.... introduce yourself to the Essenes and the Community of Angels by enjoying one Blockbuster Novel

and a solid supporting pyramid of well researched yet popular nonfiction titles

by Leo Rivers
Biography

The Gospel of Miriam

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50 years of scholarship into the discoveries of the Library at Nag Hammadi in Egypt and the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran has created a tidal wave of popular interest and speculation, but a unifying vision of the intellectual and spiritual world of the Ancient World in which Jesus and the Essenes lived has yet to reach the ordinary man or woman who is not privileged to the mysteries of Academics or their arcane tongues.

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Not a potboiler about the love life of Jesus or a polemic about religion, The Gospel of Mariam is a fireside tale set in the Holy Land of the hard life lived in the shadow of Imperial Rome as would be told Mother to Daughter, Father to Son.

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Let Mariam of Magdala be your guide to the World in which she lived, the history of heaven and earth as she knew it, using the breadth and depth of scholarship available to effortlessly spin a vision of the world in which revolution and religion wrestled together to make the Future in which we live today.

The Words of the Perfect Shepherd

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There is the religion ABOUT Jesus, called Christianity. This is the religion we know. But there is a second religion we don't know! This is the religion OF the Jesus. This is the religion found in the wise sayings of Jesus known from the Nag Hammadi Library as The Gospel of Thomas.

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The Words of the Perfect Shepherd takes 91 of the Logii of the Gospel of Thomas and arranges them in 12 groups by theme, enabling the religion of the Man to naturally speak for themselves without interpretation or suffering the fate of being used as bludgeons for someone else's agenda!

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Cut through 2000 years of conflicting and confusing theology and politics to the simple sense of words spoke simply from the spirit to the spirit in a timeless way!

a Community of Angels

in a World ruled by Arrogant Powers and Demonic Winds?

The Community of Companions

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No matter what your Politics or your Faith, the Community we all must share suffers from abandonment and erosion. Our Modern Culture is the Commercial Culture agreed upon by a few huge Corporations and the Government in Washington must first please them, before it can remember us. It is Time we rebuild our Values so we are restored to the basic frame of the Family, and reestablish our Community as the place to which we give and from which we derive.

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The Community of Companions is a blueprint for a New Community Rule, or Contract for a Life lived for each other rather than a life lived just for ourself! It is no less than a blueprint of how to live in but not of the World.

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Enjoy an extended meditation on the kind of values that all deeply felt religions honor, and the humanist values themselves enshrined in the hopes and dreams of a Nation in which both Leaders and the Led have gone astray.

The Blockbuster Novel

The Apocalypse of Angels

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A sprawling, lusty, and yet spiritually profound Historical Romance of life on the border of the West and East as it was 2000 years ago, The Apocalypse of Angels opens Ancient Rome and Ancient Parthia like overpowering blossoms and then plunges the reader into a thrill and danger filled escape from Babylon, its Gods, Goddesses and scared harlots, on a journey to a Secret Valley with the future itself at stake.

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Historically rich in detail The Apocalypse of Angels tells us about ourselves and our world as it tells its story about the mysteries and perils of the Ancient World.

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No Fantasy World could equal or compare to the Fantastic World of the border between Rome and Parthia 2000 years ago. Stories of space ships and dragons pale beside this epic adventure where the brutal battlefields of Rome and unknown wonders of the Ancient Near East collide in a Century when the War of the Angels of Light and Darkness descended onto the mountain tops of the Earth!

58,870 words approx.

The New Common Sense

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By engaging us in a game of 20 Questions Leo Rivers places the home back in the center of a stable community and explains the Way of our turbulent World for those bewildered by it.

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High School didn't teach you everything you needed to know about Life, did it? Did it really open your eyes and prepare you for the reality of the political and economic powers all around you in your day to day life and controlling your future from a distant and unseen place?

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The New Common Sense cuts through the bewildering Mirage of Commercialism and Propaganda and predigested News with scalpel of brilliant insights into the Way it is and What can be done about it!

