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 New This Year from Black Mountain Seeds:

The Legendary Abramelon (Cucumis melo wormsiensis)

Black Mountain Seeds is proud to offer, for the first time, a treasured heirloom variety melon, long thought lost: the famed Abramelon.

A favorite of early Renaissance Ceremonialists and Kabalists, the variety is thought to have originated in 15^th century Germany; recent genetic studies suggest that it may have been first developed in the Middle East or North Africa, possibly Egypt.

Perfectly spherical in shape, about the size of a man's head or a little larger, the Abramelon is characterized by tender, succulent flesh striated with yellow ocher, russet, and olive. While not very sweet, it has a complex, spicy flavor with overtones of cinnamon and citrus.

Often pickled, the Abramelon takes a great deal of cultivation, but—adepts agree—is well worth the effort.

Give the Abramelon a try. You'll thank your Holy Guardian Angel that you did!

From germination to table: 180 days (but worth the wait).

Entering the buzzing Cairo souk filled with aliveness, I walked about feeling uplifted, smelling shishlik roasting and hookah pipe smoke. Immensely attracted to the turquoise that was mined in the eastern desert of Egypt; I had to purchase a colorful Nefertiti necklace of orange and turquoise beads, as well as a “had to have” exquisite turquoise ring. The greenish blue tint of turquoise is symbolic of the joy of life and to this day, I frequently wear it.

The Europa Hotel, from which I could see the three Great Pyramids, was home yet again for a few more days. Throughout the nights at the Europa I was in touch with the stars of Sirius and the Pleiades. Bright Light Spirit Beings often came and went, the eyes of which were deep violet and blazed like stars on a clear winter night. This sacred site was full of Star Being energy being pulled in and cellular memory awakened in me as the Pyramids were being activated!

Now, I'm neither a Cabalist nor a Ceremonial Magician, but I do speak Hebrew, and I can tell you this much: the Cabalistic Cross, as it has come down from the Golden Dawn, was clearly put together by someone with only the most superficial knowledge of the language. In fact, it's just plain wrong.

Ateh Malkuth ve-Geburah ve-Gedulah, le-Olahm. Amen.

This is supposed to mean (it's the tag-line of the "Our Father" prayer): "For thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, forever. Amen."

But it doesn't.

Regardie, Israel. The Golden Dawn: A Complete Course in Practical Ceremonial Magic. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn. 1986.

I'm going to try something of a new kind of entry for a while: Comments on various works that may be of interest to Pagans, Wiccans, people interested in magic, and more. These comments are intended to introduce a book to a broader audience who may have heard of it but haven't read it. With that in mind, there are several things that these comments are not: They are not scholarly book reviews that attempt to comprehensively address the arguments of the work and all its relationships to the existing literature. Hopefully some of that sort of awareness will be included - so that someone who reads my comments would be better informed without still having read the book itself - but these are going to be briefer and aimed at a nonspecialist audience. For that audience, these comments are still not the kind of book review that tells you whether it's a "good" book or a "bad" book. I may occasionally excoriate a truly abysmal work for the fun of it, in general I want to tell readers who might want to read this book and why, and what readers will find or not find within it. It's up to you to use that information to figure out if it's a good book for you and for your interests and purposes.

I decided when I started to blog that I would write about various magical topics that interested me at any given moment. That means this blog is likely to be something of a mixed bag. I"ll take requests if someone wants me to write about a specific topic, but otherwise, my posts will be about whatever I've recently discussed with colleagues and friends, or whatever I happen to be reading or most interested in at any give moment. Today that topic of interest happens to be the Goetia.