A Wheel of Small Gods by Brian Wilkins and Brennen Reece is all three.
I was fortunate to receive an early digital review copy of A Wheel of Small Gods, available now through Revelore Press. My own hardcopy, along with the companion deck The Oracle of the Decans, are currently on their way to me, but I’ve been dipping into and engaging with the book for several weeks now and have been very impressed. This is a powerful tool for healing, based on direct experience with the Decan spirits, created with a healer’s wisdom, a poet’s skill, and an artist’s deep symbolic understanding.
Good Medicine: When someone puts a healing work out into the world, it’s useful to start by asking whether they have actual experience healing. When it comes to Brian Wilkins, I can unequivocally and personally say yes. He and his magical partner Jess were kind enough to reach out and direct some healing my way when I was in treatment for cancer, and I can tell you it was very effective and very helpful. In addition, I have my own experience using the Decan spirits for healing someone I care about (I did the same year-long rite that Brian talks about in his introduction) and know that these beings are powerful and operate as advertised.
Brian knows what he’s talking about and I truly hope the publication of this book will help spread this knowledge into a world that sorely needs all the healing tech it can get. In fact, it was also a great reminder for me. I did the year-long ritual and found it life altering, but haven’t gone back to bother these spirits as much as I should since then. This book is going to change that for me.
Good Poetry: This book is inspirational rather than prescriptive (and Brian makes this very clear in the Practice section). I happen to LOVE this kind of book. It assumes that the reader is intelligent and either has a ritual framework they are used to using or can find or create one using the zillions of resources already out there. The goal of this book isn’t to teach you how to do magic, but to share symbolic keys of language and image that can open doors to be in relation to these entities. What do you with the keys is up to you.
The bulk of the book is comprised of poetry to engage with the spirits (36 Decans and some bonus Stars as well) and it’s here that the author really shines. Before I became a Technical Project Manager I was an English Lit major. I’m not much of a poet myself, but I know from good poetry — and this is good poetry. Brian demonstrates both a depth of magical knowledge and a breadth of poetic knowledge in this work. The poems range from free verse and concrete to more formal structures like sonnets; more importantly, the poems are tuned to and make sense in context of the Decan spirits they are associated with. And this is key. We might have preferences in the kind of poetry we enjoy, but so to do the spirits and it’s really obvious that these poems were crafted with these beings and their bodily domains specifically in mind.
Good Art: Finally, the images. This project not only includes a book that’s been thoughtfully illustrated with images for each Decan spirit and Star, but also a deck. I’m a card slut anyway and am super excited to get my hands on these cards. I plan to try using them to diagnose the source of dis-ease in the body, as quick altar decoration for calling on the Decans for healing work, and of course strictly for magic.
The images are in a rough, black and white woodcut style and — having met these beings myself — are correct in terms of appearance and symbolism. They feel magical and right and with a weight and substance — evocative in the magical sense as well as the artistic sense. And as an aside, they’d make excellent blackwork / tribal-style tattoos.
A Wheel of Small Gods is an example of the current renaissance in magical and magio-philosophical thinking / publishing that is pushing past old tired tropes and into fresh territory. And like other members of this exciting new movement (which includes Alkistis Dimech & Peter Grey of Scarlet Imprint, Becca Tarnas, Camelia Elias, Gordon White, Peter Mark Adams, Aidan Wachter, and many more I haven’t read yet) Brian and Brennen take the ancient wisdom and make it relevant to who we are today, and in a way that respects both.
