Recommended Reading for Occultists

In this blog, I'll be talking about books that I have found very useful over the years, because there is simply too much crap out there not worth reading, and, well, we all have only so much time to waste (and money).

First up, I want to write a disclaimer: On some of these posts, there will be links at the bottom referring you to a site where you can purchase these books. If you click on the affiliate links and buy the books, I'll make money; the more books you buy that I recommend, the more money I will make. Some points on this:
(1) I'm not going to recommend any books just to make sales. Why not? Because there are so many good books out there to recommend, that I dont need to pick any lousy ones. More importantly, I have too much self-respect to prostitute myself, even through an alias. Finally, because if I were to promote crap, you'd rapidly lose interest, and rightly so.
(2) If you purchase books by clicking through from here, you'll be rewarding me for providing you with this material. If you go through the seller directly, they get all the cash.
Thats about as direct an honest as I can be.
Having said all that, this blog isnt here as a way for me to make money - I doubt many people will ever see it, let alone purchase the books from an online conglomerate. In fact, I prefer to use libraries and second hand bookstores.

OK, drivel over.

What follows will be a list of the books I like, and have liked, over the years, which directly or indirectly have led to the mindset I have today. Not all of these will be Occult per se, many will be philosophical, scientific or metaphysical in nature. Its a personal list, quite eclectic, but each of these books will contain ideas that I havent seen anywhere else, or they will express common ideas uncommonly well, or they will be useful reference books.

What this isnt going to be is a list of spectacularly, almost erotic leatherbound books to drool over, for that kind of Bibliophilia I have another blog entitled The Wizard's Quill.
It also is not a random list of what I'm reading right now - if you are interested in that, you can visit my reading list.

No: this is a distilled list of the most important books that I have read during my life in terms of my personal metaphysical speculations and curiosity regarding the occult.

To see if this would appeal to you, I should explain my reasons for approaching the occult to begin with: I'm not a satanist, I'm not affiliated with any secret societies, and I'm a scientist by training and by nature. I have a fairly good "bullshit detector", and while this stuff can be fun to read at times, I'm not going to recommend it here, at least not because I'm going to pretend that it works. Largely, I'm a skeptic; however, I'm aware that there is more than meets the eye. I tend to focus on real-world explanations of how the occult works, so, for example, I consider calling up demons to be a way of interacting with the subconscious (right brain) consciousness. Youre not going to find many "how-to wiccan spell books" here, nor anything that begins with "practical...". The occult just ISNT practical. That doesnt mean it doesnt have its uses, but youre not going to find "practical candleburning spells", "practical crystal healing" or "practical(ly insane) magic" books here.

You'll find philosophy, history, science, some occult training programs, and some plain old fun books. These are not in order of preference, but I should be giving them rankings out of 10 in the posts.

Enjoy!