The Business of Writing 2
Part 2: Building Brand Awareness: How Authors Create Internet Presence
Start Blogging
The internet is the authors’ real marketplace and I sell 99% of my books online while the remaining 1% is almost all in person, bookstores just don’t figure in the equation for financial reasons. Bookstores want to share the profits on my books. On the other hand, online bookstores take far less of a cut and selling books directly through the publishers’ websites returns the highest amount of royalties. This means that the marketing model that most authors adopt is to keep a website which has the links to their books’ sales pages on their publishers’ websites. For several reasons, the best kind of website for an author to have is a blog.
The first reason that authors should have blogs is that it gives them a great foundation for their online presence. There are a great number of places online where it is possible to leave links in various forms and having a blog gives them all a place to point to. The object of all of this linking is to direct traffic to the blog where they will see your books advertised and hopefully click through and buy them. I see a lot of links left online by writers that lead to their book on amazon.com which are missing a great opportunity to build greater engagement with their readers and create opportunities to sell them all books. By directing traffic to your own website you take them to the website that has the promotional content for all of the books in your catalogue, while at the same time you can build an audience who are more than likely going to be interested when you publish new books.
The second reason that authors should have a blog is that it is an effective way to develop their writing style and their skill as a communicator. Blogging will very likely take authors out of their comfort zone with the things that they write for the blog. It also forces writers to become regular producers of fresh content for their blog in order to keep their audience of readers interested and engaged with them. Blogging can also help writers to find their voice. This voice is what people want to read and it is what authors want to write but it takes a lot of hard work to produce it. Blogging isn’t a shortcut but it is a great platform for experimenting and often it gives writers an instant reaction to their work that they won’t find anywhere else.
Your score on Google
The third reason why a blog is the preferable form of website for an author is that the steady supply of fresh content will constantly improve your place in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This is important to the business of writing because most of the traffic to your blog will come from the search engines and so most of your new readers/customers will find you in the SERPs. To take advantage of this most effective marketing tool authors have to have a website that the spiderbots, the programs sent out by search engines to find and index pages, will see as being filled with valuable content. Writers who focus on their niche and write blogs that are connected to their published works can be on the front page of Google in the space of a few short months. Considering the traffic for some of the most searched keywords (the words that really define what a piece of writing is all about) this can be an audience that is potentially in the millions and that is a too many potential readers to ignore.
The other benefits of having a blog based website is that it gives authors a platform to present themselves to their public. The structure of blogs allows for webmasters to create ‘About Me’ pages and link lists to their other published works online. It is also possible to make a webpage that is totally devoted to their published works in a place where visitors expect to find the hard sell being applied to them. Blogging allows authors to share the writing and publishing process with their readers and so they can begin promoting a work well before it is available for sale (which is what I am doing right now as I have an internet marketing for small business book in the process of being written and hopefully all of the small business operators amongst my readers have just become more interested in this post!). Probably the greatest benefit for authors that keeping a blog promotes is that it creates a point of direct connection between the author and their readers. It is important to engage readers on social media sites like Facebook as well but whether you have two fans or two million fans they will make more of a connection with you on your own blog.
The most confronting thing for many authors when they come to setting up a blog isn’t the writing, it is having to deal with the technology. Most writers would use a computer to produce their books but many of them would know very little more than how to format their pages in a word processor. Suddenly finding themselves in the blogosphere where everything is HTML5 and Java Script can be confusing. Fortunately there are several options for quickly and easily setting up a blog and there are a number of free websites where it is simple to start a new blog. In most instances, authors won’t want to plaster Affiliate and CPC advertising all over their webpages to compete with their own advertised products so a free website from Blogger or, my preference of course, WordPress, will suffice for their promotional needs.
Take Ownership of Your Online Presence
Scribd.com online library
A blog is the foundation of an author’s online presence but there is still plenty of opportunity to expand outwards from that base. The evolution of Web 2.0 has meant that there is now a whole range of internet services that you can use, usually for free, that will help to get the word out to the reading public that a new literary star is on the rise. For authors there are generally five sorts of Web 2.0 sites that they will need to use to promote themselves online.
1. User Content Sites
Squidoo.com where user content rulz
These are sites like Squidoo.com and HubPages.com where users supply the content. The value of these sites to a new author is that they provide an opportunity to post information related to their niche or genre that helps to establish them as being an authority on their subject. Attached to this is a profile of the author and a link to their website. In marketing parlance this is all about raising brand awareness of the author and their work. It can also generate a lot of traffic for a website because readers that like what they have read will often want to read more by the same writer. Another valuable avenue for authors to publicize their work is via sites like Scribd.com where users can upload documents that they want to sell or, more commonly, to share. Uploading the introduction or an excerpt from a book can be a great way to entice readers to click through and buy the full book.
2. Article Directories
Article directories are websites where users post links to articles that relate to specific topics to make it easier to find references online. As part of the process of generating traffic to a website it can be worthwhile posting links to the new posts that are made on the blog or to new lenses on Squidoo.com when they are published. These sites are beginning to come under the microscope by search engines, especially Google, and so they are less important now than they have been in the past. Nonetheless, for an author that is just starting to try and attract some traffic to their work this can be a good place to start to develop an online presence from scratch.
3. Social Bookmarking Sites
Similar to the article directories are the social bookmarking sites like Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com where users post links to interesting things that they find on the internet. The links that users have posted can be seen and shared by all of the users and something that is interesting or quirky can go viral if enough people share it. Again, it won’t directly sell books but it will direct traffic to the website where you have the best chance of making that conversion.
4. Press Releases
Press Releases (PR) were once the domain of the professional journalist but, like many other things, in the internet age it has become possible for anyone to use them. There are a lot of PR websites where users can upload their latest news for the perusal of the world’s media and many of them are free. Choose one that allows you to include images as well as links to your website. While PR isn’t always a suitable medium for everything that an author does it is good for announcing the publication of a new book, a personal appearance or book signing and other events that the author is involved with.
5. Author Profile Pages
Authors that have books for sale on Amazon.com also can have an author page on the site. Your publisher will also have an author profile page on their site and there are many other places online where you can post your bio and links to your books and, most importantly, to your website. Taking the time to fill out your profile page, especially on the more important sites like Amazon.com, is vital to developing your online presence. Your readers want to see the writer behind the books so let them.
Engage Your Audience on Social Media
Like it on Facebook
While selling books is the ultimate objective of an author’s online marketing efforts, selling books is a highly competitive business and the most practical long term strategy is to build awareness of your brand. In other words you have to let people know that you are an author that has a book (or books) for sale. The easiest place to do this is on the social media sites like Facebook and Google+. The key to using social networks to sell books is to begin by engaging your readers/customers. Contribute to the conversations that they are having, like their posts, answer the comments that they leave on your wall and all of the other things that social media users do to interact on the sites. This will mean that they will feel like they already have a connection with you when you announce the release of your latest book in your status update.
+1 for SEO
The first step in using most social media sites for book marketing is to create a brand page. This separates your personal socializing from your book marketing so that you can let your fans, the people that are following your brand page, see only the posts that you make that relate to you as an author. Because Facebook is by far and away the largest of the social networks at the moment I focus my marketing on Facebook but Google+ has definite advantages for a page’s ranking in Google’s SERPs so I will be devoting more time to that site in coming months as well. The third site which is essential for authors to have a page on is Linkedin which not only offers the chance to market your books but is also a useful resource and a link to other authors and professionals in the publishing industry via its groups.
Internet marketers generally consider social media sites to be a source of first click as opposed to last click customers. What this bit of advertising jargon actually means is that when consumers see a brand on Facebook that they may well click through to its website to check it out but that those clicks will have a very low rate of conversion to sales on that visit. The search engines are the largest source of last click traffic to most websites so while readers/customers may first learn about an author on social media they are likely to look for them via one of the search engines when they want to buy their books. This makes social media a marketing tool that is used to raise brand awareness and an important part of an author’s marketing strategy.
