Best of
Alchemy

2016

The Psilocybin Mushroom Bible: The Definitive Guide to Growing and Using Magic Mushrooms


K. Mandrake - 2016
    The book features over 40 step-by-step photographic instruction guides to each step of the process, including: sterilizing the equipment to produce mushrooms; how to build the containers used during home mushroom cultivation; safety measures for preventing contamination of the mushroom cultures; and a guide to consuming magic mushrooms safely and enjoyably.Dr. Mandrake uses his doctoral studies in mycology to detail the history and botany of psilocybin mushrooms to give readers an idea of their prevalence throughout human history. The book is highly detailed and comprehensive, allowing readers to learn the entire process required to produce perfect magic mushrooms every time.

If A Dragon Cries (The Legend of Hooper's Dragons Book 1)


Gary J. Darby - 2016
    It also says she will save everyone from the catastrophe. Hooper doesn’t believe in such nonsense, but he is about to find out how utterly wrong he is, and so is everyone else on Erdron.Terribly burned by dragon fire, Hooper’s hatred of dragons sears his soul. Yet, it is his lot to work around the foul beasts day and night on a dragon holding. When Golden Wind is born on the farm, Wilders, savage warriors who ride scarlet dragons attack the stead to steal the golden. Hooper is the only one who can save the golden from the Wilders but just before he reaches her; he stops, unable to go on, torn with indecision spurred by his loathing of dragons. As he stands frozen, a tiny wisp of light pushes away his dark hatred and with it, a gentle whisper, but what if the lore is true and only she can rescue us all?If a Dragon Cries is Book One in the fantasy series, The Legend of Hooper’s Dragons. A riveting tale of magic, mystical dragons, and engaging characters, Gary Darby will transport you into in a world where dragons and one young man can destroy or save a world.Buy now and treat your imagination to a feast of epic fantasy on a grand scale! Available both as an audible book and e-book on Amazon..

Spiritual Alchemy: A Practical Manual for Self-Initiation into the Western Mystery Tradition


Steve Seven - 2016
    Working at the intersection of spiritual experience and depth psychology, this manual is a modern interpretation and rendering of the traditional symbols and processes of alchemy into a workable road-map for Self-realization and transformation.Kindle version available on Amazon;https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089FMX6WD/...Print copy available here: www.spiritualinstinctpress.com

The Toad in Magic, Sorcery and Midwifery


Ernst Hentges - 2016
    Print copy available from the Spiritual Instinct Press website:https://www.spiritualinstinctpress.co...From the back cover:"The toad has had a colorful and checkered history with its role in magic and folk-lore. It has simultaneously been seen as mid-wife's helper and devil's familiar. At the same time both life giver and life taker. There are toad rituals to protect property and live stock and toad spells to being sickness and calamity. Toads can be used for love charms or they bewitch an enemy with their evil eye and even cause death. The present work is unique in its comprehensive treatment of the occult history connected to this ambiguous creature. It includes information from many sources that are translated into english for the first timeincluding the entire study by Ernst hentges: 'Die Krote; eine okkultiistisch-kulturgeschichtliche Betractung.' Also included are sections on the complex nature of toad symbolism in both Eastern and Western Alchemy, as welll as thorough-going theoretical and practical treatments of the arcane art of toad magic."

Victory Gardens for Bees: A DIY Guide to Saving the Bees


Lori Weidenhammer - 2016
    In ecological terms, bees play a critical role in the survival of many plant communities and the continuation of life on this planet. No pollination, no seeds. No seeds, no future. Now that bees are facing unprecedented levels of die-off caused by a toxic mixture of environmental stresses, a community-based effort is needed to make gardens, fields and landscapes healthy sanctuaries for bees. Just as citizens banded together to produce Victory Gardens to offset the perilous food shortages of World Wars I and II, now a similarly vital level of collective effort is needed to make our gardens into lifesaving shelters for these essential creatures. Planning a bee-friendly space can provide a beautiful and bountiful selection of edible crops, native plants and fragrant ornamentals, as well as herbs that have medicinal properties for both pollinators and people. With the help of ten inspiring garden plans and planting guides, Weidenhammer shows how bee-friendly plants can be used in creative combinations for plots and pots of all sizes, and are easily grown by novices and seasoned gardeners alike.In the spirit of the history-making Victory Gardens, readers will learn how to pack optimum benefits into a limited space for the survival of hive and home, and backyard beekeepers will learn great planting strategies for making sure their honeybees are healthy and have ample food to overwinter. Victory Gardens for Bees is also buzzing with DIY projects that will provide nesting sites and essential supplies for precious pollinators. With plenty of photographs to help readers identify bees of all stripes, beekeeping tips and other interesting bee-phemera, this book is a must-have for anyone who wants to do their part to save bees.

Postcards from the End of America


Linh Dinh - 2016
    From Los Angeles, Cheyenne, Portland, and New Orleans, to Jackson and Wolf Point--Linh walked miles and miles through unfamiliar neighborhoods, talking to whoever would talk to him: the homeless living in tent cities, the peddlers, the protestors, the public preachers, the prostitutes. With the uncompromising eye of a Walker Evans or a Dorothea Lange, and the indomitable, forthright prose of a modern-day Nelson Algren or James Agee, Dinh documents the appalling and the absurd with warmth and honesty, giving voice to America's often forgotten citizens and championing the awesome strength it takes to survive for those on the bottom. Growing out of a photo and political writing blog Linh has maintained since 2009, Postcards from the End of America is an unflinching diary of what Linh sees as the accelerating collapse of America. Tracking the economic, political, and social unraveling--from the casinos to the abandoned factories and over all the sidewalks in between--with a poet's incisive tongue, Linh shows us the uncanny power of the people in the face of societal devastation.

