The word 'magic' evokes many ideas, from a stage magician performing illusions to the pyrotechnics of witches and wizards depicted in movies and on television. This book covers the history, practices, and philosophies of magic and alchemy in Western history. It also looks at the tools used by magicians and alchemists.

Prints, drawings, documents, and text illuminate the development of the occult sciences to the nineteenth century

This is a new release of the original 1929 edition.

Includes subject section, name section, and 1968-1970, technical reports.

In the midst of the remarkable revival of interest and belief in angels comes this handsomely illustrated reference work--the fruit of 16 years of research in Talmudic, gnostic, cabalistic, apocalyptic, patristic, and legendary texts. "A wacky and wonderful compendium of angelic lore".--Time. Illustrations.

The Faust legend seen as a transmission of core Gnostic teachings disguised as a morality tale • Shows the 16th-century Faust text to be a coded, composite Gnostic creation myth • Identifies the many Hermetic, alchemical, and Tantric symbols found in Faust that signify worship of the divine feminine through sacramental sexual practices • Reveals a mystical process of spiritual salvation, as distilled from esoteric traditions In The Gnostic Faustus, Ramona Fradon shows the legend of Doctor Faustus to be a composite Gnostic creation myth that reveals the process of spiritual salvation. Nearly every element of the original 16th-century text is a metaphor containing profound spiritual messages based on passages of Coptic and Syrian Gnostic manuscripts, including the Pistis Sophia and The Hymn of the Pearl. Fradon identifies many Hermetic, alchemical, and Tantric symbols in the Faust Book that accompany the story of Sophia, the goddess of wisdom, whose troubled journey to salvation is a model for human spiritual development. Extensive line-by-line text comparisons with these Gnostic manuscripts show that Faustus’s corruption by the Devil and his despair parallel Sophia’s transgression and fall, and that his tragic death is a simple reversal of her joyful rebirth, so written in order to make an otherwise heretical story palatable to Church authorities at that time. Fradon demonstrates that the Faust legend is a vehicle for transmitting antiquity’s secret wisdom. It provides an account of spiritual initiation whose goal is ecstatic revelation and union with the divine. The elements of alchemy, sacramental sex, and worship of the divine feminine that are encoded in the Faust Book reveal the same hidden goddess-worshipping tradition whose practices are hinted at by the writings of Renaissance magi such as Cornelius Agrippa and Giordano Bruno.

Robert Fludd was one of the last true 'Renaissance men' who took all learning as their preserve and tried to encompass the whole of human knowledge. His voluminous writings were devoted to defending the philosophy of the alchemists and Rosicrucians, and applying their doctrines to a vast description of man and the universe. Expounding the ideas of cosmic harmony, the multiple levels of existence and the correlations between them, Fludd summarizes esoteric teachings common to all ages and peoples. Fludd had a genius for expressing his philosophy and cosmology in graphic form, and his works were copiously illustrated by some of the best engravers of his day. All of Fludd's important plates are collected here for the first time, annotated and explained, together with an introduction to his life and thought.