Sharing Some of My Favorite Books

Hey everyone. This is Adam Elenbaas from Nightlight Astrology [https://nightlightastrology.com/].

Happy Sunday, everybody today, a bonus episode for you. I'm going to tell you about all of my favorite books. Well, not all of them. I could never possibly catalog all of them, but I'm going to show you some of my favorite books today from a lot of different genres, kind of spiritual texts, philosophical texts, astrological texts, texts that have really shaped me as a person, as an astrologer, as a spiritual seeker.

I just selected a number of them from my shelf. And the reason I'm doing this is because every year in the comment section here on Instagram, social media, people ask me, what would you recommend? Reading a lot of these texts I recommend for my courses. So some of you may be familiar with some of them already, but also these are there are a lot of texts in here that are just personal favorites.

Now I'm not including fiction or comic books, but I hope that you'll find this useful. So before we get into it, as always, please remember to like and subscribe, share your comments, your reflections. It helps the algorithm find us. We're not going to be sensational here. We're just going to be ourselves.

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I'm going to start with astrological texts. These are texts that for Hellenistic astrology and psychological archetypal astrology have meant a lot to me, and they're in no particular order, really. So anyway, here's one that I love, called Astrology and the Authentic Self, by Demetra George.

Subtitle is integrating traditional and modern astrology to uncover the essence of the birth chart. We do an Amazon affiliate thing for these texts. You can find the Amazon affiliate links if you want to support Nightlight and support these authors, you can find that on the shop page of the or the resources page of our website, by the way, for any of the most of these, not all of them.

But I love this book because it's really accessible for people who are just starting to learn traditional techniques and wanting some very basic approaches to integrating traditional techniques into reading natal charts. I feel like this text is perfect for people who are sort of in the first couple of years of learning Hellenistic maybe coming from a modern background, and need some help kind of bridging the two worlds.

I love it for that reason, a text that I love that really takes you into the heart of mythological astrology, psychological astrology is the Astrology of Fate, by Liz Greene. I love this book because it speaks very deeply to the reality of fate and the reality of the soul.

And it has some great coverage of the myths of the Zodiac, of Pluto and of just kind of, it's like an overlap between mythological archetypal and psychological astrology and the topic of fate. And it's written by one of the great modern masters, Liz Greene. Of course, all of her books are great. I think I've read most of them, but this one is my favorite.

And so if you want to deep dive into the topic of fate and the mythological and psychological approach to astrology, the Astrology of Fate by Liz Greene is one of my absolute favorites. Now, when it comes to learning Hellenistic to me, Chris Brennan's text, Hellenistic Astrology, I require it as supplemental reading for my courses.

He's great. Obviously, a lot of us wouldn't be here without his work of bridging technical historical features of Hellenistic astrology into the modern era. Of course, a lot of people like him were also inspired by Robert Schmidt from Project Hindsight, like Demetra as well, and she also has a textbook that I recommend for my students called Ancient Astrology in Theory and Practice.

Now this is a two volume set, and both her and Chris's books are like the authoritative textbooks on Hellenistic astrology. I don't teach directly from them, but I have them as a signed supplemental reading, like if you want to read more about the topics we're covering in our own Nightlight way within Hellenistic, read these books.

So for people who just straight up want to learn Hellenistic, that's where I would that's the direction I would point you in when it comes to traditional horary astrology. The text I teach from is the Horary Textbook by John Frawley, the revised edition. This is our textbook for our horary course, and it's my favorite.

Of course, I studied with Frawley through two of his private apprenticeship programs. Really deeply enjoyed that process took my time. Took about four years to work through it and really, really appreciated it, and I teach almost directly from Frawley's methods. However, like most good horary astrologers, I have my copy of Christian Astrology by William Lilly, which is a kind of Renaissance masterpiece on the topic of horary.

The introduction to astrology here this kind of first books, one and two. The purple cover, if you're looking online, it's just a classic horary textbook. It's a little dense to read because, you know, it's kind of like Old English. I think I'm not sure if it's old or middle or what it is, but it's a form of the English language that's a little hard to read for some people, but it's filled with really good horary examples.

Another book that I absolutely love when it comes to archetypal astrology, mundane astrology, the tracking of major historical events, Cosmos and Psyche, by Richard Tarnas. If you haven't read it yet, my God, it's a classic. It is absolutely amazing, looking at human history through the lens of outer planetary cycles like Saturn, Neptune, Pluto, Uranus and many others.

And he does a really good job arguing that history repeats in archetypal cycles and patterns, and that you can trace them along the lines of the outer planetary dynamics. And that book got me into astrology. That was my first astrological book that I ever read alongside of a book called Your Sun Sign by Swami Kriyananda.

