Books like The Underworld Initiation — picked by fans

There is a visceral feeling sense we all possess that speaks in the ancient language of emotion and instinct.

This primal sense weaves meaning with our embodied world, flowing beneath the busy worded substrate of the mind. It is a language of the heart, the universal mother tongue of nature and the soul. Once I learned to appreciate this felt sense, my walks in nature became journeys of discovery. 

Buhner shows how to become fluent in this forgotten language, opening a door to the inner secrets of the natural world. One of the great teachers of the heart’s language is the plant world: the plants in your garden, by the roadside, and along the forest trail can all become mentors that help you learn the subtleties of instinctual communication with nature. 

I have often considered what spirituality meant for my ancestors of long ago, when lifeways were aligned with local subsistence patterns through gathering and hunting.

For inspiration, I turn to the Bushman (San) cultures of southern Africa, who hold one of the most ancient living spiritual traditions on the planet; this book offers a window into their enduring cosmovision, woven close to the fabric of the Earth.

The Bushman story of First and Second Creation immediately caught my attention as a primary teaching about unity consciousness (First Creation) and the mind’s tendency to trick itself into believing its own projections (Second Creation) – an important reminder to step back into the moment and not take ourselves too seriously in the midst of our spiritual life journey.

Because much of my work is about bridging connections with nature into the modern experience, as a reader, I appreciate Nabhan’s insightful reflections of participation in cultures close to the Earth; his stories show how deeply people can live into balanced connections with our local environments.

Simple, everyday activities like gathering firewood for grandma and grandpa can become openings into deeper relationships with our local ecosystems, if we gift ourselves some time to explore and become curious about the world around us along the way.

That possibility gives me inspiration for my own family’s nature connection journey and helps me think creatively when I work with clients who want to deepen their sense of place.

Reading this book in my teen years changed my life.

Instinctually, I had always known there was a deeper layer of reality beyond the veneer of modern experience, waiting for me to connect. Tom’s meditations were part of a larger awakening process that opened my eyes to the spiritual world.

These true stories inspired me to get outside and make real connections with animals and ecosystems of my place, and with the spirit-that-moves-through-all-things. Through this practice, I found renewed hope and motivation and began building my own experiential understanding of nature’s mysteries.

Ultimately, this book sent me on a journey that continues to this day, thirty years later! Thank you, Tom.

Lobsang Rampa was a Tibetan Monk that took over the body of an Englishman in order to accomplish his destiny in teaching Westeners the Wisdom of the Ancients.

I found this book at 18 years old while searching for the meaning of life, needing to know that what I experienced and could do was not an overactive imagination. As I read the book, a great calmness settled into my soul. All the information related was confirmation that I knew all these concepts already. Now I had the terminology to go with it. It was such an exciting discovery.

If you wish to learn ancient knowledge in a nutshell, this is the book to start with.

This book is based on the series of articles that Dion Fortune (1890-1946) originally published in The Inner Light Magazine in 1939-1940. It was published in a book format with an added contribution by Gareth Knight (1930-2022), who continued and made more widely known Fortune’s work and ideas.

Fortune is mostly associated with championing the “Western Esoteric Tradition,” and she was critical of those Westerners practicing foreign spiritual systems, such as Indian Yoga, arguing that cultures should not mix. Nevertheless, this particular series of essays on “the circuit of force" displays her deep familiarity with Yoga, in particular as it concerns subjects such as the kuṇḍalinī and prāṇa. “I have tried both methods,” wrote she somewhat surprisingly, “and in my opinion, the Eastern method is incomparably the more efficacious.”

Knight’s comments benefit the book, as is usual, because they are based on his deeply personal experience with the subject matter… show more.

This pick is for the history nerds like me. This book provides, in a single volume over ten selections from foundational tarot books from the last two hundred years. This book is definitely for the enthusiast who wants to go back to the study texts that are out of print or to go back to the beginning of occult Tarot. This book includes ‘old school’ fortunetelling techniques not seen in a long time. I love some old fashion fortunetelling techniques. This is also a recently published book, so you can show off a fresh hot big book on Instagram to make the followers go “ooooo.” 

An atmospheric biography—a book you can curl up with—by British occultist King (not to be confused with the more ‘literary establishment’ Francis King, a respected gay novelist; our man sometimes called himself Francis X King to distinguish between them). King was a quietly eccentric character who had been traumatized by his experiences in the Korean War, and at one stage sold ice cream on Bournemouth beach. Steeped in the Golden Dawn tradition, his other books include works on alchemy, Western esotericism, tantra, and more, and he was a friend of Crowley’s friend Gerald Yorke, who also wrote on those subjects. I’ve always had a soft spot for their charmingly old-school, gentlemanly style of bygone British occult scholarship.

This is an unreliable but very readable book from occult writer Kenneth Grant. I used to find the title mysterious; it really means images and oracular worlds, and I remember seeing great heaps of this book remaindered in the 1980s, little knowing it would go on to fetch £300 a copy. Fortunately, Fulgur have since produced an affordable edition.

Grant’s depiction of Spare is heavily influenced by his reading of popular fiction writers like Arthur Machen, Sax Rohmer, and H.P. Lovecraft, and he gives us Spare, the black magician seduced in childhood by an elderly witch, who launches “an amphibious owl with the wings of a bat” into a conflict between magical groups. This is really the book that started the “Spare Mythos.”

Mya Spalter is a New York witch who learned the ropes by way of her ancestors as well as the Enchantments occult shop. Learning from both guides and NYC witches, I love the way this book shows how Spalter’s magic was conjured by personal connections to survival and home.

Gaining knowledge on both our magic and ancestral practices can be a difficult journey for queer folks, navigating the ultra-conservative laws of mainstream spirituality. However, magic is not conservative nor heterosexual—it is universal and a tool we can all access. This book showed me the divine connections between Wiccan history, self-care, and surviving as a queer person of Color in America.