The most effective methods for using social media sites to promote yourself as an author are to post interesting content that your fans will be interested in and to engage with them when they comment. This might seem too obvious to need to be pointed out but a surprising number of people, not just authors, do little else but hawk their goods in their status updates and while this might seem like a productive path it has just the opposite effect. Because social media is about socializing hard sell is the quickest way to tune out your potential audience to anything that you might have to say because they have become so accustomed to your constant sales pitch.
Facebook posts have a variable shelf life but it is possible to optimize your status updates by tailoring them to have a high Edge Rank rating. Edge Rank is the algorithm that Facebook uses to place users’ status updates into the news feed for the site and posts that have video images or links, or combinations of these, rank higher than just plain text or sharing other users’ material does. Posting a link to your latest blog post with the featured image and a comment asking for your fans to leave their opinion is going to give your post the best shot at staying on the top of the news feed for the longest possible time.
Another shameless plug for my novel
On its own social media marketing won’t sell many books but authors that use it to build an audience can, over time, create an audience that will be ready to buy their next book. There is a danger of spending too much time on social media than the return on that investment really merits. It is most useful for the short term effect that it can have on the traffic to your blog and as a way to engage with your readers in an informal way. Authors are really only selling books for a short time after they are published and spend the majority of their marketing time and effort selling themselves and social media sites are the most practical means for doing it.
The Business of Writing 1
Part 1: Plan to Work at Being an Author
Taking Off the Rose Colored Glasses
Most people have an image of authors and the business of writing that owes more to fiction than reality. The popular idea that writers scratch out a scintillating new novel and fire it off to their publishers between sipping martinis at celebrity soirees and attending book signings where their adoring fans queue for them to scrawl a platitude over their signature in copies of their latest novel are a nice dream but they have nothing to do with this plane of existence.
Since I have been writing as a full time occupation the reality of what it means to get up every day and write a few thousand words has become the round of my life. A more accurate portrayal of what it is to write for a living involves gallons of coffee and long hours spent tapping on a keyboard. Only the most naive writers ever imagine that it will be easy to find a publisher who will take their work but even when you do the reality of your relationship with them is far different to what the reading public imagines it to be.
Loot
When I published my first novel, Loot (available on amazon.com), the publisher didn’t give it an awful lot of support or promotion and the message to me was that, while they would assist me to sell my book, I was basically on my own. The marketing manager explained to me that publishers put 90% of their effort into promoting less than 10% of the authors that write for them and that if I wanted to become one of those writers that I had to sell a lot of books. The reality of being a writer had become more complicated because writing a book and finding a publisher willing to print it were only the first step on the road to literary success. Writers have to be marketers as well.
I belong to several online writers groups and the one consistent question that continues to come up in all of the forums is how do authors promote their work? There are a couple of options and authors can take the expensive PR route or, as is more commonly the case, they can go the DIY promotions road. Either way the first reality check for most writers is that they aren’t so much artists as they are small business operators.
How to Sell Books in the 21st Century
Pushing for Dollars
Even if you are fortunate enough to be able to afford to outsource your book promotions there is no guarantee that they will sell enough copies to cover the expense involved, especially as authors only make an average of 10-12% of the cover price for every book that they sell. A professional advertising campaign for a book might cost thousands and it is likely that you would have to sell the first few thousand just to cover those costs. When you consider that a book that makes the bottom of the New York Times Bestseller lists may have sold as few as 50,000 copies and the royalties from even a moderately successful book may only be $10,000-$15,000 the martini sipping illusion soon begins to dissipate in the harsh glare of reality.
The reality of having to sell books can be a steep learning curve for writers who may not be natural marketers or even possess business management skills. Suddenly being thrust into the world of ad campaigns and promotional strategies can be a big shift from spending hours composing literary gems and many authors that have great books flounder because they never get a handle on how to sell them. As confronting as it may be it is possible for authors to be very successful at promoting themselves and their books without having to spend huge amounts of either time or money. The internet has made taking control of the marketing side of publishing books accessible to anyone and in many ways authors are better off taking the DIY option.
The business of writing takes commitment and persistence if you are going to succeed. Most authors don’t start to make a living from their books until they have an established back catalogue to support the sales of the new books that they publish. It usually takes at least three or four books to become established and after four books I am just starting to head into the black now. My journey has taught me many lessons about what it takes to sell books and the marketing learning curve that I have been on has given me the confidence to know that I can succeed as an author.
Now that I have spent a few years on the business of writing I have a much clearer idea of what book marketing actually involves. In the end marketing your books isn’t very complicated but it does take time to get going just like any other small business does.
Make Writing Your Business
Cashing In
If you are going to market yourself and your books then the best place to start is to make writing your business. Looking at the business of writing pragmatically may not be the most romantic vision of what life as an author is all about but when you take off the rose colored glasses and look at what you need to do to sell books it is the only practical option. Like all businesses, authors have a product to sell and need to take a practical approach to how they go about doing that. Just like any other business, authors have to have a plan with clear objectives and strategies that they intend to use to achieve those goals.
The objective that most authors would place at the top of their list is to sell lots of books but when you break that large target down it is actually composed of a few interconnected components. Of course the most important part of the goal is to continue to produce new books to sell. Writing is the core activity of the business of writing and any plan for world domination has to allot enough time to it so that the quality of the work continues to improve. At the same time the real commodity that the author is selling is himself. This makes the fundamental thrust of the marketing that authors do about raising their public profile. The books that they write are the product but the author himself is the brand that is the focus of the marketing activities. Finally, the mechanical aspect of selling books is almost totally concerned with clerical administration and professional networking.
In broad terms, author’s business plans should include regularly publishing new material and with the development of e-books and Print on Demand (POD) publishing many writers are producing several books every year. In support of this authors also need to keep a blog where they can connect personally with their book buying public. To let people know that the blog and the books that are being sold on it are there it is necessary to advertise the facts and the most accessible (and cost effective) marketing tool that is available are social media and Web 2.0 sites where users contribute the content. Where possible authors should try and attend any book fairs and related events and find ways to actively promote their books and finally it is vital to network with other authors and people in the publishing industry generally.
Time management is vital in any enterprise and it is even more so in a time consuming occupation as writing. Just keeping up with the office work can be a considerable investment in time. This makes time management one of the most important skills that authors will need to develop in order to succeed at the business of writing. Without managing your time it is difficult to do a good enough job on all of the subsidiary efforts that authors need to make to sell their books while if too much time is being spent on promotions then the new material that they need to publish a steady supply of books for their readers won’t be getting done.
Part 3: Page Rank, the SERPs and Crafting the Perfect Blog Post
Most bloggers that have been online for a while will have picked up a few subscribers and be generating at least some traffic to their website. Depending on the niche it can be easy to develop an online profile and to build a good page ranking but for most bloggers they are going to have to compete for their share of the limelight in cyberspace. One thing that every blogger that has been at it for a while should do is to check their page ranking and Google has a service called Page Rank Checker(very imaginative) that will show the page rank ou
What’s Your Score?
t of ten of any URL that is entered. A score of three or less puts your page at the bottom of the SERPs generally while pages that score seven or more are the rock stars of the blogosphere. The advantage that comes from having a higher page ranking is that the crawlers will naturally give your posts a better placement in the SERPs.
The Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs, are the most easily misunderstood part of the whole SEO process. It is easy to make the mistake of entering your name, or your site’s name, into the search engine query and when your page is all that comes up to think that you are dominating Google. In reality the search terms that you are competing for are the keywords that define the topics in your posts. If you enter these into Google the SERPs will reveal a far different story. All of your direct competition for those keywords will become immediately apparent and even blogs that have been going for years might not make the first page. There are two sides to this situation that most bloggers should look at before they write a word.
