book review - soulcruzer

I finished Richard Cavendish’s The Black Arts this week.

Not in the heroic readerly sense of having sat down and consumed it cleanly from first page to last, pencil in hand, scholar’s lamp burning into the night. I have been reading it on and off for a few months. Picking it up, putting it down, returning to it when the mood came back round. Some books ask for that kind of reading. They don’t want to be finished quickly. They want to become part of the weather for a while.

My copy is the 50th anniversary edition. I bought it after seeing Cavendish turn up in Mitch Horowitz’s Daydream Believer: Unlocking the Ultimate Power of the Mind. Horowitz quotes him early, in a passage about the Cabalists and the Gnostics trying to answer the old religious questions: evil, suffering, mercy, the infinite God and the finite world.

That was enough.

Some books arrive because another book opens the door. This was one of those. I was already wanting to increase my occult knowledge. No theatrical hunger for a shelf full of grimoires and an air of candlelit importance. The occult keeps appearing in the territories I already work in: narrative, belief, imagination, trance, symbol, transformation, and the strange plasticity of the self. Cavendish looked like the right kind of guide for that moment. A historian, not an evangelist. Interested, informed, steady. Close enough to take the material seriously. Distant enough not to demand that I join anything.

The Field, Surveyed

The Black Arts is a survey. That’s its strength and its limitation.

Cavendish moves across the field rather than burrowing permanently into one chamber. The occult worldview, names and numbers, the Cabala, alchemy, astrology, ritual magic, witchcraft, demonology, devil worship, spells, charms, necromancy. He gives you the architecture, the correspondences, and the old symbolic machinery. He doesn’t try to initiate you. He maps.

For what I needed, that was perfect.

I read the opening chapters most intently. Chapter 1, “The World of the Black Magician,” sets out the worldview: the magician standing inside a cosmos where visible things are threaded with invisible correspondences. Chapter 2, “Names and Numbers,” goes straight into one of the oldest intuitions of magical thought: that names are not labels pasted onto reality after the fact. Names carry force. Numbers carry structure. Language and quantity become ways of touching the hidden order of things.

Chapter 3, “The Cabala and the Names of Power,” had my full attention.

That isn’t surprising. The Cabala sits exactly where my interests tend to gather: language, cosmology, psychology, symbol, power, divine names, letters as living forces. It treats text as more than text. Letters become ontological furniture. Names become operations. The world is not merely described by language. It is, in some sense, articulated by it.

That lands differently now.

The old magical intuition that words participate in reality no longer belongs only to temples, grimoires, and prayer. Type a sentence into a box and an image appears. Type another and code runs. Type another and a voice speaks back. The prompt is the brushstroke. Text has become technically generative as well as spiritually and psychologically generative.

Cavendish wasn’t writing for that world.

He helps explain why it feels ancient.

The Stone and the Elixir

I paid particular attention to Chapter 4, “The Stone and the Elixir.”

Alchemy has always had a different pull for me. It refuses to stay in one category. It is chemistry, and it is not chemistry. It is a spiritual practice and it is not reducible to spiritual metaphor. It is metallurgy, medicine, cosmology, theatre, psychology, and obsession. The stone and the elixir are both material dreams and imaginal necessities.

This is where Cavendish’s historian’s approach works well. He doesn’t try to turn alchemy into a tidy self-help metaphor. He lets it remain strange. The apparatus is there: sulphur, mercury, salt, metals, colours, furnaces, vessels, stages, transmutation. The psychic charge comes through because the historical material is allowed to keep its density.

Jung is unavoidable here, though not as a way of explaining alchemy away. That is the lazy move. Jung saw in alchemy a symbolic record of the psyche trying to perceive its own transformations. The alchemist thought he was working on matter. He was also working on himself. The furnace was outside and inside. The vessel was outside and inside. The blackening, whitening, reddening, dissolution, conjunction, death, and gold were not simply chemical fantasies. They were images of psychic process.

Hillman complicates this further, which is why I keep returning to him. The mythic imagination doesn’t treat these images as coded messages waiting to be translated into psychological prose. It lets the image have its own life. The stone is not “really” the integrated self. The elixir is not “really” personal growth. The image is not a disguise for an idea. The image is the event.

Better to let the symbols do their work.

The Chapters I Skimmed

I skimmed the chapters on astrology, ritual magic, and the worship of the Devil.

Astrology interests me as a symbolic grammar of time and temperament, but it isn’t where my attention wanted to linger in this reading. Ritual magic interests me more, especially the apparatus of circle, triangle, name, command, protection, and imagination, but I have been working that thread elsewhere. Devil worship, or the Christian demonological imagination around it, felt more historically useful than personally magnetic.

