To Gordon
I felt a strange sadness looming over me all through the weekend of May 8. Then, on May 11, I woke up to a message from Avalon Cameron saying that Gordon White had passed. During his 2024 visit to my house here in Brazil, Maria Padilha told him he wasn’t long for this world, to which he replied, “I know.” And I believe he did.
I met Gordon in 2015 via Sef Salem, who felt that we should get to know each other. Of course, I knew about Gordon back then because of Runesoup, a podcast from before occult podcasts were even really a thing. Whether Gordon invented the genre, I wouldn’t know, but I’m certain that he perfected it. I remember those days of our friendship as if every time we met, we had whole lifetimes to tell each other about.
Sometime in 2016, Alkistis Dimech generously remarked that Scarlet Imprint would be willing to publish me if I decided to write. Gordon had on a number of previous occasions poked me to write a book about my experiences with Solomonic magic. During a dinner with him when I still lived in Australia, I mentioned that conversation and he suggested that I should take that as a serious invitation. I wrote the first few chapters of what would become Magister Officiorum and he kindly offered to review my manuscript as it developed. As Gordon was such a prolific writer, this was a unique opportunity for me. He gave that book its title, though the conversation in which he did so is lost to memory. To put it another way, there would be no book if it weren’t for him. I wouldn’t have been published, and I’m certain that in turn I’d have lived a very different, and smaller, life.
As he started spending significant time in South America in recent years, and as his interest in spiritual traditions closer to my own developed, so did our conversations about it. I know that he planned to do great things with what he found in this corner of the Earth. Gordon knew that his health wouldn’t take him much further, and yet his will to keep on discovering the spiritual never diminished.
In death, we choose how to remember others and how much they changed the course of our lives. I’ll always remember Gordon as someone who dramatically changed mine. My readership might guess that our views often differed, and they certainly did. Our friendship survived that, even in years when it was no easy thing for either of us, opinionated as we both were.
May you join your ancestors on the other side, Gordon. We’ll meet again someday.
I am just learning of Gordon's passing from your post here -- what a beautiful and fitting tribute.
I only had very brief interactions with Gordon -- I was a guest once on Rune Soup, and we exchanged a few e-mails here and there. And I was struck both in those interactions and in my experience of his work by his generosity of mind and spirit.
Like you, my views on many things differed from his. And that never diminished my gratitude and respect for him.
Thank you for this.
Thank you for this lovely and important tribute. Gordon's generosity was one of his great gifts, as was his hospitality, and willingness to connect us all together.