Free eBooks, and Poll
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tobookclubSome of the books listed in (or being considered for listing in) the Otherkin and Therianthrope Book List have a print-on-paper version, and are available as free eBooks, and legally so: either because the author voluntarily released the book(s) online, or because the copyright has expired and the book has entered the public domain.
Douglas Rushkoff has voluntarily released a free online version of his non-fiction book, "Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Cyberspace" (2002), which is included in my booklist because it includes a brief interview with a person who says he's an elf (a shee or sidhe) here to help bring magic back into the world. The rest of the book is mostly about psychedelic culture.
http://www.rushkoff.com/cyberia.html
Through the Online Books Page, Edith Wharton's autobiography, "A Backward Glance," can be read online for free... but only if you live in Australia, not the USA. There's a legal complication about copyright expiring at different times, you see. If you can get it, let me know about whether you think it describes soulbonding or not, as one person said it did.
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/search?author=wharton%2C+edith&amode=words&title=&tmode=words
David Garnett's metamorphosis story, "Lady Into Fox," can be found on Gutenberg.net because its copyright has expired and it has entered the public domain. One of you guys recommended it as being a pretty good human-animal transformation story.
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10337
Robert Peterson has voluntarily released a free online version of his non-fiction book, "Out Of Body Experiences: How To Have Them And What To Expect" (1997). It's on his personal website. (I thought I'd heard something about "Astral Dynamics" being available for free online in its entirety, too, but apparently I was mistaken, unless if I just wasn't looking in the right place on his website. Maybe I was thinking about Robert Peterson's book being free, and I mixed them up.) Peterson's book is pretty good, but it's one that's mostly his diary of his experiences with OOBEs rather than being a "how-to," and (if I recall correctly) this was the astral projection book that talks a lot about the Church of Eckencar. This wasn't my favorite book on astral projection (again, if I'm not mixing it up with the other astral projection books in the stack that I was reading) but a lot of people speak highly of it. Maybe I should give it another try; when I had the big stack of books, I was having to make decisions too quickly about which ones looked worthwhile and which didn't, so I may have ruled out a good one before giving it a chance.
http://www.robertpeterson.org/obebook.html
There used to be a free online copy of the English translation of Hermann Hesse's "Steppenwolf" (1929), but it's gone now, and I haven't stumbled across another. Maybe someone thought "Steppenwolf" had entered into public domain by now, and they were mistaken. Some of Hesse's other works are available on Gutenberg.org, but not many of them, and (last I checked) only one in English.
No link. :(
Hakim Bey's book, "T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone," has been voluntarily released by its author as "Anti-copyright, 1985, 1991. May be freely pirated & quoted". It's a literary equivalent of shareware. Here's one of several copies that are floating around. Although it's not directly about therianthropy, so far as I know (I haven't read it yet), a lot of people have encouraged me to include TAZ in the booklist, saying that it has a lot in common with (or inspiration for) the faerie glamourbomber concept.
http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html
Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book." I haven't read it yet (for shame!) and I'm curious if other therianthropes have a sense of deep connection to this book, since I've heard it mentioned in relation to that a couple times. A wolf therianthrope (or "shifter," in her jargon) Rosalyn Greene wrote in her book on therianthropes (or shifters), "The Magic of Shapeshifting" (2000), on page 243-244: "This book is fiction, and animal life is not portrayed in a realistic way in these stories. Yet, the book contains much deep wisdom about the ways of animal magic. Mowgli, the wolf boy, symbolizes a shapeshifter, and the stages he goes through in life are deeply symbolic of the stages that a shifter goes through. I have known more than one shifter who used this book as a kind of spiritual handbook, and some shifters also use the 'songs' from this book as power chants or magical songs." (Note that although Greene is accused of plagiarizing information from therianthrope websites, which may be true, she does appear to be authentically a therian herself, regardless of slight terminology changes, and she does describe the therian worldview eloquently, and some of her more unusual observations have been of value to me.) In a fiction novel about a boy's encounters with animal totemism, "The Flight of the Cassowary," Kipling's "The Jungle Book" is also tied in as an example of the relationship between humans and animals. As I said, I'm really curious to see how therians feel about this, whether they feel like it has any particular personal message for them, or if it's just an entertaining book.
