Author Just curious: What's the general consensus on E.A. Koetting's books?

[Faria]

The CIA piece seems a bit far fetched in parts. Is it impossible? No, but I dont think they give a fuck about pumping magickal authors for reasons.

I guess at least some citation is warranted. Here is this from McKenna "True Hallucinations:"

And certainly when I reached La Chorerra in 1971 I had a price on my head by the FBI, I was running out of money, I was at the end of my rope. And then they recruited me and said, "you know, with a mouth like yours there's a place for you in our organization". And I've worked in deep background positions about which the less said the better. And then about 15 years ago they shifted me into public relations and I've been there to the present.

And this tracks with what else Ive said above, where you find yourself in a corner and then get offered a silver platter by someone based in Langley.

 

[Lucien6493]

For someone that takes Koetting with a mountain of salt I have to fess up. I have read everything he ever wrote. Why? because I read him as a writer. He gives himself away in his books, between the lines. We all do. So, I appreciate his artistry. Yes, I do think he is full of shit, but that is neither here nor there. So are most of here. He was not the first man to believe his own hype nor will he be the last. But what can I say? He inspires me. I don't like Lenny Bruce either but anyone that gives consensus reality a fuck you notice gets an honorable mention. His Spider and Green Butterfly book on Vodou was laugh out loud funny. Did I like it? Yeah. Not for the information but for something upstream of that. I don't do ritual, so I can't comment on his technique and I care not one whit about Verified Public Gnosis in any form so his oven-baked UPG is as it is. If I wanted verified anything I would eat at McDonalds and go to church. Verified toxic on both ends. At least Koetting is alive. So was Osho. So was my spiritual preceptor, McKenna. I am not equating them. Koetting is not in the same league. I find it a bit disingenuous to call him a fraud though when anyone shy of being a Dumbledore look-alike (as I am) grew up in a culture where the lines between reality and delusion are mighty thin. Koetting is very much a product of our time and I say that tongue-n-cheek because as an occultist, we are in the same business, only difference being he is drawing glamor past propriety and satire and into something dangerous, like someone trying to wear the wrong size britches.

 

[Frater M.M.]

My only serious complaint here echoes Faria's. Too much deliberate phantasmagoria. Any "tradition or set of practices that has you "astral projecting" into the shrubbery or up the "Tree of Life" or to "Olympus" or "down the Reverse Tree" -like *sigh * fine, but often discernment is totally lost. Not that I believe it will attract "astral parasites," but spiritual psychosis is real. If you latter find yourself dressing up as a RenFest reject , wearing cloaks and pentagrams, trying to look spooky, AND are separating yourself from your fellow human, that is usually a cry for help, not magic or spirituality.

His target demographic also matters here. He isn't writing for the over 30 crowd that is into Thelema, or Hermetics. That's just business 101.

Yeah, I only read a bit of one of his later books in my 40s (plus looked at his YouTube vids before that). It was way too magick bro for me. I assume I'm not the demographic he's aiming for, which is fine.

If you are wondering whether any system/school/tradition is worth bothering with, look at its "graduates", its teachers, those who are presented as having completed the system. Then ask yourself if twelve-year-old you would be proud to have turned into any of those people. You will have your answer one way or another.

I mean, by that standard you'd probably have to dismiss basically every tradition eventually, because you're always going to find someone you wouldn't want to become. People are people and I could probably find someone fucked up in pretty much any tradition. You can give ten people the same system and get ten completely different people out of it. Every system has people I wouldn't want to turn into and that doesn't tell me whether the system itself is worth studying. And my twelve-year-old self would probably have very different criteria than I do now.

This is pretty much how I see it too. It´s such a strange standard to apply to occultists in the first place. A lot of occultism has always existed outside the boundaries of what society considers respectable and plenty of practitioners had pretty fucked up lives. Just look at people like Crowley, Spare or plenty of the various occult and esoteric circles throughout history. A lot of these people were hardly model citizens with perfectly clean lives.
Does that make their work not worth reading? No. It makes much more sense for me to engage with material critically, keep what you find useful, discard what you don't, come to your own conclusions and move on. There is something very profane about deciding that a text is off limits before you've even bothered to examine it.
Obviously there are things about Koetting worth keeping in mind, like his connection to ToB. But isn't that exactly where critical reading comes in? You take the context into account, look at the material for yourself and see what holds up. That's pretty much how occult material should be approached anyway, regardless of who wrote it.

I think this discussion here raises some very interesting issues about what magick and the occult are, what they're for and what exactly the author/path is offering.

To take two extreme examples:

[1] Let's say there is an amazing guitarist on YouTube who is a wife-beater.

Would I watch his videos if he had interesting licks I wanted to learn that I couldn't find elsewhere? Yes
Would I pay for a pre-recorded course of his? Borderline -- depending on whether he was the only guitarist to provide such info and how important it was for me to learn it.
Would I want to talk to him or go for a beer with him? No
Would I want to attend/join his guitar school and interact with him and his wife-beater buddies? No
Would I want to go on tour with him? No
Would I choose another guitarist to watch on YouTube who offered exactly the same material as he did? Yes

[2] Let's say there is an "amazing" relationship/self-development/anger-management guru who beats his wife on YouTube.

I'm not going to waste my time, personally, even to look at a single minute of his free YouTube videos even if some of his techniques were supposedly any good in isolation -- especially in 2026 when there is so much other info out there.

 

[nunaphael]

He's a prolific author, although I've only personally read one of his books and then I never felt the need to read any more of his books after that. That's not because they were bad, however; if I had not already been exposed to a lot of currents and ideas from other books that I had already read, I would probably have considered his books much more important and probably would have read a lot more of his publications. As other have said, he doesn't have much in the way of inspiring new ideas, but he does present everything that a beginner would need to know to have a decent foundation. The quality of his work is comparable at least to any other "tradition" or system developed by other mainstream authors.

I think it's important to have more authors like this actually. It's not about being innovative, you're being innovative enough just by publishing a book about magical practice that is meant to be taken seriously and doing a decent job of it. That's niche enough. What we need are more points of entry, more ways to get "initiated" into practicing and being excited about practicing. The more authors exist that know how to tap into the reader's unconscious current and activate it, the better, even if those currents are not the same ones that I am part of. There is still the larger, deeper current of the occult itself, in general, which I am always happy to see being revitalized in people. It means I can make friends with more people that I might casually meet or run into and not feel like I'm some lunatic outsider all the time.