This unique selection of illustrations with commentaries and source texts guides us on a fascinating journey through the representations of the secret arts.

    It is subtitled A Voyage to the Inner Earth. Olaf Jansen was a Norwegian sailor who sailed his sloop though an entrance near the North Pole to the earth's interior. This novel is an early example of an underground civilization. Jansen spent two years living with the inhabitants in a network of subterranean colonies. A smoky central sun lighted the world. Their capital city was believed to be the original Garden of Eden.

    A book that has definitions & explanation about numerous signs & symbols

    In the tradition of unsolved historical mysteries like David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon and Douglas Preston's The Lost City of the Monkey God, Brian Muraresku’s 10-year investigation takes the reader through Greece, Germany, Spain, France and Italy, offering unprecedented access to the hidden archives of the Louvre and the Vatican along the way.In The Immortality Key, Muraresku explores a little-known connection between the best-kept secret in Ancient Greece and Christianity. This is the real story of the most famous human being who ever lived (Jesus) and the biggest religion the world has ever known. Today, 2.4 billion people are Christian. That's one third of the planet. But do any of them really know how it all started?Before Jerusalem, before Rome, before Mecca—there was Eleusis: the spiritual capital of the ancient world. It promised immortality to Plato and the rest of Athens's greatest minds with a very simple formula: drink this potion, see God. Shrouded in secrecy for millennia, the Ancient Greek sacrament was buried when the newly Christianized Roman Empire obliterated Eleusis in the fourth century AD.Renegade scholars in the 1970s claimed the Greek potion was psychedelic, just like the original Christian Eucharist that replaced it. In recent years, vindication for the disgraced theory has been quietly mounting in the laboratory. The rapidly growing field of archaeological chemistry has proven the ancient use of visionary drugs. And with a single dose of psilocybin, the psycho-pharmacologists at Johns Hopkins and NYU are now turning self-proclaimed atheists into instant believers. No one has ever found hard, scientific evidence of drugs connected to Eleusis, let alone early Christianity. Until now.Armed with key documents never before translated into English, convincing analysis, and a captivating spirit of quest, Muraresku mines science, classical literature, biblical scholarship and art to deliver the hidden key to eternal life, bringing us to what clinical psychologist William Richards calls "the edge of an awesomely vast frontier."Featuring a Foreword by Graham Hancock, the New York Times bestselling author of America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization.

    In these pages you will meet extraordinary beings from Hindu and Navajo religions, Scandinavian tales, Russian folklore, Lithuanian stories, Irish oral history, American tall tales, and Aztec myth. Just some of the monstrous entourage:• Baku, a benevolent Japanese monster with the body of a horse, the head of a lion, and the legs of a tiger, who helps people by devouring their nightmares.• Kurma, the giant tortoise of Hindu myth, whose upper shell forms the heavens and lower part the earth.• Missipissy, the feared fish serpent of North America's Great Lakes region.This illustrated encyclopedia not only identifies and describes individual beasts in their cultural context but also groups them together across cultures and discusses common mythological strands and conceits.

    The Golden Bough" describes our ancestors' primitive methods of worship, sex practices, strange rituals and festivals. Disproving the popular thought that primitive life was simple, this monumental survey shows that savage man was enmeshed in a tangle of magic, taboos, and superstitions. Revealed here is the evolution of man from savagery to civilization, from the modification of his weird and often bloodthirsty customs to the entry of lasting moral, ethical, and spiritual values.

    Original, well researched, and well documented by distinguished sources, The Field is a book of hope and inspiration for today's world.

    In this tapestry of poetic and religious scholarship, Graves explores the stories behind the earliest of European deities—the White Goddess of Birth, Love, and Death—who was worshipped under countless titles. He also uncovers the obscure and mysterious power of "pure poetry" and its peculiar and mythic language.

    I. Gurdjieff (1866-1949) has come to be recognized as one of the most original, enduring, and penetrating of our century. While Gurdjieff used many different means to transmit his vision of the human dilemma and human possibility, he gave special importance to his acknowledged masterwork, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. Beelzebub's Tales is an "ocean of story" and of ideas that one can explore for a lifetime. It is majestic in scale and content, challengingly inventive in prose style, and, for those very reasons, often approached with apprehension. The first English language edition of the Russian original appeared in 1950. Since then, readers have recognized the need for a revised translation that would clarify the verbal surface while respecting the author's own thought and style. This revised edition, in preparation for many years under the direction of Gurdjieff's closest pupil, Jeanne de Salzmann, meets this need. Originally published in 1992, this translation offers a new experience of Gurdjieff's masterpiece for contemporary readers. It is presented in a sturdy cloth edition that echoes its original publication.

    The reader will not discover wild theories or unfounded claims, but instead will confront a solid -- if often unsettling -- reality, one that demands the collaboration of all of us in every field of human endeavor if we are to understand it and manage its effects. If nothing else, readers will come to the conclusion that the Phenomenon is not what they think it is.  It is, in fact, much more serious and potentially much more threatening than they can imagine.Sekret Machines: GODS is volume one of the companion investigation series to the bestselling thriller Sekret Machines: Chasing Shadows by DeLonge and NYTimes bestselling author AJ Hartley.  The whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts.  Read together, the thriller series and the investigation series show what cannot be revealed with one approach alone.

    John Mack. This eminent Harvard psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer risked his career to investigate the phenomenon of human encounters with aliens and to give credibility to the stupefying tales shared by people who were utterly convinced they had happened.Nothing in Mack's four decades of psychiatry had prepared him for the otherworldly accounts of a cross-section of humanity including young children who reported being taken against their wills by alien beings. Over the course of his career his interest in alien abduction grew from curiosity to wonder, ultimately developing into a limitless, unwavering passion.Based on exclusive access to Mack's archives, journals, and psychiatric notes and interviews with his family and closest associates, The Believer reveals the life and work of a man who explored the deepest of scientific conundrums and further leads us to the hidden dimensions and alternate realities that captivated Mack until the end of his life.

    Ten years after it was first published, this is still the leading resource and reference for all those interested in cross-cultural and current forms of shamanism: now with a new introduction and a list of current shamanic resources.

    When their conclusions did not support the official position, the findings were suppressed.Now, the secret findings of Project Sign, Project Grudge, Special Report #14, and Project Blue Book are revealed in this explosive and significant document!Examine it and decide for yourself . . . but you may not be able to dismiss the riveting testimony of scientists, the military, pilots, and citizens all over the country who have witnessed UFOs!

    Weekly as "the culture's foremost spokesman for the psychedelic experience," Terrence McKenna is an underground legend as a brilliant raconteur, adventurer & expert on the experiential use of mind-altering plants. In these essays, interviews & narrative adventures, McKenna takes us on a mesmerizing journey deep into the Amazon as well as into the hidden recesses of the human psyche & the outer limits of our culture, giving us startling visions of the past & future.

    With more than 300,000 copies sold to date, this is the definitive work on the extraordinary phenomenon of out-of-body experiences, by the founder of the internationally known Monroe Institute.