Googoliath
The first is that the keywords that they have chosen are highly competitive and they will have to work hard to work their way up the SERPs for those terms. The second is that they haven’t optimized their pages well enough so that the crawlers have been through them deeply enough to find everything of value on the site. Another Google service that can be useful is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool which will generate a list of related keywords and give the search statistics for them. Using the Keywords Tool can help to narrow down the list of tags that you use on your blog and is a good way to isolate keywords in your niche that can be more easily dominated. The second difficulty is generally a matter of going over your old posts and making sure that there are enough links and that the keywords are all right. This may seem like a lot of work for nothing; after all, those old posts are yesterday’s papers aren’t they? To your regular readers they might be but to the search engines they are your content and when you upgrade it for better SEO the spiderbots will certainly notice.
Tell it how it is
How to Put All of This Together in the Perfect Blog Post
It isn’t necessary to write specifically for the search engines in order to improve your SEO and in fact it can be bad to do so but good blogging generally start with a plan. Starting with a practical list of keywords is important and making sure that your site is easy to navigate so that the user experience is positive also has a beneficial influence on your overall SEO. When you write posts be mindful of staying on topic so that the content matches the keywords all the way through beginning with the headline.
A good blog post headline will, like any headline, need to catch the attention of the passing reader with a clever turn of phrase or an interesting message while also telling them something of what the story under it is all about. For good SEO the headline should have a keyword included in it to show the crawlers that the tags are matched by the content. This same principal holds true for any subheadings that are used and while it can be tempting to use cryptic headlines for artistic effect it can confuse both your readers and the spiderbots alike.
It almost goes without saying that the most important part of a blog post is the written content. The more valuable that you make your content the more that it will attract links and be cited by other websites, thus improving your SERP ranking in an organic way. This long term optimization strategy takes advantage of the real value that the search engines offer with its links to your website- longevity. Links on social media sites may have great potential for generating immediate interest in your blog posts but the shelf life of the average Facebook post is only six and a half hours while a SERP listing lasts for as long as Google stays online. Stick to the basic keyword density rules, include a healthy amount of outward bound links to reputable sites and write for your readers and you should naturally produce the sort of valuable content that the search engines will rank highly.
It is also important to blog regularly to maintain a good ranking in the SERPs. The reason for this is that if the crawlers have been to your site a couple of times and nothing has changed then they will come back less and less often and your latest post won’t make it into the results pages for weeks instead of days (or hours). Writing regular posts or connecting several posts as a series will attract the spiderbots more regularly and improve your overall page ranking.
There is a lot of debate in internet marketing circles at the moment about the value of social media links to SEO. Apart from Facebook’s ability to draw a crowd when you publish your post it also is a large database of the links that users have posted in their status updates. Because these links have been chosen by a person to share with their friends the search engines assume that they lead to a better class of information and so they have an effect on the SERP rankings. There has also been some scuttlebutt around about Google using this to push the membership of Google+. The social media effect makes including share and like buttons with your blog posts worth considering as a practical way to both attract new visitors and to encourage good SEO.
On the surface the evolution of search engine algorithms should see more blogs scoring higher rankings in the SERPs. Google wants to put you higher on the list than the webspammers but in order to do that you have to make your blog visible in the ethereal light of cyberspace. As always, well written blog posts with lots of interest, great pictures and genuinely valuable content will be successful and the bloggers that can get a handle on presenting their work to the spiderbots will get the SERP ranking that will put them in front of a bigger audience.
So what do all you bloggers out there think? What have I missed? Leave a comment and let me know. And, keep on bloggin’!
Part 2: Basic Principles that Will Optimize Your Blog for the Crawlers
No matter how fantastic your blog posts are, if they aren’t visible to the spiderbots nobody will be able to find them to read them and so to make sure that they get indexed by the search engines it is vital to know what the crawlers look at when they visit your blog. At the end of April Google’s Matt Cutts posted an article on the Google Webmaster Central Blog that outlines what the search engine giant is looking for in a good website. In it Cutt’s talks about White Hat search engine optimizers being the ones that create a great website with lots of valuable information and which provides a good user experience. Google’s latest algorithm is designed to reward those websites while weeding out the webspam and pages that use link schemes to generate back links to their site specifically to improve their SERP rankings. Google’s official line on this is: “We want people doing white hat search engine optimization (or even no search engine optimization at all) to be free to focus on creating amazing, compelling web sites.”3
Choose Your Keywords Carefully
The first thing that the crawlers will look at are the keyword tags that you have attached to your page. The spiderbots can’t actually read your content and need these tags to set the topic for the web page that it is examining so it is important that you tag your blog posts with words that explain exactly what your content is about. Choosing the right keywords is an art in itself (and perhaps the subject of another blog post here) but generally they are words that are central to the niche that you are writing about and that should occur naturally in most things that are written on your topic. Most corporate websites will try and focus on a particular set of keywords to leverage them for a good position in the SERPs but bloggers commonly have quite a few keyword tags that they have used on their sites.
Google’s keyword inspection team
To make sure that you are getting the attention that you deserve from the search engines choose a core set of keyword tags and use one or more of them in all of your posts. There are two kinds of keywords: long and short tail keywords and, as their names suggest, the difference is merely that short tail keywords are one or sometimes two words while long tail keywords are short phrases. So, for instance, if your blog is aimed at anglers then your keywords might be fishing, bait, fish hooks, reels and a few long tail keywords like fly fishing poles, fishing boats, hooks and sinkers and you would try and use them most of the time when making a post. Most blogs could use about a dozen or so central keywords and another twenty or so that are associated keywords without becoming too imprecise for the spiderbots. Every post should be limited to three or four short tail keywords and a couple of long tail keywords with about half at least being core keywords that you want to compete for in the SERPs.
After examining your keywords the crawlers will then go through your copy and look for how often you have used the keywords in your copy. Too few times and the material won’t be seen as being very valuable while too often will be interpreted as keyword stuffing and hurt you even more. Google has been moving towards using more semantic search parameters in their algorithms and so the crawlers will also look for synonyms for your keywords as well as other words that it recognizes that relate to your topic. This should mean that the carefully crafted article that you sweat over will rank higher in the SERPs than the keyword stuffed webpage that was made to create back links to a Canadian Viagra sales page. To make sure that the spiderbots see your posts in the right light it is still best to ensure that you have one keyword for every 100-150 words of copy and try and scatter your links evenly through your posts. Citations at the end of a post are also great for drawing the crawlers into your site as they are often hyperlinks and include specific information.
The Trio of Hyperlinks
After the keywords and the content the next most important thing on your website for the spiderbots are the links. Web pages have three kinds of links- those that point out and those that point to the page as well as internal links and they are all interpreted differently by the search engines. In the past the number of links that pointed to your web page had the most influence on the ranking in the SERPs than those that you made to link the page with other sites but this has evolved so that it is now preferable to have a balance of both. Links that point out are referencing valuable content on the web and so they are now considered as adding value to their own website by doing so. Links that point towards a webpage reference it as valuable material and so the crawlers give it more weight. One of the recent changes that the Google Penguin Update made is to look at sites that have unnatural links which, put simply, are pages with links stuffed into them to generate SEO for other pages. This means that your blog post with a couple of hyperlinks to Wikipedia or another blog and a couple of ping backs is going to look like A1 internet copy to the spiderbots.
