Making reference to an astonishing number of cultures & drawing on scholarship published in no less than half a dozen European languages, Eliade's "The Myth of the Eternal Return makes both intelligible & compelling the religious expressions & activities of a wide variety of archaic & "primitive" religious cultures. While acknowledging that a return to the "archaic" is no longer possible, Eliade passionately insists on the value of understanding this view in order to enrich our contemporary imagination of what it is to be human.

    He attracted legends as easily as disciples. But behind the Gurdjieff myth lies a solid corpus of thought, the importance of which is only now being generally recognized. At its heart was the idea of "the war against sleep", the fact that man, in Colin Wilson's words, is like "a grandfather clock driven by a watch-spring." This brilliant & much praised examination of a psychologist & teacher of genius has established itself as the most important & accessible account for the general reader of Gurdjieff's life & work. This edition has been revised & expanded, providing the definitive introduction to the philosophy of Gurdjieff.

    Allegedly dictated to Crowley in Cairo, Egypt between noon and 1 pm on three successive days in April 1904, the Book of the Law is the source book and key for Crowley's philosophy and/or religion, Thelema.

     Learn about: The grimoire tradition and its relationship to Chaos Magic. The latest consciousness science and the return of Animism. The role of the Devil and the Saints in European magic and witchcraft. Begin practising: A Chaos Magic form of Remote Viewing. An Ancient Roman system of hexing. A method of summoning Dragon Spirits. A Sumerian method of banishing Ghosts. A complete system of spirit evocation. From the author of the acclaimed Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits and The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality comes a definitive and much-needed exploration of the core principles of Chaos Magic. "Whoever said books on magick can't be fabulously entertaining as well as eminently practical has obviously not read up on their Gordon White. Remedy that situation." -Christopher Knowles. The Secret Sun.

    This Weiser Classics edition is newly re-typeset and include a new foreword by Judika Illes and a new afterword by Stuart R. Harrop, co-director of the Society of Inner Light (founded in 1924 by Dion Fortune).Dion Fortune's classic, The Mystical Qabalah, explores all aspects of the Qabalah, including the esoteric sciences of astrology and tarot, which form the basis of the Western Mystery Traditions. It provides a key to the practical working of this mystical system for both novice and initiate alike.

    When the mind has understood all things and found them to be in harmony with what has been expounded by the teachings, it is faithful and comes to rest in that beautiful faith.”Hermes to AsclepiusThe Corpus Hermeticum, a powerful fusion of Greek and Egyptian thought, is one of the cornerstones of the Western esoteric tradition. A collection of short philosophical treatises, it was written in Greek between the first and third centuries A.D. and translated into Latin during the Renaissance by the great scholar and philosopher Marsilio Ficino. These writings, believed to be the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, were central to the spiritual work of Hermetic societies in Late Antique Alexandria (200-700 A.D.), and aimed to awaken gnosis, the direct realization of the unity of the individual and the Supreme.In addition to this new translation of The Corpus Hermeticum, which seeks to reflect the inspirational intent of the original, The Way of Hermes includes the first English translation of the recently rediscovered manuscript of The Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus to Asclepius, a collection of aphorisms used by the hermetic student to strengthen the mind during meditation. With the proper mental orientation,a state of pure perception can be achieved in which the true face of God appears. This document is of enormous value to the contemporary student of gnostic studies for its insights into the actual workings of this spiritual path.Clement Salaman is the editor of the English translation of The Letters of Marsilio Ficino. Dorine Van Oyen is a lecturer on Hermetic studies in Amsterdam. William D. Wharton teaches Classical history, languages, and philosophy in Boston. Jean-Pierre Mahe is Correspondent of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, Paris.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    Richard Smoley, an expert in esoteric Christianity, traces the Gnostic legacy from its ancient roots in the Gospel of Thomas, discovered in Egypt; early 2nd-century Gnostic communities of the Roman Empire & the Manichaeans of Central Asia. He tracks how the Gnostic impulse was publicly repressed but survived underground in various forms of Christianity, surfacing again in the Middle Ages with the Cathars, a mysterious group of heretics who inspired the medieval tradition of courtly love but were then wiped out by the Inquisition. Since then the Gnostic legacy has survived into the modern era with the help of Kabbalists, the Freemasonry of our founding fathers, Wm Blake's poetry, the intuitive insights of 19th-century Theosophists & the psychological work of C.G. Jung. Finally, we learn how some of their key teachings are being revived in Harold Bloom's criticism, the sf of Philip K. Dick & films like The Matrix & The Da Vinci Code. Why should Gnosticism exercise such a lasting fascination? Throughout most of Christian history, Gnosticism was the "forbidden faith," & such condemnation by the official Church might actually have served to endow the movement with glamour. But that explanation goes only so far. For the Gnostics to have such lasting appeal, it seems logical that they must offer solutions to some problems, solutions overlooked by mainstream religion. Forbidden Faith provides the enduring story & continuing legacy of those errant faithful who've had direct experiences of the divine that can't be explained by the official beliefs of the Church.

