Here is the occult as you've never seen it before! A history of magic framed as a travel guide featuring 10 magical tours through history and across the globe. Packed with fascinating information and illustrated with Shell guide-style collage artworks, retro-looking postcard imagery and route maps. This terrific book is a guide to the occult world, featuring 10 itineraries and maps of magical tours across the globe. Spanning countries and continents in pursuit of occult themes, it is meant to be pursued by the astral or armchair traveller rather than on the ground, although we expect readers to be inspired to plan epic trips of their own. It takes a fantastically fresh approach to the occult, with a nod to the retro Shell Guides in the use of collage artwork and humorous, on-point suggestions of places to stay and eat. Expand your occult horizons by trying these tours – and many more! Necromancy through the Ages Tour: Travel from Ancient Nineveh to northern England, tracing sites of necromantic practice. Crowley & Choronzon Desert Tour: Hike across the Algerian desert in the footsteps of the magicians Aleister Crowley and Victor Neuburg, invoking angels and meeting the terrifying demon Choronzon. The Descent & Rise of Witchcraft Tour: Visit the temples of Hekate and Circe in Turkey and Italy, the Spanish sites of the Inquisition's witch-hunts, and the haunts of the Norse sorceresses. Curse, Protect and Divine Tour: Travel across Europe to the United States and Kenya unearthing buried curses and counter-magic, from tiny frog coffins in Finnish churches to sinister village hexes. After completing the journeys, the book offers the unique Geonomicon – a simple divinatory and meditational tool that invites the reader to develop their own creative approach to magical practice.

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.

American spirituality—with its focus on individual meaning, experience, and exploration—is usually thought to be a product of the postmodern era. But, as The New Metaphysicals makes clear, contemporary American spirituality has historic roots in the nineteenth century and a great deal in common with traditional religious movements. To explore this world, Courtney Bender combines research into the history of the movement with fieldwork in Cambridge, Massachusetts—a key site of alternative religious inquiry from Emerson and William James to today. Through her ethnographic analysis, Bender discovers that a focus on the new, on progress, and on the way spiritual beliefs intersect with science obscures the historical roots of spirituality from its practitioners and those who study it alike—and shape an enduring set of modern religious possibilities in the process.

We all have the ability to separate from our physical bodies and travel on the astral plane. In this uniquely practical guide, you will learn how to differentiate between astral travel and conventional dreaming, and how to control and monitor the exper

In 1624 Pope Urban VIII appointed Marcello Sacchetti depositary general and secret treasurer of the Apostolic Chamber, and Giulio Sacchetti bishop of Gravina. Urban later gave Marcello the lease on the alum mines of Tolfa and raised Giulio to the cardinalate. To assert their new power, the Sacchetti began commissioning works of art. Marcello discovered and promoted leading Baroque masters, such as Pietro da Cortona and Nicolas Poussin, while Giulio purchased works from previous generations. In the eighteenth century, Pope Benedict XIV bought the collection and housed it in the Capitoline Museum, where it is now a substantial portion of the collection. By focusing on the relationship between the artists in service and the Sacchetti, this study expands our knowledge of the artists and the complexity of the processes of agency in the fulfillment of commissions. In so doing, it underlines how the Sacchetti used art to proclaim a certain public image and to promote Cardinal Giulio as a candidate to the papal throne.

What exactly is happening on Planet Earth? What is the truth behind the various prophecies and predictions? For the first time, we now have a concise explanation carefully prepared and received by telepathic contactee Sal Rachele from a vast collective intelligence called the Founders. This book answers the who, what, where, when and even why of the Earth Changes, and includes information relating to biology, psychology, technology, metaphysics, religion, spirituality and even economics and politics. This is the most significant time in all of human history. For the first time, millions of us will have an opportunity to evolve beyond the limitations of material form into a new world of untold beauty and magnificence. The doorway into the next step of human evolution is right in front of us. The Founders are your guides into this amazing journey of soul evolution, ascension and freedom from limitation. They teach us that we are vast beings of infinite capacity and love, created in the image and likeness of our Creator. Welcome to the new world!

Bennie H. Reynolds analyzes of the language (poetics) of ancient Jewish historical apocalypses. He investigates how the dramatis personae, i.e., deities, angels/demons, and humans are described in the Book of Daniel (chapters 2, 7, 8, and 10–12) the Animal Apocalypse (1 Enoch 85–90), 4QFourKingdoms(a-b) ar, the Book of the Words of Noah (1QapGen 5 29–18?), the Apocryphon of Jeremiah C, and 4QPseudo-Daniel(a-b) ar. The primary methodologies for this study are linguistic- and motif-historical analysis and the theoretical framework is informed by a wide range of ancient and modern thinkers including Artemidorus of Daldis, Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Peirce, Leo Oppenheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Umberto Eco. The most basic contention of this study is that the data now available from the Dead Sea Scrolls significantly alter how one should conceive of the genre apocalypse in the Hellenistic Period. This basic contention is borne out by five primary conclusions. For example, while some apocalypses employ symbolic language to describe the actors in their historical reviews, others use non-symbolic language. Some texts, especially from the Book of Daniel, are mixed cases. Among the apocalypses that use symbolic language, a limited and stable repertoire of symbols obtain across the genre and bear witness to a series of conventional associations. While several apocalypses do not use symbolic ciphers to encode their historical actors, they often use cryptic language that may have functioned as a group-specific language. The language of apocalypses indicates that these texts were not the domain of only one social group or even one type or size of social group.

Winner of the Jewish Book Council Nahum M. Sarna Memorial Award in Scholarship This book explores the reception history of the most important Jewish Bible commentary ever composed, the Commentary on the Torah of Rashi (Shlomo Yitzhaki; 1040-1105). Though the Commentary has benefited from enormous scholarly attention, analysis of diverse reactions to it has been surprisingly scant. Viewing its path to preeminence through a diverse array of religious, intellectual, literary, and sociocultural lenses, Eric Lawee focuses on processes of the Commentary's canonization and on a hitherto unexamined--and wholly unexpected--feature of its reception: critical, and at times astonishingly harsh, resistance to it. Lawee shows how and why, despite such resistance, Rashi's interpretation of the Torah became an exegetical classic, a staple in the curriculum, a source of shared religious vocabulary for Jews across time and place, and a foundational text that shaped the Jewish nation's collective identity. The book takes as its larger integrating perspective processes of canonicity as they shape how traditions flourish, disintegrate, or evolve. Rashi's scriptural magnum opus, the foremost work of Franco-German (Ashkenazic) biblical scholarship, faced stiff competition for canonical supremacy in the form of rationalist reconfigurations of Judaism as they developed in Mediterranean seats of learning. It nevertheless emerged triumphant in an intense battle for Judaism's future that unfolded in late medieval and early modern times. Investigation of the reception of the Commentary throws light on issues in Jewish scholarship and spirituality that continue to stir reflection, and even passionate debate, in the Jewish world today.

The study of contemporary esoteric discourse has hitherto been a largely neglected part of the new academic field of Western esotericism. Contemporary Esotericism provides a broad overview and assessment of the complex world of Western esoteric thought today. Combining historiographical analysis with theories and methodologies from the social sciences, the volume explores new problems and offers new possibilities for the study of esoterica. Contemporary Esotericism studies the period since the 1950s but focuses on the last two decades. The wide range of essays are divided into four thematic sections: the intricacies of esoteric appeals to tradition; the role of popular culture, modern communication technologies, and new media in contemporary esotericism; the impact and influence of esotericism on both religious and secular arenas; and the recent 'de-marginalization' of the esoteric in both scholarship and society.