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/236
And the Second Jungle Book: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1937
Rudyard Kipling's "Puck of Pook Hill," which I noticed had a rant about the misportrayal of faeries as being sweet and innocent that was exactly the same kind of rant as what some faerie otherkin have ranted about.
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/15976
A zillion books on Theosophy, spiritualism, and so on are available through Gutenberg.org and Sacred-Texts.com, because they've passed into the public domain in the century since they were written. Theosophy and spiritualism are where a lot of the modern new age and neo-pagan stuff started: all this talk about astral bodies, communicating with spirits, fairies and magic being real, that sort of thing. Pick up some of those to learn more about the astral plane and astral bodies, if you so wish, since a lot of their literature is about that. You'll have far better luck finding the older source materials about the astral plane than you will with trying to find free versions of any recent publications on the subject.
Evans-Wentz's "The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries" (1911)
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/ffcc/index.htm
Baring-Gould's "The Book of Were-Wolves" (1865) is a pretty solid reference on werewolf folklore until it goes on a perplexing tangent in the middle.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/goth/bow/index.htm
Shepard's "The Lore of the Unicorn" (1930) is a well-respected reference on unicorns. Here I was struggling to find a copy of it anywhere, and it was on Sacred-Texts all along.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/etc/lou/index.htm
Ingersoll's "Dragons and Dragon Lore" (1928) is a thorough and international reference on dragon lore. Another one where I'd struggled to find a copy of it and eventually picked it up through an interlibrary loan, and afterwards found out that it was on Sacred-Texts. Ingersoll's book has solid content, but I was put off by his bad attitude towards non-Western civilizations... he always had to add some snippy comment about "cowering, superstitious primitives," even when he's talking about really advanced or modern civilizations. I guess that owes mostly to his time period, since anthropology used to always sound like that back when they believed in the progressivist model of human civilizations, but I've read other mythology books from his time (or earlier) that were more respectful.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/etc/ddl/index.htm
Charles Gould's "Mythical Monsters." I checked out its Dover reprint (which for some reason goes by a different title: "Dragons, Unicorns, and Sea Serpents") from the library a few times, and I keep wanting to have it handy to cite from it, but I was having a hard time finding it in the stores. To my delight, it's available online in its entirety, in PDF format. Or it used to be... the site is gone now. But luckily, they're on Archive.org, so I was able to get a copy after all! What's more, this is a scan of the original printing, so it has color plates where the Dover reprint had only grayscale. Love love love love!
http://web.archive.org/web/20060424074308/http://www.herper.com/ebooks/titles/Mythical.html
"The Evolution of the Dragon" is another classic book on dragons.
http://fax.libs.uga.edu/BL313xS648/
Visser's "The Dragon in China and Japan."
http://fax.libs.uga.edu/GR830xD7xV8/
Kirk's & Lang's "The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies" (1893) is a peculiar and enigmatic spiritualist work. Some portions of it may have been hoaxes, it seems to me. Supposedly the person who wrote it was later spirited away by the fairies. I'm skeptical but fascinated.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/sce/index.htm
Waite's "The Pictorial Key to the Tarot," generally considered to be the best introduction to Tarot for people new to it, as well as being a sturdy reference for people who have been using the Tarot for a long time:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/tarot/pkt/index.htm
Have fun browsing around for whatever books you think may be available, on any of these:
...the free book archive on the Gutenberg Project: http://www.gutenberg.net
...or the various free classics and scriptures on Sacred Texts: http://www.sacred-texts.com
...or the catalogue of free books wherever they are, The Online Books Page: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/
A few of the aforementioned books are especially good for discussing, so I've selected those for the poll, but since they're all out there, you can grab as many of these books as interests you. Which would you like to read in February-March? Note that if you don't like reading books on a computer, feel free to print out, check out, borrow, or buy a paper version of the book instead. Having an online version just makes it more accessible to begin with, so we don't lose any time while we wait for the book to come in at the library/mailbox/store, that sort of thing.