The third kind of link, the internal link, is important for two reasons. Firstly it keeps your readers on your website as it takes them to some other page on your site to continue reading. The second reason is similar to the first except that it takes the crawlers deeper into your site and shows them that you have a greater depth of valuable information. It is good if the anchor text (the text with the link attached to it) is one of the keywords or closely associated with it but it isn’t vital.
The creatures that visit your blog in the night
Images also come in for some scrutiny and generally add value to a post as well as making it easier to separate the blocks of text in longer articles. It is important to make sure that images have a title, preferably one of the keywords, and it is also good to include a caption and the Alt text that appears if the image fails to load. The crawlers use all of these things to determine if the image contributes to the content or if it is some unrelated marketing ploy. If you ‘borrow’ the image from another site it is also a good idea to attach a link to that site. It gives the spiderbots exactly the sort of information that it likes about the source of the image and also abuses copyright far less than just pinching it does.
There are other things that the algorithm uses to influence the page ranking such as how much content is above the ‘fold line’ or, in other words, how much is on one screen when the page opens. The number of PPC ads that appear on a page can also demote it but for most bloggers that isn’t a real issue as their sidebars are usually filled with widgets and share buttons.
As a rule of thumb, good SEO should result from well written organic copy. In the normal course of writing on a topic you should generally use the right amount of keywords in the right places and your posts should have the right amount of links and anchor text to make them look valuable to the search engines. While I wouldn’t take Google quite at face value and not think about SEO at all it doesn’t take a lot of extra effort to make sure that you tag your latest post and include the Alt text on the images before you publish them.
Next: Part 3: Page Rank, the SERPs and Crafting the Perfect Blog Post
Writing Blog Posts that the Search Engines Will Love
Part 1: Blog Traffic Basics
When I started this blog just over two years ago one of the objectives was to share some of the useful things that I learn about the business of writing. Since I have been freelancing I have been able to spend time researching a number of interesting topics but a large percentage of my paid writing work is about internet marketing. In the course of the research that I do to stay on top of the latest changes to Google’s search algorithm and Facebook’s newest analytical tool I have discovered some basic principles that can have your blog shooting up the search engine results pages (SERPs).
The creatures that crawl through your blog in the darkness
Many of my readers are also bloggers (you know who you are) and one thing that we all have in common is that we hope that someone is reading our stuff. After all, it takes a lot of time to research and write a good blog post and we all hope that someone other than mum is actually reading it. Fortunately blog software usually comes loaded with statistics that we can use to assure ourselves that we aren’t blogging to an empty house. At the same time it is easy to look at the number of visitors as it ticks along steadily and wonder how you could increase those numbers.
Bloggers according to their pro-am status
Professional bloggers (5% of all bloggers derive their primary income from blogging1) know how to drive traffic to their websites because they know where that traffic comes from. For most bloggers the main sources of new visitors will be one of two general sources; social media sites like Twitter and Facebook or one of the search engines.
Search Engines and Social Media Links
Social media statistics are mind boggling and the amount of traffic that is generated by Facebook’s 800 million+ users is a great potential source of new visitors for most bloggers. Social media is a dominant force online and the number of people using it has grown by 600% in the past 5 years with 61% of internet users visiting social network sites regularly2. Even only a couple of years ago it was good enough to just keep a blog, write interesting content, engage the visitors that left comments and let nature take its course and your blog would grow organically. The blogging game has changed as Web 2.0 has come to be the dominant form of internet and being noticed in the immensity of this new cyberspace became more difficult as billions of new voices joined the conversation online. This development has made the creation of a parallel brand page for your blog on Facebook a necessity for any serious blogger in 2012.
In a way blogging and social media, both different applications of Web 2.0, are complimentary to one another. Social
WordPress & Facebook- two peas in a pod
media is driven by off site content as a significant means of contributing to its own content. People go onto Facebook and post links to interesting websites and images that they find while they are surfing the web. This works because if someone likes something it is likely that their friends will like it too and it makes Facebook an excellent social platform. Professional bloggers use this to promote their blogs and build their subscriber base by posting the RSS feed from their blog into their status update on Facebook and by Tweeting about the great blog post that they just published.
Social media, with all of its glamour and incessant chatter, is only the second best potential source of internet traffic for your blog. Most websites derive two thirds of their new traffic from the search engines and with 91% of internet users regularly using search engines2 it is vital to have a good position in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for the topics that your blog is about. Google is the giant in the search engine world with 83% of all search engine traffic2 and so it is most productive to look at how Google determines your page’s place in its SERPs because it is most likely where your new visitors are going to find your blog.
Search engines are really just large indexes of all of the websites that they have found on the internet. In order to index the pages the search engines send out programs that jump from website to website examining them and cataloguing their contents called crawlers or spiderbots. When the crawler arrives at a web page it uses a complex algorithm to examine the content so that it can index it in its proper place in the SERPs. The way that it does this is to examine several key components of the web page including links, keywords, images and other content to judge how valuable and fresh the information in order to calculate its ranking. The search engines are constantly updating their search algorithms so to some degree the target is always moving but there are some basic principal that you can use to make sure that the spiderbots judge the great content on your blog fairly. Creating content that is tailored for the crawlers is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and every blogger does it to some degree even if it is mostly unconscious.
Next Part 2: Basic Principles that Will Optimize Your Blog for the Crawlers
References:
1. The State of the Blogosphere 2011, Higgins, Technorati Media http://www.slideshare.net/crbrook/state-of-the-blogosphere-2011
2. Search Engine Use 2012, Kristen Purcell, Johanna Brenner, Lee Rainie, Pew Research Center http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Search-Engine-Use-2012/Summary-of-findings.aspx
Conspiracy Theories and Tales of Armageddon
Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin; but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!- Alice in Wonderland
While I was doing some research for an article entitled Conspiring to Find a Policy for Moot Magazine’s March edition I had the opportunity to spend some time reading up on conspiracy theories. The gist of the article was that several of the policies being touted by the Republican candidates for the upcoming US election were once considered to be on the fringes of believability. This led me to thinking about conspiracy theories in more detail. I asked myself- when did we start spreading these sorts of urban stories? Why are people so eager to believe in secret cabals that plot for world domination or that the British Royal family are our reptilian overlords? Why do these theories start in the first place and who derives the greatest benefit from them really? All very deep and searching questions.
The literature on the subject all seems to point to conspiracy theories as being a modern phenomenon and as far as I can see the term was first used in its present context by K.R. Popper in his book Open Society (1952) in which he says:
“I call it the ‘conspiracy theory of society’. It is the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon.” Popper’s ideas in this book have been shown to be flawed but his contribution to the English language remains. The concept of groups working together to achieve a common result that is the basis of most conspiracy theories isn’t so hard to accept, in fact it is the truth, there are groups devoted to a common end, many of them. The conspiracy isn’t the thing that gives these theories their flavor, it is the intention of the conspiracy. Murray Rothbard points this out in his essay; The Conspiracy Theory of History Revisited. It isn’t about whether we believe that the cabals exist it is what we believe about their motives that is pertinent.
A lie is most cleverly hidden between two truths.- Mark Twain
In his book A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, Michael Barkun examines the conspiracy theory phenomenon from an academic perspective. Professor Barkun demonstrates that the evolution of the internet has seen the development of the number and complexity of conspiracy theories, no doubt due to the absolute freedom to express your opinion that the internet provides. He also points to the confluence of two trends which he calls “improvisational millennialism” which he says “is by definition an act of bricolage, wherein disparate elements are drawn together in new combinations” and “stigmatized knowledge” or “knowledge claims that run counter to generally accepted beliefs“. Barkun also defines three common properties that are shared by most conspiracy theories:
1. Nothing happens by accident
2. Nothing is as it seems
3. Everything is connected
He stresses the importance of secrecy to conspiracy and defines three main types of conspiracy theories:
1. Event conspiracies
2. Systematic conspiracies
3. Super Conspiracies
It is the empirical soundness of conspiracy theories that is the grey area. Most conspiracy theories don’t ask to be taken on faith and come complete with a full complement of apparently inviolable proofs. Facts and citations of scholarly works that support the facts of the conspiracy which while usually very parsimonious are also usually based on generalizations. Barkun puts it like this: “the more sweeping a conspiracy theory’s claims, the less relevant evidence becomes, notwithstanding the insistence that the theory is empirically sound. This paradox occurs because conspiracy theories are at their heart nonfalsifiable. No matter how much evidence their adherents accumulate, belief in a conspiracy theory ultimately becomes a matter of faith rather than proof.” Because these theories are so all encompassing they are untestable, unfalsifiable and theorists can fall back on the theory to prove itself by claiming that the general ignorance of the truth is one of the tools of the conspirators.
