ADVANCED PLANETARY MAGIC: First Reviews, Questions, and Answers.

ADVANCED PLANETARY MAGIC has only been on sale for 24 hours now, is already generating reviews and questions.

Deborah Castellano at Charmed I’m Sure said:

“I’ve always really liked how Jason has a way of laying out complicated concepts very simply. In cooking, one generally has to be a master chef before one can open a restaurant with simple flavors because one needs to be very skilled to not hide behind elaborate preparation. When it’s just you, the basic ingredients and a few simple spices, you have to be on top of your game. Jason Miller is on top of his game in Advanced Planetary Magic.”

Read the full review at her site.

Note that she is also going to use the calls to charge her  Jovian Jupiter Limited Edition Ritual Oil. Having sampled her wares, I can tell you that her work is first rate.

I have also received some interesting questions about the book:

Q: What is the source of the 49 calls?

A: I wrote them during the proper day/hour combo after meditating on the appropriate powers and chanting the vowel combo. They are not channeled, the result of automatic writing, or dictated directly by a spirit.

Q: What is with all the alliteration?

A: The alliteration in the calls is both a technique to help the invocations strike the mind as special and sacred as well as a bit of a homage to William Gray. For years I have been a member of a Sangreal Sodality that performs the Office of the Tree of Life, which explores the paths between each of the Sephira. That kind of interfacing of forces is similar to what is happening in the calls.

Q: Should I have contacted all the planetary angels or traveled through all the gates before working with this material?

A: No. This is not advanced in the sense that you need to have successfully completed something else before hand. It is advanced in that it presents planetary material that is different and maybe a bit more nuanced than you will find in many other books.

That said, doing the seven planetary workings as put forth in Frater Rufus Opus’s Gate Rites and Modern Angelic Grimoire, or doing evocations of the seven Archangels as put forth in  Frater Ashen’s Gateways Through Stone and Circle, or even the gate walking rites in The Necronomicon, are related to the work at hand. Perhaps even more than any of the above, the material in Michael Cecchetelli’s Book of Abrasax relates closely to the material I present.

Q: Are you making the move to self-publishing? Should we expect all your books from now on to be e-books?

A: No. Definitely not. I am still a believer in traditional publishing and I am in the planning stages of my next book for New Page Books already. I have never understood the either/or approach to publishing. Some things are best done as widely published books that people can stumble across on the shelves at Barnes and Noble and reach a wide audience over many years. Others are best put out in fancy-shmacy limited editions that produce a treasured talismanic tome. Yet others may serve the author best as e-books by keeping costs low and profits high. I plan on taking advantage of all three avenues over my career and have never understood the sense of viewing them as competing models.

Q: You mentioned this is the first of a series. Are the books all connected?

A: No. The only thing connecting them is that they deal with niche topics that I think would make great chapbooks of 10,000 words or so. Some things suffer from saying too much about them. Actually a lot of really practical stuff, suffers from this. It keeps people in reading mode instead of doing mode. The next chapbook is going to be on Designer Entities, or as they are sometimes called “Servitors” and “Artificial Spirits”. It is tentatively titles “The Secret of the Tulpa”.

You can purchase ADVANCED PLANETARY MAGIC here: