Sir Aleister Crowley, Emmanuel Swedenborg, Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus of Hohenheim, Eliphas Levi, Edgar Cayce, Paramahansa Yogananda, Swami Vivekananda, Manley Palmer Hall, Edgar Allen Poe, Dr. Paul Foster Case, Israel Regardie, Mouni Sadhu.

We traveled around in a trailer house until I was five. My first memories are of the artificial moons over Niagara, the hazy Smoky Mountains from the back seat of the car going west through Tennessee and staring up at the Milky Way, playing at my mother's feet and watching the blue smoke curl and wind around itself spiraling upwards from the ashtray/cigarette, My daddy was a pipeliner out of Texas working for Oklahoma Pipeline Construction traveling all over the country pushing as many as 30-40 welders going across country laying over 5,000 linear feet of 36' steel pipe into ditches up and down mountainsides, across and under rivers, through rock and swamp, rain, snow and cold, debilitating hot, gale force wind storms. He would put his clean khaki clothes on in the early morning darkness. Twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours later he got home and his face would be pitch black. Every day he would "hit the ground a running! Not hardly daylight but it's six o'clock!" I was born on the pipeline. I was burning rods and had a company badge before I could read or sign my name. I was born in Nitro, West Virginia. At two months we moved north and east toward New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine and Canada. My daddy would pull the trailer house with our 1949 Oldsmobile '98 from one trailer park to another then another on down the line. As the work progressed, one mile or more each day, we would move every three to six weeks. This is how we lived until I was five. When jobs were done we would go back to Dublin, Texas. My mother was from Wilson community seventeen miles south and east of Dublin. Daddy was born at Cow Creek, five miles west of Dublin out by the way of DeLeon.These communities do not even exist any more. These people were true pioneers. Dock Kerley came into Comanche County in 1874 from Arkansas. He was one of the first settlers in Comanche County. I was privileged to be in attendance at his 100th birthday party in October of 1957. He died a few days after his party. Mother told me he was a real son-of-a-bitch. He was a womanizer and a hard drinker and a gambler and a barroom brawler. Dock Kerley was rumored to be the one who hanged Chap Howard from a tree and left him there for the feral hogs to eat his legs.. I remember my grandmother, Dock Kerley's daughter, washing clothes in large cast iron pots on an open fire back of the house using lye soap. I remember all these old ladies making quilts inside the Wilson community school house. I remember slopping the hog in the mornings and feeding the chickens at three every afternoon. Granddad would say, "Here, chick-chick-chick! Here, chick-chick-chick!" Daddy's mother and daddy both died in 1948, the year I was born. John August Knape was a Swede. Everyone said he was a fine gentleman. He found himself a young bride. She was Annabelle White and was born in Sulfur Springs, Texas. Everyone said she was lazy as sin!" This is where I come from. We would travel in the aluminum-sided trailer house. We would stay for a while. We would move on. From Texas we went to Louisiana, Shreveport, Baton Rouge, Covington, Cracker town . . .We went to Mississippi, McComb and Meridian . . . Alabama was next ,Bessemer. We crossed Tennessee, from Shiloh to Chattanooga. Pennsylvania was home all one summer...Back to Texas! Robstown, Refugio, Port Lavaca. A time in Dallas, Texas. We stayed in a trailer park over on Harry Hines Blvd. One more place we called home was Hobbs, New Mexico where my little brother, Anthony. was born. From Hobbs we went back to Mississippi. My sisters went to one school in one town for one day. We moved. They went to a different school in a different town the next day. Mother said, "Enough!" Daddy stayed pipelining in Mississippi. We went home to Dublin, I started first grade in Dublin. We moved to Richardson in 1955. Mother always said she had chosen to live in Richardson because of the reputation of the school district. I have been very well educated and if I have any talent as a writer, perhaps, this talent was nurtured as a child growing up in Richardson,Texas!

Occult means secret and reserved for the few. All the negative connotations thrown around have some basis in fact since the subject matter covers a wide range, from the macabre to the sublime. There came a time in my life I became susceptible to Egypt's dark splendor of clairvoyant visions. Puzzlement and unpreparedness to interpret the events of that period made for panicky response. With a crisis looming, with personality fragmenting, i came across a insignificant paper scrap on the ground as I walked along in the sunshine of an afternoon in springtime Austin, Texas in 1981. This scrap of paper announced an upcoming public seminar hosted by the Rosicrucian Order. I was intrigued. I had been coming across the word Rosicrucian for weeks. Never had I even seen the word and I knew nothing about Rosicrucianism other than the information I had gathered from Franz Hartman's Magic, Black and White.I felt kinship and really took to the romanticism and mystery. At the seminar I was given a lot of attention and made to feel 'special!' Thus began my Rosicrucian adventure! Affiliation with the Order gave me protection from the negative psychic forces that troubled me. I received guidance. I have been inspired. I received knowledge of hidden things and wealth and health beyond measure. These benefits, among others, are the promises the Order pledges to neophytes. I will say the promises made to me have been fulfilled. Continuing as to why I must declare to the world the beauty and wonderment of occult knowledge, no other type of literature moves me as deeply and as poignantly as the best of the best of occult literature. Early on I felt a rapport with the books I began to collect. I could hold a book of this special class and open the book to any random page. Glancing down the page, lo and behold, there would appear answer to a question I might have or a gem of wisdom directed to my personal growth. The term for this psychic art is stychomancy. Over the years since initiation into the mysteries, intensity and dedication to the Great Work has waxed and waned yet I persevere! I have never thought to abandon my studies.I remain a Rosicrucian Royalist and Loyalist! So may it ever be! If it pleases the cosmic, it is done!

Very sporadic having years of dormancy with absolutely nothing of a creative inspirational nature. Then, feverish, manic, compulsive and obsessive work enduring all night long. I am pretty good with paper and pencil as to seminal, stream of consciousness free flow expression. Then comes the hard part, making sense of what I have written, especially when considering complicated and technical material. I may have to stare at a phrase for moment after moment trying to get the words to balance and make sense, to say what I mean to say. If I cannot get it right I will leave it but when I have a quandary I usually come back to it soon. Sometimes no. Some of the stuff is so abstruse that even I know not what I am getting at!

I am anarcho-socialist in persuasion. As to anarchy, one first must define anarchy. Definition of anarchy;an anarchist insists upon the inviolability of self striking an iconoclastic stance in defiance of societal norms. Furthermore, he reserves for himself, and for everyone else, the right to make his own determination on all things of an ecumenical, political, economic, and social nature.

Most probably, most assuredly, the inclusion of anima etc. is a function of the sub conscious, the inner world and the working out of personal development.

I never really thought to have 'fans' always faking an elitist presumption that the stuff I was writing was not for public tastes, that the subject matter was too deep and the writing too involved. I always recognized way down inside I was compensating for insecurity. I know that the abstruse, difficult style and convoluted and awkward syntax is not a sign of erudition. Maybe the reader discerns in the wording an element of charm but confusion and uncertainty,more probably, affronts most readers. That self-criticism aside, I am very pleased! The downloads here on Smashwords have been beyond what I ever thought possible. Thank you! I know the book is not perfect. It is what it is. A pledge: To edit and to rewrite one more time!