We’re through the looking-glass here, people… white is black and black is white -JFK 1991
The 1960s were the real start of the conspiracy theory phenomenon in Western society. The historians point to the Kennedy assassinations as the main source of most early conspiracy theories and they remain popular today. It was at this time that Area 51 myths and stories about spaceships hidden in Arizona made Roswell the capitol of the conspiracy theory world. As Western society has become more occultural the inclusion of secret groups like the Illuminati and the Knights Templar and then the Rothschilds and the Fabian Society have added new dimensions to the theorists’ level of complexity. Since the 1970s a whole genre has developed around conspiracy theories that has spawned dozens, if not hundreds, of books, television shows, movies and thousands of websites making it an influential part of pop culture.
I strongly suspect that one of the main motives behind most conspiracy theories is financial. Books in the genre sell huge numbers. The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield has sold 23 million copies- not a bad hedge against the Apocalypse. The latest superstar of the conspiracy theorists’ world is David Icke who has an eclectic conflation of conspiracies working together in a giant super conspiracy that places reptilian humans at the top of the food chain. With twenty odd books for sale, a dozen videos and a full schedule of speaking engagements we perhaps should ask if Mr. Icke is on the payroll of our velociraptor masters? In fact since the days of Erich von Daniken’s Chariot’s of the Gods (20 million copies sold) conspiracy theories have blossomed into almost an art form as they twist just enough truth into their intricate mechanisms to make the blatant untruths and fabrications palatable enough to generate a generous return on the investment. This trend seems set to continue as the popularity of Dan Brown’s conspiracy theory novels recently proved.
Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it- Adolph Hitler
The question of why people are so willing to believe in conspiracy theories is far harder to fathom. Barkun implies that they give the world a black and white, good versus evil explanation that people want to identify with. Instead of the world’s problems being the accumulation of greed and ignorance there is an alternative force behind the scenes manipulating events and controlling our lives. It involves people in a life or death struggle for the possession of their own minds and souls that gives greater definition to the value that they give to their lives. The broad generalizations of most theories make the complex ideas that they represent easier to grasp in a world that has expanded and become difficult for the individual to conceptualize.
Two of the yardsticks that I have always relied upon to measure the validity of a statement are the Naturalistic Fallacy and Occam’s Razor. The first is treating the term “good” (or its equivalent) as if it were the name of a natural property. Occam’s Razor simply stated is “a principle urging one to select among competing hypotheses that which makes the fewest assumptions and thereby offers the simplest explanation of the effect (Wikipedia)”. This means that when a conspiracy theory talks about abuses of the common good I am already suspicious but when they demand that I believe in reptile people from outer space that the theory is becoming too complex to accept on face value alone. This process usually reveals that at the heart of most conspiracy theories is a truth. Often it has been twisted to suit the desired end and usually it is the premise that is used to make the underlying falsehood seem reasonable.
O conspiracy! Sham’st thou to show thy dangerous brow by night, When evils are most free?- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Over a couple of months I have perused the most popular of the current crop of conspiracy theories and have come to group them under my own headings. Some conspiracies fall into more than one category simply because they have conflated so many ideas into one grand scheme. Nonetheless, there are certain themes that seem to be pretty constant and so disproving the validity of one conspiracy theory begins to make many other look pretty shaky too. As they can’t all be right about the coming apocalypse and its causes this constant cross referencing naturally tends towards one super conspiracy theory which seems to be taking shape in the work of David Icke.
Illuminati and the Domination of the New World Order
This is one of the most common themes and has a long history as the Freemasons have been running the world for centuries. The real Illuminati were a short lived occult institution in Bavaria in the 1770s and was disbanded in 1784. Of course the theorists postulate that the Illuminati went underground and became an uber-secret group. The same has been said about the Knights Templar who were disbanded in the 14th century. The New World Order (NWO) is an interesting concept that conjures up Orwellian images of slave laborers and political doublespeak. Secret societies (the Fabian Society is a favorite) that seek to create a world for elites and where we will all be chained to the wheel in some socialist hell. This category naturally tends to be somehow conflated with the next one.
Rothschilds, Central Banks and Funny Money
The fiscal domination of the earth is a popular theme in many grand theories and often the focus is on the Rothschilds who are supposed to be orchestrating the devaluing of our currency by the use of fractional reserve banking and fiat money. The motive for this is to take control of all of the money supplies in the world through their own central bank. By printing valueless money and redistributing the wealth of the world they intend to keep the wealthy and affluent West in debt while they bleed the third world dry. The convincing aspect of these kinds of theories is that many of the details are correct, the broad generalization that one central group is using this means is where we depart from the truth. Everyone knows that the government are the ones that are keeping us all brain washed.
False Flags and CIA Assassinations
Secret government cabals have been a central conspiracy theory since the beginning and no respectable conspiracy theory is complete without some level of government involvement. They are subverting our children, feeding us all poison, lying about the aliens and selling us out to their satanic overlords. The conspiracy isn’t that they are doing all of those things, it is that they are doing them in secret. Within days of September 11 2001 there were so many theorists claiming that it was a false flag operation by the CIA that President Bush actually commented on it. Since the CIA set Lee Harvey Oswald up for the JFK assassination they have been a central player in the conspiratorial shadow world.
Hidden Messages from the Ancient World
These sorts of theories are probably my favorite and I fondly remember poring over the Chariots of the Gods in my youth and wondering if the aliens were coming back. Unfortunately archaeology has uncovered the truth of most of the mysteries and I have had to come to terms with the fact that the Maori people carved the statues on Easter Island, not the aliens. Stonehenge and the Nazca Plains just aren’t the same anymore. Atlantis myths may have been the first conspiracy theories and the DaVinci Code has shown that we will continue to look for the hidden wisdom of the concealed masters for some time to come yet.
UFOs, Aliens and Assorted Higher Intelligences
Who doesn’t love an alien? Roger from American Dad is fantastic. Like the rest of humanity I hoped that the alien autopsy films were real. UFOs might be real- who knows? The definitive proof is still lacking. Higher forms of life that are secretly fostering humanity (or breeding them like cattle) have been around since Moses was a boy. Napoleon said that religion was nothing more than saying that my imaginary friend is better than your imaginary friend- maybe he was right. A really good conspiracy theory needs a sinister alien component.
The Royal Family are Reptilian Aliens
This one is a David Icke special which is part alien, part Illuminati elitism, and part apocalyptic. This theory of the secret enslavement of humanity is all encompassing and by far the most imaginative attempt at re-explaining the world in far more reasonable terms. Her Majesty is a velociraptor! That explains everything.
The Bermuda Triangle, Crop Circles and the Yeti
I still hope that it is possible that aircraft do disappear in the Bermuda Triangle but the statistics just don’t support the assertion. This class of conspiracy theory generally revolves around someone keeping them a secret. The government knows why those ships go into the time vortex in the Bermuda Triangle, they just aren’t telling us. The aliens are leaving the crop circles and the government knows why but they just aren’t telling us. One day they will catch Big Foot.
