In On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, Gershom Scholem guides the reader through the central themes in the intricate history of the Kabbalah, clarifying the relations between mysticism and established religious authority, the mystics' interpretation of the Torah and their attempts to discover the hidden meaning underlying Scripture, the tension between the philosophical and the mystical concepts of God, and the symbolism employed in mystical religion.With a new foreword by Bernard McGinn

    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.

    Today's view of history cannot account for ancient anomalies, such as the Pyramids and advanced knowledge contained in India's Vedas-but in 1894 an Indian sage gave us an explanation not only for our hidden past, but for the trends of today and for our future enlightenment-the 24,000 year yuga cycle

    First published in 1954, it details his experiences when taking mescaline. The book takes the form of Huxley's recollection of a mescaline trip that took place over the course of an afternoon in May 1953. The book takes its title from a phrase in William Blake's 1793 poem 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'. Huxley recalls the insights he experienced, which range from the "purely aesthetic" to "sacramental vision". He also incorporates later reflections on the experience and its meaning for art and religion.

    With all four books of the Latin Picatrix complete in one volume, translated & annotated by the noted scholars, magicians and astrologers John Michael Greer & Christopher Warnock, Picatrix takes its rightful place as an essential occult text. Picatrix is an encyclopedic work with over 300 pages of Hermetic magical philosophy, ritual, talismanic and natural magic. Greer & Warnock’s complete translation is lucid and well annotated. Renaissance Astrology & Adocentyn Press have released the complete Picatrix in a variety of different editions, including the Liber Atratus and Liber Rubeus editions. All editions contain the same basic text, but add additional variant passages, either from the Arabic Picatrix or authors cited, but not found in the Latin Picatrix. The Liber Atratus edition adds a passage on poisons from Ibn Washiyya’s Book of Poisons.

    Original.

    This is a encyclopedia of witchraft and Wicca, providing a history of belief and ritual practices of Neopagan Witches, an overview of the evolution and central tenets of modern Paganism and advice on rituals, poetry and magical ethics.

    Eros and Magic in the Renaissance challenges this view, providing an in-depth scholarly explanation of the workings of magic and showing that magic continues to exist in an altered form even today.Renaissance magic, according to Ioan Couliano, was a scientifically plausible attempt to manipulate individuals and groups based on a knowledge of motivations, particularly erotic motivations. Its key principle was that everyone (and in a sense everything) could be influenced by appeal to sexual desire. In addition, the magician relied on a profound knowledge of the art of memory to manipulate the imaginations of his subjects. In these respects, Couliano suggests, magic is the precursor of the modern psychological and sociological sciences, and the magician is the distant ancestor of the psychoanalyst and the advertising and publicity agent.In the course of his study, Couliano examines in detail the ideas of such writers as Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola and illuminates many aspects of Renaissance culture, including heresy, medicine, astrology, alchemy, courtly love, the influence of classical mythology, and even the role of fashion in clothing.Just as science gives the present age its ruling myth, so magic gave a ruling myth to the Renaissance. Because magic relied upon the use of images, and images were repressed and banned in the Reformation and subsequent history, magic was replaced by exact science and modern technology and eventually forgotten. Couliano's remarkable scholarship helps us to recover much of its original significance and will interest a wide audience in the humanities and social sciences.

    10, 1913 - Feb. 10, 1914 (CW 148)From his clairvoyant reading of the akashic record--the cosmic memory of all events, actions, and thoughts--Steiner was able to discuss aspects of the life of Jesus Christ that are not recorded in the four Gospels of the conventional Christian Bible. The results of such research has been called "The Fifth Gospel."After an intense inner struggle to verify the exact nature of these events, and having checked the results of his research, Steiner described many detailed episodes from the akashic record. For example, he speaks of Jesus' life in the community of the Essenes, the temptation of Christ in the wilderness, and a significant, previously unreported conversation between Jesus and Mary.Steiner states that divulging such spiritual research is intensely difficult, but that "although people show little inclination to be told such facts as these, it was absolutely essential that knowledge of such facts should be brought to Earth evolution at the present time."German title of the German source edition: Aus der Akasha-Forschung. Das f�nfte Evangelium.

