The manuscript for Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy is now off to my publisher. This will be my second published book. No, it’s not the sequel to Arcana. That book, tentatively titled Demiurge, is in process at about seventy thousand words on the first draft. I’m hoping to finish it this year, but we’ll have to see how that goes with the other projects I have in the works.
Heptarchy is a non-fiction guide to working practical magick with the Heptarchia Mystica, the planetary grimoire assembled by Dr. John Dee. It is part of what modern magicians call the Enochian system of magick, but represents a relatively unexplored portion of said system. The entities that it calls upon are Kings and Princes related to the seven ancient planets and days of the week that have particular powers. One of those entities, Prince Befafes, may have been called upon to defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588, which if true would represent one of the few occasions in which grimoire magick accomplished a task that radically altered the course of human history. Imagine if the Spanish had conquered England in the sixteenth century – no British Empire, no Anglican Church, no English-speaking colonies in the Americas, Australia, India, and the list goes on.
The approach I take in the book is, I think, somewhat unusual. Most books use the Golden Dawn system of attributions for the Enochian entities, but that system is synthetic and in a number of cases contradicts the original Dee material. A much smaller number of books address the system from a “Dee Purist” perspective, eschewing the Golden Dawn system and all modern ceremonial forms. The system laid out in Heptarchy is for the most part true to purist methods, but it also includes various ceremonial forms, some original, that I have employed over the years and have found useful. Those portions of the system are marked as optional in the master ritual template, so that both purist and modern magicians can make use of it as they see fit. Also, many books on Enochian magick go into painstaking detail about the symbology of the language and the various implements used in the conjurations, but Heptarchy is instead written as a practical guide that will have you doing the magick right away in pursuit of practical objectives.
I don’t know how long the process will take to get the book to the printers, but I’ll make an announcement here as soon as it’s available for purchase.
Scott Michael Stenwick 