Book Reviews

The Miracle Month: Thirty Days to a Revolution in Your Life / The Miracle Habits: The Secret of Turning Your Moments into Miracles

Mitch Horowitz
Both books case-bound, 215 and 263 pps. respectively. New York: Gildan Media, 2020–21, $30 each.

Don’t get too flummoxed by the word “miracle” in the latest books by TS member Mitch Horowitz. On the first page of The Miracle Habits, he defines it as “a fortuitous event or circumstance that exceeds all conventional expectation.” We’ve all had those moments, but perhaps didn’t pay too much attention to them. Horowitz’s aim, I believe, is to help us learn to be more aware of these moments and use them as guides in life.

These books can serve as companions to each other, offering mutually supportive ideas. Neither book requires any particular insight into religion or spiritual tradition, and both contain a big helping of American philosophy from two of my favorites: Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James.

If Alcoholics Anonymous offers a Twelve-Step program for self-development, Horowitz takes it one step further, with thirteen steps in The Miracle Habits, designed to help you gain “personal power,” “cultivate providence,” and realize “epic performance.”

The Miracle Month offers thirty days of exercises to begin each; a program to alter the way you think and help you recognize and remove the barriers to self-development and personal power. He begins with an exercise that seemed rather odd to me: ridding yourself of an overabundance of clothing. (I was suddenly glad I’d just taken a large bag of clothes to Goodwill—I was a step ahead of the game!) Instead, consciously pick the attire that creates the image you want to project. Perhaps clothes do make the man (or woman), as we’ve heard said.

This exercise corresponds to the second habit in The Miracle Habits: create your total environment, including how you dress and look; create your image; “own who you are,” as Horowitz states. Find your path—not the path of some teacher, preacher or guru, but what “expresses the self.”

Each of the thirty daily exercises in The Miracle Month is designed to help us become more aware and face the daily challenges that we have all encountered. One of the biggies is anger: either being angry or dealing with an angry person. Writing from his own experience as an angry person, Horowitz encourages us to “face your anger.” He notes that (and as I’ve learned through studying Buddhism) most anger is rooted in fear: “Fear is probably the trigger for most angry or destructive emotions.” We need to consider that fact both in ourselves and in angry people we may encounter.

Horowitz asks important questions such as the one we’re asked to contemplate on day 8: “What do you want?” Do we know what we really want? Sometimes we think we do, but he urges us to clarify our aim by writing down “that one overarching non-negotiable thing, that one core aim that you desire like breath itself. Search yourself. It is there.”

That is similar to the first habit: unwavering focus. “Choose a Definite Chief Aim (DCA) for which you feel passion,” writes Horowitz. “To bring something into actuality, you must know and be focused on precisely what you want. And you must pursue the wished-for condition with absolute focus and single-minded purpose.”

Often in our search for happiness, we find that we are trapped in suffering, that we are even addicted to suffering. Horowitz asks on day 26’s exercise, “Do you enjoy suffering?” He is straightforward about this issue: “The greatest barrier to your happiness is often the secret pleasure that you derive from suffering.” Often people like their suffering so much that they have a difficult time walking away from it.

Horowitz’s exercise for day 13 is “give up one thing that causes you pain.” (He gave up Facebook, which sounds like a pretty good idea!) And it prepares us for contemplating whether we actually enjoy suffering, and if we do, why. 

Sometimes the people around us—coworkers, relatives, a spouse—cause us pain. In both books, Horowitz emphatically tells us to “escape cruelty” (day 16) and “get away from cruel people” (habit 6). People who suck the life out of you with barbs of passive-aggressive or hostile behavior aren’t worth being around. “Often it is vital, first and foremost, to physically separate from cruel or depleting people,” said Horowitz. “You do not have to be around cruel people” (italics his).

Horowitz refers to some good philosophical reading. He calls upon Emerson frequently, especially his essay on karma, “Compensation,” which Horowitz says is his “personal creed,” and “Self-Reliance,” an essay that “deeply influenced” Horowitz in “matters of self-verification.” I would recommend reading these two essays to understand how Emerson’s philosophy, along with that of William James, influenced Horowitz’s life.

New Thought writers have also shaped Horowitz’s philosophy, including Neville Goddard and Napoleon Hill, from whom Horowitz quotes often. Sun Tzu’s Art of War provides insight into conflict (something we all face) and winning. “Select a conflict,” advises Horowitz. “Surrender, back down, walk away—it has its advantages and also rids you of needing to be right or winning . . . lost battles are sometimes quietly won battles.” 

