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[And, yet another post! I shouldn't have said "There's nothing on for the 19th or the 20th, because now there is, on which more in a moment...]

No, dear friends, the above subject line does not indicate that the present entry is about pornography, erotica, or anything of the kind. There’s nothing wrong with those quite respectable genres of literature, and if you find types of it that appeal to you and that are non-exploitative, more power to you! No, I’m talking in the present post, quite literally, about the process of “dirtying up” printed codices, the result of which is “dirty books.”

Perhaps I’d better explain myself a bit more before I launch too heavily into the discussion, however.

One time, when I was either in late high school or early college (though no later than fall of 1996), I was home alone and it was later at night, and there was nothing on television. Cable was relatively new to my family at that point, and there were vast swathes of channels that we had but never watched, and so I was flipping through them to find something diverting for a while. I eventually settled on a televangelist show that I’d never seen before, with some older preacher whose name I never caught and that I’ve never seen since to my knowledge, who had a very odd premise in that particular episode. At the very beginning, he and his congregation said a weird kind of “prayer” (if you can call it that) which began “This is my Bible.” (No, the rest of it didn’t rhyme or have hand gestures accompanying it, or a tune, in case you wondered…!?!) The bulk of his talk was all about how it is important to read “the Bible” constantly, and to always have it with you to consult, and so forth; but, there was little emphasis on actually understanding it, or putting it in historical context. The entirety nearly verged on a talk on bibliomancy, and one could certainly say that this particular group practiced bibliolatry–actual veneration of the Christian bible itself. While a great deal more could be said about this, I’m reminded of the biggest salient point I can recall during that sermon, of which the subject line of this entry parodies slightly. The upshot of this particular man’s preaching was “God loves dirty Bibles.” He said, though, that you shouldn’t go out and get dirt and mud all over it or anything, because that would be wrong, but instead that one’s personal bible should be dirty “from the oil on your fingers and the water of your tears” because one looks at it so often and is so moved by what is in it.

Hence, “dirty books,” and the subject of my present entry.

As a person heavily devoted to various gods of writing–including Thoth and Seshat–the preservation of books is an extremely important life activity for me. I am very careful of doing any “violence” to the written word, and that includes not destroying pieces of paper with writing on them (and recycling or getting as much use out of them as possible, even when they’ve got garbage or junk-mail content on them), and certainly never destroying books of any kind. Sure, I’ve been tempted on occasion to think that “burning” a particular book might be a good idea, but I’ve never thought that for very long.

Very sadly, I had some of my own books burned when I was younger–an ill-advised sibling allowed some of my vintage Dungeons & Dragons books to be lent out to the next-door-neighbor, and unbeknownst to him, his mother went through his room and took all of his role-playing books and burned them. When I tried to get a fair price for them in recompense, it took months and lots of pleading, and finally his mother paid…but far less than what they were worth. I’ve had many other occasions where people have lent out my books without asking, only to have them lost or destroyed; and on the few occasions that I’ve lent out books myself in the last fifteen years, I’ve always had them returned with broken bindings, folded pages, and any number of other atrocities (in my mind), if they are returned at all, which often they have not been. This is why I no longer allow people to borrow my books!

A very good thing happened yesterday (the 19th), though. After I completed Devotio Antinoo in December, I decided that I would make a “Doctor’s Edition” of the book for my own private usage, which removed the index and the ads from the back, and then added in a number of other texts I’ve either written or collected over the years, which I’d like to have ready access to in a single volume. I then had it printed up hardcover via Lulu. I will use this book not only as my primary reference book and devotional guide for my own Antinoan and Graeco-Roman-Egyptian syncretistic practices, but it will also serve as a portable shrine of sorts, since it has a prominent icon of Antinous on the front cover, and it is sturdy enough to stand on its bindings on a table, desk, or what-have-you. I plan to have a consecration ceremony for this new book later today (after work), and to transfer the numen (or at least seed a new numen in it) from my old traveling ritual book that I wrote by hand. No one else will get to see or use this book until I am dead; and then after that, I am thinking that I might have it specifically donated to some group effort or archive like The New Alexandrian Library, even if all of my other papers and books go to some academic archive elsewhere (which they may or may not, depending on how the remainder of my life goes!); though, depending on some other things as well, it may end up passing to whomever becomes my “successor” in the Ekklesía Antínoou happens to be…but, that’s rather premature to consider, since it is difficult to get people to talk on the Yahoo!Group or come to rituals most of the time, much less have a long-term commitment to a group and a practice that may carry into future generations…!

But meanwhile, I think I’m going to write in it…And, that’s a very hard thing for me to do. I keep my books in pristine condition; while I do have some textbooks that I put little stars and such in the margins to remind me of things, I tend not to be a person who underlines books or in any way “defaces” them–and it’s not because I want to sell them back at the end of quarter, as it were. My American Lit teacher from 11th grade told us to highlight our books, as we had to buy all the novels we read in the class, and many other profs I’ve had over the years in college have suggested doing this as well. Joseph Campbell, when asked about his spiritual practice as “an academic,” said “I underline passages in books.”

But, I really hate to do it. Books are expensive, they’re fragile, and the less one mucks with them, the longer they’ll last…not only for myself, but for whoever gets all of them once I am dead. (Let’s keep on the good side of the Library Angel Harahel, shall we?) Having utilized many books of formerly-living people in the special collections of various libraries over the years, I’m most grateful when books come to me in a state of preservation that is highly attentive to these concerns; there’s nothing worse than getting a book out of a library that has been so underlined and defaced by various people that it’s almost unusable…There are occasional gems of commentary in the margins, of course, but they’re far fewer than trying to figure out why in the hell the person who checked this out earlier decided to underline that particular bit when a more important bit follows it and is untouched…?!?

But, I’m also thinking of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, in which a class textbook with very useful notes in the margins was rather pivotal to the plot. And, that’s what I’d like this book to be in my own usage–something that is useful, and gets used, and becomes even more personal and powerful in doing so. And, I think that even though I “wrote the book” in terms of producing most of the material in it, and I certainly created it in terms of compiling all of that info (which means typing it all up, etc.!), I think that this activity of actually writing in it, and having it be an interactive text even after it is printed and “completed” ostensibly, will have that effect for me.

Nonetheless, all these years of not writing in books is very hard to get over…So, perhaps I’ll start small, and just put the date today in the front end-page, and then take it from there…

And yet, just in doing that over the last twelve hours, I’ve found that I can’t stop now. I’ve found errors in the book, which I’ve corrected; I’ve added in a further short text that I really should have remembered to have included in the first place; I’ve drawn in the figure from a PGM spell that I included in the book for future use and study; and, I’ve significantly added to parts of the calendar of the Sancti, which I’ll update on this site eventually. It’s already becoming, in addition to a beautiful object and something over which I’m quite proud and happy, but a book that is getting used in the best possible way.

Someday, some scholar, or other spiritual practitioner, might look at the book and see the developments in thought and practice that have occurred since it came into my hands…Even in the few weeks that have passed in which I’ve been waiting for it to arrive, things have changed. And, nothing prevents one’s primary “religious text” from becoming forever ossified and sanctified as “scripture” (and thus sliding into fundamentalism) than an ever-changing text, multiply dirtied by further marginalia, notes, corrections, and other scrawlings! Or, at least I hope so…

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