[Poll #918593]
Douglas Rushkoff has voluntarily released a free online version of his non-fiction book, "Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Cyberspace" (2002), which is included in my booklist because it includes a brief interview with a person who says he's an elf (a shee or sidhe) here to help bring magic back into the world. The rest of the book is mostly about psychedelic culture.
http://www.rushkoff.com/cyberia.html
Through the Online Books Page, Edith Wharton's autobiography, "A Backward Glance," can be read online for free... but only if you live in Australia, not the USA. There's a legal complication about copyright expiring at different times, you see. If you can get it, let me know about whether you think it describes soulbonding or not, as one person said it did.
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/search?author=wharton%2C+edith&amode=words&title=&tmode=words
David Garnett's metamorphosis story, "Lady Into Fox," can be found on Gutenberg.net because its copyright has expired and it has entered the public domain. One of you guys recommended it as being a pretty good human-animal transformation story.
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10337
Robert Peterson has voluntarily released a free online version of his non-fiction book, "Out Of Body Experiences: How To Have Them And What To Expect" (1997). It's on his personal website. (I thought I'd heard something about "Astral Dynamics" being available for free online in its entirety, too, but apparently I was mistaken, unless if I just wasn't looking in the right place on his website. Maybe I was thinking about Robert Peterson's book being free, and I mixed them up.) Peterson's book is pretty good, but it's one that's mostly his diary of his experiences with OOBEs rather than being a "how-to," and (if I recall correctly) this was the astral projection book that talks a lot about the Church of Eckencar. This wasn't my favorite book on astral projection (again, if I'm not mixing it up with the other astral projection books in the stack that I was reading) but a lot of people speak highly of it. Maybe I should give it another try; when I had the big stack of books, I was having to make decisions too quickly about which ones looked worthwhile and which didn't, so I may have ruled out a good one before giving it a chance.
http://www.robertpeterson.org/obebook.html
There used to be a free online copy of the English translation of Hermann Hesse's "Steppenwolf" (1929), but it's gone now, and I haven't stumbled across another. Maybe someone thought "Steppenwolf" had entered into public domain by now, and they were mistaken. Some of Hesse's other works are available on Gutenberg.org, but not many of them, and (last I checked) only one in English.
No link. :(
Hakim Bey's book, "T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone," has been voluntarily released by its author as "Anti-copyright, 1985, 1991. May be freely pirated & quoted". It's a literary equivalent of shareware. Here's one of several copies that are floating around. Although it's not directly about therianthropy, so far as I know (I haven't read it yet), a lot of people have encouraged me to include TAZ in the booklist, saying that it has a lot in common with (or inspiration for) the faerie glamourbomber concept.
http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html
Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book." I haven't read it yet (for shame!) and I'm curious if other therianthropes have a sense of deep connection to this book, since I've heard it mentioned in relation to that a couple times. A wolf therianthrope (or "shifter," in her jargon) Rosalyn Greene wrote in her book on therianthropes (or shifters), "The Magic of Shapeshifting" (2000), on page 243-244: "This book is fiction, and animal life is not portrayed in a realistic way in these stories. Yet, the book contains much deep wisdom about the ways of animal magic. Mowgli, the wolf boy, symbolizes a shapeshifter, and the stages he goes through in life are deeply symbolic of the stages that a shifter goes through. I have known more than one shifter who used this book as a kind of spiritual handbook, and some shifters also use the 'songs' from this book as power chants or magical songs." (Note that although Greene is accused of plagiarizing information from therianthrope websites, which may be true, she does appear to be authentically a therian herself, regardless of slight terminology changes, and she does describe the therian worldview eloquently, and some of her more unusual observations have been of value to me.) In a fiction novel about a boy's encounters with animal totemism, "The Flight of the Cassowary," Kipling's "The Jungle Book" is also tied in as an example of the relationship between humans and animals. As I said, I'm really curious to see how therians feel about this, whether they feel like it has any particular personal message for them, or if it's just an entertaining book.
