For years, the only way to get access to these poems was to buy some badly formatted, poorly-thought-out Kindle books on Amazon. A bunch of my friends online got together and goaded and cajoled me into doing something better. So, here it is.
What will you do with it once you have it? Well, my hope is that you’ll take it to your local print shop, and have it printed out, preferably in a spiral binding so that it will lie flat. You’ll read the poems, illustrate them, sigilize them, and otherwise adorn them with your thoughts and visions as you read. You’ll cross words out, and write in your own, where you think they serve your purposes better. You’ll mark up the text, and the margins, with your own thoughts and ideas. You’ll read them aloud, both to yourself and to others, in gatherings small and large, and communicate about the ideas in them to others.
Of course, most of you won’t do this. You’ll buy the PDF, it’ll sit in your hard drive for a few years, and then your laptop or tablet will die, and you’ll lose the file. Or maybe, you’ll find it during the migration to your new computer, and get it printed this time, and it’ll languish until you move house when you’ll give it to a buddy… and she’ll make magic out of it. But at the same time, you’ll have supported this work, in retrospect when it mattered, and after all the hardest work is done. And you’ll find, as many others have, that this collection is worth bringing into the world: it’s a unique thing, quite unlike any other book of magic you’ve ever worked with, and it will give you insights that you can find nowhere else.
But most of all, what this book will do, is give you a sense of time’s flavor and savor, the meaning of the flow of time. You’ll make magic from these poems, in a way that few other sources can.
In five ‘books’, you get:
- The Neo-Orphic Hymns to the Planets (including never-before published poems for Uranus, Neptune and Pluto)
- The Hymns to the Behenian Stars
- The Hymns to the Decans of the Zodiac
- The Hymns to the Mansions of the Moon
- The Hymns to the Core Constellations
Festae, my collection of hymns to the Greco-Roman gods and their feast days scattered through the year, will come out in a similar format later this year.
