What I Did In My Holidays: - essays on black magic, Satanism, devil worship and other niceties

The book title may scare the puritans but imagine for a moment that the modified shortened title is “What I did in my holidays: Essays on magic, religion, worship, and other niceties”. Could that help you to decide reading it? I deleted the words black, satanism, and devil. These essays are on very different topics. As any essay, there is a possibility for the reader to argue and provoke debate. This will take a lot of words to comment individually on the more of 30 essays in the book. The most important value, in my opinion, is the way the author explains the different topics, from a different angle “as mental tools which can be very practical because they are ways of thinking which people can apply straight away”. If you need to characterise the writing you can say it is “occult philosophy”, as the author explained on page 328. According to the author, his “best contribution to the occult is liberation, liberating people ideas and things like that”; he says “I really like to think that I’ve opened people’s eyes to different ways of looking at commonplace things” and I totally agree with that because he takes a very uncommon angle to develop his ideas. He always recommends analyzing the situations under the Cup of Acceptance before the struggle of the Sword of Analysis and Control.For all those cranky readers like me and the author (he said, “I have real sympathy for cranks because I am one myself. What is more that some of my readers are also cranks”), you will find stuff related to Spare, Crowley, Book of the Law, OTO, God and Devil, Kenneth Grant, Jung, Demeter, Aphrodite, Hecate, Aeon of Horus, Chaos, Thelemic Morality, etc. For all those scared puritans reading this book is like what the character Jonathan Noel felt when a pigeon (The Pigeon, a novella by Patrick Suskind) roosts in front of his one-room apartment's door, prohibiting him entrance to his private sanctuary, an unwelcome, diabolical intruder, but at the end it was just an ordinary pigeon. Read it without prejudice. Bonus: you will laugh out loud in some sections.

I was surprised to see that my favorite of Dukes' books hasn't been reviewed yet. It's Ramsey's biggest book and I think also his most satisfying - with a large range of subjects and the consistently unique voice and breathtaking insights that have made Dukes occult literature's best kept secret. Dukes is like a grittier and more eccentric Robert Anton Wilson, he has the gift of combining profound psychological and philosophical arguments with lightness and irreverence in such a way that the jokes only strengthen the case he's making. Dukes's work has the mark of great non-fiction - it has a genuine novelty, and he brings to light things that have never been observed before, but with directness and simplicity that makes them all-but impossible to refute. Once they have been made, it seems as if we have always known it. One of the most thought-provoking and entertaining books in occult literature - an unhailed classic.

Read it once, now need to read again, a classic and a must for the collection if the subject floats your boat. All of Ramsey Dukes’ books need reading, they keep you thinking for a long time afterwards, as well as change how you think.