The Free Spirit: Unleashing the Individual from Internal and External Constraint

This book explores the "Free Spirit" as a historic concept and contemporary possibility for liberation. The promise of true, wild life: personal freedom, divine freedom. In offering examples and liberating experiences throughout the course of its exploration, this book proposes a Canon of the Free Spirit (or anti-canon, by its nature) useful for reference to individuals, works, and deeds that model how to free your mind and soul. Exposure to great and questionable figures such as the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus and the ancient Roman Emperor Heliogabalus demonstrates that free-burning spirits once thrived. Egyptian pharaoh Akhnaton and his love Nefertiti, angelic medieval mystic Marguerite Porete, and the diabolical Rasputin give proof of concept beyond all contexts. Thus, you'll find wild examples of pansexual ecstasy, mysterious proponents of mystical anarchy, and saints and sages of radical love.

From antiquity, and the history of heresy in medieval times, to recent radical theory, The Free Spirit examines how to be free in an unfree world, and inspires the will and the way for you to...

• Smash your "mind-forg'd manacles," as described by poet William Blake.


• Put a sledge hammer to self-imposed and society-imposed padlocks on your thought and intention.


• Remove your spiritual shackles.

Ultimately, this means you'll learn the art of nonconformity, which is the art of living your life.

Reading this Kindle book begins a process of unblocking; the work is an unfolding of and encouragement to self-emancipation. Author Magus Magnus pursues an affinity for the Free Spirit concept in the wake of his iconoclastic treatment of Heraclitus in Heraclitean Pride and amidst his in-progress project, Heliogabalus: Priest of the Sun, Emperor of Rome. This is philosophy of the poet, and ecstasy of the philosopher.

To ignore the possibilities and past actualities of such freedom as The Free Spirit explores is to accept the unexamined life, as well as to accept needless guilt (without examining true responsibility). Don't allow yourself to live an unfulfilled life. Don't accept boring conformity. Don't be fooled. This book points to real freedom. History's examples of great free lives raise many questions about right and wrong, yet until you ask what is right and wrong for yourself, you have not begun to move towards your potential and fulfillment. Have fun, and begin to live your life with The Free Spirit! Don't forget the #1 deathbed regret, according to palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware: "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."

The Free Spirit refuses to accept false limits and any form of oppression: internal, external, societal, or circumstantial. Franz Kafka once said, "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." Don't forget to Look Inside! (take that in more ways than one, but do scroll up to the top left and Look Inside), and start the process of hacking away at what's iced over inwardly.

Magus Magnus' work sources poetry and "the poetic" as central both to the extremes of interiority (thought, philosophy) and exteriority (performance, deed). Born in L.A. in 1967, Magnus' privileged upbringing in Southern California did him no favors, but brought him lasting distrust of materialistic veneer and, by his teen years, charges of "malicious mischief" from the Beverly Hills cops. He lives only for love and to drink from the Enchanted Spring.

His books include The Re-echoes, Heraclitean Pride, Idylls for a Bare Stage, and Verb Sap.