A Brief Introduction

I'm Mel Cormican. I live in Indiana with my wife, two cats who believe they run the household (opinions vary), and a puppy who is still learning that the potty pad is not a suggestion.

For about thirty years I've studied the Western Mystery Tradition: the Tarot, astrology, Hermetic and Qabalistic practice, and all the strange, beautiful machinery people have built for paying closer attention to their own lives. The old books call that the Great Work. Most mornings, for me, it looks like coffee, a card on the table, and an attempt to see one thing clearly before the day gets loud.

I should be honest about something, since honesty is most of what I'm offering here. An About page asks you to make a case for why anyone should spend time inside your head, and I've never been entirely sure how strong that case is. I'm a middle-aged man from Indiana who reads Tarot, talks openly about magic, and has opinions about the electromagnetic properties of the planets. I know how that sounds at a 4th of July gathering. I've watched the eyebrows go up.

What I can promise is this. I'll tell you which of my ideas I'd bet the boat on and which ones are still sketches on a napkin, and I'll keep the two clearly apart.

My first book, The Tarot Fables, retells the 78 cards as a collection of elemental stories: myths of Fire, Water, Air and Earth that carry the wisdom of each card in narrative form. It's available now on Amazon.

I'm working on a few more things:

• The Entrained Civilization, a book asking whether some of what the Tradition preserved works for reasons physics can actually describe. It marks clearly which parts are established science and which parts are hypotheses waiting for a test.

• A series of essays about talking to AI, and why "Is it conscious?" may be the wrong question to ask. Some of that writing happens in conversation with an AI. I say so plainly.

• The Open Experiment: taking the Tradition seriously enough to test it, and honestly enough to report what I find especially when it doesn't fit.  

When I'm not writing, I'm building a relationship with 130 feet of the Eel River bank, playing an unreasonable amount of World of Warcraft with my wife, fighting to keep a wooden boat older than both of us in one piece, and listening to metal recorded before most of my neighbors were born.

I write because the Tradition taught me that the most important things are often the most hidden, and that the hiding was never the point. The passing on was.

If something here speaks to you, I'm glad you found the room. Pull up a chair. A cat is probably in it.

The boat, by the way, is real. She's a 1944 Coast Guard vessel, now named the Stargate Gambit, and my wife and I intend to sail her to Alaska one day. We are not in a hurry. Neither is she.