Book Review: Advanced Magick for Beginners

In light of my last post I am reviewing a book I recently finished reading...

Advanced Magick for Beginners by Alan Chapman

This book is somewhat of a rant about magick mixed with some excellent exercises and a few really worthy pieces of information. In some ways I feel like perhaps this book was written in pieces, because it almost feels like he repeats some of the faults he decries earlier in the book.

Basically, he starts out talking about Magick. All about it. What is it, who uses it, the culture of Magick. He makes some interesting points here. One of them is the point that inspired my last post, he talks about how people really haven't been pushing into the far edges of magick anymore, and they also tend to regurgitate magickal knowledge in  books. This is an excellent point. He kind of undercuts it later in the book but reiterating some of those bits of magickal knowledge. He has a lot on sigilization he could have just said "Go read Peter Carroll!"

Where the book starts to shine is later on when he discusses invoking gods and working with them with some of the most straighforward instructions I have ever read. I really recommend this portion of the book. He also goes on to discuss what some people call your "Holy Guardian Angel" or "Future Magickal Self." This is an interesting concept where you can learn to work with a higher magickal self of yourself to do works you would not be able to do under normal circumstances.

All-in-all, it's not a genius book but it has some really good parts and at 166 pages it's worth the read.

3/5 Wands