And those who claim they can’t get X spell book to work, I often ask, “Did you bother to perform a Progressive Relaxation ritual prior to performing the spell or working from the spell book?” and usually they answer, “Um, no, I didn’t think I had to”. They didn't THINK they had to. Well when you should know better, why then do you try to bypass one of the most important steps? Impatience. Thus the way these modern spell books are written for the impatient wannabes, most of whom will never be able to work these spell books all because they are impatient wanting to skip ahead of important steps.
Not to defecate all over the Gallery of Magick books (again) but Brand’s books are very light on instructions and he fails to tell you how he came up with his seals, names, or the attributes say for instance, his 72 Angels of Magick book. Where did he get the individual attributes for the Shemhamforash angels? These don’t jive with what I was taught about the Shem angels but all right I’d still like to find out where Brand got his info from.
Some systems like Miracle of the New Avatar Power (NAP) are fairly self-explanatory and this system has a history of working going back to its original publication in 1978 so that’s a “44" year history as of this writing. GoM’s stuff is barely a decade old.
It seems to me during the 1990's we had a slew of occult authors who wanted to indoctrinate you with all manner of
- occult theory
background information
history
links to historical personages
where ritual practices began
who started them
the sacred mysteries
why they’re mysteries
and yadda.
It was information overload and at times it was boorish to read. Today it’s almost the exact opposite to the point modern occult books offer none of that. What you often find today is revisionist history in many books where some authors rewrite history based on conjecture, hyperbole and theory without substantially grounded facts and sadly they don’t seem to care.
And while modern spell books do not need to have full histories and such in them it would be ideal for them to be comprehensive enough to include the bare bones basics to make their spells work such as:
Breathing
Progressive Relaxation
Using the Imagination (i.e. visual, auditory, kinesthetic, & etc)
Then most of these spell books would be ideal but leafing thropugh them they just want you to scan their images with your eyes which sounds more like Chaos Magick unless I'm missing something?