┌─╷─┐ ╵┌┼┐╵ polyphanes.smol.pub ╷└┼┘╷ by polyphanes └─╵─┘
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Rebel against the fetishism of the book. Something being in a book does not necessarily make it legitimate, nor are all legitimate things determined by being found in a book.
This might come across as a bit odd coming from me, bookhoarder and bookish occultist that I am, but when it comes to magic, magical practice, and magical innovation, hear me out. Yes, to be sure, there are lots of ways to accomplish something magically, and lots of traditions provide a lot of concrete, recorded methods, many of which are often compiled in books in one form or another. Such books (rubrics, missals, grimoires, spellbooks, manuals, enchiridia, and so on) are super useful! But here's the thing: books are inherently limited, compared to the infinite variation in human life and experiences. Worse, once you only consider stuff in books as valid or only the stuff in the way such books present it, then they become limiting as well. People who think this way only memorize instead of integrate, and not as many take that next step of synthesis and extrapolation as one might think. Such people limit themselves only to what is read, and think that that's the end of it.
What such books really provide us, in addition to a few premade recipes, are the core tools, materials, and ritual components to tackle any goal. To think otherwise is to think that the recipes in a middling bookstore's French cookbook was the sum total of French cooking, or that the math you learned from a single course's textbook in college that one semester is all of mathematics. It might take a bit of reading between the lines to get at the theory of a system, but it's that theory that allows a one to extend into or extrapolate from a book into an actual system. Sometimes you have to bring your own plate instead of having everything handed to you on one. From such books, we have all the constituent parts and a bunch of examples of how they fit together. It's on us to go beyond the book and to figure out how else they might fit together to tackle the things that the book doesn't touch upon.
When it comes to the occult or to esotericism or to spirituality, books are useful, absolutely, but in the end they're only just books. No matter how big a book might be, its pages will always be limited—our lives are not.