Ace of Wands: A Reading List

Books Read, Sampled, and On-Going Under the Wolf Moon

As my paid subscriber count continues to slowly increase, so does my feeling of guilt that I have not landed on a consistent offering for you lovely patrons. No longer! This year, I am committing to a monthly reading roundup that will catalog all that I’ve read in the preceding month alongside some short form reviews. This will offer potential insight into upcoming deep dives and will also give me a chance to share some of the books I am enjoying (or not enjoying) that might not be exactly “Gnostic Pulp” material.

While it may behoove one who runs a literary blog to posture as if there is nothing they have not read, this will offer a peak behind the curtain. While I have maintained a pretty steady 50 books/year pace since my mid-twenties, I must admit that leaves a lot of ground left to cover.

Ace of Wands

Every full moon, my wife and I do a single card pull from one of our Tarot decks. This past moon, the Wolf Moon, she received the Queen of Swords and I got the Ace of Wands.

I do not mean to say that I chose the following books based on this card. Rarely could I tell you why I have chosen to read the book I am reading at any particular moment. When it is time, I simply stand before my bookshelf and let its influence move through me. That is how I see these full moon cards, too. They are not at the forefront of my mind throughout the month, but their influence is shining down, seen and unseen, like the moon.

“At the beginning of some situation, no card could signal a better start,” Rachel Pollack writes of the Ace of Wands in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom. Not a bad pull for the start of a new year. The card is often associated with inspiration, energy, passion, and potential, and indeed its reveal did mark the beginning of a very fruitful creative period for me.

I spent the better part of 2022-23 at work on my sixth novel manuscript¹, but it just wouldn’t come together, leading me eventually to abandon it. Since then, I have focused my energy on short fiction, and more lately on this here project, unable to work up the gusto to start anew on something long form after such a let down. But then, earlier this month, while out on a run, in what I can only describe as a moment of gnosis, an idea struck me that revived this old piece. I quite literally ran home, dug up the file, and have ever since been working on it with a sense of urgency that I haven’t felt in a long time, waking up at 4:30 in the morning to write before work or before the baby wakes up, depending on the day.

This same energy has carried over into my reading. I have knocked out more books this month than usual. As all dedicated readers know, there are periods when pockets of time seem to open up, little burrows one can while away in, seemingly without time proceeding at its usual clip outside, and then there are times when these burrows are sealed shut, and it feels impossible to get any reading done. My friends, I have been living in a bonafide prairie dog town of temporal reading burrows. Firstly it’s January, meaning a dead month for service industry, so I have read a lot at work. Secondly, on the days when it’s just me and baby at home, the best way for me to get her to nap is to put her either in her stroller or her car seat. Seeing how winter has finally arrived down here, we have mostly been going with the car seat, which gives me an hour and a half of sitting in the car with no where to go. I have largely spent this time parked in the driveway, reading.

And finally, speaking of the cold, we were snowed in for a 80-hour period, so that also gave me ample reading time. All that to say, I am trying to keep in mind Pollack’s warning. The Ace is always received as a pure gift, as signified by the yods’ presence on the card:

“We cannot cause or produce them by any normal means; they come to us as hands emerging from clouds. Only by reaching the high states of awareness shown in the later cards of the Major Arcana can we understand the sources of these bursts of elemental energy. In ordinary situations it is enough to experience and appreciate them.”

So that is what I have been trying to do, enjoy and utilize this energy, for, when it goes, I know all I’ll be left with when I try to wake up before the crack of dawn is cold-handed discipline beckoning me to get out of bed and trudge down the hall to the office.

But Anyway, let’s get onto the books. Please, follow me behind the curtain.

Oh, I’m sorry. Initiates only.