This is the pleasure of a survey. The reader moves through according to their own heat map. Cavendish lays out the territory. The attention catches where it catches.

Mine caught on names, numbers, Cabala, alchemy, symbolic systems, and the question underneath all of them:

What is the mind doing when it makes a magical world?

Belief as a Tool

Like Cavendish, I don’t feel the need to pass judgement over the material.

Judgement is often the least interesting move available. The better question is not “Do I believe this?” but “What does this belief make possible?”

That is the chaos magician in me speaking.

Belief is a tool.

This principle has become one of the most useful bridges between my occult interests and my NLP background. NLP, at its best, treats belief as structure rather than doctrine. A belief is not only a proposition about reality. It is an operating instruction. It shapes attention, possibility, posture, memory, emotion, and behaviour. Change the belief, and the world does not necessarily change in some crude external way. Instead, the field of available action changes. The person changes. The perceived world changes with them.

Chaos magick says something adjacent, with more smoke and sharper edges. Belief can be adopted, intensified, performed, exhausted, or discarded. The magician works with belief rather than kneeling permanently before it.

Read through this lens, Cavendish becomes something else. Across the book, the West appears as a long sequence of symbolic technologies: divine names, planetary hours, talismans, numbers, metals, spirits, circles, images, rites, words of power. These are not random curiosities. They are ways human beings have organised attention and desire in order to meet the invisible pressures of life.

Fear. Hope. Death. Sex. Power. Suffering. Fate. Luck. Illness. Love. God. The future.

The occult is one of the ways the mind speaks when ordinary language is too thin.

The Western Mind Dreaming Itself

What interests me most is how these forms of occult thought manifest in the cultural identity of the West.

The West likes to tell a story about itself as rational, secular, progressive, and disenchanted. Then it keeps producing astrology columns, tarot decks, magical orders, conspiracy cosmologies, prosperity metaphysics, ritual revivals, angel books, demonologies, occult novels, superhero mythologies, and self-help systems built around intention, visualisation, and the creative power of thought.

The enchantment didn’t disappear. It changed costume.

Cavendish’s book is useful because it shows some of the older costumes. The magician, the Cabalist, the alchemist, the astrologer, the witch, the necromancer, the demonologist. Some of these figures are historical. Some are polemical inventions. Some are cultural projections. All of them belong to the Western imagination.

Bring Jung into the room, and the occult starts to look like a symbolic archive of psychic process. Bring Hillman in, and it becomes even richer: a theatre of images through which the soul thinks, rather than a set of errors waiting to be corrected by modern psychology. The gods, demons, metals, planets, angels, stones, elixirs, numbers, and names are not dead beliefs. They are imaginal forms. The mind working to understand itself.

The cultural mind. The myth-making mind. The frightened and desiring mind that can’t bear a flat world and so keeps discovering depth, even when it has officially declared depth unavailable.

A Historian With a Lamp

Cavendish’s value is not that he settles the occult.

Nobody does. The occult is partly made of what refuses settlement.

His value is that he stands at the doorway with a lamp. He shows the rooms. He names the furniture. He gives enough history to keep the reader from floating away into pure fantasy, and enough sympathy to keep the material from being flattened into foolishness.

The book is dated. Of course it is. The Christian framing is obvious in places, especially around witchcraft and devil worship. Some categories feel compressed. Some historical claims need companion reading. Ronald Hutton for witchcraft history. Frances Yates for Renaissance hermeticism. Hanegraaff or Faivre for Western esotericism as a proper academic field. And 1967 is inside the prose, unavoidably.

None of that makes it the wrong place to start. The architecture is still standing. The lamp still works.

The 50th anniversary edition sits on my shelf now, next to Horowitz, next to Hillman, next to the others that arrived because a different book sent them. What stays with me most is the feeling that Cavendish isn’t really writing about a world that has passed. He’s writing about a layer of the mind that the modern West spent three centuries trying to cover over. The grimoire and the language model are asking the same question.

What happens when you say the name?

Source Notes

Mitch Horowitz, Daydream Believer: Unlocking the Ultimate Power of the Mind.

Richard Cavendish, The Black Arts, 50th anniversary edition.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989)

Ask a room full of people if they’ve ever wanted to write a book, and most hands go up. It’s one of those universal fantasies — like running a restaurant or owning a vineyard. The image is appealing: the writer at the desk, the manuscript growing, the solitary genius wrestling meaning out of silence. Nobody fantasises about the blank page that won’t fill. Nobody pictures the years of work that might never be read.

Annie Dillard is not interested in the fantasy. The Writing Life is a short, strange book — more extended essay than memoir, more meditation than manual — and its apparent aim is to tell the truth about what writing actually costs. She does not want you to romanticise it. She wants you to see the cabin for what it is: a place of confinement, of daily struggle, of a life that looks from the outside like very little happening at all.