    It was written as a phenomenological account of the "results of observing the human soul according to the methods of natural science. This seminal work asserts that free spiritual activity - understood as the human ability to think and act independently of physical nature - is the suitable path for human beings today to gain true knowledge of themselves and of the universe. This is not merely a philosophical volume, but rather a warm, heart-oriented guide to the practice and experience of living thinking. Readers will not find abstract philosophy here, but a step-by-step account of how a person may come to experience living, intuitive thinking - "the conscious experience of a purely spiritual content." During the past hundred years since it was written, many have tried to discover this "new thinking" that could help us understand the various spiritual, ecological, social, political, and philosophical issues facing us. But only Rudolf Steiner laid out a path that leads from ordinary thinking to the level of pure spiritual activity - intuitive thinking - in which we become co-creators and co-redeemers of the world.

    Did some divine power create the first couple? Religious scriptures the world over aver that one or the other god gave birth to humans, but science has not yet identified any supernatural power that created and governed human beings. Did primeval humans come up with the idea of gods to help them cope with their fears? Could it be that they attributed natural phenomena — unfathomable and frightening to them — to the working of invisible gods? The Evolution of Gods uses modern science to explain why, when and how religions and gods became the desirable explanations of the inexplicable events. It describes anthropological and historical facts about the evolution of religions and gods, in a simple and straightforward manner, to assert that human imagination created gods, and not the other way around.The book begins with the epoch when the human race came into being, between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago. Around 100,000 years ago, humans invented language and began to discuss and analyze each happening around them. Whatever they could not comprehend, their priest attributed to some unseen power. At one point in time, we do not know exactly when it happened, humankind began an activity called worship. Humans began to worship each seen or unseen power, which was beyond their control, but could either harm or help them. They believed that worship protected them and sought the blessings of that power. Priests all over the world invented almost identical methods of worship, such as folding their hands, bowing, kneeling, flowers offering, prayers and sacrifices. For example, anthropologists have drawn that ancient humans had largely inadequate protection against cold; their survival largely deepened upon available sunlight—something beyond their control. In that scenario, solar worship was a logical outcome. In a similar manner, the humans found thunder and lightning inexplicable and frightening. Gradually, they began to worship the sky as god. There is enough historical evidence to assert that the ancestors of Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians and Muslims, before their religions came into practice, worshipped the sun and the sky. Thus, history demonstrates that whenever humankind faced a new challenge, priests invented a more useful deity and consigned the older one to oblivion. For example, around three thousand years ago, cultivation provided several facilities to humans that paved the way for a population explosion. At the same time, farming exposed people to pets, rodents, mosquitoes, houseflies and parasites. All these factors together gave rise to altogether new diseases such as cholera, tuberculosis, typhoid and plague. Apart from these diseases, population explosion also gave rise to social diseases such as poverty, inequality, injustice, crime and exploitation. All these together forced people to lead a miserable life no better than hell. Around this time, a few geniuses such as the Buddha, Moses and Jesus discovered the causes and remedies of human sufferings. For example, Moses suggested ten morals, sacrifices and prayers to protect people from their miseries. The contemporary priests transcribed prayers, rituals, myths, allegories and morals preached by these prophets after their death. The Holy Scriptures, such as the Vedas and the Bible were the compilations of such writings. These books advised worship, sacrifices, magic or morals to eradicate human miseries. The Suffering masses had no option but to follow those advices. These scriptures fashioned the organized religions of today. Let us think for a moment why there are many religions and there is only one science on the Earth. There is one concrete reason behind this irony; about one thing or concept there is only one truth but there can be many lies. This book is an effort to light a candle in the darkest corner of human consciousness.

    The selections, which are substantial in length, provide a generous sampling of Merton's vast output. +

    The facts relating to the immaculate conception, the birth, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension will astound and inspire you. The book contains many mystical symbols, fully explained, original photographs, and an unusual portrait of Jesus.

    The lectures provided a backdrop for the degrees by giving lessons in comparative religion, history, and philosophy."