Get ready for powerful fortune-telling skills and an incredible new level of self-discovery. The eagerly awaited 10th Anniversary edition starts here. Internationally praised as one of the leading experts on divination and oracles, Scott Grossberg returns with this expanded version of his original best-seller. After reading The Vitruvian Square, you will have all the tools needed to bring you and your divination craft to an incredible new level of understanding and effectiveness. The Vitruvian Square contains some penetrating and imaginative approaches to using and combining the Tarot, oracle cards, numerology, labyrinths, H'oponopono, the Platonic Solids, palmistry, astrology, colors, alchemy, the I Ching, and so much more. This marriage of various divination and mystical traditions is what has easily led people all over the world to use The Vitruvian Square in compelling and exciting ways. Since mankind's earliest days, we have sought to know the thoughts of another. No one has ever dreamed it would be possible to bring all the varied divination methods together into one workable system. Until now . . .

In Da Vinci's Ghost, critically acclaimed historian Toby Lester tells the story of the world’s most iconic image, the Vitruvian Man, and sheds surprising new light on the artistry and scholarship of Leonardo da Vinci, one of history’s most fascinating figures. Deftly weaving together art, architecture, history, theology, and much else, Da Vinci's Ghost is a first-rate intellectual enchantment.”—Charles Mann, author of 1493 Da Vinci didn’t summon Vitruvian Man out of thin air. He was inspired by the idea originally formulated by the Roman architect Vitruvius, who suggested that the human body could be made to fit inside a circle, long associated with the divine, and a square, related to the earthly and secular. To place a man inside those shapes was to imply that the human body could indeed be a blueprint for the workings of the universe. Da Vinci elevated Vitruvius’ idea to exhilarating heights when he set out to do something unprecedented, if the human body truly reflected the cosmos, he reasoned, then studying its anatomy more thoroughly than had ever been attempted before—peering deep into body and soul—might grant him an almost godlike perspective on the makeup of the world. Written with the same narrative flair and intellectual sweep as Lester’s award-winning first book, the “almost unbearably thrilling” (Simon Winchester) Fourth Part of the World, and beautifully illustrated with Da Vinci's drawings, Da Vinci’s Ghost follows Da Vinci on his journey to understanding the secrets of the Vitruvian man. It captures a pivotal time in Western history when the Middle Ages were giving way to the Renaissance, when art, science, and philosophy were rapidly converging, and when it seemed possible that a single human being might embody—and even understand—the nature of the universe.

The Vitruvian Code: The Secret Anatomy of Washington DC and its Connections to the Ancient Mysteries is a stunning journey across a real-life treasure map that ultimately leads to the greatest treasure of all, The Holy Grail. SYNOPSIS Backed by the longstanding principles and understandings of mathematics, geometry, astrology, ancient Egyptian mythology, and the documented meanings of arcane symbols, a secret geometric code is revealed within the layout of our nation's capital in astonishing detail. The infamous Masonic square and compasses that appear in the layout of Washington DC are the keys to unlocking this secret code that overlays scaled diagrams of Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, the Great Pyramid of Giza, and more onto a map of the city in perfect harmonious unison, revealing some of the greatest and most closely guarded secrets of Freemasonry. Part educational and informational textbook, part real-life mystery thriller, this in-depth analysis of Washington DC explores various aspects of the federal city's design, including the city's art, architecture, astrology, history, and esoteric symbolism, all in search of clues to unlock this secret code. Each chapter takes an in-depth look at each individual piece of the puzzle, with each clue leading to the next, until this amazing code is completely revealed and deciphered. Have you ever wondered why the Catholic Church got into such a fuss over Dan Brown's "fictional" novel, The Da Vinci Code? This elegant, yet profound geometric code has never been explored in any previous literature, simultaneously sheds new light on multiple age-old mysteries, and has the potential to shake the very foundations of all that we have been led to believe about our origins, our past, our present, and even our future.

Berloquins spellbinding look at codemaking through the ages will grab historyand cryptology buffs alike, as he looks at secret codes from ancient times tothe present.

