Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy is Now Available

My new book, Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy, is now available at Amazon. Here’s the official product description:

Dr. John Dee, England’s most famous Renaissance magus, spent seven years working with scryer Edward Kelley in the late sixteenth century. Together the two men established contact with various angels who endeavored to teach them a new spiritual system described as the true art of magick. Dee’s diaries chronicling these communications formed the basis of the Enochian magical system, which has profoundly influenced the development of ritual magick for centuries and is reputed by many to be especially effective.

The Heptarchia Mystica is the only part of the Enochian system that Dee ever managed to assemble into a usable grimoire, but paradoxically it also seems to be the most overlooked portion of his work. Author Scott Michael Stenwick presents this material in a coherent manner suitable for both modern magicians and traditional grimoire practitioners, with an eye towards producing measurable, practical results. The powers of the Heptarchial Kings and Princes are extensive, and yet conjuring and conversing with them is a relatively simple process.

Unlock the secrets of this remarkable grimoire, and employ them to transform your life.

Click here to order your copy today, or click on the menu item at the top of the page to find out more.

My New Book Cover

Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy cover
I guess it’s just the season or something. A few days ago Jason Miller posted the cover of his new financial sorcery book, and then last night Pendraig sent me mine for Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy. So here it is.

I still don’t have a firm date as to when it will become available for purchase, but it’s on its way to the printers so it should be pretty soon now. I’ll post another link as soon as it’s out, so watch this space for more details.

UPDATE: I just checked out RO’s place and he has a new eBook available as well. ‘Tis the season indeed!

CONvergence 2011

This coming weekend is Convergence 2011, the Twin Cities’ largest fantasy and science fiction convention. It runs from Thursday evening through Sunday, and I’ll be mounting a more agressive postering and flyering effort for Arcana and my Augoeides blog this year than I managed to pull off last year. Hopefully I’ll be able to pick up a few sales, and even if I don’t several thousand more people who read science fiction and fantasy should at least be made aware of my novel’s existence.

I’ll be at the convention with copies to sign, so if you see me there don’t hesitate to ask. I haven’t put anything up on BookTour since I’m not sure of the exact times I’ll be out there, but your best bet is probably going to be Friday and Saturday evenings, which are the convention’s biggest nights. I usually loop through ConSuite on a fairly regular basis, so I’m rarely all that hard to find.

Hope to see you there!

Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy

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.

Planetary Magick Presentation at Paganicon

With my new job I’ve been too busy to do any events over the last couple of months, but my next appearance is approaching fast. I will be giving a presentation on planetary magick at Paganicon, a new Pagan convention that is being held at the DoubleTree Park Place hotel in St. Louis Park, Minnesota.

The presentation will be given at 1 PM on Saturday, March 26th in the Courtyard 3 room. You can see the full schedule for the weekend here. I have a lot of good material put together based on my magical working group’s operations involving the traditional Angels, Intelligences, and Spirits of the seven ancient planets, so it should involve more traditional ceremonial magick than one generally sees at Pagan events.

I will also be appearing at 10:30 that same Saturday morning as part of a panel entitled “So You Want To Be A Pagan Author?” with my friend and fellow magick blogger Frater Barrabbas, fellow Pendraig author Veronica Cummer, and a number of other writers. There will likely be an impromptu book signing or two at some point on Saturday as well.

Hope to see you there!

New Website Theme

As you can see I’ve changed the look and feel of this website.

While I liked the Regulus theme that I was using, it was very popular and very recognizable. After running into it on several other sites, particularly anything related to astrology, I decided that I wanted something else. Also, I’ve been wanting to set the site up with three columns rather than two and Regulus just doesn’t do that. The new theme is Coraline, which is still popular but more customizable. It also allows for a three-column display so that I can show more information when readers first arrive at the site.

I slightly prefer Coraline’s sidebar-content-sidebar layout over the content-sidebar-sidebar that I currently have set, but in testing with the former layout I found that the page with my posts seemed to have some sort of problem displaying correctly on Internet Explorer 6 which a lot of people are still using. Look for that change at some point in the future, either once IE6 has been mostly upgraded or when the Coraline folks come up with a fix.

Arcana for Kindle is Now Available

Amazon KindleFor those of you with Kindles and iPads who have been asking for an ebook version of my novel, it finally is available from Amazon.

You can check it out here.

In addition to the ebook being significantly less expensive than the print version, I also submitted some further small edits to Pendraig for the Kindle version that I believe improve the book substantially. So even if you have the print version, you still might want to pick up an electronic copy as well and see how it reads compared to the original.

The only downside is that there’s no way I can sign an ebook.

Arcana Makes The Perfect Gift

Arcana was officially released a year ago, but due to the time it took to get the first printing out the novel was not actually available until the first week of January. As a result, it was not out in time to be purchased as a gift for the holiday season.

This year is different. If you order from Amazon there’s still time to buy a copy for that friend of yours who likes occult fiction and is always looking for something new and interesting – like an occult novel that includes genuine, accurately rendered magical practices.

Better still, buying two copies puts the order threshold over $25 and the shipping is free. Don’t delay – click here to order today!

Next Up: Arcana at Arcana

So it turns out that right here in Minnesota there is a convention of the dark fantastic called – yes, you guessed it – Arcana, just like my novel. The convention has been running since the 1970’s and, believe it or not, I only found out about it this year so the title of the novel is a total coincidence. Either that or an omen. I will be attending Arcana to promote Arcana, and will be there both Friday and Saturday evenings with signed copies for anybody who would like to pick one up.

Arcana runs from October 15-17 at the Best Western Bandana Square in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The address is:

1010 Bandana Boulevard W
Saint Paul, MN 55108

You can register to attend here at the Arcana convention web site.

Hope to see you there!

Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram Workshop at Twin Cities Pagan Pride

My friend Michele and I will be teaching a workshop on the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram at Twin Cities Pagan Pride. The workshop will be held on Saturday, September 25th at 1:30 PM in the Purple Room at:

Lake Harriet Spiritual Community
4401 Upton Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55410

In this workshop we plan on covering both the banishing and invoking forms of the ritual and also a number of elements that are rarely taught but which nonetheless make the ritual much more effective.

Here’s a link to the full Pagan Pride programming guide, in PDF format.

Hope to see you there!