I think it was Your Spiritual Sun Sign or something like that, anyway. So those are some of my absolute favorite astrology texts. Now, what else can I? Oh, yeah, one more for people who want to get into traditional astrology. This is a little bit more toward the medieval era of traditional astrology, but On the Heavenly Spheres, a treatise on traditional astrology by Helena Avelar and Luis Ribeiro.

I think that's how you say his name. They've been on the astrology podcast before. This text is lovely. I really like this text. Really good for beginners who want to get into traditional astrology, although it is different from Hellenistic in many respects. But that was actually the first traditional textbook I read.

And it was Chris Brennan, actually, I reached out to him, and I was like, I know you're doing a lot of work with traditional astrology. I was getting into horary at the time, and I said, I want to read a good starter textbook on traditional form. I was practicing evolutionary. He recommended that.

That was my very first traditional book, and then eventually found my way to Project Hindsight. Chris and Demetra were major figures who's working in kind of carrying Robert Schmidt's ideas into more mainstream, all of that started inundating my world as an astrologer. So those are all astrology texts that have been really, really meaningful to me.

Here are some texts that really put me on a path, like they changed my life and got me into psychedelics and shamanism and animism and the idea that we live in an animate Cosmos, that astrology could even exist in. You know, that only an animate Cosmos could astrology really exist.

The very first book that I got actually recommended to me by my dad, who had heard about it on a radio show, Breaking Open the Head by Daniel Pinchbeck. This book really helped me understand entheogens animism, and got me interested in psychedelic experience from a more spiritual, ritualistic and sort of shamanic context.

This book is awesome. If you want to read it, you know, Daniel Pinchbeck, whether you like him or not, his early book here about going into altered states of consciousness in different parts of the world with different spiritual indigenous people and traditions. Wow. Fan, absolutely a fan. Changed my life.

Another book that really changed my life, which I found about the same time, a little bit later, after I'd had some psychedelic experiences, was called Food of the Gods, by Terence McKenna. This book, Food of the Gods, is really about the potential. It's a kind of a hypothesis about the way that drugs and plants in human diets have shaped human history and human consciousness, and may even be partly responsible for primates becoming more self conscious, so to speak.

Anyway, that book is wild and really fun and also really, really was important in my life, at a time when I was becoming sober, I was getting sober, I should say, and I was finding a path of healing and really taking seriously the idea that we should be putting plant medicines into our body, and they wouldn't just heal us physiologically, but mentally, spiritually. That book was really important to me.

There are a few other books that I would say have really, really shaped me. This is a book that not everyone may know, but it's by Iain McGilchrist. It's called The Master and His Emissary, the divided brain in the making of the Western world. This book is absolutely fantastic, and it really helped me understand some of the basic dualities that are present, for example, in Taoism, in the ancient language of astrology, hermeticism, languages that are replete with opposites and tensions of opposites and how they work together and resist each other.

And he really works out a lot of what I would call that mystical doctrine, in terms of the physiology, neurochemistry, neuroscience of the brain. And I love this book. It's like half neuroscience, half mysticism. A lot of people love it, but it's a little bit of a dense read, if you don't like science and stuff like that. But wow, love this book.

I'm running out of room. One of the books that really helped me grow spiritually, a couple of books that have made a huge impact in my life, the Tao Te Ching, huge, huge. I mean, I've read this, I don't know, probably 20 times. The I Ching, obviously being a kind of companion study. And you guys know the Benebell Wen translation of the I Ching.

These two texts together are at the heart of most of how I see and experience life and reality. These two texts have been integrated into my life over 20 years of all different kinds of experiences, practices, with astrology, with yoga, with different forms of mysticism, with entheogens, but every step of the way, these books have been there as almost like a backdrop to my growth and development.

So I couldn't recommend the I Ching more if you've never worked with it. I love Benebell Wen's translation. She came on the website for a Sunday episode maybe a couple months ago. Now, the Tao Te Ching, I have the Tarcher Cornerstone edition. There's also a series on my YouTube channel. If you search Tao Te Ching for astrologers, you'll find me reading through the whole text and offering some reflections on how the text supports us as astrologers.

The other text I did a series on on the channel from this exact book is The Hermetica. This is the Lost Wisdom of the Pharaohs. I love this Tarcher Cornerstone edition. Tarcher published my first book. So really love them. This is a great study of one of the early religious, spiritual, philosophical sects that practiced astrology, that attribute astrology to Hermes, and this text is just so rich, spiritually, philosophically.