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/236
And the Second Jungle Book: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1937
Rudyard Kipling's "Puck of Pook Hill," which I noticed had a rant about the misportrayal of faeries as being sweet and innocent that was exactly the same kind of rant as what some faerie otherkin have ranted about.
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/15976
A zillion books on Theosophy, spiritualism, and so on are available through Gutenberg.org and Sacred-Texts.com, because they've passed into the public domain in the century since they were written. Theosophy and spiritualism are where a lot of the modern new age and neo-pagan stuff started: all this talk about astral bodies, communicating with spirits, fairies and magic being real, that sort of thing. Pick up some of those to learn more about the astral plane and astral bodies, if you so wish, since a lot of their literature is about that. You'll have far better luck finding the older source materials about the astral plane than you will with trying to find free versions of any recent publications on the subject.
Evans-Wentz's "The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries" (1911)
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/ffcc/index.htm
Baring-Gould's "The Book of Were-Wolves" (1865) is a pretty solid reference on werewolf folklore until it goes on a perplexing tangent in the middle.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/goth/bow/index.htm
Shepard's "The Lore of the Unicorn" (1930) is a well-respected reference on unicorns. Here I was struggling to find a copy of it anywhere, and it was on Sacred-Texts all along.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/etc/lou/index.htm
Ingersoll's "Dragons and Dragon Lore" (1928) is a thorough and international reference on dragon lore. Another one where I'd struggled to find a copy of it and eventually picked it up through an interlibrary loan, and afterwards found out that it was on Sacred-Texts. Ingersoll's book has solid content, but I was put off by his bad attitude towards non-Western civilizations... he always had to add some snippy comment about "cowering, superstitious primitives," even when he's talking about really advanced or modern civilizations. I guess that owes mostly to his time period, since anthropology used to always sound like that back when they believed in the progressivist model of human civilizations, but I've read other mythology books from his time (or earlier) that were more respectful.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/etc/ddl/index.htm
Charles Gould's "Mythical Monsters." I checked out its Dover reprint (which for some reason goes by a different title: "Dragons, Unicorns, and Sea Serpents") from the library a few times, and I keep wanting to have it handy to cite from it, but I was having a hard time finding it in the stores. To my delight, it's available online in its entirety, in PDF format. Or it used to be... the site is gone now. But luckily, they're on Archive.org, so I was able to get a copy after all! What's more, this is a scan of the original printing, so it has color plates where the Dover reprint had only grayscale. Love love love love!
http://web.archive.org/web/20060424074308/http://www.herper.com/ebooks/titles/Mythical.html
"The Evolution of the Dragon" is another classic book on dragons.
http://fax.libs.uga.edu/BL313xS648/
Visser's "The Dragon in China and Japan."
http://fax.libs.uga.edu/GR830xD7xV8/
Kirk's & Lang's "The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies" (1893) is a peculiar and enigmatic spiritualist work. Some portions of it may have been hoaxes, it seems to me. Supposedly the person who wrote it was later spirited away by the fairies. I'm skeptical but fascinated.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/sce/index.htm
Waite's "The Pictorial Key to the Tarot," generally considered to be the best introduction to Tarot for people new to it, as well as being a sturdy reference for people who have been using the Tarot for a long time:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/tarot/pkt/index.htm
Have fun browsing around for whatever books you think may be available, on any of these:
...the free book archive on the Gutenberg Project: http://www.gutenberg.net
...or the various free classics and scriptures on Sacred Texts: http://www.sacred-texts.com
...or the catalogue of free books wherever they are, The Online Books Page: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/
A few of the aforementioned books are especially good for discussing, so I've selected those for the poll, but since they're all out there, you can grab as many of these books as interests you. Which would you like to read in February-March? Note that if you don't like reading books on a computer, feel free to print out, check out, borrow, or buy a paper version of the book instead. Having an online version just makes it more accessible to begin with, so we don't lose any time while we wait for the book to come in at the library/mailbox/store, that sort of thing.
[Poll #918593]
