This Is A New Release Of The Original 1800's Edition.

What are we to make of the Victorians’ fascination with collecting? What effect did their encounters with the curious, exotic and downright odd have on Victorian writers and their works? The essays in this collection take up these questions by examining the phenomenon of bric-à-brac in Victorian literature. The contributors to Literary Bric-à-Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities explore sites of unusual concurrence (including museums, the home, art galleries, private collections) and the way in which bric-à-brac brought the alien into everyday settings, the past into the present and the wild into the domestic. Focusing on the representation of material culture in Victorian literature, the essays in this volume seek out miscellaneous and incongruous objects that take readers beyond the commonplace paradigms associated with commodity culture. Individual chapters analyse the work of writers as different as Edward Lear and John Henry Newman, Robert Browning and George Eliot, Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll. In so doing they shed light on a dizzying array of topics and objects that include class and capitalism, the occult and the sacraments, Darwinism and dandyism, umbrellas, textiles, the Philosopher’s Stone and even the household nail.

This comprehensive annotated bibliography, first published in 1990, guides the user helpfully through where to find information on various elements on alchemy when researching. Divided into categories to aid finding the right area of interest, this book forms a unique reference tool.

In this newly discovered text, famed occultist Israel Regardie sheds light on the psychological and spiritual meaning behind the symbols and metaphors of alchemy. Locked away for years before it was made available, and now fully annotated by Chic and Sandra Tabatha Cicero, Gold is the first new book by Regardie published in decades. Analyzing important seventeenth-century alchemical treatises, such as "The True Book of the Learned Synesius," Regardie uses the language of Jungian psychology, magnetism, and hypnosis while citing his own unique experiences as a therapist and healer. Learn about spiritual alchemy and the connection between ancient magic and modern-day psychology. Explore the similarities between alchemical theory, Taoist philosophy, yoga, Zen Buddhism, and experiments with the human aura. With illustrations and appendices, including Regardie's original text "The Art of True Healing," Gold is a definitive work by a true master.

Esotericism and Narrative: The Occult Fiction of Charles Williams situates the life and fiction of the Inkling Charles Williams in the network of modern occultism, with special focus on his initiatory experiences in A.E. Waite’s Fellowship of the Rosy Cross. Aren Roukema evaluates fictional projections of magic, kabbalah, alchemy and ritual experience in Williams’s seven novels of supernatural fantasy. From this specific analysis, he develops more broadly applicable approaches to the serious expression of religious experience in fiction. Roukema shows that esoteric knowledge has frequently been blurred into fiction because of its inherent narrativity and adaptability, particularly by authors already attracted to the syncretism, multivalence and lived fantasy of the modern occult experience.