|
Books > Religion & Spirituality > Alternative belief systems > Occult studies
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.
Connect with Mother Earth's love and discover the healing wisdom of
nature through the unique spells, rituals and beautiful, diverse
illustrations in this sacred 44-card oracle deck. Mother Earth is
our sacred home. We rely on her for everything from the air we
breathe to the water we drink. She gives us so much and yet we can
sometimes take her magic for granted. But it is not too late. We
may have stopped listening, but she has not stopped communicating.
Each card message in this deck is an invitation to listen to Mother
Earth's guidance; each spell, ritual or invocation an opportunity
to bring these lessons off the pages and into your daily practice;
and each illustration a reminder that we are part of nature, not
outside of it. With bodies of every shape, size, skin tone and hair
texture represented, this deck affirms we are all Mother Earth's
children.
This sourcebook provides the first systematic overview of
witchcraft laws and trials in Russia and Ukraine from medieval
times to the late nineteenth century. Witchcraft in Russia and
Ukraine, 1000–1900 weaves scholarly commentary with
never-before-published primary source materials translated from
Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. These sources include the earliest
references to witchcraft and sorcery, secular and religious laws
regarding witchcraft and possession, full trial transcripts, and a
wealth of magical spells. The documents present a rich panorama of
daily life and reveal the extraordinary power of magical words.
Editors Valerie A. Kivelson and Christine D. Worobec present new
analyses of the workings and evolution of legal systems, the
interplay and tensions between church and state, and the prosaic
concerns of the women and men involved in witchcraft proceedings.
The extended documentary commentaries also explore the shifting
boundaries and fraught political relations between Russia and
Ukraine.
Complete and unabridged, here is the unparalleled landmark of
occult philosophy and lost history that reshaped the modern
spiritual mindset and continues to fascinate readers today. There
is perhaps no greater enigma in modern Western literature than THE
SECRET DOCTRINE. The controversial Russian noblewomen Madame Helena
Petrovna Blavatsky told the world that the book restored humanity's
lost history and destiny. Its insights, she said, had been gleaned
from long-secret books of wisdom and her tutelage under mahatmas,
or great souls: adepts from the East who exposed the seeker to
their esoteric teaching. To read THE SECRET DOCTRINE is to enter a
mysterious world of ancient cosmology and spiritual-scientific
insights, which tell of humanity's unthinkably ancient past and its
burgeoning evolution into a new, more refined existence. For the
first time, Blavatsky's encyclopaedia arcana is available in a
reset and redesigned single-volume edition, complete and
unabridged. Its truths and challenges are available to the intrepid
reader, who may find yet-unknown insights within its pages.
A collector's edition of the classic, illustrated, and
comprehensive history of magic and the occult In the occult classic
The Mirror of Magic, renowned Surrealist Kurt Seligmann (1900-1962)
draws from his encyclopedic practitioner's knowledge and extensive
antiquarian collection to offer a comprehensive, illustrated
history of magic and the occult from Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt
through the 18th century. He explores the gods and divinatory arts
of the legendary Sumerians and the star-wise Babylonians, including
the birth of astrology. He examines the afterlife beliefs of the
ancient Egyptians and the dream interpretation practices and
oracles of ancient Greece, including the mysteries of Eleusis and
the magical philosophy of Plato, Socrates, and other Greeks. He
uncovers the origins of Gnosticism and the suppression and
banishment of magic by the post-pagan, Christian emperors of Rome.
Seligmann reviews the principles of alchemy, sharing famous
transmutations and allegorical illustrations of the alchemical
process and explores the Hermetica and its remarkable adepts.
Investigating the Middle Ages, the author discusses the work of
European magicians of the time, including Albertus Magnus, Roger
Bacon, Agrippa, Nostradamus, and Pico Della Mirandola. First
published in 1948, this history of magic and the occult seeks to
"mirror" the magical worldview throughout the ages. Beautifully
illustrated with images from the author's rare library, this
collector's edition features all of the artwork--more than 250
images--from the original 1948 edition.
From its inaugural Black Plaque in honour of Witchfinder General
director Michael Reeves, this unique collection follows a veridical
trajectory to the frontiers of belief. Reeves' film becomes a
conspiratorial cauldron drawing in a host of tragic players in the
end game of the Sixties. The Cornwall of Du Maurier's The Birds is
ploughed to reveal the hidden psychic codes of our Blitz spirit. In
a powerfully relevant occult rendering of a bruised Island, the
myth of Churchill is dissected and re-animalised. New maps of hell
are drawn by colliding the forensic vision of JG Ballard and
Lovecraftian magic. Actors, witches and psychopaths maraud across a
nightmare terrain of murderous henges and abandoned military bases;
conflating creative research into a surreal documentary, history as
hallucination. Geography becomes an alchemical alembic, a vale of
soul-making distilled by the lysergic psychobiology of Stanislav
Grof, the alcoholic lyricism of Malcolm Lowry, and the convulsive
travelogues of the Marquis de Sade. If history is revealed as
paranoid ritual, how do we escape its time traps to wild new
imaginative geographies? The English Heretic collection is a darkly
comical, urgently lyrical, mental escape hatch from the hells of
our own making.