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Take control of your Life for the sake of your Family and reestablish a community able to endure as an Ark upon the Flood Waters of the World now and to come!

Two Ground Breaking

When the Essene spirituality of Angels

calls up the best in us!

The Companion Angel

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For too long the philosophy of angel magic or angel calling ceremonial prayer has been repressed by Religious Dogma and put into the same intellectual prison cell as demonology and black magic. The Companion Angel restores this spirituality, (called theurgy), to its rightful place as a form of focussed meditation on all that is highest in us. The Companion Angel presents the Theory and History of this Ancient Essene Science.

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Following the threads of Angel Magic back to the spirituality of the Essenes, for the first time Angel Magic is presented in a context in which it is at home.

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Explore that divine bridge which rises from prayer to the magical!

restore your heights and depths!

The Sacred Angel Magic

How do I pray? How do I ask for a spirit guide? The Sacred Angel Magic presents a clear, rich framework for pursuing the Practice of the this new Essene Angel Magic.

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Extensively using materials from the Books of Enoch and The Dead Sea Scrolls, The Sacred Angel Magic presents a program and a liturgy of Theurgy that recreates the Angiology of the Essenes, an angiology equally at the mystical roots of Christian Mysticism, Islamic Revelation, and the Jewish Kabballah!

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Let timeless Essene Prayers raise your eyes to the angelic presence within!

* I am a writer living in Cottage Grove, Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest, and enjoy not just the surprisingly varied and lively literary and musical climate here near Eugene, but enjoy access to one of the finest research libraries west of the Rockies,... it has made my decades of study both possible and enjoyable.

* I have a B.A. in History as well as completing the Teaching Program at the University of Long Beach in California, well known for its contributions to the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Here, it was my favorite professor and mentor, Doctor Frayda D. Hoffnung, who wrote the seminal The Family of Jesus, a work that opened my eyes in so many ways... I take the perspective on Essene evolution that Gabriele Boccaccini takes in his ground-breaking Beyond the Essene Hypothesis.

* At that time I also participated in the IIMAS (International Institute for Mesopotamian Studies) Home Seminar Program, a course equivalent to a Literature 103 undergraduate level survey in Mesopotamian Literature.

* It is also at this time I developed a passion for pursuing the deeply shared roots of world religiosity. A thread I would pick up with the works of Professor Edward Conze, who identified both a Deified Female Wisdom Figure and a Transcendent Ultimate as two shared features of Mahayana Buddhism, Jewish Mysticism, and Greek-Egyptian Gnosticism, all products of the post-Alexander Mediterranean World of 200 B.C. to 400 A.D..

* I discovered the Zohar while living in San Francisco in the late 1960s, and pursued my studies in the western occult Tradition in New York City up through the early 1970s. But I thank the BOTA for grounding my efforts in meditation rather than reading and theory. From them I learned to plunge into the depths of the Tarot. (I went on to design and paint a "Gnostic Tarot" deck at this time after a series of dreams an waking visions that opened my eyes to the reality of such phenomena.)

* I found my true home in the Western Tradition of Spirituality with a Golden Dawn temple with which I worked 6 years. I helped edit and extensively footnote the Second Order materials in the 5th Edition of The Golden Dawn (Llewellyn Publications, 1986)

* I wrote for the Hermetic Journal (Issue #32- Summer 1986) on Gnostic Magic and Jacob Boehme. I spent the next 10 years deepening my studies in the deep shared roots of the Tantric Buddhist, Egyptian Gnostic and 2nd Temple Jewish Kabballism in the first century before and after Christ!

* For the last decade I have dedicated myself to both the academic and the spiritual pursuit of the lost spiritual culture of the Essenes. This has led to my composition of a series of 7 books determined to restore the community, household, and heart in a spiritual context that dissolves the tired mind-body, spirituality/worldly divisions that torment and weaken both the World and the Individual in this 21st Century.

P.O. Box 682 Cottage Grove OR 97424