In the seventh habit, “Choose your comrades,” Horowitz tells us that our choice of companions is the “most critical decision in life.” He advises, “Never settle for low company.”

Ultimately, guidebooks on self-development provide insight into how someone else’s experience helped shape their life. They inspire us to develop a practice (which I believe is what Horowitz is encouraging us to do) that gives us a new perspective on our own miracle moments. Life can be as easy or as difficult as we make it: it’s up to us. The world “out there” is merely a reflection of our world “in here.” If we change the world in here, the world out there may look a lot different, and might become more peaceful and easier to navigate.

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Clare Goldsberry’s latest book, The Illusion of Life and Death, will be published in 2021 by Monkfish.

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A Healer’s Journey to Intuitive Knowing: The Heart of Therapeutic Touch

Dolores Krieger  
Rochester, Vt.: Bear & Co., 2021. 272 pp., paper, $20.

Dr. Dolores Krieger’s life’s work was the deep inquiry into the healing modality of Therapeutic Touch (TT), which she created with Dora Kunz. This book, Krieger’s last before her death, explores the perspective of the healer during the healing moment. Through her findings, one begins to see a paradigm forming regarding the future of healing, consciousness, and TT.

Dr. Krieger interviews, documents, and analyzes data from numerous long practiced healers. She unites her own self-inquiry with that of these individuals and presents a possible tool for navigating present-day challenges: a mindset of inquiry, linked to the practice of TT.

When one develops an ongoing mindset of inquiry in regard to TT, it becomes a tool used for self-inquiry, reflection, and a way to make meaning of one’s experiences. She relates it to sentience, the power of perception by the senses, rather than by structured logic. As the book notes, she created a series of questions to stimulate a deep inquiry, requiring a conscious awareness of the experience of TT. It is a way of creating experiential knowledge.

David Spangler notes in his foreword that Dr. Krieger’s work with TT has given us a holistic tool that “honors who we are as inhabitants of the world in its wholeness, and not just as physical beings.”

This book begins with an eloquent description of the experiential findings of TT practice, developed over the last fifty years by Dr. Krieger and Dora Kunz. Dr. Krieger states, “The crux of this mode of healing is that Therapeutic Touch facilitates vital-energy (pranic flow) by bringing order to dysfunctional physical and psychodynamic systems of sentient beings.”

Dr. Krieger goes on to say that healing in TT is a humanization of energy that conveys order and compassion to body systems that are fatigued, in trauma, imbalanced, in a state of disrepair, or in final transition.

Two research studies are presented, titled “Looking over My Shoulder” and “Healing at a Distance.” Healers were asked to describe the experience of moving through the many shifts in consciousness that occur during their practice of TT. The study explores the impact on healers’ subtle energy fields and on their lives when they consciously enter into a state of peace and maintaining it as they reach deeper toward a connection with the inner Self. The studies reveal the changes that have occurred within these healers. In addition, Dr. Krieger explores the healers’ impetus for continuing on with this “heroic pursuit.”

The TT community has been waiting for this book. Since TT’s inception, many aspects of it have seemed a mystery. The founders’ rigorous study throughout the years, combined with the findings described in this book, provide many answers.

The following excerpts from the book, which are direct statements by Dr. Krieger, give the reader a glimpse into some of her findings.

It is my personal impression that at the core of Therapeutic Touch lies the challenge of confronting one’s own being . . . healing is a conscious, full engagement of the Inner Self in the compassionate interest of someone who is ill, in trauma, or in energy deficit.

The Inner Self is essentially the soul—the spiritual or innermost part of individual’s being. It is the yearning for self-realization, and it is the impetus for this yearning that carries the therapist to another level of consciousness where awareness of the Inner Self acquires a reality of its own. It is in the process of consciously integrating her Inner Self into the daily routines of her life that the therapist becomes aware that there is not just one reality; that there are multiple realities depending upon the aspect of consciousness on which she chooses to focus. It is in the integrating of these multiple realities that the illumination may click! on [sic].           

Of prime importance was the growing realization that the verbal expression of healing strongly depended on experiential knowledge based on sentience—the power of perception by the senses rather than structured logic—to articulate clearly this world of interiority, a profound, far-reaching realm into which the student is plunged as she follows a personal commitment to support those who arouse her compassion . . . The language of this profound experience is richly multitasked and multilayered, sentient and proprioceptive, intuitive and instinctive, intentional and willful, and subject to uncommon and unusual hints and hunches about the possible.

