Do you have any recommendations for prerequisite reading for Azoetia?
Those illustrations are downright beautiful, but the text seems fairly dense, referentially speaking
@madmonksandmaenads is more familiar with the Sabbatic corpus than I am, and they say to start with Lux Haeresis. I managed to struggle through it on my knowledge of Gnosticism and Sunyata alone, but I know for a fact that I'm not getting the whole picture.
Like, understand that Azoetia is pretty high level stuff. And while there are many inroads to Chumbley's work it can be pretty labyrinthine.
I hit the character limit like four times answering this question when it got forwarded to me over discord so be warned I’m copypasting huge blocks of text here
Depends on what you haven’t read
Like it does operate on a baseline assumption that you’re familiar with like /how to do/ things in wicca and ceremonial magic and witchcraft but that doesn’t mean you’ll have to read all of chumbley’s influences from cochrane to shah to spare to kenneth grant (these will illuminate the work but they shouldn’t stop you from starting it).
If you’re seriously confused by a lot of stuff about how to do the rituals don’t worry, it’s confusing, some of the integral parts of the main rituals only appear later in the book, there are terms and blinds that are designed to turn away or distract the unprepared. You’re kind of implicitly supposed to know when to do the sabbats, it’s assumed you’re familiar with the wheel of the year, certain ritual instruments and instructions, etc.
The book has the main rituals of the sabbat, ingress, congress and egress toward the beginning, the rest of this book, the 11 cells (or Aats) explore certain theological realms and formulae of the main rituals. These Aats are divided into sysygies of two letters, each letter has it’s own magical formulae to explore and apply.
There’s a lot deeper stuff but that’s all kind of beyond the scope here
All this said, if you’re struggling to know what to do ritually you’d wanna read Janet and Stewart Farrar’s “The Witches Bible” and Crowley’s “Book 4” maybe regardie’s Golden Dawn. Like if this is your first time practicing magic maybe spend a bit of time on the more straightforward stuff cause that’ll get your feet planted on the ground here and give you an inroad.
If you want to understand the deeper theology of the book let it be first said AZOËTIA ITSELF IS THE BEST TOOL FOR UNDERSTANDING AZOËTIA. Also the illustrations are way more than just illustrations, in some sense they are the book itself. The work of Azoëtia is very much about changing how you sense and experience, it’s better understood in personal phenomenological experience than intellectually because words don’t capture a lot of this sort of thing.
This being the case you will absolutely find some books might help you crack into the whole mystery of the book once you’ve kind of started to grasp how it’s structured and put together (to explain that isn’t hard but it is a long talk especially if you’re completely unfamiliar with it). Chumbley’s writing is always gonna be the first thing you go to to grok this, again Id say dive into Azoëtia, spend a lot of time with it, everyone wants to point you in directions other than the book itself but if you can’t get into the water itself you’re never gonna learn to swim
You don’t NEED anything but yourself to do this work. There’s a lot out there to read if you want it, sure, but if you stop and wait til you’ve got a master’s in chumbley studies til you get to the work you’re never going to even understand what you’re reading
ALL THIS SAID
Recommendations:
Chumbley’s essays and more straightforward works in Opuscula Magica 1 & 2 and “Mysticism Initiation and Dream” will be a godsend
His other magical work will serve as a good guide to fill in some of the gaps, in particular the other major work The Dragon Book Of Essex (the whole thing has important details that can expound upon Azo but of particular interest to someone just trying to get their footing with the first circle work of Azoëtia are the chapters on Exordia, the Draconian Oracle, and the Hendecarch and maybe the Hallowing ) it should be noted that while there’s a lot of structural similarities and important theological expansion on azo in here they are not the same work and some things while parallel are not interchangeable one to one, and there isn’t that much analog for the second circle rites of the DBOE in azo
At some point read Qutub and Psalter of Cain these works are your friend, there is a lot to say about these but I don’t wanna dwell too long on each thing.