    It lays a spiritual foundation under the material one of science; one upon which the current New Age movement is built.A century and more ahead of his time, Walter Russell, in The Secret of Light presents a unique Cosmogony, that of a universe in which Creator and Creation are proven to be a seamless, unified whole, and in which the dualism of “mind and matter” disappears.In revelation of what he terms “natural science,” Russell presents a two-way, magnetic-electric thought-wave universe, cyclic in nature and eternally “creating,” as opposed to the “created, expanding, entropic universe” of current science.Russell’s philosophy of the science of Being, the invisible world of Cause—the nature of consciousness, knowing, thinking, sensing, inspiration, intuition, energy, and the creative process—and the science of Expressed Being, the visible world of Effect—the nature of light, the wave structure of universal creation, the creation of the elements that make up our visible world, and the cycle nature of life and death— are proven a unified continuum.The Secret of Light illuminates the many questions regarding the nature of “science and consciousness.” Dr. Francis Trevelyan Miller (LITT.D., LL.D.), Historical Foundations, New York, wrote in 1947 of The Secret of Light,“I hasten to congratulate you on your epoch-making achievement in giving the world The Secret of Light. In this little volume, with its tremendous magnitude of thought, you have given Science and human knowledge a rebirth—a transmigration from its physical plane to its potential grandeur on the cosmic plane.”“You have opened the door into the infinite—science must enter. It may hesitate; it may engage in controversy, but it cannot afford to ignore the principles you have established which eventually will revolutionize man’s concept of himself, his world, his universe, and his human problems.”“You have done for us in the Twentieth Century what Ptolemy, Euclid, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler did for their earlier centuries. But you have further penetrated all physical barriers and extended your discoveries into definite forms of the infinite law which created our universe and keeps it in operation with mathematical precision through the millions of years.”“Hitherto, Science while delving into these infinite sources has not attempted to define them. It has left the terminology to the ecclesiastics and theological dialectics. You have the courage and vision to start where they leave off — to explore the creative or spiritual law which motivates everything that exists: principles of far greater import than Einstein’s relativity. I hail you as a forerunner of our New Age of Science.”Part I: Omniscience, The Universe of KnowingPart II: Omnipotence, The Universe of Power Part III: Omnipresence; The Universe of Being

    Now, in Egyptian Mythology, Geraldine Pinch offers a comprehensive introduction thatuntangles the mystery of Egyptian Myth.Spanning Ancient Egyptian culture--from 3200 BC to AD 400--Pinch opens a door to this hidden world and casts light on its often misunderstood belief system. She discusses the nature of myths and the history of Egypt, from the predynastic to the postpharaonic period. She explains how Egyptian culturedeveloped around the flooding of the Nile, or the inundation, a phenomenon on which the whole welfare of the country depended, and how aspects of the inundation were personified as deities. She explains that the usually cloudless skies made for a preoccupation with the stars and planets. Indeed, much early Egyptian mythology may have developed to explain the movement of these celestial bodies. She provides a timeline covering the seven stages in the mythical history of Egypt and outlining the major events of each stage, such as the reign of the sun God. A substantial A to Z section coversthe principal themes and concepts of Egyptian mythology as well as the most important deities, demons, and other characters. For anyone who wants to know about Anubis, the terrifying canine god who presided over the mummification of bodies and guarded burials, or Hathor, the golden goddess whohelped women to give birth and the dead to be reborn, or an explanation of the nun, the primeval ocean from which all life came, Egyptian Mythology is the place to look.

    These religions represent the last vestiges of the magnificent civilizations in ancient history: Persia, Babylon, Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs. Their followers have learned how to survive foreign attacks and the perils of assimilation. But today, with the Middle East in turmoil, they face greater challenges than ever before. In Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms, former diplomat Gerard Russell ventures to the distant, nearly impassable regions where these mysterious religions still cling to survival. He lives alongside the Mandaeans and Ezidis of Iraq, the Zoroastrians of Iran, the Copts of Egypt, and others. He learns their histories, participates in their rituals, and comes to understand the threats to their communities. Historically a tolerant faith, Islam has, since the early 20th century, witnessed the rise of militant, extremist sects. This development, along with the rippling effects of Western invasion, now pose existential threats to these minority faiths. And as more and more of their youth flee to the West in search of greater freedoms and job prospects, these religions face the dire possibility of extinction. Drawing on his extensive travels and archival research, Russell provides an essential record of the past, present, and perilous future of these remarkable religions.

    Whether you’re an Indigo yourself or a parent or caretaker of one, this book will usher into your life new levels of understanding, peace, and purpose.

    This collection includes two books in one volume, Eight Sabbats for Witches and The Witches' Way and is the most comprehensive and revealing work on the principles, rituals and beliefs of modern witchcraft.

    In ancient monuments as far apart as Egypt’s Great Sphinx, the strange Andean ruins of Tihuanaco, and Mexico’s awe-inspiring Temples of the Sun and Moon, he reveals not only the clear fingerprints of an as-yet-unidentified civilization of remote antiquity, but also startling evidence of its vast sophistication, technological advancement, and evolved scientific knowledge. A record-breaking number one bestseller in Britain, Fingerprints of the Gods contains the makings of an intellectual revolution, a dramatic and irreversible change in the way that we understand our past—and so our future.And Fingerprints of the Gods tells us something more. As we recover the truth about prehistory, and discover the real meaning of ancient myths and monuments, it becomes apparent that a warning has been handed down to us, a warning of terrible cataclysm that afflicts the Earth in great cycles at irregular intervals of time—a cataclysm that may be about to recur.