[The healer] is in the impersonal space where she may become a clear instrument for the universal healing field and remain detached from the outcome. This finely tuned state creates a singular atmosphere that allows the Inner Self to commune with the therapist and enter her daily activities.

As the quest for self realization deepens and the therapist’s practice of TT continues and becomes full fledged, she finds that her frequent TT practice invites a psychological and spiritual transformation.

This book inspires one to explore the subtle energies around us, search for meaning, and find the wisdom that lives within the deeper reaches of one’s inner Self. Dr. Krieger believed that TT would continue to evolve in order to meet the needs of a high-tech future. At the close of her book, she says, “In my ninety-seventh year, I am confident that the future consciousness of Therapeutic Touch is in very capable hands.”

Marilyn Johnston-Svoboda

The reviewer is a retired professor of nursing and the credentialing trustee of Therapeutic Touch International Associates. She has been a teacher and practitioner of Therapeutic Touch for over forty years. Her teachers were Dora Kunz and Dolores Krieger. She currently teaches and maintains a private practice.

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Three Books of Occult Philosophy

By Henry Comelius Agrippa of Nettesheim
edited and annotated by Donald Tyson;
Llewellyn Publications, Saint Paul, MN, 1994; paper, 938 pages.

When he delivered his massive manuscript to the Antwerp printers in 1531, Henry Cornelius Agrippa was a little concerned that his reading public would mistake him for a sorcerer since his subject was magic. After all, what this 45-year-old occultist was seeking to publish would be nothing less than the Renaissance's definitive handbook on all aspects of the Western esoteric tradition, from Kabbalah to medicine, astrology to herbalism, geomancy to angelology. Nor was it a book he was rushing into print, following a weekend 's illumination. He had written an early draft of it back in 1509 when he was all of twenty-five.

But now, two decades later, he wanted to assure his readers-and these would stretch across the next five centuries to our present generation - that to be a magician signified that one was not a conjurer or practitioner of forbidden arts, but rather a wise man, priest. and prophet. That said, he hoped his reader would receive "no little profit and much pleasure" from his efforts, providing they have as much "discretion of prudence as bees have in gathering honey." But if the "judicious" reader also learned how to destroy sorceries, turn away evil events, cure diseases, extirpate phantasms, preserve life, honor, and fortune, all the better, for these, too, are both profitable and necessary, said Agrippa.

As occultists and scholars have appreciated in the centuries since its first publication, Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, drawing on Greek, Egyptian, Jewish. Roman, and Arabic esoteric sources, probably the most complete digest of pagan and Neo-platonic magical practice ever compiled. What makes this old fact a new publishing event in the mid-1990s is the prodigious editing work of Donald Tyson, a well-known writer on magical themes and guidebooks.

Llewellyn Publications are to be congratulated and thanked for undertaking such a huge but hugely necessary task of making Agrippa accessible and affordable to a large reading public. For too long, as Tyson explains. Agrippa's invaluable book on "the Art" was difficult and costly to obtain, and those editions that were available were marked by so many mistakes dating back to the first translations, that many important operations and correspondences in magic have long been misconstrued.

Tyson reconstructed and redrew nearly all the charts and tab les to correct mistakes. He documents, footnotes. explains, and amplifies Agrippa; in numerous special appendices Tyson gives the biographies of all the notables mentioned by Agrippa; and in eight supplementary chapters he explains magic squares, the elements, humours, geomancy, and practical Kabbalah. In his breadth of reference and precision of detail, Tyson nearly outdoes the old magus himself.

Tyson is not boasting when he declares to the reader that while this work was a "great labor" and "monumental task," it offers the serious reader "a graduate degree in Renaissance magic." This was evidently Agrippa's intention. because he leads the reader through a fund of accumulated knowledge from neoclassical and Hebraic occultism as it was understood in the early sixteenth century.

Agrippa 's scope was encyclopedic, but inherently fated to be incomplete. "Agrippa knew he could never compress the entire literature of magic into a single volume, so he pointed the way. The reader will derive inestimable profit in following his discretion," Tyson says.