I also did a series on the YouTube channel. You can search and find where I go through the whole text. So that's also fantastic. Another one that's very similar for me is the Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus. These are like little fragmented teachings that are so beautiful, like, here's a line that I love: Things keep their secrets yet without obscurity or needless explanation, the true prophet signifies the prophet's voice.

Possessed of God requires no ornament, no sweetening of tone, but carries over 1000 years, just like golden nuggets of wisdom. I love this Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus. This one has a foreword by James Hillman, which is why I got it, because I love James Hillman. More on him in a second.

One of the texts that really shaped me, shaped I guess this is kind of a pun, The Shape of Ancient Thought, by Thomas McEvilley. This is a comparative study in Greek and Indian philosophy, which is really important if you want to study ancient astrology, because ancient astrology is a blend of ancient Eastern and Western philosophy, really at its roots, and they share a root system technically in their forms of astrology as well.

So I read this book to really help me understand the connections between Vedic philosophy and Vedic Astrology and ancient Western esotericism and philosophy and Western astrology. And it's not a perfect text. There's been some criticisms of his academic work, but it is beautiful. And if you're into philosophy and history, The Shape of Ancient Thought is powerful.

Another spiritual text that I absolutely love, the Bhagavad Gita. There's a million translations, but the Bhagavad Gita was a central spiritual text in my life for four or five years, while I was practicing bhakti yoga. The Bhagavad Gita is filled with timeless wisdom, and a lot of what we really understand about karma comes from texts like this.

And since the astrology landscape is filled with the language of karma, I think it's a good one to read at some point. There's another text that I absolutely love, which I think we're actually going to be trying to republish through the Sky House Press that we started for publishing my own books through. But I have been in contact with the author of this book, and we're talking about hopefully trying to republish it, because it's out of print.

But it's called Listening to the Oracle, by Diane Scott Nafti, the ancient art of finding guidance in signs and symbols all around us. I love this book. It is so good and so in line with the way that I think and work with astrology as a form of divination. I know I'm not going through. I have so many of these. I just wanted to kind of mention things that I love.

Another book that I absolutely love is called Religious but Not Religious, Living a Symbolic Life, by Jason Smith. This is a play on that phrase spiritual but not religious, but it's religious, but not religious. And I think it actually meets a lot more of us where we're at than that phrase spiritual but not religious, which he examines a lot in this book.

And this is fantastic for people who feel like maybe I am religious, but it doesn't feel like there's a religion for me, which is probably what we mean when we say spiritual but not religious. But it actually unpacks this whole dilemma at a deeper level. And I really, really love it.

And this book also the author, Jason Smith, is a Jungian who has a great podcast called The Digital Jung. And he blurbed my book for me, which was really, really nice. So that book is fantastic. A book that I love that really helped me deepen my relationship to Saturn as a Cap Moon is called Saturn and Melancholy.

This book is expensive, but it's huge and vast and it's a big historical track. It's like going up a mountain, which is appropriate for a book about Saturn, I guess. But boy, is this book expansive, paradoxically, right? When it comes to Saturn, my whole mystical Saturn talk came from this text.

If you've ever seen me give that talk, I'm giving it at NORWAC this year. Finally, one of my favorite authors of all time, James Hillman, an archetypal psychologist who has really shaped everything about the way I practice astrology psychologically. My favorite book by him is Revisioning Psychology, where he really takes the field of psychology into therapy. It's brilliant.

I love this book. It was Pulitzer Prize nominated, so good. He also wrote a book called The Soul's Code, which I recommend for my students. Both are really fantastic explorations of psyche and soul. A Terrible Love of War is another one by him that has made a very lasting impact on me in terms of understanding why human beings like and need conflict, and it's dark, but it's really deep.

Finally, there's a book he wrote called The Dream and the Underworld, which is all about dreams and about Hades and Pluto and depth, and why the human soul needs dark, mysterious spaces, psychologically. These are some of my favorite books. I know I wasn't able to spend a ton of time going through each of them, but I just wanted to flash some of them before you and be like, Look, I like this for this reason.

If you find it interesting, you know, check it out. A lot of these books, you can help support the school. We have affiliate links through our Amazon business account. So if you purchase them through the Resources tab on our website, you help the school a little, which we appreciate. But anyway, I hope that wherever you get them, if you try to read any of them, that they are helpful for you.

To me, these are, I mean, I have, my God, I've got at least 100 more I could show you that have been meaningful to me. But these are some of the ones that really stand out. And I wish I could go into fiction or creative nonfiction, but yeah, for now, this is it. I hope it's useful to you and that you get some good reading out of this.

Leave a comment in the comment section and tell me if you've read any of these, or which ones you want to read, or which ones really caught your eye. And then if you do read them, tell me what you think. Hope you're having a great day. We'll see you again soon. Bye.