In this title, the history of alchemy traced from its earliest roots through to its influence in modern-day science. Beginning in China in the search for the secret of immortality, and appearing independently in Egypt as an attempt to produce gold through the arts of smelting and alloying metals, alchemy received a great boost in Europe from studies by Islamic and Jewish alchemists. Translated into Latin and then combined with what was known of Greek natural science these accounts provoked an outburst of attempts to manipulate matter and to change it into transformative substances known as the Philosopher's Stone or the Elixir of Life. Alchemy's heyday in Europe was the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Demonstrations of the art were performed in royal courts and specimens of the gold so transmuted can be seen in various museums today. During the nineteenth century, attempts were made to amalgamate alchemy with the religious and occult philosophies then growing in popularity; and in the twentieth century psychologists - principally Carl Jung - perceived in alchemy a powerful vehicle for aspects of their theories about human nature.

During the Middle Ages, the Western world translated the incredible Arabic scientific corpus and imported it into Western culture: Arabic philosophy, optics, and physics, as well as alchemy, astrology, and talismanic magic. The line between the scientific and the magical was blurred. According to popular lore, magicians of the Middle Ages were trained in the art of magic in "magician schools" located in various metropolitan areas, such as Naples, Athens, and Toledo. It was common knowledge that magic was learned and that cities had schools designed to teach the dark arts. The Spanish city of Toledo, for example, was so renowned for its magic training schools that "the art of Toledo" was synonymous with "the art of magic." Until Benedek Lang's work on Unlocked Books, little had been known about the place of magic outside these major cities. A principal aim of Unlocked Books is to situate the role of central Europe as a center for the study of magic.

Lang helps chart for us how the thinkers of that day--clerics, courtiers, and university masters--included in their libraries not only scientific and religious treatises but also texts related to the field of learned magic. These texts were all enlisted to solve life's questions, whether they related to the outcome of an illness or the meaning of lines on one's palm. Texts summoned angels or transmitted the recipe for a magic potion. Lang gathers magical texts that could have been used by practitioners in late fifteenth-century central Europe.

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.

Magic is a universal phenomenon. Everywhere we look people perform ritual actions in which desirable qualities are transferred by means of physical contact and objects or persons are manipulated by things of their likeness. In this book Sorensen embraces a cognitive perspective in order to investigate this long-established but controversial topic. Following a critique of the traditional approaches to magic, and basing his claims on classical ethnographic cases, the author explains magic's universality by examining a number of recurrent cognitive processes underlying its different manifestations. He focuses on how power is infused into the ritual practice; how representations of contagion and similarity can be used to connect otherwise distinct objects in order to manipulate one by the other; and how the performance of ritual prompts representations of magical actions as effective. Bringing these features together, the author proposes a cognitive theory of how people can represent magical rituals as purposeful actions and how ritual actions are integrated into more complex representations of events. This explanation, in turn, yields new insights into the constitutive role of magic in the formation of institutionalised religious ritual.

Between Magic and Religion represents a radical rethinking of traditional distinctions involving the term 'religion' in the ancient Greek world and beyond, through late antiquity to the seventeenth century. The title indicates the fluidity of such concepts as religion and magic, highlighting the wide variety of meanings evoked by these shifting terms from ancient to modern times. The contributors put these meanings to the test, applying a wide range of methods in exploring the many varieties of available historical, archaeological, iconographical, and literary evidence. No reader will ever think of magic and religion the same way after reading through the findings presented in this book. Both terms emerge in a new light, with broader applications and deeper meanings.

For all their pride in seeing this world clearly, the thinkers and artists of the English Renaissance were also fascinated by magic and the occult. The three greatest playwrights of the period devoted major plays (The Tempest, Doctor Faustus, The Alchemist) to magic, Francis Bacon often referred to it, and it was ever-present in the visual arts. In "Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age" John S. Mebane reevaluates the significance of occult philosophy in Renaissance thought and literature, constructing the most detailed historical context for his subject yet attempted.