Is Agrippa worth bothering with in our metaphysically profligate 1990s? With all our freelance "new age" psychics and channeled occultists, does a Renaissance text on magic offer us anything new? Most certainly. It gives us the source of this so called newness, which is nothing more than a little initiatory knowledge seeping into the awareness of a comparatively mass audience. In his three books, Agrippa gives us a touchstone, a standard reference source, and the bedrock of a perennial tradition that has seen yet another copious re-flowering in our own time. For anyone even a little familiar with the true root s of the art of magic. this book is doubly indispensable; for those new to the field. this is an excellent and metaphysically reliable starting point for a deep investigation. Even though it is generally inappropriate for an author to pitch his own book in this way, we can forgive Tyson for saying that "n o true student of the Art can afford not to possess this book."

The fact of the perdurability of this classic text raises an interesting question. Are we today more sophisticated than occultists and magical scholars of Agrippa's time? Or are we dilettantes, no better than those Monday morning mystics Agrippa dismissed as being satisfied with the "superficial and vulgar" account of the stars, their influences and manipulation s, those content with touching the "outside" of philosophy?

Agrippa wrote for those wanting the insider's track on occult philosophy., those who know that knowledge of the Art, both theoretical and practical, enables one, as Agrippa 's English translator in 1651 noted, to "operate wonderful things" that are "effected by a natural power," and to do so "without either offence to God or violation of religion." Surely we can't go wrong today with that sober approach.

-RICHARD LEVITON

Autumn 1994

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by Wouter J. Hanegraaff
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 400 pp., hardcover, $135.

Hermeticism is the ever-elusive philosophy. Since late antiquity, following a jagged and indirect path, the amalgam of Greek-Egyptian thought has promised seekers a whisper of the insights of primeval esotericism. This ideal grew pronounced in the Western mind with the rediscovery of Hermetic texts during the Renaissance.             

In the fifteenth century, many translators, clerics, scholars, and nobles believed that the resurfaced Greek dialogues—translated into Latin as the Corpus Hermeticum—represented the fabled prisca theologia: a theological “holy grail” codifying humanity’s earliest spiritual and cosmological insights. The fragmentary writings suggested a pantheistic view of creation emanating from nous, an infinite mind, which humanity, in its journey to transcendent awareness, could eventually rejoin.

The mysterious tracts, sometimes credited to the mythical psychopomp Hermes Trismegistus, held the promise of individual greatness: “See what power you have, what quickness! If you can do these things, can god not do them? So you must think of god in this way, as having everything—the cosmos, himself, (the) universe—like thoughts within himself. Thus, unless you make yourself equal to god, you cannot understand god; like is understood by like.”

These hopes were largely dashed in 1614 when linguist Isaac Casaubon demonstrated that the magico-cosmic works were written in the centuries immediately following the death of Christ and not the mists of deep antiquity. Its ancient vintage dispelled, the Corpus Hermeticum retained the devotion of a few stalwarts, including natural philosopher Sir Thomas Browne, who wrote in his 1643 Religio Medici: “The severe Schools shall never laugh me out of the Philosophy of Hermes, that this visible World is but a Picture of the invisible wherein.”

Following Casaubon’s exposure, few translations were ventured. Hermeticism was not widely heard of again until the late nineteenth-century occult revival instigated by H.P. Blavatsky. Her secretary G.R.S. Mead produced a pioneering English translation in his 1906 Thrice-Greatest Hermes. Still, most classicists continued to regard the Hermetica as little more than a late ancient retread of Neoplatonism with a conceit of Egyptian origin.

This viewpoint shifted in the 1970s as mounting evidence and discovery of earlier texts reestablished Hermeticism’s authentic, if syncretic, Egyptian roots. The rehabilitation culminated in 1986 with the publication of historian Garth Fowden’s work The Egyptian Hermes. New translations followed, including philosopher Brian P. Copenhaver’s 1992 Hermetica.

Into the byways and debates surrounding Hermeticism now steps a vital and perspective-shaping study by historian of esotericism Wouter J. Hanegraaff. “I could never shake off the uncomfortable feeling that somehow, something remained less than fully convincing about how these texts were being discussed in the scholarly literature or translated into modern languages,” Hanegraaff writes. “What, if anything, was missing?” He announces as his guiding principle the Latin maxim ad fontes—“to the sources.”

Through intensive study of the ancient Greek originals, Hanegraaff illuminates a truth that many scholars and interpreters overlook. What we call the Hermetica are, in fact, a disordered, reassembled, recopied, and sometimes tendentiously translated body of work tracing a messy arc from late ancient Alexandria (the originals are lost) to medieval and Renaissance-era copies whose insights were muddied and reworded along the way.