Dreaming Wide Awake: Lucid Dreaming, Shamanic Healing, and Psychedelics


David Jay Brown - 2016
    With this extraordinary sense of awakening comes a clear perception of the continuity of self between waking and sleeping and the ability to significantly influence what happens within the dream, giving you the opportunity to genuinely experience anything without physical or social consequences. In this way, lucid dreaming offers therapeutic opportunities for fantasy fulfillment, fear confrontation, and releasing the trauma of past experiences. With development and practice, lucid dreaming can provide a powerful path to greater awareness, heightened creativity, spiritual awakening, and communication with the vast interconnected web of cosmic consciousness.In this detailed guide to mastering the practice of lucid dreaming, David Jay Brown draws from his more than 20 years’ experience using these techniques and his interactions with dozens of experts on consciousness, physics, dreaming, and entheogens, such as Stanley Krippner, Rupert Sheldrake, Stephen LaBerge, Robert Waggoner, Dean Radin, Terence McKenna, and many others. He explores the intimate relationship between lucid dreaming, shamanic journeying, visionary plants, and psychedelic drugs and how they are used for healing and spiritual development. Offering methods for improving both lucid dreaming and shamanic journeying abilities, he explains how to enhance dreaming with oneirogens, supplements, herbs, and psychedelics and offers techniques for developing superpowers in the dream realm.Summarizing the scientific research on lucid dreaming, Brown explores the ability of lucid dreamers to communicate with people in the waking realm and the potential for dream telepathy, shared lucid dreaming, and access to the vast unconscious regions of our minds, opening up a path that takes us beyond dreaming and waking to dreaming wide awake.

The Awakening Ground: A Guide to Contemplative Mysticism


David Chaim Smith - 2016
    The path articulates the ultimate quest for meaning, which seeks to pass through the clutter of the mind’s conceptual associations to nakedly and directly recognize the innate essentiality of all things known as the light of En (no) Sof (end), or the Infinite. Most mainstream conventional schools of Kabbalah hold such a radical aspiration to be inapproachable at best, and heretical at worst. • The work introduces six stages that articulate how the mind breaks through its own restrictive habitual reflexes to awaken to the ground of En Sof, which is the mind’s essential nature • Each stage is illustrated by the author’s own original works of art and line diagrams • Draws upon obscure sources such as the 13th-century Kabbalistic text "Fountain of Wisdom", various alchemical and gnostic texts, and the writings of Isaac the Blind The author reveals how meaning never remains static—its nature is to move, transmit, and display—yet its precious potential becomes buried under layers of mental constructs. He explains how the mind’s habits and reflexes impose structures of containment that try to make sense out of phenomena, but these very structures actually obscure their essence completely. Smith’s experiential path to gnostic awakening reveals how, in the wake of the lesser concerns of the conceptual mind, primordial purity shines in resonances of vast poetic beauty, if a sensibility of wonder, awe, and delight is cultivated.Contemplation begins with intellectual understanding. As contemplation deepens, the mind shifts from the accumulation of data to the unfolding of direct gnostic apprehension. This dissolves the idea that outer and inner or personal and cosmic distinctions exist, allowing phenomena to return to its basis as a single, uninterrupted continuum. As the mind becomes dwarfed by the sheer immensity of this vast wholeness, the character of meaning begins to change. Meaning’s fullness shapes the mind rather than the mind’s reflexes and habits shaping meaning. The fullness opens beyond the experiences the mind relies upon to define both itself and the world, but paradoxically only arises within those experiences as their basis. Once this basis is recognized as the root of the paradox, the awakening ground becomes clear. Offering a step-by-step analysis to the ecstatic aspects of contemplative revelation, David Chaim Smith explores how to ride the razor’s edge of the paradox to coax the mind from the sleep of habituation towards the culmination of gnosis. Although the process is described within the traditional symbol system of kabbalah, its import is a truly radical exponent of extreme mysticism.

HRILIU: Symbolic Explorations of the Gnostic Mass


IAO131 - 2016
    The first half of the book gives a general overview of the Gnostic Mass from several different perspectives, including an examination of the basic symbols at work in the mass, the Officers, magical energy, and how Baphomet might play a major factor... The second half of the book is a detailed analysis of the rubric of Liber XV: Ecclesiæ Gnosticæ Catholicæ Canon Missæ , the ritual text of the Gnostic Mass itself. IAO131 goes line by line through the text and goes into symbolic aspects of every part of the Gnostic Mass.The book takes its title 'HRILIU' from the climax of this ritual, when the Priest and Priestess simultaneously utter this angelic word in rapturous communion. Overall, this tome comes in at almost 400 pages of symbolic and Qabalistic exploration of this beautiful and sacred Rite.

Mushrooms, Mankind, DMT, and Hyperspace


Terence McKenna - 2016
    Topics include: the "Stoned Ape" Theory of evolution, consciousness expansion, the purpose of history, extraterrestrial possibilities, interdimensional communication, the DMT trip expericence, shamanic science, alchemy and Hermeticism, the Logos, the eschaton, and many other spectra.

Reverti Ad Praeteritum


Batsutousai - 2016
    Armed with the knowledge of what's to come and burdened with guilt for the choices he'd made as an adult, Ed sets out to fix every mistake he ever made and save every life they ever lost, no matter what it takes.