An insider's guide for beginner mystics, How to Study Magic is your ultimate introduction to the main areas of magic-from witchcraft to grimoires-what it means to practice them, and, most of all, how to get started.Have you ever wanted to dive into the world of magic, but weren't sure where to begin? You're not alone! Knowing where to start can be mystifying, but it doesn't have to be. In How to Study Magic, author, educator, and seasoned witch Sarah Lyons guides you through an introductory course of study, and an enchanted entry point to the wide world of magical paths.Drawing on Sarah's own experience practicing and teaching magic for more than a decade, this interactive exploration takes novice witches through basic tools they can use in their studies-from divination and meditation to cleansing and protection-before diving into the history, lore, and modern incarnations of a wide range of magical practices. With chapters on Witchcraft, Chaos Magic, Spellbooks and Grimoires, Gods and Goddesses, and more, this dynamic guide gives readers an insider's perspective on how to craft their own, personalized practice. Each chapter also contains interactive activities, journal prompts, and suggestions for further reading, allowing baby witches to chart their own paths and explore their own power. For anyone who knows they want to study magic, but has no idea where to begin, How to Study Magic is the answer you've been waiting for.

Strange Histories is an exploration of some of the most extraordinary beliefs that existed in the late Middle Ages through to the end of the seventeenth century. Presenting serious accounts of the appearance of angels and demons, sea monsters and dragons within European and North American history, this book moves away from "present-centred thinking" and instead places such events firmly within their social and cultural context. By doing so, it offers a new way of understanding the world in which dragons and witches were fact rather than fiction, and presents these riveting phenomena as part of an entirely rational thought process for the time in which they existed. This new edition has been fully updated in light of recent research. It contains a new guide to further reading as well as a selection of pictures that bring its themes to life. From ghosts to witches, to pigs on trial for murder, the book uses a range of different case studies to provide fascinating insights into the world-view of a vanished age. It is essential reading for all students of early modern history. .

Subjects include: -Alchemy and the Rise of the Modern Mysteries -The Loss of the Divine and the Alchemical Quest -Mysteries of the Metals -The Standpoint of Human Wisdom Today -Alchemy and Consciousness - the Transformation Alchemy and Archangels -The Alchemy of Nature - Mercury, Sulphur, Salt -Beyond Nature Consciousness - the Spiritual Goal

Giordano Bruno is known as the Prophet of the New Age, and his vision of an infinite universe grounded in science is increasingly celebrated.

One of the principal forces behind his rediscovery was the great British historian Frances Yates. In calling attention to Giordono Bruno, she paved the way for a revaluation of the esoteric influences at play during the onset of the modern era. Today, when traditional answers about the universe and our place within it are under increasing scrutiny, Giordono Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition proves itself a true classic for our time.

Table of Contents

Preface

Abbreviations

Introduction J. B. Trapp

1. Hermes Trismegistus

2. Ficino’s Pimander and the Asclepius

3. Hermes Trismegistus and Magic

4. Ficino’s Natural Magic

5. Pico della Mirandola and Cabalist Magic

6. Pseudo-Dionysius and the Theology of a Christian Magus

7. Cornelius Agrippa’s Survey of Renaissance Magic

8. Renaissance Magic and Science

9. Against Magic: (1) Theological Objections; (2) The Humanist Tradition

10. Religious Hermetism in the Sixteenth Century

11. Giordano Bruno: First Visit to Paris

12. Giordano Bruno in England: The Hermetic Reform

13. Giordano Bruno in England: The Hermetic Philosophy

14. Giordano Bruno and the Cabala

15. Giordano Bruno: Heroic Enthusiast and Elizabethan

16. Giordano Bruno: Second Visit to Paris

17. Giordano Bruno in Germany

18. Giordano Bruno: Last Published Work

19. Giordano Bruno: Return to Italy

20. Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella

21. After Hermes Trismegistus was Dated

22. Hermes Trismegistus and the Fludd Controversies.

Index /

Derived from two previously unpublished seventeenth century manuscripts on angel magic, this coveted book contains the final corrected version of John Dee's great tables and an expansion of his most prized book of invocations.