Hanegraaff issues an important caution to interpreters of the Hermetica, especially seeker-historians like me: “This means that precisely those elements in the Hermetica that strike us as familiar (those that make us feel comfortably ‘at home’ in our own mental world, surrounded by concepts and ideas that we readily know and understand) are most likely to lead us astray.” Material that may appear “familiar” or, I would venture, parallel to modern concepts, may seem so because ancient scribes adapted the Hermetic sources to which they had access to reflect rising norms, conceptions, and speech patterns of the day, which also populate the dominant classical and religious literature to which we’re accustomed. (There is the further issue of transcribers’ own prejudices and preferences.) Hanegraaff notes: “We tend to use interpretation so as to make these texts fit our own agendas rather than allowing those agendas to be challenged by the texts.”

For this reason, Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination is probably the most important analysis of the Hermetica since Fowden’s efforts restored the locus of Hermetic spirituality to late ancient Egypt. But Hanegraaff goes further than a critique. He probes the probable meaning of Hermetic literature to ancient acolytes.

Hanegraaff reasons that “the Way of Hermes was practiced in very small gatherings, probably not much larger than what we find in the texts themselves: one teacher and one to three pupils—hardly more.” A key part of Hermetic practice, he writes, entailed using the philosophical insights of the dialogues to attempt a “careful and attentive mental praxis, a way of training the mind.” He continues, “Our text holds out the promise that all those who choose to follow the Way of Hermes and persist to its very end will be able to immerse themselves wholly in the vessel of nous, thereby achieving gnōsis and human perfection.” For this, ancient seekers approached nous with reverence and petition for help.

Unlike some Gnostic sects, he suggests, the Hermeticists did not despise the body or materiality—in fact, sexuality was considered a transcendent gateway—but rather understood both selves, physical and ethereal, as core to human existence.

Hanegraaff’s perspective on this ancient therapeia hardly settles all questions. The extant texts harbor too many riddles, including the role of “cyclical recurrence,” an ambiguous concept—perhaps referencing reincarnation—which my correspondence with Hanegraaff leaves unresolved.

Ultimately, Hanegraaff endorses a reconciling point of view:

The core metaphysics of Hermetic spirituality, or so I have argued, should be understood in terms of radical nonduality. This means that the experiential world of multiple phenomena in which we find ourselves is not ultimately real, in the sense that how things appear to our dualistic consciousness is not how things really are. The human quest for enlightenment or gnōsis could be described as the individual soul’s hypnerotomachia, a dreamlike quest or strife for felicity driven by the power of erōs. And yet it was precisely by pursuing their passionate desires all the way through this worldly labyrinth of merely phenomenal experiences that souls could finally discover the ultimate oneness of true being—the secret that nothing unreal exists.

In this last phrase (italicized in the original), some readers may detect the wording of a core maxim from the modern channeled text A Course in Miracles. I regard this echo as unintentional but worth pausing over when considering parallel insights between old and new spiritualities. Hanegraaff is, in my reading, uncomfortable with such analogies. When pondering correspondences between the Hermetic concept of “cosmic consciousness” and Richard Maurice Bucke’s popular 1901 book of the same name, the historian notes both defensively and affirmingly:

This comparison is not meant to imply any quasi-perennialist claim about ancient Hermetic practitioners and modern transcendentalists dipping into “the same universal mystical experience,” an assumption for which we have no data. It indicates simply that descriptions as found in CH XI and XIII [of the Corpus Hermeticum] do not need to be dismissed as “narrative fictions” based on nothing but theory. We know that people can have intense visionary experiences; we know that these can involve a vivid sensation of boundless perception unrestricted by time and space; we know that these experiences can be strongly enhanced by alterations of consciousness; and we know that this can happen either spontaneously or be induced artificially by specific spiritual techniques.

gainst binary interpretations can, I believe, leaven his occasional archness about comparing ancient and modern thought systems. Even within the folds of his predilections, Hanegraaff opens new doorways—and slams shut none.  Indeed, Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination heralds a new phase of Hermetic studies with an intellectual demand to which scholars and seekers alike should rise.

Mitch Horowitz

 

Mitch Horowitz is a PEN Award-winning historian, writer-in-residence at the New York Public Library and TSA member whose latest book is Uncertain Places: Essays on Occult and Outsider Experiences (Inner Traditions).

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