This collection presents fifty large-scale artworks from the American master's color field period (1949–1970) alongside essays by Rothko's son, Christopher Rothko, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curator of painting and sculpture Janet Bishop. Featuring illuminating details about Rothko's life, influences, and legacy, and brimming with the emotional power and expressive color of his groundbreaking canvases, this essential volume brings the renowned artist's luminous work to light for both longtime Rothko fans and those discovering his work for the very first time. A textured case and large-scale tip-on on the front cover round out this sumptious package.

    This book introduces Cthulhu, the priest of the great old ones.

    Approaching magical practice from an information paradigm, Patrick Dunn provides a unique and contemporary perspective on an ancient practice. Imagination, psychology, and authority-the most basic techniques of magic-are introduced first. From there, Dunn teaches all about symbol systems, magical artifacts, sigils, spirits, elementals, languages, and magical journeys, and explains their significance in magical practice. There are also exercises for developing magic skills, along with techniques for creating talismans, glamours, servitors, divination decks, modern defixios, and your own astral temple. Dunn also offers tips on aura detection, divination, occult networking, and conducting your own magic research.

    He felt that achieving purity by avoiding meat and refraining from committing harm further promoted the pursuit of a peaceful life. Elements of the worship of Dionysus, such as shape-shifting and ritualistic ecstasy, were fused with Orphic beliefs to produce a powerful and illuminating new religion that found expression in the mystery cults. Practitioners of this new religion composed a great body of poetry, much of which is translated in The Orphic Hymns.The hymns presented in this book were anonymously composed somewhere in Asia Minor, most likely in the middle of the third century AD. At this turbulent time, the Hellenic past was fighting for its survival, while the new Christian faith was spreading everywhere. The Orphic Hymns thus reflect a pious spirituality in the form of traditional literary conventions. The hymns themselves are devoted to specific divinities as well as to cosmic elements. Prefaced with offerings, strings of epithets invoke the various attributes of the divinity and prayers ask for peace and health to the initiate. Apostolos N. Athanassakis and Benjamin M. Wolkow have produced an accurate and elegant translation accompanied by rich commentary.

    "This is a book," writes Gary Snyder, "about danger: dangerous knowledge, even more dangerous ignorance." Against the greater danger, ignorance, Pendell strikes a formidable blow, as he proves himself a wise and witty guide to our plant teachers, their powers and their poisons. "Pharmako/Poeia is an epic poem on plant humours, an abstruse alchemic treatise, an experiential narrative jigsaw puzzle, a hip and learned wild-nature reference text, a comic paen to cosmic consciousness, an ecological handbook, a dried-herb pastiche, a counterculture encyclopedia of ancient fact and lore." -Allen Ginsberg poet"Dale Pendell reactivates the ancient connection between the bardic poet and the shaman." -Terence McKenna author of True Hallucinations

    The original African faith is carried in chains across the abysmal waters of Kalunga and it flowers in Cuba as a New World Creole sorcery.This is an initiate's account of a much maligned religion and cult whose central mystery is the prenda, the cauldron containing the human skull or bones, re-animated by living spirits.The Garden of Blood & Bones gives explicit details of the workings of Palo Mayombe for good and ill: the method of divination, the herbs, animals, trees and plants, powders, baths and waters, the songs and chants. It presents a complete living system, one which embraces both the arts of healing and resurrection, and those that remove life.This is a serious study which confronts the sinister and violent aspects of the cult, but rather than purveying lurid sensationalism expresses the deep dignity and integrity of its nature.In drawing parallels with both the Ancient Greek practices of Necromancy and Nigromancy, and the grimoire tradition, Frisvold also illuminates the Western Tradition, showing what we have lost in our denial of the dead and the cult of the ancestors. Yet Palo Mayombe can only be truly understood in the light of a highly developed African cosmology. This is a book written from inside the cult, and will serve as a guide for practising Paleros and those seeking initiation. With access to rare materials, pamphlets, booklets and unpublished field notes, this is the most comprehensive study of Palo Mayombe to date.

    In clear and understandable language, Case elucidates the Tarot tradition and technique for the modern thinker. Students of the Tarot will find in these pages the necessary information to understand and apply the principles of Tarot-and the correspondences of symbol, tone, color, and number-to the art of daily living. The author also includes extremely useful chapters on methods of study and Tarot divination.In this 2006 edition, the book appears for the first time with an index and an appendix of resources. Here is a genuine underground masterpiece, made available to a broad new readership.

    

    Jessa Crispin guides you through the intuitive world of the tarot to get those creative juices flowing again. Thought to be esoteric and mystical, tarot cards are approachable and endlessly helpful to overcoming creative blocks. Crispin offers spiritual readings of the cards, practical information for the uninspired artist, and a wealth of fascinating anecdotes about famous artists including Virginia Woolf, Rembrandt, and David Bowie, and how they found inspiration. With five original tarot spreads and beautiful illustrations throughout, The Creative Tarot is an accessible, colorful guide that demystifies both the tarot and the creative process.