Discover what happened to John Dee's most important manuscript, his book of personal angelic invocations, and how it was developed by seventeenth century magicians into a full working magical system. Learn how only a small part of this material reached the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and was suppressed--never appearing in Israel Regardie's monumental work on the Order rituals.

Daughters of Hecate unites for the first time research on the problem of gender and magic in three ancient Mediterranean societies: early Judaism, Christianity, and Graeco-Roman culture. The book illuminates the gendering of ancient magic by approaching the topic from three distinct disciplinary perspectives: literary stereotyping, the social application of magic discourse, and material culture.
The volume challenges presumed associations of women and magic by probing the foundations of, processes, and motivations behind gendered stereotypes, beginning with Western culture's earliest associations of women and magic in the Bible and Homer's Odyssey. Daughters of Hecate provides a nuanced exploration of the topic while avoiding reductive approaches. In fact, the essays in this volume uncover complexities and counter-discourses that challenge, rather than reaffirm, many gendered stereotypes taken for granted and reified by most modern scholarship.
By combining critical theoretical methods with research into literary and material evidence, Daughters of Hecate interrogates gendered stereotypes that are as relevant now as for understanding antiquity or the early modern witch hunts.

Also available in an open-access, full-text edition at http: //repositories.tamu.edu/bitstream/handle/1969.1/86080/Marlin_585444251_Txt.pdf?sequence=1 The black sun, an ages-old image of the darkness in individual lives and in life itself, has not been treated hospitably in the modern world. Modern psychology has seen darkness primarily as a negative force, something to move through and beyond, but it actually has an intrinsic importance to the human psyche. In this book, Jungian analyst Stanton Marlan reexamines the paradoxical image of the black sun and the meaning of darkness in Western culture.
In the image of the black sun, Marlan finds the hint of a darkness that shines. He draws upon his clinical experiences--and on a wide range of literature and art, including Goethe's "Faust, " Dante's "Inferno," the black art of Rothko and Reinhardt--to explore the influence of light and shadow on the fundamental structures of modern thought as well as the contemporary practice of analysis. He shows that the black sun accompanies not only the most negative of psychic experiences but also the most sublime, resonating with the mystical experience of negative theology, the Kabbalah, the Buddhist notions of the void, and the black light of the Sufi Mystics.
An important contribution to the understanding of alchemical psychology, this book draws on a postmodern sensibility to develop an original understanding of the black sun. It offers insight into modernity, the act of imagination, and the work of analysis in understanding depression, trauma, and transformation of the soul. Marlan's original reflections help us to explore the unknown darkness conventionally called the Self.
"The image of Kali appearing in the color insert following page 44 is (c) Maitreya Bowen, reproduced with her permission, "[email protected].

Stephen A. Mitchell here offers the fullest examination available of witchcraft in late medieval Scandinavia. He focuses on those people believed to be able-and who in some instances thought themselves able-to manipulate the world around them through magical practices, and on the responses to these beliefs in the legal, literary, and popular cultures of the Nordic Middle Ages. His sources range from the Icelandic sagas to cultural monuments much less familiar to the nonspecialist, including legal cases, church art, law codes, ecclesiastical records, and runic spells. Mitchell's starting point is the year 1100, by which time Christianity was well established in elite circles throughout Scandinavia, even as some pre-Christian practices and beliefs persisted in various forms. The book's endpoint coincides with the coming of the Reformation and the onset of the early modern Scandinavian witch hunts. The terrain covered is complex, home to the Germanic Scandinavians as well as their non-Indo-European neighbors, the Sami and Finns, and it encompasses such diverse areas as the important trade cities of Copenhagen, Bergen, and Stockholm, with their large foreign populations; the rural hinterlands; and the insular outposts of Iceland and Greenland. By examining witches, wizards, and seeresses in literature, lore, and law, as well as surviving charm magic directed toward love, prophecy, health, and weather, Mitchell provides a portrait of both the practitioners of medieval Nordic magic and its performance. With an understanding of mythology as a living system of cultural signs (not just ancient sacred narratives), this study also focuses on such powerful evolving myths as those of "the milk-stealing witch," the diabolical pact, and the witches' journey to Blakulla. Court cases involving witchcraft, charm magic, and apostasy demonstrate that witchcraft ideologies played a key role in conceptualizing gender and were themselves an important means of exercising social control.

