This is the book that made me realize that I was not alone with many of my opinions. For a long time I felt rather alone and undermined on forums and places like that for how I believed things worked when it came to evocation and grimoires. Lisiewski changed all that not just for me but for many magicians of the old arts that have been oppressed for such a long time by modern ceremonial magicians.

It is a book that serves many purposes. First of all it is a guide in traditional grimoire magic and shows how to apply a traditional style to the grimoire Heptameron which is also included in the book. Now you can debate weather or not all the axioms he lays forward are really needed or not but at least it is a serious attempt of creating a sort of standard for working with the grimoires.  It is also explained in a very simple way without any of the cryptic stuff modern new age magicians are so famous for. This is the book I recommend that all new students on grimoire magic reads first of all. Then they can move on to the more complex grimoire translations out there by legends like Stephen Skinner, David Rankine, Joseph Peterson, Donald Tyson and many less known translators and editors.

If you can you really should try to get a hold of the few Journals called Howlings from the pit that he wrote that further describe his style of magic. He expands a lot on his theories regarding grimoire and old school magic in them.

Another thing I love about this book is how he totally bring down the modern new age magicians of today. He does it with undeniable logic and using their own theories against them. He gives both Alister Crowley and the Golden Dawn a well needed wake up call and also reveals some interesting information on what Israel Regardie really thought about the Golden Dawn system that most modern magicians praises to the sky’s today.

That I think is a very important message that this book has. New is not always equal to better. Many people seems to have taken this the wrong way and think he is against all development but that is not the case. He is a strong believer in what is called New thought. Not just Crowleys and Golden Dawns version of it. I personally believe he suspected the same as I have for a long time. That something went wrong with magic during the period of the Golden Dawn and Crowley and that what we have today is a very weak version of magic that you can even question if it actually is magic or if it is not more a way to reach self enlightenment. Modern magic seems to have forgotten what magic really is about and Lisiewski explains this in a very effective way in his book.

It is a very provocative book and I can understand that many people feel hurt by it since it is basically saying that most modern magicians today are not even doing magic. Still I think this is a book that every magician should read since it will challenge you and probably upset most readers. If you can not take that you really have no business doing evocations anyway in my opinion.

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