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This is the final book written by the seventeenth-century occultist
and alchemist, Thomas Vaughan (1621 66). Originally published under
Vaughan's penname, Eugenius Philalethes, in 1655, the work found a
new audience in the Rosicrucian circles of the nineteenth century,
when William Wynn Westcott, Supreme Magus of the Society,
republished the volume in 1896 with a commentary by an associate,
S. S. D. D. 'I have read many Alchemical Treatises', its annotator
comments, 'but never one of less use to the practical Alchemist
than this.' For its later readers, however, the value of the text
lay in its insights into the history of hermetic thought rather
than its alchemical advice. An important work of occultist
philosophy in both its seventeenth- and nineteenth-century
contexts, it purports to reveal nothing less than the origin of all
life. The paragraph-by-paragraph commentary in turn demonstrates
the history of its reception and interpretation.
Eliphas Levi, born Alphonse Louis Constant, (1810-75) was
instrumental in the revival of Western occultism in the nineteenth
century, and published several influential books on magic that are
also reissued in this series. This posthumous publication (1896) is
a translation by William Wynn Westcott, co-founder of the 'Hermetic
Order of the Golden Dawn', of an unpublished French manuscript by
Levi, then owned by the spiritualist Edward Maitland. It includes
eight of the author's drawings. Each short chapter outlines the
meaning of one of the twenty-two tarot trumps and is followed by a
brief editor's note describing the card's iconography and
summarising interpretations (sometimes deliberately misleading)
given in Levi's earlier publications. The book ends with
Kabbalistic prayers and rituals, praise of Jesus Christ as the
great initiate, and a surprising assertion that Christianity has
superseded ancient magic, revealing the life-long tension between
Catholicism and magic in Levi's personality and thought.
This Is A New Release Of The Original 1714 Edition.
This Is A New Release Of The Original 1922 Edition.
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