Print version of THE SOUL’S INNER STATUES

The print version of The Soul’s Inner Statues is now available for purchase. As a reminder, the ebook is freely available online: PDF, mobi, epub, and HTML. The HTML page uses the gitbook package because it allows for customization of contrast and fonts for reading accessibility — it’s all in the top menu options.

The pricing of the print book is materials cost plus the distribution fee for making it available on Amazon, Bookshop, B&N, and other sites. You may occasionally see discounts on any of those sites, but I do not control those discounts or benefit from any kickback from them. (I’m guessing the distributor or website does?) $10.05 is the price Draft2Digital told me was the one that resulted in $0.00 royalties.

Here is the blurb:

The Soul’s Inner Statues is a practical guide for anyone looking to develop a solid spiritual practice and honor the Gods. This book takes you on a journey through the foundations of daily prayer, offering guidance on finding and honoring the Gods that resonate with you. It delves into contemplative practices, the essentials of building meaningful rituals, the importance of purification, and the role of the hearth and home in your spiritual practice. We will also discuss the importance of mindset, critical thinking, and lifelong learning. The author, raised in modern Neopaganism, takes a Platonizing approach to theology and bases the practical elements on her own lived experience. Whether you identify as pagan, polytheist, or simply a spiritual person seeking a deeper connection to something greater than yourself, The Soul’s Inner Statues provides the accessible and realistic tools you need to embark on a fulfilling spiritual journey through daily prayer and sustained connection to the Gods.

Many of the edits have come about through refining my thoughts on a few areas. In addition, shortly after writing The Soul’s Inner Statues, I started posting mini-excerpts to Twitter on the account “innerstatues,” interfiling them with glossy quotations from Platonists and a few infographics that explained some foundational concepts. I decided to practice silence on that account because social media exhausts me. However, people did sometimes reply or quote-tweet things, and I want to send my heartfelt gratitude to several individuals who misinterpreted a passage or who responded antagonistically to something. I saw those comments when I logged in every few months to refresh the tweet cycle, and reflecting on some of those reactions helped me make the book even better.

While building the reader’s advisory section in the back — reader’s advisory is a librarian jargon term for book suggestions — I decided to add a few of the books to my TBR. Librarians do not have reading superpowers, and the advisory technique is based on analyzing available information about a work so you can determine what someone may find interesting — the librarian has often not read the book. Recommendation algorithms on spiritual topics are very unreliable, so it’s still a best practice to do all of the hard groundwork on one’s own, hence why librarians still practice this professional skill. My approach was to think about (a) what could help someone improve their multicultural awareness and (b) what would be most relevant to someone building a spiritual practice for Gods in the United States.

Reflecting on some of the things I found in the process of that reader’s advisory effort, I was once again struck by how different The Soul’s Inner Statues is from what I was seeing. Technically, The Soul’s Inner Statues is a theurgic work that focuses on household worship and building/maintaining a lifelong ritual connection to the Gods. I don’t use the word theurgy in the book blurb, and I tried to minimize the amount I used terms like pagan and polytheist (they’re in the blurb so the book comes up in search) because I want to present worshipping many Gods as a normative spiritual practice regardless of how someone decides to label themselves. I think that the book is a good complement to what is already out there.

Our practice — what we do in a conscious theurgic mode — is an idiolect that we develop with the Gods and something we pass down to our children, niblings, and (for some) students and close friends, something that they will shape and change during their own unfolding of what their relationship with the Gods in this realm of coming-to-be. It is not edgy or transgressive or a way to numb the self. It is not something that requires merch or developing a certain aesthetic. It requires presence and (to allude to Plotinus’ Ennead I.6) wakefulness. And it’s accessible to anyone. ☀️

Enjoy the print, and if you find the book useful, please let others know about it. I think it should be available for purchase anywhere (?), so if something isn’t working internationally, please me know so I can figure out what went wrong in the distribution channel settings.

🙏 Thank you, Apollon and Aletheia, for your guidance. 🙏