    The water magic and lore in this book focuses on the Celtic tradition, but draws on other water magic traditions as well, and features rainwater, as well as lakes, rivers, oceans, canals, swamps, and other watery locations, together with the folk and magical customs that have been and are still practiced at these places. The book teaches the reader how to set up a water altar at home, how to connect with water spirits, and how to gather or create water witch tools. Readers are encouraged to visit local water sites but will also find an abundance of material to perform at home. Included are practical examples, visualizations, and exercises so any reader can start to take up spell work and establish their spiritual connection to water.

    From Abramelin he took his concepts of protections, purifications, evocations, vestments, and dromena down to specific details. This system of Abramelin the Mage is known from a unique 15th century manuscript persevered in the Bibliotheque de l`Arsenal in Paris. In it, Abraham of Wurzburg, a cabalist and connoisseur of magics, describes a tour that he made of the then civilized world, visiting sorcerers, magicians, and cabalists, estimating their powers and virtues. This quest is in itself as fascinating as the similar tours of Gurdjieff. The high point of Abraham`s travels was found in a small town on the banks of the Nile, where he encountered the great magician Abramelin, whose complete system Abraham thereupon sets out in detail. This amounts to a complete course in ceremonial magic (both white and black), which the student can pursue by himself. Abramelin, whose system is based mostly on Hellenistic theurgy of the Iamblichan sort, but with Jewish increments from the Cabala, explains the qualifications needed to become a magician, purifications and asceticisms to be practiced month by month, studies and activities permitted during this period, selections of place and time for working magic, equipment needed, prayers and formulas, evocation of good and evil spirits, commanding spirits, to do one`s will, overcoming rebellious spirits, an similar material. Specific instructions are offered to develop such powers as clairvoyance, divining metals and treasurers, warding off evil magic, healing illness, levitation, transportation, rendering oneself invisible, creating illusions and glamour, reading minds, placing compulsions, working black magic, and a host of other abilities. We do not guarantee that Abramelin's techniques work, not that the results are desirable...

    In this Penguin Classics edition, the letters are selected and edited by Ronald de Leeuw, and translated by Arnold Pomerans in Penguin Classics.Few artists' letters are as self-revelatory as Vincent van Gogh's, and this selection, spanning his artistic career, sheds light on every facet of the life and work of this complex and tortured man. Engaging candidly and movingly with his religious struggles, his ill-fated search for love, his attacks of mental illness and his relation with his brother Theo, the letters contradict the popular myth of van Gogh as an anti-social madman and a martyr to art, showing instead a man of great emotional and spiritual depths. Above all, they stand as an intense personal narrative of artistic development and a unique account of the process of creation.The letters are linked by explanatory biographical passages, revealing van Gogh's inner journey as well as the outer facts of his life. This edition also includes the drawings that originally illustrated the letters.Vincent Willem van Gogh (1853-1890) was born in Holland. In 1885 he painted his first masterpiece, The Potato Eaters, a haunting scene of domestic poverty. A year later he began studying in Paris, where he met Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Seurat, who became very important influences on his work. In 1888 he left Paris for the Provencal landscape at Arles, the subject of many of his best works, including Sunflowers.If you enjoyed The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, you might also like 100 Artists Manifestos, available in Penguin Modern Classics.'If there was ever any doubt that Van Gogh's letters belong beside those great classics of artistic self-revelation, Cellini's autobiography and Delacroix's journal, this excellent new edition dispels it'The Times

    Careful at all times to observe basic rules of responsibility - that a spell should never intend anyone harm or manipulate anyone against their will - this is a comprehensive guide to ways of effective spell-casting. This book covers all aspects of spells - including psychic self-defense, sex magic, qabalistic magic, and talismans. There is a generous anthology of actual spells worldwide, past and present, drawn from history, literature, folklore, old grimoires, and from the 20 years experience of the authors. Spells of love, healing, weather, binding, and more combine in this unique addition to the literature on magical workings.

    The second journal of an artist by "an extraordinary woman: sensitive, intelligent, perceptive"--Doris Grumbach.

    Having grown up in an extended Italian family in North America and Italy, the author presents us with the stories, characters, saints, charms, and prayers that form the core of folk religion, setting them in context in an authentic, down-to-earth, and humorous voice. A delight to read!"—Sabina Magliocco, Professor of Anthropology, University of British ColumbiaItalian Folk Magiccontains:magical and religious ritualsprayersdivination techniquescraftingblessing ritualswitchcraftThe author also explores the evil eye, known as malocchio in Italian, explaining what it is, where it comes from, and, crucially, how to get rid of it.This book can help Italians regain their magical heritage, but Italian folk magic is a beautiful, powerful, and effective magical tradition that is accessible to anyone who wants to learn it.