AI Summary 1:
Richard and Ehud shared their personal and professional histories, including their early careers at Weiser's and their respective publishing ventures Inner Traditions and North Atlantic Books. They discussed their first meeting arranged by Vatsala and the evolution of their publishing companies, including challenges and transitions over the years. The conversation concluded with reflections on their publishing journeys, editorial approaches, and the impact of their work in the publishing world, including experiences with authors and organizational changes.
AI Summary 2:
Ehud and Richard encountered technical difficulties during a recorded interview that resulted in an incomplete recording. They decided to post the unfinished recording with an explanation of the interruption and plans to continue the conversation later. Despite being unable to edit the recording on Substack due to technical limitations, they discussed wide-ranging issues about publishing in general and esoteric publishing in particular. They agreed to continue at a later time.
Draft Sections from Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage and Out of Babylon:
Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage
The only person to whom I could vent the North Atlantic debacle was fellow hermetic publisher Ehud. Outraged on my behalf, he requested a full narrative, which meant going back forty years to creation of the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences. “They should put a plaque with your picture on the wall,” he concluded, “thanking you for their jobs.” Then, in what he later called “the most impulsive act of my career,” he invited me to bring my authors to Inner Traditions and start my own imprint there, adding, "The only reason I can think of for this terrible thing happening is that you and I were meant to work together in our seventies."
I called my imprint Sacred Planet Books. Authors came from the windways of Earth, more than a hundred in the next two years: witches’ runes, animal karma and reincarnation, precognitive dreams, dragons and mermaids, activation of Mary Magdalene’s DNA by a celestial beam of light, feline keepers of the spiritual world, sacred menstruation, the extracellular matrix, Bön monks fleeing Tibet, Egyptian astrology, flower essences, vardøgers and déjà rêvé, UFOs, poltergeists, activation of our 12-stranded DNA.
Out of Babylon
[This section needs some additional revision and correction after Ehud’s and my interview]
Fellow publisher Ehud Sperling asked me to bring my authors to Inner Traditions under my own imprint. I christened it Sacred Planet Books because now was when the planet had to become a blue-green water disk under a six-dimensional star. At Sacred Planet’s briss, North Atlantic Books ceased to exist.
I had met Ehud in the late nineties when his wife Vatsala observed our homeopathy display at a New York trade show, introduced herself and, with Vedic prescience, led me to the Inner Traditions booth. The son of Israelis who had moved to Washington Heights, Ehud dropped out of a psychology program at Queens College when he saw through academic shallowings of Freud to hia deeper occult light.
He worked for Donald Weiser in his Broadway Basement of the Occult before starting his own press. His first employee was his father, a retired librarian at NYU who spoke Yiddish and Hebrew with a smattering of Arabic at NYU.
One day in a rowboat with his friend and attorney Arthur Jacobs, Ehud complained about his landlord on lower Park Avenue, “I have to burn sage every time I meet with him.” His lease was currently up for renegotiation.
“Why not burn the lease,” offered Arthur, “and move the company here. You love Vermont, and you can grow sage instead.”
In Ehud’s imagination, two streams suddenly met: a recurrent REM dream of an underground community in the northland and the dilemma of publishing company in a corporate megapolis. So began his migration to the hills between Randolph and Middlebury.
His psychospiritual initiations went back to the Stone Ages. Earth’s original religions were still being practiced by Tasmanian, Dogon, and Yaghan hunters and gatherers. While helping Robert Lawlor put together a book about the Dreamtime that he would publish as Voices of the First Day), he watched an Aboriginal hunter lie down beside the great bird he had just killed, put his head on its belly, and say (per translation), “Thank you Brother Emu, Sister Emu, for sharing yourself and feeding us. Your spirit will always be with us and part of our tribe.” That was a vision stretching eighty-five thousand years across Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic vistas.
He found Schuar headhunters in Ecuador among the kindest hosts to invite him into their homes. That hospitality informed his practice and profession thenceforth.
When Ehud moved the press to Vermont in 1986, he not only bought an old farmhouse on the Rochester village green for the publishing office, he arranged for employee housing. By the time he welcomed me to the IT team, he ran a solar bank in Randolph that provided power for the town, while Vatsala, whom he met later in India, opened her homeopathy center next door.
Ehud said that the universe’s reason for my banishment from my own press was that he and I were meant to work together in our seventies: two hermetic publishers completing their work together.
While Ehud was relocating in Rochester, Lindy and I were leaving Plainfield for the West Coast. Now forty-three years later I was back in Vermont, having orphaned North Atlantic Books in California—a rudderless vessel manned by pirates, towed like a dead barnacle by tugboat Random House, our present distributor. A name I borrowed from Ed Dorn’s “North Atlantic Turbine” when we lived on the turbine was now an albatross branding the fox in the chicken house while stringing my mixed metaphor around its neck.