Elvis Lives and We Faked the Moon Landings
These are half conspiracy theory and half urban myth. Of course it is common knowledge that Elvis quit the dull life of a rock star to join the FBI and went on to work in a 7Eleven in Pittsburg. Of course it was much easier to fake the whole space program and film it somewhere at a secret location in the Rocky Mountains than it was to actually go to the moon. These stories always leave me asking why?
The Mayan Calendar and the Apocalypse
This is a long standing niche in the genre. We have been having the Apocalypse for around 1600 years when we first worked out that the Beast whose number is 666 was Nero. Of course it took the wind out of the Mayan Calendar inspired end of timers when someone asked a Mayan and he said that the calendar just starts again. Duh. The end of the world lobby seem to want the world to end, as if that will show the rest of us sinners where we went wrong. Although not strictly one of the conspiracy theories the Apocalypse features in many of them and their emergence in the late 20th century has been attributed to the coming of the millennium.
Every time that I mention conspiracy theories on this blog I seem to attract a few comments from people that tell me that I should look into the subject more deeply and then I will see the truth. Well the scales have been lifted from my eyes now and I see that these alternate theories of reality are generally created and believed by people that want things to be other than they are. I still enjoy a good conspiracy theory, they make for fantastic reading. In the end my faith falls short of actually believing them because, like e-mails from Nigeria, they are so full of promise but contain so little of substance.
Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.- Lord Acton
There are many things that were once a part of the ‘occult’ which have now found mainstream acceptance and even belief. Of the new age beliefs that have seeped into the middle class consciousness magick is one of the most popular and across the range of spiritual beliefs that have a magickal aspect there are only a small number of consistent practices. Alongside astrology and a general practice of sympathetic magick, the use of the Tarot is almost universal. Spiritual disciplines as different as Rosicrucian and Hermetic magicians, Satanists and Pagans of many varieties all accept Tarot as a part of their standard practice. With the large number of solitary practitioners that are choosing the magickal spiritual path often the Tarot’s place in their witchcraft regimen isn’t even questioned, and they take it up as a useful part of their usual practice even though it really has little or nothing to do with withcraft per se.
I have been writing short essays on the Tarot Trumps, or Atus, on my other blog where I post most of my musings on the dark arts. These posts have seen the traffic on Ankhafnakhonsu’s Magick Blog rise dramatically because of the huge interest in the Tarot. It has given me the opportunity to discuss the Tarot with more people and often I find that people that are new to cartomancy often have some common misapprehensions about their origins. Perhaps it is a part of the mystique or the numismatic power of the cards that encourages people to want to believe that they are the remnants of secret ancient Egyptian magickal mysteries, created by Thoth for the enlightenment of the wise but the truth of their genesis shifts the genius of the Tarot from the gods to ourselves where it truly belongs. The ingenuity of the Tarot and the way that we have shaped it to be a tool of our will make it one of the most potent tools for spiritual development ever devised. This power also makes them among the most deceptive and elusive of occult paraphernalia and it always pays to remember that at their base the Tarot is still a game, the divination game.
A Short History of Cards
The are many myths on the origins of the Tarot cards; that they are a fragment of the magick of ancient Khem, that they were connected to the Knights Templar and that the Gypsy people brought them into Europe being the most common. To find the real origins of the Tarot cards it is necessary to look at the origins of playing cards more generally and we find the first playing cards in Tang Dynasty China in the 9th Century. It is thought that the first cards were money and that the games that were played with them used them for the game and the stakes of that game at the same time. These cards developed into the general configuration of four suits that we are familiar with today by the 11th Century and they had spread across Asia. Their design is also thought to have been influenced by Chinese dominos and to have evolved into the familiar MahJong tiles that are used today and the Chinese word pái (牌) stands for both ’tile’ and ‘card’.
The Chinese playing cards traveled west with the Mongol expansion in the 13th Century where the Mongol invasion of Syria first introduced them to the Islamic world. In 1260 the Mamluk Caliphate of Egypt defeated the Mongol advance and within a century almost all of the Mongols had returned to China, leaving behind the Chinese playing cards as a treasured possession of the Islamic world. The Mamluk modified the cards, mostly by altering their decorative designs while leaving the overall structure in place. The Mamluk cards were made up of four suits that were the prototype of the structure of the playing cards that we use today. The first playing cards entered Europe in the late 14th Century via Spain’s rulers, the Mamluk Caliphate, and from there the use of playing cards spread across Europe quickly and their use has been confirmed from 1377.
These first sets of cards were expensive, hand painted works of art that were available only to the wealthy and in 1392 Jacquemin Gringonneur was commissioned to create a deck of cards for Charles VI. The first set of Tarot cards appeared in Italy in 1440 and was used for playing a trick taking game similar to bridge called Tarrochi. The oldest known set is named for its patron the Duke of Milan is called the Visconti-Sforza Tarocchi Deck with 74 cards from the full set known to be still existing. This is the first set that contains the twenty-two trump cards of the Tarot, a series of images of ever increasing power from the Juggler to the Last Judgement and the World.
These cards are considered to be the prototype deck that all modern sets are modeled on. The origins of the twenty-two trumps is uncertain. There is some speculation that Islamic sets of cards may have included trump-like cards, while the original card games played in China often used trading cards not unlike modern trading card games popular with children. In any event, by 1440 the components of the modern Tarot were in place and trick taking card games had become popular across Europe taking the Tarot into most of Europe where it had its next period of evolution in France with the production of a set called the Marseilles Tarot standardized the Trumps late in the 15th Century. At this same time the first sets of 52 card decks started to be manufactured in France with the familiar suits of clubs, hearts, spades and diamonds and then continued to evolve alongside the development of the Tarot.
Ye Olde Tarot Lore
The first mention by the church of Trump cards is from Italy around 1470 when it was said that playing with them was equated with the devil’s work, beginning the long association that the Tarot has with being ‘the Devil’s Picture Book’. There is also a mention of divination using cards from 1487 but it refers specifically to playing cards and it wasn’t until much later that the Tarot was attributed with spiritual powers. Another source mentions the Tarot cards in a witchcraft trial in Venice in 1589 but their use wasn’t specified. It wasn’t until the end of the 18th Century that Tarot cards began to be associated with divination.
The first mention of the Tarot in relation to magick or divination was in 1781 by Antoine Court de Gébelin and the Comte de Mellet in the book, “Le Monde Primitif” (The Primitive World). Mellet was the first to make the connection between the twenty-two Trumps and the letters of the Hebrew Alphabet while Gébelin was the first to attribute them to ancient Egypt and to attribute secret occult origins of the Tarot cards. The Hermetic attribution of the Tarot was readily accepted, so much so that by 1788 the first deck designed specifically for divination, the Ettellia Tarot deck was published with alteration to their designs that reflected their new Egyptian connection. It is interesting to note that this is the first time that the meanings of the cards was printed on them, a feature of many modern Tarot sets.
The fact that Barrett’s Celestial Intelligencer makes no mention of any sort of divination by cards at all indicates that, at the beginning of the 19th Century, there was little use being made of the cards for divination by any serious students of occultism. The real evolution of the Tarot from a set of playing cards for Italian Nobles into a systemized method of divining the future took place during the ‘Occult Revival’ of the latter half of the 19th Century.
