About the Book of Onei
“The Book of Onei covers topics that many modern pagans seem to shy away from: spiritual horror, the power of nightmares, and how to use that power to break through the constructs of your own dreams and find out what is on the other side.”
You can pre-order The Book of Onei here: https://bit.ly/3xpMQjy
A Work of Dark Mysticism
Now that Gods and Radicals Press is planning to release The Book of Onei on October 1, I’d like to talk a little about how this work came into being. I’ve been working on the individual poems and other pieces in The Book of Onei for a number of years now, and I began to put them together into their current form at least a decade ago.
The self-published first edition was reviewed by Lorna Smithers as “a valuable contribution to visionary literature and dark mysticism that deserves to be preserved for longevity.” Now that Gods and Radicals is publishing the second edition, I’m hopeful that many more people will have the opportunity to read it.
An “Antinomian Dream Grimoire”
This work has gone through many different permutations before taking on the shape that it has today: part fantasy fiction, part poetry collection, part “antinomian dream grimoire.” What exactly is an antinomian dream grimoire? Well, antinomianism is essentially the religious equivalent of anarchism. Antinomian movements violate the established moral norms of their own traditions and practice some form of radical freedom.
For example, antinomian Christian heresies in medieval Europe preached that the saved were not bound by conventional morality. In the Hindu traditions, tantric practices and especially “left-hand” tantric practices could be considered antinomian, as they involve the deliberate violation of religious rules about alcohol, sex, and so on.
So, The Book of Onei is a work of pagan antinomianism. You might wonder what there is in paganism to be antinomian about. Well, The Book of Onei covers topics that many modern pagans seem to shy away from: spiritual horror, the power of nightmares, and how to use that power to break through the constructs of your own dreams and find out what is on the other side.
The Book of Onei is a work about oneiromancy, the magic of dreams. It teaches a method for working with nightmares, transforming the things you meet there, and using them to access experiences of spiritual ecstasy. Onei can teach you things you would never have had access to otherwise and some of these things can transform your life.
The Book of Onei doesn’t teach any of this in a straightforward manner, though. In fact, much of the book is designed to obscure the relatively simple method at the core of the system. You can use this book as a grimoire in the traditional sense. You can also simply enjoy it as a work of weird fantasy or as a collection of dark and surreal poetry. However, it has much more to offer if you try to solve the mystery.
I wrote this book to share some of the things I’ve learned in Onei. I’m profoundly grateful to Gods and Radicals Press for making this possible.
Christopher Scott Thompson
Photo by Tam Hutchison.
is an anarchist, martial arts instructor, and devotee of Brighid and Macha.