In The Dark Side of the Enlightenment, John V. Fleming shows how
the impulses of the European Enlightenment generally associated
with great strides in the liberation of human thought from
superstition and traditional religion were challenged by tenacious
religious ideas or channeled into the darker pursuits of the
esoteric and the occult. His engaging topics include the stubborn
survival of the miraculous, the Enlightenment roles of
Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, and the widespread pursuit of magic
and alchemy.
Though we tend not to associate what was once called alchemy
with what we now call chemistry, Fleming shows that the difference
is merely one of linguistic modernization. Alchemy was once the
chemistry, of Arabic derivation, and its practitioners were among
the principal scientists and physicians of their ages. No point is
more important for understanding the strange and fascinating
figures in this book than the prestige of alchemy among the learned
men of the age.
Fleming follows some of these complexities and contradictions of
the Age of Lights into the biographies of two of its extraordinary
offspring. The first is the controversial wizard known as Count
Cagliostro, the Egyptian freemason, unconventional healer, and
alchemist known most infamously for his ambiguous association with
the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, which history has viewed as
among the possible harbingers of the French Revolution and a major
contributing factor in the growing unpopularity of Marie
Antoinette. Fleming also reviews the career of Julie de Krudener,
the sentimental novelist, Pietist preacher, and political mystic
who would later become notorious as a prophet.
Impressively researched and wonderfully erudite, this rich
narrative history sheds light on some lesser-known mental
extravagances and beliefs of the Enlightenment era and brings to
life some of the most extraordinary characters ever encountered
either in history or fiction."
If you want to know how hypnosis really works (and, no, it has
nothing to do with waving of hands or other similar nonsense), you
will want to read this book. If you want to know the "magic" behind
Ericksonian techniques and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, you have
to read this book. From one of the true masters of hypnotherapy,
this is one book that can really change your life!!
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.
Discover the strange world of the undead and the proof that
creatures of the night exist when you read Vampires by
Konstantinos. The facts about vampires are stranger than anything
you may have read, heard, or imagined before. In Vampires you'll
learn the truth about the undead. It rips away the myth and exposes
the habits and lifestyles of these beings. Vampires reveals the
occult truths about these creatures including actual first-person
encounters with vampires of all types--the ancient undead of
folklore, contemporary mortal blood drinkers, and the most
dangerous creatures of all: psychic vampires who intentionally
drain the life force from their victims. - Learn about the four
types of vampires - Read about vampire legends from around the
world - Discover vampires from history, including: - Arnold Paole
of Serbia - Peter Plogojowitz and the Count de Cabreras of Hungary
- The vampire of Croglin Grange, Cumberland, England - Countess
Elizabeth Bathory, responsible for up to 650 deaths - Gilles de
Rais - Fritz Haarman, of Germany, from ninety years ago - John
Haigh of Yorkshire, England, from just before WWII - And of course,
the real Vlad Dracula - Present-day blood drinkers - How to protect
yourself from vampires Included are letters from contemporary
vampires. You will be shocked and surprised as you discover what
these people are really like. Besides learning about the psychic
vampire that unintentionally drains you of your energy as well as
the intentional psychic vampire, you'll learn rituals for
protection and methods to avoid falling into their clutches.
Vampires finally reveals the truth about the undead. You will be
fascinated when you discover who they were and what they are now,
and you'll be grateful when you learn how to protect yourself from
them. This is not a book of fantasy and imagination, but of
science, history, and spirituality.
This key to the world's esoteric traditions unlocks some of the
most fascinating and closely held secrets of myth, religion, and
philosophy. Unrivaled in its beauty and completeness, it distills
ancient and modern teachings of nearly 600 experts. Compelling
themes range from the riddle of the Sphinx and the tenets of
Pythagorean astronomy to the symbolism of the pentagram, the
significance of the Ark of the Covenant, and the design of the
American flag.
Acclaimed by "Publishers Weekly" as "a classic reference, dizzying
in its breadth," this remarkable resource was compiled by the
founder of the Philosophical Research Society. Author Manly P. Hall
examines the secrets of Isis along with arcane aspects of mystic
Christianity and other religions. Fascinating surveys cover topics
as diverse as Kabbalah, alchemy, cryptology, and Tarot, along with
Masonry, gemology, and the identity of William Shakespeare. Sixteen
pages of color plates and 100 black-and-white images by the
celebrated illustrator J. Augustus Knapp illuminate this vast and
indispensable encyclopedia of the occult.
|
|