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Help the Hermetic Library make Magick for another year!

Go to https://igg.me/at/hermeticlibrary

Help fund content, creation and curation at Hermetic Library!

December 2016 will be the 20th anniversary of Hermetic Library!

As it enters its 20th year, the Hermetic Library needs your help to keep going. Hermetic Library has been the one of the most comprehensive and popular resources on the Internet for the kind of information in its collection. The Hermetic Library is justifiably famous, and perhaps a little infamous, as the source for an amazing collection of information useful to every researcher and student of the ancient and living Western Esoteric Tradition. Many students over the last two decades found their start with their studies by perusing the materials of the Hermetic Library and consequently started building their own actual libraries by downloading numerous pages of content made available to them in electronic and searchable form by the library.

Since 2009, John Bell, the Librarian, has been working to expand what was just a website into a multi-platform online presence, with active social media accounts in all the right places. He’s been working on constant updates and improvements to the site. He’s introduced many new services provided by the library. Until recently, it’s been a one-person show, with everything—all the work on the site and constant curation effort on social media and on the site and all—being done by John. Even with the beginning of a wonderful volunteer team forming this year, the time and energy needed to keep up the pace and continue growing, as well as the new effort required for volunteer coordination, just isn’t possible without your help to make it sustainable.

This is the first ever funding drive for the library, and we can keep going for another full year on our base budget. However, if there is enough additional support that surpasses the necessary goal. We can actually take large steps toward doing even more. With additional budget beyond the campaign goal, we can provide

more content from additional materials in existing and expanded sections;

more communication through developing a newsletter, podcast, or even finally launching our journal;

more curation of all the new and interesting things to be discovered through the website, blog, tumblogs and social media;

more creation through actively developing new ideas, new resources, and even commissioning new work from authors and artists to develop new ideas and resources.

What We Need & What You Get

$9996 dollars will allow us to pay our bills and expenses for the next year. That means providing money to offer a stipend or honorarium to volunteers for their effort, expenses related to keeping our websites up and running, and the tools needed to keep our social media presence going.

This budget is what is necessary for the Hermetic Library to continue to be of excellent and essential service to the community. We need your help now in order to continue. It’s time to decide not only if we can keep going but if we can keep growing!

But, seriously, this is crunch time for the future of the site. It is not a coincidence that this campaign is being announced on May 1st is not only about timing to coincide with May Day—it is a loud mayday call through the aethyrs to you. Will you help?

The Impact

The Hermetic Library is a shining example of excellence for providing and supporting a living esoteric tradition online. Millions of people a year visit the site. Close to an hundred thousand people follow the Hermetic Library on various social media platforms. Every year more and more people can count on the Hermetic Library as their best and primary esoteric resource online.

We need your help not only in making the current level of activity sustainable, but also in taking the next step in our ongoing growth. This 2016 fundraising campaign will be what decides whether to keep going and growing or not. We need your help to make that decision, and your support is needed to continue putting in all the incredible amounts of time, effort, and love into this endeavour.

Other Ways You Can Help

If you aren’t able to help out by contributing, there are still plenty of ways you can participate and support this effort!

Let your esoterically-minded colleagues and friends, who may be interested in such matters, know about this campaign.

Please share this campaign on your social media accounts: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and with any forums where you are active. Use the sharing tools here on Indiegogo, or post your own personal messages.

Let other people know how important Hermetic Library is to you!

Share this link: https://igg.me/at/hermeticlibrary  

  Consider also:

The Wild Hunt 2013 Fall Funding Campaign

Hermetic Library album call for 2016 submissions

Why have a Patron campaign?

There is no mention at all of use of Mossack Fonseca by massive western corporations or western billionaires – the main customers. And the Guardian is quick to reassure that “much of the leaked material will remain private.”

What do you expect? The leak is being managed by the grandly but laughably named “International Consortium of Investigative Journalists”, which is funded and organised entirely by the USA’s Center for Public Integrity. Their funders include

Ford Foundation Carnegie Endowment Rockefeller Family Fund W K Kellogg Foundation Open Society Foundation (Soros)

among many others. Do not expect a genuine expose of western capitalism. The dirty secrets of western corporations will remain unpublished.

These are just a few of the ungenerous reviews the new Baldur’s Gate expansion, Siege of Dragonspear, is getting on Steam. The game has generated this response entirely because Beamdog Entertainment included a trans character in their updated material.

All they did was INCLUDED a trans character. Baldur’s Gate occupies a place at the crossroads of video gaming, tabletop gaming, and gaming nostalgia. Obviously it’s attracted the worst elements from all of these communities. It’s also meant that a friend has faced days of harassment.

I’m not asking that you buy this game—though, that couldn’t hurt. Rather, please, lend Beamdog your support, your kind words, your appreciation for helping to make gaming more inclusive, and a reminder that adding LGBTQ content to a game wins more than public hate, harassment, and toxic reviews.

(Additionally, you should absolutely check out Kathrine Cross’s words on Virtue Signalling & Trans Characters in Baldur’s Gate.)

This company’s takeaway from this experience, in 2016, cannot be that including LGBTQ content in a video game is not worth the pain. 

Your support and positivity would mean a great deal right now.  

Steam page for Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear.

Beamdog’s forum for Siege of Dragonspear.