Just when it seemed that Science and Reason had scored their greatest triumphs, the mid-nineteenth century witnessed an astonishing rebirth of occultism and anit-rationalism: the beginnings of the movement we now call New Age. A secret tradition of knowledge rejected by the Christian or Scientific establishments suddenly became emboldened to seek publicity and converts. James Webb's painstaking research carry him into the undergrowth inhabited by such illuminated personages as Madame Blavatsky, the Reverend Leadbeater, the Bortherhood of Luxor, Annie Besant, Krishnamurti, Swami Vivekananda, Spiritualists, Rosicrucians, Vegetarians, Mithraic cults, and all manner of occult propagandists. "fascinating detail . . . particularly good in tracing the obscure and subterranean spiritual affiliations through which these pilgrims of eternity were bound together . . . as relevant to our own time as it is to the nineteenth century." --Goronwy Rees, ENCOUNTER

This is a new release of the original 1923 edition.

First written by Marcel Mauss and Henri Humbert in 1902, A General Theory of Magic gained a wide new readership when republished by Mauss in 1950. As a study of magic in 'primitive' societies and its survival today in our thoughts and social actions, it represents what Claude Lévi-Strauss called, in an introduction to that edition, the astonishing modernity of the mind of one of the century's greatest thinkers. The book offers a fascinating snapshot of magic throughout various cultures as well as deep sociological and religious insights still very much relevant today. At a period when art, magic and science appear to be crossing paths once again, A General Theory of Magic presents itself as a classic for our times.

Treason and magic were first linked together during the reign of Edward II. Theories of occult conspiracy then regularly led to major political scandals, such as the trial of Eleanor Cobham Duchess of Gloucester in 1441. While accusations of magical treason against high-ranking figures were indeed a staple of late medieval English power politics, they acquired new significance at the Reformation when the 'superstition' embodied by magic came to be associated with proscribed Catholic belief. Francis Young here offers the first concerted historical analysis of allegations of the use of magic either to harm or kill the monarch, or else manipulate the course of political events in England, between the fourteenth century and the dawn of the Enlightenment. His book addresses a subject usually either passed over or elided with witchcraft: a quite different historical phenomenon. He argues that while charges of treasonable magic certainly were used to destroy reputations or to ensure the convictions of undesirables, magic was also perceived as a genuine threat by English governments into the Civil War era and beyond.

Partly because of alchemy's dismissal from the Parnassus of rational sciences, the interplay between this esoteric knowledge and the visual arts is still a surprisingly neglected research area. This collection of articles covering the time span from the Late Middle Ages to the 20th century intends, however, to challenge the current neglect. Areas on which its twelve authors cast new light include alchemical gender symbolism in Renaissance, Mannerist, and modernist art; alchemical ideas of transformation in Italian fifteenth-century landscape imagery; Netherlandish seventeenth-century portrayals of alchemists; and alchemy's tortured status as a forerunner of photography. Art and Alchemy indicates that alchemy indeed has several connections with art by examining some of the pictorial and literary books that disseminated alchemical symbols and ideas, delving into images, which in one way or another can be shown to appropriate and interpret alchemical ideas or environments, and expanding t

The ancient Greeks commonly resorted to magic spells to attract and keep lovers--as numerous allusions in Greek literature and recently discovered "voodoo dolls," magical papyri, gemstones, and curse tablets attest. Surveying and analyzing these various texts and artifacts, Christopher Faraone reveals that gender is the crucial factor in understanding love spells. There are, he argues, two distinct types of love magic: the curselike charms used primarily by men to torture unwilling women with fiery and maddening passion until they surrender sexually; and the binding spells and debilitating potions generally used by women to sedate angry or philandering husbands and make them more affectionate.

Faraone's lucid analysis of these spells also yields a number of insights about the construction of gender in antiquity, for example, the "femininity" of socially inferior males and the "maleness" of autonomous prostitutes. Most significantly, his findings challenge the widespread modern view that all Greek men considered women to be naturally lascivious. Faraone reveals the existence of an alternate male understanding of the female as "naturally" moderate and chaste, who uses love magic to pacify and control the "naturally" angry and passionate male. This fascinating study of magical practices and their implications for perceptions of male and female sexuality offers an unusual look at ancient Greek religion and society.

