Monsters - An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings

Monsters An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings by John Michael Greer.

Combining folklore, Western magical philosophy, and actual field experience, Monsters An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings is required reading for both active and armchair monster hunters. Between these covers you'll find a chilling collection of fiendish facts and folklore.

Of course that monster hiding under your bed when you were little didn't really exist. Faeries and dragons, vampires and werewolves, angels and demons, even the boogeyman all are simply figments of our imagination, right? After all, their existence has not yet been scientifically proven.

But there is one giant problem with such an easy dismissal of these creepy creatures people keep encountering them!

Combining folklore, Western magical philosophy, and actual field experience, Monsters: An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings is required reading for both active and armchair monster hunters. Between these covers you'll find a chilling collection of fiendish facts and folklore, including:

The five different kinds of ghosts
Magical origins of the werewolf legends
The hidden connections between faery lore and UFOs
Where dragons are found today
How to investigate a monster sighting
Natural and ritual magic techniques for dealing with hostile monsters

Join ceremonial magician John Michael Greer for a harrowing journey into the reality of the impossible. This book is your guide to the strange, spooky, and sometimes sinister world of the creatures who lurk in the shadowy realms outside the reality we take for granted.

In the following excerpt, author John Michael Greer explains that monsters have something valuable to teach us about ourselves and our world.

A thousand years ago, vampires and shape shifters, spirits of the ancestors and spirits that were never human at all, intelligent beings with subtle bodies or none, were as much a matter of everyday life then as electricity is now.
But we know better nowadays, of course. Don't we?

This book is based on the uncomfortable knowledge that we don't know better that at least some of these entities had, and still have, a reality that goes beyond the limits of human imagination and human psychology. For most people nowadays, such ideas would be terrifying if they weren't so preposterous. Plenty of modern Americans believe that UFOs are spacecraft from other worlds and psychics can bend silverware with their minds but the existence of vampires and werewolves?

To make things worse, this book explores such beings from the standpoint of an equally discredited system of thought: the traditional lore of Western ceremonial magic, which has been denounced and derided by right-thinking folk ever since the end of the Renaissance.
The word "monster" comes from the Latin monstrum, "that which is shown forth or revealed." The same root also appears in the English word "demonstrate," and several less common words (such as "remonstrance") that share the same sense of revealing, disclosing, or displaying. In the original sense of the word, a monster is a revelation, something shown forth.

This may seem worlds away from the usual modern meaning of the word "monster" a strange, frightening and supposedly mythical creaturebut here, as elsewhere in the realm of monsters, appearances deceive. Certainly, monsters are strange, at least to those raised in modern ways of approaching the world. As we'll see, too, monsters have a great deal to do with the realm of myth, although this latter word (like "monster" itself) has older and deeper meanings that evade our modern habits of thought. The association between monsters and terror, too, has practical relevance, even when the creatures we call "monsters" fear us more than we fear them.

The myth, the terror, and the strangeness all have their roots in the nature of the realm of monsters and the monstrous world of revelations, where the hidden and the unknown show furtive glimpses of themselves. If we pay attention to them, monsters do have something to reveal. They show us the reality of the impossible, or of those things we label impossible; they point out that the world we think we live in, and the world we actually inhabit, may not be the same place at all.
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Table of Contents: Monsters: An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings

CONTENTS:
Foreword xiii
How to Use This Book xvii
A Cautionary Note xxi
PART I: An INTRODUCTION TO THE FIELD GUIDE
On the Reality of the Impossible 3
PART II: A FIELD GUIDE TO MONSTERS
Vampires 35
Ghosts 53
Werewolves 71
Creatures of Faery 83
Mermaids 109
Dragons 119
Spirits 131
Angels 147
Demons 161
PART III: A GUIDE TO MONSTER INVESTIGATION
The Compleat Investigator 177
PART IV: MAGICAL SELF-DEFENSE
Natural Magic 217
Ritual Magic 229
A Glossary of Monster Lore 241
An Annotated Bibliography of Monster Lore 251
Index 279

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