Description: A coming-of-age memoir linking Freudian analysis, New York City, and esoteric practice across the fifties and sixties
- Traces a timeline of 1944-1965 to show the author's growth from elementary school to college while concretely mapping his psychological development - Explains how Freudian analysis, Jungian reading, dream interpretation, and tarot divination help decode fear, alienation, and trauma - Situates family conflict, camp life, baseball, and the threat of nuclear war as laboratories for identity development, spirituality, and social awareness New Moon is an autobiographical novel that tracks the "enchantments" through which one passes in a life. It begins with Richard Grossinger's 1950s American childhood (board games, candy bars, cherished toys, baseball) and is followed by his New York school daze (grade school at P.S. 6, "group" in Central Park, Freudian psychoanalysis, Grossinger's Hotel in the Catskills, Color War at Camp Chipinaw, and '50s rock 'n' roll). Then comes the watershed of his early 1960s adolescence (prep school at Horace Mann, creative writing, teen dating, the mysteries of tarot and divination), culminating in mid-sixties initiation (college at Amherst, spiritual and political baptisms, nascent romance, the beginnings of confronting the shadow, and the onset of adult life). By presenting coming of age as a series of enchantments that break and re-form over time, New Moon offers you a model for reviewing your own childhood, individuation, and spiritual quest as a single, continuous path.Brief description: Richard Grossinger is the curator of Sacred Planet Books, a member of the Inner Traditions editorial board, the founder and former publisher of North Atlantic Books, and a founding copublisher of Io, a seminal interdisciplinary literary journal that ran from 1964-1993. He attended Amherst College and completed a PhD in ecological anthropology at the University of Michigan. He has written more than 30 widely acclaimed books on alternative medicine, cosmology, embryology, and consciousness, including Dark Pool of Light: Reality and Consciousness, The Night Sky: Soul and Cosmos, and Bottoming Out the Universe.
Through the Sacred Planet collection, published under the umbrella of the Inner Traditions family of imprints, Grossinger continues his long-standing publishing talent for developing deep co-creative relationships with authors. His main psychospiritual practices have been dreams and symbols, t'ai chi ch'uan, craniosacral therapy, and the Sethian system of psychic energy taught by John Friedlander and Gloria Hemsher. Sacred Planet continues these themes while emphasizing other urgent topics: climate, permaculture, alchemy, biological transmutation, viral transmission, meta-politics, hyperobjects, spiritwalking, shapeshifting, the etheric realm, oracles, locutions, time travel, astrology, crystals, and subtle bodies. Grossinger lives in Portland, Maine, and Berkeley, California.Review Quotes: "This is a strong, deeply moving book. I can't think of another example in which the details and particularities of childhood have been evoked so fully, with such painstaking care and precision."-- "PAUL AUSTER, author of Moon Palace, Mr. Vertigo, and Smoke"