Henrik Bogdan and Martin P. Starr offer the first comprehensive examination of one of the twentieth century's most distinctive occult iconoclasts. Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was a study in contradictions. He was born into a Fundamentalist Christian family, then educated at Cambridge where he experienced both an intellectual liberation from his religious upbringing and a psychic awakening that led him into the study of magic. He was a stock figure in the tabloid press of his day, vilified during his life as a traitor, drug addict and debaucher; yet he became known as the perhaps most influential thinker in contemporary esotericism. The practice of the occult arts was understood in the light of contemporary developments in psychology, and its advocates, such as William Butler Yeats, were among the intellectual avant-garde of the modernist project. Crowley took a more drastic step and declared himself the revelator of a new age of individualism. Crowley's occult bricolage, Magick, was a thoroughly eclectic combination of spiritual exercises drawing from Western European ceremonial magical traditions as practiced in the nineteenth-century Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Crowley also pioneered in his inclusion of Indic sources for the parallel disciplines of meditation and yoga. The summa of this journey of self-liberation was harnessing the power of sexuality as a magical discipline, an instance of the "sacrilization of the self " as practiced in his co-masonic magical group, the Ordo Templi Orientis. The religion Crowley created, Thelema, legitimated his role as a charismatic revelator and herald of a new age of freedom under the law of ''Do what thou wilt.'' The influence of Aleister Crowley is not only to be found in contemporary esotericism-he was, for instance, a major influence on Gerald Gardner and the modern witchcraft movement-but can also be seen in the counter-culture movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in many forms of alternative spirituality and popular culture. This anthology, which features essays by leading scholars of Western esotericism across a wide array of disciplines, provides much-needed insight into Crowley's critical role in the study of western esotericism, new religious movements, and sexuality.

In the middle of the fourteenth century, the Franciscan friar John of Rupescissa sent a dramatic warning to his followers: the last days were coming; the apocalypse was near. Deemed insane by the Christian church, Rupescissa had spent more than a decade confined to prisons--in one case wrapped in chains and locked under a staircase--yet ill treatment could not silence the friar's apocalyptic message. Religious figures who preached the end times were hardly rare in the late Middle Ages, but Rupescissa's teachings were unique. He claimed that knowledge of the natural world, and alchemy in particular, could act as a defense against the plagues and wars of the last days. His melding of apocalyptic prophecy and quasi-scientific inquiry gave rise to a new genre of alchemical writing and a novel cosmology of heaven and earth. Most important, the friar's research represented a remarkable convergence between science and religion. In order to understand scientific knowledge today, Leah DeVun asks that we revisit Rupescissa's life and the critical events of his age--the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, the Avignon Papacy--through his eyes. Rupescissa treated alchemy as medicine (his work was the conceptual forerunner of pharmacology) and represented the emerging technologies and views that sought to combat famine, plague, religious persecution, and war. The advances he pioneered, along with the exciting strides made by his contemporaries, shed critical light on later developments in medicine, pharmacology, and chemistry.

What is the secret meaning of alchemical symbolism? Why was the Royal Art kept secret for so long? Could ancient images really turn molten lead into gold with a mere pinch of the Philosopher's Stone? Really? Alchemy is perhaps the last true magical art to survive the ravages of the modern world. In this exquisite book, top laboratory alchemist Guy Ogilvy initiates the reader into some of the key concepts and practices of this extraordinary field of study. It includes extensive appendices. WOODEN BOOKS are small but packed with information. "Fascinating" FINANCIAL TIMES. "Beautiful" LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS. "Rich and Artful" THE LANCET. "Genuinely mind-expanding" FORTEAN TIMES. "Excellent" NEW SCIENTIST. "Stunning" NEW YORK TIMES. Small books, big ideas.