"When the seeds of modern thought were planted in 15th-century Italy, no one sowed more of them than Leonardo da Vinci. For the millions of readers today who ponder the mysteries behind his sketch-filled notebooks and enigmatic paintings, National Geographic presents Leonardo's Universe. This richly visual reference reveals the spellbinding Renaissance world like no other, painting a vivid picture of the historic backdrop of this astounding period that revolutionized art, science, philosophy, and politics."--BOOK JACKET.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, critics have predominantly offered a negative estimate of John Donne’s Metempsychosis. In contrast, this study of Metempsychosis re-evaluates the poem as one of the most vital and energetic of Donne’s canon. Siobhán Collins appraises Metempsychosis for its extraordinary openness to and its inventive portrayal of conflict within identity. She situates this ludic verse as a text alert to and imbued with the Elizabethan fascination with the processes and properties of metamorphosis. Contesting the pervasive view that the poem is incomplete, this study illustrates how Metempsychosis is thematically linked with Donne’s other writings through its concern with the relationship between body and soul, and with temporality and transformation. Collins uses this genre-defying verse as a springboard to contribute significantly to our understanding of early modern concerns over the nature and borders of human identity, and the notion of selfhood as mutable and in process. Drawing on and contributing to recent scholarly work on the history of the body and on sexuality in the early modern period, Collins argues that Metempsychosis reveals the oft-violent processes of change involved in the author’s personal life and in the intellectual, religious and political environment of his time. She places the poem’s somatic representations of plants, beasts and humans within the context of early modern discourses: natural philosophy, medical, political and religious. Collins offers a far-reaching exploration of how Metempsychosis articulates philosophical inquiries that are central to early modern notions of self-identity and moral accountability, such as: the human capacity for autonomy; the place of the human in the ’great chain of being’; the relationship between cognition and embodiment, memory and selfhood; and the concept of wonder as a distinctly human phenomenon.

Leonardo da Vinci was a brilliant artist, scientist, engineer, mathematician, architect, inventor, and even musician—the archetypal Renaissance man. But he was also a profoundly modern man. Not only did Leonardo invent the empirical scientific method over a century before Galileo and Francis Bacon, but Capra's decade-long study of Leonardo's fabled notebooks reveals that he was a systems thinker centuries before the term was coined. At the very core of Leonardo's science, Capra argues, lies his persistent quest for understanding the nature of life. His science is a science of living forms, of qualities and patterns, radically different from the mechanistic science that emerged 200 years later. Because he saw the world as an integrated whole, Leonardo always applied concepts from one area to illuminate problems in another. His studies of the movement of water informed his ideas about how landscapes are shaped, how sap rises in plants, how air moves over a bird's wing, and how blood flows in the human body. His observations of nature enhanced his art, his drawings were integral to his scientific studies, and he brought art, science, and technology together in his beautiful and elegant mechanical and architectural designs. Capra describes seven defining characteristics of Leonardo da Vinci's genius and includes a list of over forty discoveries he made that weren't rediscovered until centuries later. Capra follows the organizational scheme Leonardo himself intended to use if he ever published his notebooks. So in a sense, this is Leonardo's science as he himself would have presented it. Obviously, we can't all be geniuses on the scale of Leonardo da Vinci. But his persistent endeavor to put life at the very center of his art, science, and design and his recognition that all natural phenomena are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent are important lessons we can learn from. By exploring the mind of the preeminent Renaissance genius, we can gain profound insights into how to address the complex challenges of the 21st century.

First Published in 1999. This title is the third volume in the ten-volume set titled the Selected Works of Frances Yates. Greyscale illustrations and figures are included throughout - alongside the related descriptive work where applicable. The art in this volume seeks to memorise through a technique of impressing 'places' and 'images' on memory. It has usually been classed as 'mnemotechnics', which appears an unimportant branch of human activity. However, the author discusses in this title that the manipulation of images in memory must always, to some extent, involve the psyche.