Eliphas Levi Names the Devil
The absolute kabalistic alphabet, which connected primitive ideas with allegories, allegories with letters, and letters with numbers, was then called the Keys of Solomon. We have stated already that these Keys, preserved to our own day, but wholly misconstrued, are nothing else than the game of Tarot, the antique allegories of which were remarked and appreciated for the first time in the modern world by the learned archaeologist, Court de Gebelin.- Dogma et Rituel, Eliphas Levi,
The next development in the mystification of the Tarot came in the 1850s when Alphonse Constance, better known as Eliphas Levi, mused upon the connection between the Qabalah and the Tarot. His book Dogma et Rituel forever cemented the Tarot and the Qabalah together and was the penultimate step in the development of the modern Tarot and its uses. Levi also further clouded the Tarot’s connection with magick by associating XV The Devil with Baphomet, the Ass headed idol that the Knights Templar were accused of worshipping. In one stroke Levi had connected Hermetic magick, the Knights Templar and all of Rosicrucian Freemasonry and the Tarot Trumps forever. The names for the two divisions within the Tarot deck, the Major and Minor Arcana are also attributed to this time, first mentioned in Paul Christian’s (Jean Baptiste Pitois) 1870 book, The History and Practice of Magic. The final pieces of the modern Tarot were put in place at the end of the 19th Century by a group of occultists belonging to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
The Golden Dawning of the Tarot
In the hands of the Golden Dawn the Tarot was developed completely into its modern form. It is very likely that S L MacGregor Mathers was most responsible for creating the full connection between the Tarot and the Hermetic Qabalah that is the foundation of the Golden Dawn system of magick. He almost certainly wrote Book T which is the first attempt ever to collect all of the designs, esoteric meanings and divinatory interpretations into one book. Book T was distributed amongst Golden Dawn Neophytes and many of them drew up their own sets of cards based upon them, most notably the Robert Wang deck that was designed under the instruction of Israel Regardie in 1977. The systemization that MacGregor Mathers applied to the Tarot cards made them an excellent mnemonic device for learning the Qabalah. He had repurposed the Tarot into a tool for mystical introspection. Even so, the secret nature of the Golden Dawn teachings meant that Book T wasn’t published until the 1960s and it was left to another Golden Dawn adept to begin to promote the Tarot to the level of popularity that it was to achieve.
The person who was most responsible for bringing the Tarot to the attention of popular culture was A E Waite whose 1910 book The Key to the Tarot was targeted at a popular audience and was accompanied by a set designed by Pamela Coleman Smith, but because it was published by Rider Press it became known as the Rider-Waite Tarot. Waite’s book is ponderous and cursory, although it has the essence of the Golden Dawn philosophy in it, but it had the effect of raising the profile of the Tarot as a tool of serious occultists.
Three other Golden Dawn adepts had an even greater influence on the development of the modern Tarot; Dion Fortune, who clearly and concisely linked the Tarot to the Qabalah in the ultimate development of the Hermetic Qabalah, her book The Mystical Qabalah (1935), Paul Foster Case whose voluminous writings on Tarot have influenced every book that has followed him and Aleister Crowley, whose Thelema incorporated the Tarot into his Thelema, the first religious system of the new age which he entitled the Aeon of Horus. Crowley’s influence on Tarot as a tool of the magician is incalculable as it formed so integral part of his work that it is almost impossible to understand his writing without having a comprehensive understanding of the Tarot.
Tarot for Today
From there the Tarot was well established as a tool of the occultist in the popular mind, so much so that it formed the central theme to Ian Flemings Live and Let Die in 1954. In less than a century the Tarot had gone from being an obscure study, tenuously connected to divination, to the well known tool of the fortune teller. In fact the Tarot has even attained academic acceptance with Carl Jung saying;
“They are psychological images, symbols with which one plays, as the unconscious seems to play with its contents. They combine in certain ways, and the different combinations correspond to the playful development of events in the history of mankind. The original cards of the Tarot consist of the ordinary cards, the king, the queen, the knight, the ace, etc.,—only the figures are somewhat different—and besides, there are twenty-one cards upon which are symbols, or pictures of symbolical situations. For example, the symbol of the sun, or the symbol of the man hung up by the feet, or the tower struck by lightning, or the wheel of fortune, and so on. Those are sort of archetypal ideas, of a differentiated nature, which mingle with the ordinary constituents of the flow of the unconscious, and therefore it is applicable for an intuitive method that has the purpose of understanding the flow of life, possibly even predicting future events, at all events lending itself to the reading of the conditions of the present moment. It is in that way analogous to the I Ching, the Chinese divination method that allows at least a reading of the present condition. You see, man always felt the need of finding an access through the unconscious to the meaning of an actual condition, because there is a sort of correspondence or a likeness between the prevailing condition and the condition of the collective unconscious.“-Notes of the Seminar given in 1930-1934 by C. G. Jung
The popularity of the Tarot grew and gradually became a central new age spiritual practice and a central set of symbols for the Aquarian age. The huge growth in the number of commercially available Tarot decks can be attributed to Stuart R Kaplan whose US Games Systems now publishes over a hundred sets. Kaplan’s Encyclopedia of the Tarot (1978) is a catalogue of all known Tarot decks and is currently in its 4th Edition with hundreds of decks listed. What is accepted as Tarot has become more flexible as several sets that have almost no connection with the historic symbolism of the Tarot are now classed as Tarot decks, until reading Tarot cards has become synonymous with the practice of cartomancy generally.
As with the ‘traditional’ history of many modern occult practices the ancient lore of the cards is nothing more than myth. Does this in any way detract from the magick of the Tarot? Or the genius of conflating them with the Qabalah to form the framework of an entire occult system that spawned a spiritual movement? By repurposing the Tarot the Golden Dawn took advantage of a set of symbols that they could easily manipulate to represent the archetypal principals of Hermetic symbolism. The adepts of the Golden Dawn even adopted the four suits as their four principal magickal implements and in some ways it could be said that the four suits already had a natural affinity with the elements but it is much more likely that the divisions of the suits represented similar divisions in society in the original Islamic decks and the realignment to fit a Qaballistic paradigm was more likely to have been a case of altering the cards to suit the Golden Dawn usage rather than the Golden Dawn adepts finding the key to the hidden mysteries in the Tarot. The vital achievement was to have connected the Tarot to the much older Platonic influenced Qabalah and adapting the Tarot to a long established occult study. As a mnemonic device for Qaballistic contemplation the Tarot is the best magick tool bar none.
Very Inspiring Blogger Award
I was pleasantly surprised today to discover that I had been nominated for a Very Inpspiring Blogger Award by my fellow blogger Spider Goddess. I have been writing for this blog for just on two years now and it amazes me that it would inspire anyone but judging from the traffic through this site and its sister blog Ankhafnakhonsu’s Magick Blog someone is actually reading what I have been writing. This award confirms that they actually like it too.
In keeping with the rules for these awards I am now obliged to write some things about myself that my readers may not know about me.
1. I was born in the United States and lived for the first half of childhood in Syracuse New York before immigrating to Australia with my family in 1972.
2. My original ambition in life was to be an artist and I still enjoy making watercolor landscape sketches when I have the time. I have also designed three of the covers for my books.
3. I have spent over a quarter of a century working as an al a carte chef although I have become a freelance writer in recent years (shameless plug).
4. I am a compulsive sports fan and my favorite sports are Formula 1, Cricket, Baseball, Australian Rules Football (Go Bombers!!!).
5. I am a self confessed computer geek and an obsessive gamer. I would rather play Tiger Woods Golf on the Wii than spoil a good walk by playing the real thing. RTS games rock!!!
6. Even though I do drive, I dislike automobiles (except F1 cars) and I would rather walk than ride.
7. I read a lot and don’t have any favorite authors in particular (perhaps I am just indecisive) but I do have books that I admire. Among them are One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, Shogun by James Clavell and the most recent would be the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by steig Larson.
