Review — Angels, Demons & Gods of the New Millennium

Sam's review of Angels, Demons & Gods of the New Millennium.

A 1997 review of Lon Milo DuQuette's Angels, Demons & Gods of the New Millennium (Samuel Weiser). Sam's opening relief is telling: the shelves are crowded with beginners' books, and here at last is one written for readers who already know their Qabalah and their sorcery. What he values is the register — authority earned from practice rather than handed down as received truth, written as though the reader were a guest in DuQuette's house who shares his love of the work and does not need the groundwork rehearsed.

Sam places DuQuette against the great figures of the previous century and notes that the difference is epistemic, not stylistic. He has something of Regardie's manner, but he is writing in the nineties, and nobody could now write with the certainty of those forebears — least of all DuQuette himself. So he writes from successes and failures across many years of ritual, initiation and meditation, keeping what he judges important even where it does not fit the usual reading of tradition. Sam's example is DuQuette's handling of the two senses of the A∴A∴: the historical body of Crowley's students, and the timeless order of initiates said to have guided humanity since the dawn of consciousness. If the latter has included figures like Lao Tzu, the Buddha and Pythagoras, DuQuette asks, how can membership depend on paperwork signed by Crowley and his heirs? He shifts the order onto a plane where any student with genuine aspiration might find themselves inside that chain.

The Qabalah chapter Sam judges more elementary than the rest but dense enough to be useful, praising DuQuette for avoiding formulaic Sephiroth definitions in favour of distilled experience — particularly his compression of the enormous, turgid literature on the Shem ha-Mephorash into a few pages and a fold-out colour chart, which together with the later chapter on working with demons gives a workable if sparse basis for spirit conjuring. The piece Sam finds most significant is the exegesis of the Emerald Tablet read through the doctrine of the Holy Guardian Angel, turning the alchemical process into a route toward knowledge and conversation with the Angel. That, he argues, is exactly the step magical thought needs: classical texts, doctrines and practices read against each other and against what has been learned since. Lacking any formal academy in which to gather and compare such insights, magicians depend on books like this one — and Sam credits DuQuette with moving the field forward.

Originally published at samwebstermage.com →