Satyr’s Sermon, Khiazmos, ONE, all of these are your friend
You are going to want to read all of the Austin Osman Spare you can get your grubby little hands on. Maybe the single most prevalent individual influence on Azoëtia
Some very very influential-on-Azoëtia works that’ll help you out are gonna be “Call of the Horned Piper”, “Masks of Misrule”, “Pillars of Tubal Cain”, and “The Book of Fallen Angels” if you want to grok a lot of this work these are very much your friend and trusted ally
In general all the works of those guys, Robert Fitzgerald, Michael Howard, Nigel Aldcroft Jackson, Nigel Pennick are very much gonna help you make heads or tails of some of the myths, practices, vocabulary, etc of the sabbatic corpus
The writings of Daniel Schulke are going to be almost indispensable in engaging with sabbatic work. If I was to get into all of it we’d never stop talking. For the purposes of this conversation I’m just going to share my opinion that Schulke’s book Lux Haeresis is deeply intertwined with Azoëtia, you will probably find a lot to use and experience in this. You may also want to look into Viridarium Umbris but that in and of itself is such a massive undertaking I’m going to suggest you don’t push it right away
Imo Mae is very right to say Lux is a good companion for exploring azo, to some extent it is Schulke making these mysteries his own like Chumbley implores the reader to do again and again in his books.
Some works of importance that are good to familiarize yourself with are Carlo Ginzburg’s books “Ecstasies” and “The Night Battles” in particular
Wiccan texts and rituals are gonna help you out immensely, you might want to have a gander at Gardner, Sanders, the Farrars, Doreen Valiente, yada yada
That sorta discredited but influential on occultism stuff like The Golden Bough, the works of Robert Graves “the White Goddess”, “The Witch Cult In Western Europe”, Budge’s Egypt stuff, etc is helpful in understanding a bit of the mythopoetics of all this
Books of Enoch, Gnostic Gospels, Sufi texts (particularly the works of Idries Shah), Shaiva Tantra stuff (particularly Utarra Kaula Trika), works of the Clan Of Tubal Cain, most notably Robert Cochrane and Shani Oates, anything you can find on “The Society of the Horseman’s Word”, the works of Kenneth Grant (in particular the Typhonian Trilogies), the works of Aleister Crowley, Austin Spare, Agrippa, Kircher, Blake, Zevi, Bruno, Paracelsus, the PGM, Plato, Egyptian religion, these are all influences to some degree or another
on and on you’ll find the influences go. These are all amazing, powerful and helpful for your magic but remember not to get too bogged down in the endless words, always return to The Work itself, the thing these words are pointing at. These are things you may or may not read but it’s important to emphasize again that you’re going to want to return to the work itself. Understand it, make it your own, change it in ways you see fit. You don’t need to drown yourself under all the driftwood in this River if you’re getting by on a raft or a log or swimming freely just fine.
It is very nice to check out fellow travelers. Other traditional witchcraft authors like Gemma Gary, Corrine Boyer, Nigel G Pearson, Dale Pendell, Radomir Ristic, Al Cummins, Frisvold, Martin Duffy, basically most atramentous, three hands press or Troy books authors, are going to give you unique things to compare with and incorporate into your work if it interests you.
There are people alive today expanding on the work of chumbley, some who worked with him in his life and some who haven’t who will give you a lot to work with and understand, some I’ve already mentioned, Fitzgerald, Schulke, etc. The writings of Peter Hamilton-Giles, while not for beginners by any stretch of the imagination, are some of the most fascinating expansions on the sabbatic work I have seen. I’m nowhere near being ready to work with them but they’re excellent books all. He was a very close collaborator of Chumbley, his hallmarks can be seen in the dragon book and I believe Azoëtia as well. Gavin Semple, David Hererrias, Daniel Yates, Helen Oliver and Ian C Edwards are all people who work with this magic whose art and writing you will want to pay particular attention to in making your way on this path if you decide to do so.
Anyways I’m no expert, some of what I’ve said may be incorrect. I often feel kind of lost when trying to piece this together myself and I’ve had a lot of help, bless those who’ve had to forge ahead on their own through all this. My final recommendation for you trying to read all this is to ignore basically everything that I’ve said and read through it on your own first with one hand on your thesaurus, take your notes, and to focus on doing magic over talking and reading about it endlessly.
Don’t let reading be a substitute for actually walking your path