With their ability to enter trances, to change into the bodies of other creatures, and to fly through the northern skies, shamans are the subject of both popular and scholarly fascination. In Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western ImaginationRonald Hutton looks at what is really known about both the shamans of Siberia and about others spread throughout the world. He traces the growth of knowledge of shamans in Imperial and Stalinist Russia, descibes local variations and different types of shamanism, and explores more recent western influences on its history and modern practice. This is a challenging book by one of the world's leading authorities on Paganism.

Sexuality and the occult arts have long been associated in the western imagination, but it was not until the nineteenth century that a large and sophisticated body of literature on sexual magic - the use of sex as a source of magical power - emerged. This book, the first history of western sexual magic as a modern spiritual tradition, places these practices in the context of the larger discourse surrounding sexuality in American and European society over the last 150 years to discover how sexual magic was transformed from a terrifying medieval nightmare of heresy and social subversion into a modern ideal of personal empowerment and social liberation. Focusing on a series of key figures including American spiritualist Paschal Beverly Randolph, Aleister Crowley, Julius Evola, Gerald Gardner, and Anton LaVey, Hugh Urban traces the emergence of sexual magic out of older western esoteric traditions including Gnosticism and Kabbalah, which were progressively fused with recently-discovered eastern traditions such as Hindu and Buddhist Tantra. His study gives remarkable new insight into sexuality in the modern era, specifically on issues such as the politics of birth control, the classification of sexual 'deviance', debates over homosexuality and feminism, and the role of sexuality in our own new world of post-modern spirituality, consumer capitalism, and the Internet.

English summary: English summary: Between 900 and 1500 C.E., the knowlegde of Indian alchemy was codified in a group of Sanskrit texts that deal with the ideas and the methods of this scientific tradition. The dictionary explains about 400 technical terms and names of substances that are mentioned in these texts. Apart from translations of central passages of the alchemical treatises the dictionary offers an extensive collection of text references, which makes it possible to examine the intellectual cross-links in the alchemical tradition in detail. The dictionary is supplemented by a thematic introduction in the alchemical terminology and by indices of Sanskrit terms as well as of text references and topics. Dutch description: Zwischen 900 und 1500 n. Chr. wurde das Fachwissen der indischen Alchemie in einer Reihe von Sanskrit-Texten gesammelt, die detaillierte Einblicke in das Ideengebaude und die Methodik dieser wissenschaftlichen Tradition liefern. Das vorliegende Woerterbuch behandelt rund 400 Spezialbegriffe und Substanznamen, die in alchemistischen Sanskrit-Texten erwahnt werden, und umfasst damit einen Grossteil der verfahrenstechnischen und materialwissenschaftlichen Terminologie der altindischen Alchemie. Neben zahlreichen UEbersetzungen und Rekonstruktionszeichnungen liefert das Woerterbuch auch eine umfangreiche Sammlung von Textverweisen, die es erstmals ermoeglicht, die intellektuellen Abhangigkeiten innerhalb der alchemistischen Tradition im Detail zu verfolgen. Abgerundet wird das Woerterbuch durch eine thematisch gegliederte Einleitung in die indische Alchemie und durch ausfuehrliche Indizes, die den schnellen Zugriff auf Sanskrit-Begriffe, Textstellen und Themen erlauben. Dutch description: Zwischen 900 und 1500 n. Chr. wurde das Fachwissen der indischen Alchemie in einer Reihe von Sanskrit-Texten gesammelt, die detaillierte Einblicke in das Ideengebaude und die Methodik dieser wissenschaftlichen Tradition liefern. Das vorliegende Woerterbuch behandelt rund 400 Spezialbegriffe und Substanznamen, die in alchemistischen Sanskrit-Texten erwahnt werden, und umfasst damit einen Grossteil der verfahrenstechnischen und materialwissenschaftlichen Terminologie der altindischen Alchemie. Neben zahlreichen UEbersetzungen und Rekonstruktionszeichnungen liefert das Woerterbuch auch eine umfangreiche Sammlung von Textverweisen, die es erstmals ermoeglicht, die intellektuellen Abhangigkeiten innerhalb der alchemistischen Tradition im Detail zu verfolgen. Abgerundet wird das Woerterbuch durch eine thematisch gegliederte Einleitung in die indische Alchemie und durch ausfuehrliche Indizes, die den schnellen Zugriff auf Sanskrit-Begriffe, Textstellen und Themen erlauben.