Despite the dramatic expansion of modern technology, which defines and dominates many aspects of contemporary life and thought, the Western magical traditions are currently undergoing an international resurgence. How can we account for this widespread interest in ancient magical belief systems? In historical terms, Gnosticism and the Hermetica, the medieval Kabbalah, Tarot and Alchemy, and more recently, Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, collectively laid the basis for the modern magical revival, which first began to gather momentum in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Modern Western magic has since become increasingly eclectic, drawing on such diverse sources as classical Greco-Roman mythology, Celtic cosmology, Kundalini yoga and Tantra, shamanism, chaos theory, and the various spiritual traditions associated in many different cultures with the Universal Goddess. In this overview of the modern occult revival, Nevill Drury traces the rise of various forms of magical belief and practice, from the influential Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn to the emergence of Wicca and Goddess worship as expressions of contemporary feminine spirituality. He also explores Chaos Magick and the occult practices of the so-called Left-Hand Path, as well as twenty-first-century magical forays into cyberspace. Drury believes that the rise of modern Western magic stems essentially from the quest for personal spiritual transformation and the direct experience of the sacred-a quest which the trance occultist and visionary artist Austin Osman Spare once referred to as "stealing fire from heaven." Considered in this light, modern Western magic can be regarded as a form of alternative spirituality in which the practitioners seek direct engagement with the mythic realm.

Science and Magic in the Modern World is a unique text that explores the role of magical thinking in everyday life. It provides an excellent psychological look at the subconscious belief in magic in both popular culture and society, as well as experimental research that considers human consciousness as a derivative of belief in the supernatural, thus showing that our feelings, emotions, attitudes and other psychological processes follow the laws of magic. This book synthesises the science of 'natural' phenomena and the magic of the 'supernatural' to present an interesting look at the juxtaposition of the inner and outer selves. Fusing research into psychological disorders, subconscious feelings, as well as the rising presence of artificial intelligence, this book demonstrates how an engagement with magical thinking can enhance one's creativity and cognitive skills. Science and Magic in the Modern World is an invaluable resource for those studying consciousness, as well as those looking at the effect of magical thinking on religion, politics, science and society.

Histories you can trust. This history provides a readable and fresh approach to the extensive and complex story of witchcraft and magic. Telling the story from the dawn of writing in the ancient world to the globally successful Harry Potter films, the authors explore a wide range of magical beliefs and practices, the rise of the witch trials, and the depiction of the Devil-worshipping witch. The book also focuses on the more recent history of witchcraft and magic, from the Enlightenment to the present, exploring the rise of modern magic, the anthropology of magic around the globe, and finally the cinematic portrayal of witches and magicians, from The Wizard of Oz to Charmed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Comprising well over a thousand pages of densely written Aramaic, the compilation of texts known as the Zohar represents the collective wisdom of various strands of Jewish mysticism, or kabbalah, up to the thirteenth century. This massive work continues to provide the foundation of much Jewish mystical thought and practice to the present day. In this book, Pinchas Giller examines certaing sections of the Zohar and the ways in which the central doctrines of classical kabbalah took shape around them.

"Magic and Modernity" is the first book to explore comparatively how magic--usually portrayed as the antithesis of the modern--is also something that is at home in modernity. "Magic" and "modernity" are rarely regarded as belonging together. Evolutionism regarded magic as quintessentially "unmodern." Although psychologists and romantic artists have sometimes declared magic to be a human universal, few modern scholars in the humanities and social sciences have studied how modern culture and institutions incorporated and even produced magic.
This book is the first to adopt a comparative approach to the study of magic as something that has a place in modernity, and that helped to constitute modern society at local and global levels. The essays in this collection contribute to recent discussions in anthropology, cultural studies, comparative literature, history, and sociology that increasingly question the extent to which modern self-conceptions are accurate reflections of a state of affairs in the world rather than cultural interventions.

Isaac Luria (1534-1572) is one of the most extraordinary and influential mystical figures in the history of Judaism, a visionary teacher who helped shape the course of nearly all subsequent Jewish mysticism. Given his importance, it is remarkable that this is the first scholarly work on him in English. Most studies of Lurianic Kabbalah focus on Luria's mythic and speculative ideas or on the ritual and contemplative practices he taught. The central premise of this book is that Lurianic Kabbalah was first and foremost a lived and living phenomenon in an actual social world. Thus the book focuses on Luria the person and on his relationship to his disciples. What attracted Luria's students to him? How did they react to his inspired and charismatic behavior? And what roles did Luria and his students see themselves playing in their collective quest for repair of the cosmos and messianic redemption?

