everyone fears: Saturn as teacher, not punisher. Greene at her depth.
Adama Sesay — Black Moon Lilith Rising 🔥 — Lilith in the chart — the dark divine feminine, the exiled wild self, mapped and reclaimed. Ties the chart straight to shadow work.
Amy Herring — Astrology of the Moon 🚪 — The Moon through the signs and houses: the lunar self, the emotional body, the cycle. Pairs with the dark-moon reading practice.
Lisa Wagner — Karmic Astrology 🚪 — The nodes, reincarnation, and the “why” beneath the natal chart — the soul’s path read in the sky.
Ivo Dominguez Jr. — Practical Astrology for Witches and Pagans 🔥 — Astrology you operate — planetary timing for spellwork and ritual. The bridge from reading the chart to working it.
Jim Sher — Astrology as a Spiritual Path: Birth of the New Human 🔥 (not on Bookshop — Amazon) — Astrology framed as a path of consciousness and the “birth of the new human.” The spiritual-developmental read. Indie title, worth tracking down.
Living teachers (Foundation V): Cristina Farella — Eighth House Astrology / The School of Astrological Arcana (cristinafarella.com), and Tenae — Celestial Alchemy. The chorus, at the source.
The Practices — Dreamwork
Robert A. Johnson — Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth 🔥 — The method. Association → amplification → animation → ritual, plus active imagination — the exact four-step in Foundation VI. The practical bible.
Marie-Louise von Franz — The Interpretation of Fairy Tales 🜍 — Not dreams per se, but the masterclass in reading archetypal narrative — the same muscle. Teaches you to amplify.
Living teacher (Foundation VI): Alyssa Polizzi — The Artemisian (theartemisian.com). Her Dreamwork Foundations is the on-ramp.
The Descent & the Deconstruction (the throughline)
For the part of you — and the part of this audience — that came up through a faith and watched it fall apart.
Richard Rohr — Falling Upward 🚪 — The two-halves-of-life frame: the collapse of the first-half structure is not failure, it’s the doorway. Contemplative Christianity meeting individuation. The bridge book for anyone deconstructing.
Carl McColman — The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism: An Essential Guide to Contemplative Spirituality 🔥 — The map of the contemplative-Christian tradition the dark night comes from — the mystics as a living lineage, not a footnote. For the deconstructing reader who suspects the tradition they left had a deeper room they were never shown.
St. John of the Cross — Dark Night of the Soul 🜍 — The 16th-century source of the phrase. The nigredo, four centuries before Jung named it. Where the deconstructing reader’s own vocabulary already lives.
Joseph Campbell — The Hero with a Thousand Faces 🔥 — The monomyth: departure, descent, return. The structural skeleton under the majors, the houses, and the opus.
⸻ THE DEEPER CUTS ⸻ Past the Foundations, into the deep theory and the operative current. Foundations are receptive — how to read the field. The Deeper Cuts are how the field got built (Hermeticism, the metaphysical floor), how it fuses with the machine (Technomysticism, the synthesis), and how you stop reading it and start working it (Chaos Magick, the operative current).
Hermeticism — the metaphysical floor (As Above, So Below)
The correspondence doctrine — the floor every other shelf stands on. The Worldview up top is the empirical floor; this is its metaphysical twin.
Three Initiates (William Walker Atkinson) — The Kybalion: Centenary Edition 🚪 — The book Hana handed me — the one that named the resonance I’d already found on my own. Seven principles, published 1908, and the honest provenance is the proof, not the debunk. Start here. The whole floor is in it.
Erich & Alannah Brown — Modern Hermeticism: A Beginner’s Guide to Ceremonial Magic 🚪 (not on Bookshop — Amazon) — The contemporary on-ramp: two working practitioners laying out Hermetic theory and practice for now, not 1908. The bridge from the Kybalion’s seven principles to a practice you can actually run today.
Heron Michelle — Elemental Witchcraft: A Guide to Living a Magickal Life Through the Elements 🔥 — Part One is literally “Hermetic Foundations” — the correspondence doctrine walked into living practice. My training door into working the elements as above, so below.
Florian Ebeling — The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus 🔥 — The scholarly throughline: how the Hermetic tradition actually traveled from antiquity through the Renaissance to now. Where the myth of Hermes gets its real history (Cornell UP) — the rigorous antidote to making it all up.
Eliphas Lévi — Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual 🜍 — The 19th-century text that lit the fuse on modern Western occultism — Lévi’s Dogme et Rituel, the doctrine and the ritual. The Golden Dawn and nearly everything after drank from this well. Dense, foundational, gloriously a bit mad.
Israel Regardie — The Golden Dawn 🜍 — The complete ceremonial system of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, compiled by the man who broke ranks to preserve it. The operative architecture — grades, rituals, correspondences — that fused Hermeticism, Qabalah, tarot, and astrology into Western magic’s master system. Where the floor becomes a working temple.