The irony, and it’s one Dillard may or may not be aware of, is that the picture she paints is deeply seductive. Not despite the difficulty but because of it. The solitary cabin by the water. The days given entirely to reading and writing. The refusal of ordinary life in service of something larger. Tell me that doesn’t sound like a fantasy. Tell me that wouldn’t sell.

This is the central paradox of the book: the more honestly she describes the writing life, the more appealing it becomes to those of us who already want it.

What she gets right, and gets right deeply, is that wanting to be a writer and wanting to write are two completely different things. The first is about identity. The hat, as she says. The second is about the actual work — the daily encounter with the sentence, the word, the impossible gap between the idea in your head and the thing on the page.

She tells an anecdote about a well-known writer asked by a student whether they could be a writer. The writer pauses, then says: “Do you like sentences?” It sounds like a joke. It isn’t. It’s the whole question compressed into four words.

Writers, Dillard argues, are formed by what they read. Poets like poetry. Novelists like novels. They dedicate themselves to the form that attracts them, study it in the people who have done it best, and learn the craft from the inside out. Hemingway studied Hamsun and Turgenev. Thoreau loved Homer. Faulkner acknowledged his debt to Sherwood Anderson and Joyce. The great ones didn’t arrive fully formed — they were shaped by what they loved and returned to it obsessively. The young writer who reads nothing except their own work, who admires nothing except their own voice has confused the role for the practice.

Jack London’s formulation is the clearest she offers: every writer needs technique, experience, and a philosophical position. The first two are teachable, acquirable things you can work toward. The third is harder. It requires you to actually know what you think — not about writing, but about being alive. Most people who romanticise the writing life are missing all three. But especially the third.

I came to this book as someone who would not easily describe himself as a writer. A thinker, yes. Someone who uses writing to communicate what he thinks. But not someone who agonizes over sentences — not in prose, anyway. In poetry, it’s different: the line is the thing, and you can spend as long as it takes to find the right word because the word is what you’re actually making. But in prose I’m following an idea somewhere, and the language serves the movement rather than being the movement itself.

So Dillard’s sentence-obsession sits slightly outside my experience. I understand it. I admire it. But I don’t share it in the way she seems to require. And yet I kept reading, because the book is doing something else underneath its surface argument — something I recognise from my own practice, even if her version looks nothing like mine.

She includes a quote from Nietzsche: “When my creative energy flowed most freely, my muscular activity was always greatest.” He walked for seven or eight hours at a stretch through the hills. He sometimes danced. The body in motion, the mind unleashed.

That landed. Not as a new idea but as confirmation of something I already know in my bones. My best thinking happens on a walk. Not at a desk, not staring at a screen, but in motion, talking out loud, following the thread wherever it goes. Even this essay began not as writing but as conversation — answers spoken into a microphone, ideas arriving in the saying of them rather than the typing of them. The wisdom walk is not a break from the work. It is the work.

This is where I’d gently push back on Dillard’s version of the writing life. She locates the work in the sealed-off space. The cabin. The room with the view boarded up so you can’t be distracted by the beauty outside. There is something admirable in that level of commitment. There is also something that doesn’t account for how many writers, thinkers, and philosophers have done their best work in motion, in dialogue, in the porous exchange with the world rather than in retreat from it.

Emerson walked. Nietzsche walked. Wordsworth composed entire poems on his feet, on the paths around Grasmere. The peripatetic tradition is as old as philosophy itself. Dillard knows this — she quotes Nietzsche directly — but she doesn’t follow it through to its implication. The extraordinary state she asks about, “how do you prepare yourself, all alone, to enter an extraordinary state on an ordinary morning?” — there are more ways in than the desk and the closed door.

Teilhard de Chardin, whom she quotes at the very end of the book, puts it better than I can: “Purity does not lie in separation from but in deeper penetration into the universe.” That is the version of the writing life that makes sense to me. Not the retreat to the cabin but the going further in. Not less world but more world, met with more attention, digested on long walks, and talked through out loud when the ideas need air.

The fantasy I carry is not the cabin in the woods, though there are days when that sounds fine. It’s something more like this: enough time and enough freedom to spend the days reading and writing and walking, with nowhere to be and nothing to sell. Not writing for an audience or a market, but writing as Dillard describes it at its best — because you must, the way Galahad went towards the Grail, knowing that for those who can live it, this alone is life.

A day spent in the silent struggle while life passes you by might not look like much from the outside. But a life spent reading and writing and thinking out loud on long walks? That will be a good life.

Dillard probably agrees with that. The argument between us is only about what the room looks like.

A Lamp at the Doorway