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 2000 The roots of European witchcraft and magic lie in Hebrew and other ancient Near Eastern cultures and in the Celtic, Nordic, and Germanic traditions of the Continent. For two millennia, European folklore and ritual have been imbued with the belief in the supernatural, yielding a rich trove of histories and images. The six volumes in the series Witchcraft and Magic in Europe combine traditional approaches of political, legal, and social historians with critical syntheses of cultural anthropology, historical psychology, and gender studies. The series provides a modern, scholarly survey of the supernatural beliefs of Europeans from ancient times to the present day. Each volume contains the work of distinguished scholars chosen for their expertise in a particular era or region. The chronological scope of this volume ranges from the heroic age of Homer's Greek East to the time of the rise of Christianity, a period of well over a thousand years. In this long millennium the political and cultural landscapes of the Mediterranean basin underwent significant changes, as competing creeds and denominations rose to the fore, and often accused each other of sorcery. Other volumes in the series Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Biblical and Pagan Societies The Middle Ages The Period of the Witch Trials The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries The Twentieth Century

This book addresses the troubling questions confronting the modern Jewish worshiper by bringing to the reader the insights of such twentieth-century Jewish theologians as Herman Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Avraham Y. Kook, Mordecai M. Kaplan, R. Arele, Aaron Rote, Elie Munk, Abraham J. Heschel, Jakob J. Petuchowski, Eugene B. Borowitz, and Lawrence A. Hoffman, as well as a variety of feminist theologians. By discussing these theologians, the author discusses a variety of obstacles to prayer: the inability to concentrate on the words and meaning of formal liturgies, the paucity of emotional involvement and lack of theological conviction among worshipers, and the anthropomorphic and, particularly, the masculine emphasis of prayer nomenclature. The result is a book of great interest not just for Jewish worshipers but for anyone interested in the meaning of prayer and the modern approaches to it.

Throughout history, magic has been as widely and passionately practiced as religion. But while religion continues to flourish, magic stumbles towards extinction. What is magic? What does it do? Why do people believe in magic? Ariel Glucklich finds the answers to these questions in the streets of Banaras, India's most sacred city, where hundreds of magicians still practice ancient traditions, treating thousands of Hindu and Muslim patients of every caste and sect. Through study and interpretation of the Banarsi magical rites and those who partake in them, the author presents fascinating living examples of magical practice, and contrasts his findings with the major theories that have explained (or explained away) magic over the last century. These theories, he argues, ignore an essential sensory phenomenon which he calls "magical experience": an extraordinary, though perfectly natural, state of awareness through which magicians and their clients perceive the effects of magic rituals.

Magic, which is probably as old as humanity, is a way of achieving goals through supernatural means, either benevolent (white magic) or harmful (black magic). Magic has been used in Britain since at least the Iron Age (800 BC- AD 43) - amulets made from human bone have been found on Iron Age sites in southern England. Britain was part of the Roman Empire from AD 43 to 410, and it is then we see the first written magic, in the form of curse tablets. A good deal of magic involves steps to prevent the restless dead from returning to haunt the living, and this may lie behind the decapitated and prone (face down) burials of Roman Britain. The Anglo-Saxons who settled in England in the 5th and 6th century were strong believers in magic: they used ritual curses in Anglo-Saxon documents, they wrote spells and charms, and some of the women buried in pagan cemeteries were likely practitioners of magic (wicca, or witches). The Anglo-Saxons became Christians in the 7th century, and the new "magicians" were the saints, who with the help of God, were able to perform miracles. In 1066, William of Normandy became king of England, and for a time there was a resurgence of belief in magic. The medieval church was able to keep the fear of magic under control, but after the Reformation in the mid 16th century, this fear returned, with numerous witchcraft trials in the late 16th and 17th centuries.

Honza Pernath's life is barren. The person he loves is gone and his friends, even his dreams, say she will not return. When a chance meeting sets him on a search for his lost love, the path is neither straight nor easy and Honza comes to doubt everything, including the one he searches for. A single image-a star rising over the sea-calls him on, but that image is more than it seems and as Honza nears its source, his search reveals more than he could have imagined. A sequel to the mysterious and beautiful short story, 'Marietta Merz' (now an illustrated chapbook), Child of the Black Sun is an exploration of the living symbols at the core of everyday life; a visionary evocation of the internal journey.