The final condition of being awarded the Very Inspiring Blogger Award is that I have the privilege of choosing other bloggers that have inspired me to pass it on to. There are four blogs that I follow that I would like to pass this award onto because they have inspired my own blogging and made me think about the way that I write. Rather than just listing some blogs I would also like to share what I find inspiring about each of them:
Do The Right Thing- Ed Hurst: A unique view on modern America and inspiring because of Ed’s sheer level of persistent energy for writing and blogging.
Necropolis Now: The most scholarly blog on Witchcraft online. Inspiring for the detail of the research that is done by Caroline for each post.
The Venetian Vase: A great blog on all things to do with crime writing. Inspiring for closing the degrees of separation between myself and one of the all time great writers James Ellroy.
Invocatio: An interesting perspective on the occult arts and inspiring for the sheer number of great links posted.
I would also nominate The Naked Listener but as he has furloughed his fantastic blog in protest I will have to restrict myself to a very honorable mention.
Mumma Moon
Last year I wrote an article for Moot Magazine entitled Spirituality- The New Religion for the New Age, and during my research the subject of the preponderance of women that are pursuing a spiritual rather than a religious path came up. In an interesting quote, Professor Sabina Magliocco of California State University told me,
“The preponderance of women, the well-educated and youth in Pagan religions is no mystery. Modern Paganisms focus on the feminine divine, and offer women key liturgical and leadership roles. They require no belief; they are religions of gnosis and/or of practice. And they frequently foreground a strong environmental message that is attractive to many young people. Sexuality is celebrated rather than condemned; creativity is valued and rewarded; and there are ample opportunities to tailor practice to the individual by combining elements eclectically.”
The demographics that she delineated tallied with my experience of the attendees at many of the pagan gatherings that I have attended in recent years where well educated, middle class, middle aged women have consistently out numbered their male counterparts. This led me to look at the feminine aspect of new age spirituality in general and recently, having become more involved with a group that organizes Public pagan events here in Melbourne I have had some first hand experience of being involved in helping to publicize women’s only gatherings that are being held by Lady Elizabeth Rose called Mumma Moon.
While these events aren’t specifically Pagan and don’t involve witchcraft per se, there is a strong enough current of goddess worship to mark them as truly new age and, curious to find out what these gatherings are all about I spent a pleasant afternoon talking to Lizzy Rose about what she is doing with these gatherings, where they began and where they are going. I began with a set series of questions for Lizzy but as we began to chat I let her talk on about these gatherings, about which she is genuinely passionate and the interview turned into a discussion of Lady Rose’s origins as a witch and her inspiration for going into public celebrations of the Pagan Sabbats as well as the motives behind her Mumma Moon gatherings.
I will leave a detailed account of Lady Elizabeth Rose’s path through witchcraft for another post except to say that she has a lifetime of experience in the Craft and has worked for many years as a psychic after spending her life since childhood using her gifts and first registering as a Melbourne’s Medium in 1995. Lizzy has also spent her life in the entertainment industry as an actress and vocalist and so it was probably inevitable that, after consultation with the senior members of her original coven, she decided to develop her public persona as a witch.
During our chat Lizzy told me that as long ago as 1987 she was drawn to hold women’s only gatherings when she saw the need for women to have an opportunity to get together to bond and share their feelings and experiences. She went on to pursue this avenue through the Star of Ishtar group’s Red Tent Women’s Circles and passed through their training program in 2009. She later left this group and struck out on her own after wanting to be able to be more flexible with her gatherings, and to be able to improvise them more in an effort to keep them “in the moment” and to make them more relevant to the women that are attending them
That isn’t to say that these circles are all improvisation as Lizzy begins her preparations by meditating on what she will bring to each gathering individually. There is also a constant structure which is a synthesis of theory, practice and ritual that revolves around helping the women that attend to break down their facades and to open up to a sharing experience with the others in the circle.
“They come to the meetings not knowing anyone,” she told me, “not sure if it is alright or safe, and often end up making friendships that have lasted for years. A lot of them tell me that they feel like they have come home.” This experience is often cathartic and there have been occasions when the attendees have had overwhelming experiences that have been the turning point in important changes in their lives.
“The most memorable Mumma Moon ended with a lady going into labor.” laughed Lizzy, as she recalled some of her more enjoyable events.
The gatherings begin with the women in a circle sharing the ‘Oracle’. This is a ceremony in which they all have a chance to speak and as a catalyst Lizzy uses some simple device like drawing a Tarot Trump card and asking each individual to share what it means to them. Often she will have them hand around a piece of rose quartz and as each of them takes it it marks their chance to speak.
“We start with the oracle which is an opportunity for participants to share their feelings with the group.” said Lizzy, “A lot of women come in with the attitude of I am a lawyer or an executive or whatever and by the end of the night they have dropped that façade- it just isn’t necessary for them anymore.”
From this point Lizzy will lead the group into a meditation on what they have learned from their experience and then she will lead the group in some practice that is fun and creative and which helps to cement the bonds that they have formed. The theme of each evening is unique to the individual gathering and based upon the theme that Lizzy derives from the phase of the moon, thus the gatherings are called Mumma Moon.
Lizzy has taken these gatherings across country Victoria and regularly holds them at Eltham in the Melbourne’s semi-rural outer suburbs. The demand for Mumma Moon has even extended further with Lizzy having received invitations to hold them in other cities around Australia and even in California. This demand would seem to indicate that she has found a genuine need for these events from women themselves as all of the Mumma Moon meetings are held in a private home by invitation. This makes each Mumma Moon gathering an invitation by women to anywhere between 5 and 30 other women who she may or, more likely, may not already know to come to her home and share an evening of spiritual exploration. There is implicitly no religious expectation and to attend it isn’t necessary to be a pagan or a witch or even to believe in anything particularly at all. It is only necessary to have the desire to feel a community with other women and to share a part of life’s journey with them, even if only for a single evening.
Recommended Occult Reading
In my previous post I alluded to the fact that many modern students of the occult arts in their various forms are not acquainted with the classical texts on the subject. It is easy to criticize but more constructive to share and so I have given the subject some thought and compiled a list of the books that I found most useful in my own studies of magick.
While this list is by no means exhaustive, any student that is familiar with even half of them will find themselves on the right path in the Hermetic Arts while people that are curious can draw a more accurate image of what magick is actually all about. Most of these books are in the public domain and can be downloaded online and I suggest that my readers visit Christina Debs excellent online library where most, if not all of them can be downloaded for free.
In no particular order, the basic reading list that I came up with is:
The Magus- The Celestial Intellegencer , Francis Barrett
Magick White & Black, Franz Hartmann
The Emerald Tablet, Hermes Trismegistus
Corpus Hermeticum, Hermes Trismegistus
Techniques of High Magick, Francis King & Stephen Skinner
The Chaldean Oracles, Zoroaster
Mystical Qabalah, Dion Fortune
The Zohar
The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz
The Golden Dawn, Israel Regardie
Dogma et Rituel, Eliphas Levi
Occult Philosophy, Henry Cornelius Agrippa
The Key of the Mysteries, Eliphas Levi
The Tree of Life, Israel Regardie
Kabbalah Unveiled, S L MacGregor-Mathers
Witchcraft Today, Gerald Gardner
The Meaning of Witchcraft, Gerald Gardner
The Spiral Dance, Starhawk
Drawing Down the Moon, Margot Adler
The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, S L MacGregor-Mathers
Egyptian Secrets- White and Black Art, Albertus Magnus
The Book of Secrets, Albertus Magnus
The Book of the Law, Aleister Crowley
Magick in Theory and Practice, Aleister Crowley
The Book of Folly and Wisdom, Aleister Crowley
Liber LVX, Aleister Crowley
The Book of Thoth, Aleister Crowley
Liber B vel Magi, Aleister Crowley
The Goetia, various translators
The Key of Solomon, various translators
