Agreed. It was quite a shock.
I've never interacted with Gordon online, which I regret now. We never exchanged even one word. Gordon did not teach me magic. What he taught me was to not be apologetic for the illicit, "impossible" worldview of traditional magic.
I consider myself a simple end-user of magic. Most of my reading of other magicians is trying to make sense of all the experiences using the Grimorium Verum that, for a long time, I had a hard time parsing and integrating before meeting Vodou folks in the 1990s. Vodou folks are healing in ways that Jake Stratton-Kent also found them to be - as people in an unapologetically magical culture.
Gordon helped on the intellectual foundations, doing the work that bridges the amazing, wonderful, terrifying, and totally insane experiences of a grimoire practice, to ground it all again in his love of evidence-based history. Vodou gave me a community to talk with and helped me feel like I was not totally insane. What Gordon did was help me stop making any intellectual apologies. He helped me go on the offensive.
He did make a comment recently I had meant to take him to task for.
There were magicians who had thriving Grimorium Verum practices before his also lovely mentor, Jake Stratton-Kent also burst onto the scene. I had cobbled together mine in the mid-1990s from Idries Shah's
The Secret Lore of Magic and bits from Jason Black's magical journal in the wonderful, but also still 1990s Boomer edge-lord,
Pacts with the Devil. These are books my intuition says his well-read brain had read, but they seem to have been edited out of his narrations. Too cringey, perhaps, but it distorts the timelines he is fond of. I was there. I also wonder why he never mentioned the Gen-X magicians of the early... let’s be clear here... the Anglo magician's Grimoire Revival. These never died out in Mexico or Haiti. Long story.
That aside, Gordon single-handedly got rid of the cringe. Gordon took all the work that was done by magicians and academics starting in the 1990s and articulated the bigger worldview. He pushed the timeline back to the Paleolithic with
Star.Ships - something I decided to steal and use in my own mythic synthesis. He connected the dots between ancient star myths, the migration of myths, stories, and spirits, and the way our ancestors actually interacted with the landscape. Brilliant stuff!
Oh, Peter Grey give us more details .
It appears to be, as he put it, Gordon passed away from a broken heart. All Godspeed, to our brother.