I brought a plethora of topics out of my long post-Io latency to Sacred Planet Book: cyborg phantoms, machine intelligence, geoengineered transhumanism and synthetic biology, haunted technology, ecosomatics, activating our twelve-stranded DNA, flight of the Bön monks, esoteric traditions of the Yezidis, poltergeists, elemental witchcraft, subtle energies of the round towers of Ireland, the origin of alphabets, flower remedies, sound healing, the prenatal shadow, the UFO paradox, Robert Nadeau’s aikido, the soul journey throught the tarot, apports, runes for the green witch. I call it a “post-Io” latency because I abandoned the core of our magazine for more lucrative niche publishing. I now had Ehud’s staff and marketing department to back the sorts of books that alchemy, ethnoastronomy, and oneirology should have led to. For Ehud and me, the Basement of the Occult had portended a reunification O.K. Corral in Vermont.
I attended my first monthly editorial meeting while still in Berkeley on Skype, but acute insomnia left me listless, so I emailed Ehud and apologized for my zombie performance. He replied: “I’VE GOT YOUR BACK. CHILL.”
My first Sacred Planet Books author was medical intuitive Laura Aversano. She had seen me in a tarot reading, then in steam from coffee grounds. She contacted me on Facebook. On her home page—that of a psychic and medical intuitive—she resembled a tarot queen qua power witch. She lived in the last place I would have guessed, the East Bronx beyond the Knickerbocker sign. She was my son’s age which was no longer young.
A half-Sicilian, half-Italian spiritwalker with a borough brogue, she had training in demonology and exorcism. Her family held a Vatican and Franciscan medallion going back to the Middle Ages.
After I messaged her for a psychic reading, she wrote that we had different business to conduct. On the phone she offered a trade: information for information, guidance for guidance, energy for energy. I would oversee her books, and she would hold space for me, hold it as quietly as it can be held so that the movement of a tree branch or landing of a crow in Berkeley made a ripple in the Bronx and reverberated back. She sent me to Lhasa Karnak for yarrow essence and almond oil, a drop or two of each in a bath to turn depression back into melancholy by a flower’s catacombs.
When I told her that I was in the abyss, falling through space, she said, “The tribe holds you. The tribe holds the individual; the individual holds the tribe. I hold you now.”
She explained her role with me, “A psychopomp is a supernatural creature or spirit whose purpose is to guide a soul who has just died to the afterlife. But we die many times in one lifetime, aspects of ego and will, body and mind, ancient ancestors communing at the threshold of our passage so that they too can evolve as sentient beings. We embody a myriad of lineages in our flesh and bones, not just the lineages inherent in our soul's trajectory, but lineages across parallel realities that seek to serve a higher purpose. There is a sense of surrealism with each death, an altering of reality as we embrace a new one, an altering of a lineage as the sacred womb rises to give birth, life, healing and safe passage to those parts of us which need to die, which need to merge with a laden earth encumbered by human disconnect. Or perhaps those parts of us which need to ascend with the angels, a death absorbing grace as the Divine intended to the fullest experience a soul can have.”
She warned me to look away from North Atlantic Books, for the energy field we created there had drawn its antipode as higher vibrations draw denser tones and shades, and we were now in the Trumpian Kali Yuga, a breeding ground of banshees.
At one point, I wrote her, “To me you are baffling, scrambling, because you mix so many worlds I know, know a lot, know a little, know without knowing, want to know, am afraid to know, and I hardly know how to approach you: woman, author, spirit, colleague, teacher, space-holder, Sicilian, dame, daughter, truant, priest, deva, mentor, drill sergeant. You’re like an Eleusinian Shiva opening to nowhere and everywhere. You are my neighbor girl, gardener, and street sylph. I wash my hands, figuratively, and I am hooked. I’m out of here, and I’m already back.”
During a Bronx-Berkeley phone link, a very bold crow landed next to me.
She asked for an iPhone picture. I was too slow. She said, “He’ll be back.”
A day later, “Yes.”
“Have you named him?”
Why, I wondered, would I do that?
Awaking in the middle of a night, it occurred to me, “The crow’s name is CORVID.”
Her email response:
“Wow . . . yes of course. Perfect name for perfect medicine. He is helping others to cross over but also issuing a warning, there will be more to come, the earth is destined to purify one way or the other, man is unfortunately making it worse. Crow is acting like a psychopomp. I can relate—Corvid the psychopomp, as is the wind this morning.”
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