Salaman, van Oyen, Wharton & Mahé (trans.) — The Way of Hermes 🜍 — The source itself: a clear modern translation of the Corpus Hermeticum plus the Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius. Everything else on this shelf is commentary on these pages. Arrive here.
Technomysticism — the synthesis (The Machine Is Haunted)
Where the predictive brain, the Hermetic correspondence, and the machine fuse — the digital sacred, the altar with a login.
Erik Davis — TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information 🔥 — The keystone. Davis traces the mystical impulse running under every technology from the telegraph to the net — the machine was always haunted. The book this whole synthesis stands on.
Davezilla — Magical AI Grimoire: A Book of Shadows for Contemporary Chaos 🔥 — Working magick with the machine — AI as familiar, as tool, as collaborator. The grimoire for the altar with a login.
E.E. Warren — Technowitch: Ancient Wisdom, Digital Tools 🔥 — The practitioner’s bridge: old craft, new instruments, no apology for either. Witchcraft that doesn’t pretend the phone isn’t a wand.
Shira Chess — The Unseen Internet: Conjuring the Occult in Digital Discourse 🜍 — The scholarly read on how the occult actually lives online — the digital as a real site of enchantment, not a flattening of it.
Chaos Magick — the operative current (Belief Is a Tool)
Where you stop reading the field and start working it — sigils, gnosis, results, reality tunnels. Belief is a tool; the test is whether it works.
Malaclypse the Younger — Principia Discordia 🚪 (many POD editions — pick one with care) — The sacred joke itself: a religion disguised as a joke disguised as a religion. The founding scripture of Discordianism, and the on-ramp that refuses to take itself seriously (which is the point).
Thumper Forge — The Chaos Apple: Magic & Discordianism for the Postmodern Witch 🚪 — Discordianism with its boots on — chaos magick and the sacred joke, written for witches who’d rather laugh than genuflect.
Peter J. Carroll — Liber Null & Psychonaut 🔥 — The foundational text of the whole current. Carroll stripped magick to its operative core: belief is a tool, results are the test, dogma is dead weight. Where chaos magick starts.
Andrieh Vitimus — Hands-On Chaos Magic 🔥 — Exactly what it says: the workbook. Drills, exercises, the practice rather than the theory. For when you want to do it.
Gordon White — The Chaos Protocols 🔥 — Chaos magick aimed at the actual conditions of late capitalism — money, precarity, getting free. White operates where the esoteric meets the economic.
Robert Anton Wilson — Prometheus Rising 🔥 — The eight-circuit model as a self-reprogramming manual, with exercises. The most operative RAW — guerilla ontology you can actually run.
Robert Anton Wilson — Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati 🔥 — The reality-tunnel made flesh: RAW’s own account of deliberately reprogramming his model and watching the world rearrange. Belief-as-tool, lived.
Robert Anton Wilson — Cosmic Trigger II: Down to Earth 🔥 — The continuation — more autobiography of a mind that refused to settle on one reality tunnel. RAW at his most personal.
Grant Morrison — The Invisibles 🔥 — Chaos magick as comic book — or comic book as sigil. Morrison wrote it as a hypersigil and the practice bled into the writing. The myth in motion.
Peter J. Carroll — This Is Chaos 🔥 — The current brought up to now (Weiser, 2025) — where the tradition takes stock of itself decades in.
Peter J. Carroll — Liber Kaos 🜍 — The systematized sequel: the theory tightened, the magical model made explicit. For when Liber Null leaves you wanting the engineering diagram.
Mark Stavish — Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny 🜍 — The book on what a readership actually is — a group mind, fed and formed by attention. Read this and the word “community” stops being a metaphor.
The Mórrígan & Irish Practice
Lora O’Brien — Irish Witchcraft from an Irish Witch 🔥 — The book from the teacher this section already points to. Lore-accurate Irish witchcraft from inside the living tradition, not the pop-pagan import. If you read one Irish-practice book, this is it. (Use Irish, not “Celtic.”)
Lora O’Brien — the Irish Pagan School (irishpaganschool.com) — The living source for lore-accurate Irish practice and Mórrígan devotion (Foundation I‘s washer-at-the-ford). Her courses and writing over the pop-pagan shelf — accuracy is the whole point.
Courtney Weber — The Morrigan: Celtic Goddess of Magick and Might 🔥 — A working devotional to the Great Queen: myth, lore, and practice for building an actual relationship with Her. The hands-on companion to the lore.
Kindred dark-goddess work (Hellenic, not Irish): Courtney Weber — Hekate: Goddess of Witches 🔥 — Weber on the liminal goddess of the crossroads, the underworld, and the witches — the Greek cousin to the washer-at-the-ford’s dark-threshold power.
Curated, not complete — a living shelf, every title personally walked. If a book changed how you read the world, tell me in the Chat; that’s how the shelf grows. Buy through the Bookshop. Stay feral, folks.