Review - The Benighted Path
Richard Gavin’s “The Benighted Path” may be one of the more interesting and pertinent books on magical dreaming I’ve come across in the decades of my own nocturnal practice. More poetic manifesto than ritual manual, this rare tome is a powerful testament to worshipping and working with the Night Primeval, both in the form of oneiromantic practices as well as an embrace of the monstrous side of one’s own self. From a theoretical standpoint, Gavin’s work may be one of the few occult/metaphysical books on dreaming (alongside Andrew D. Chumbley’s) that recognizes that true magical dreaming treats the realm of dreams as an objective reality we enter into rather than as merely a symbolic cypher for our day lives: “The individual who experiences these symbols does not reify the image, but instead RARIFIES their own soul so that they may enter that realm” (40). The idea that we rarify ourselves into the dream world is a crucial part of the metaphysics of dreaming as an intermediating rea...
