While psychedelics of all sorts are demonized in America today, the visionary compounds found in plants are the spiritual sacraments of tribal cultures around the world. From the iboga of the Bwiti in Gabon, to the Mazatecs of Mexico, these plants are sacred because they awaken the mind to other levels of awareness--to a holographic vision of the universe.Breaking Open the Head is a passionate, multilayered, and sometimes rashly personal inquiry into this deep division. On one level, Daniel Pinchbeck tells the story of the encounters between the modern consciousness of the West and these sacramental substances, including such thinkers as Allen Ginsberg, Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, and Terence McKenna, and a new underground of present-day ethnobotanists, chemists, psychonauts, and philosophers. It is also a scrupulous recording of the author's wide-ranging investigation with these outlaw compounds, including a thirty-hour tribal initiation in West Africa; an all-night encounter with the master shamans of the South American rain forest; and a report from a psychedelic utopia in the Black Rock Desert that is the Burning Man Festival.Breaking Open the Head is brave participatory journalism at its best, a vivid account of psychic and intellectual experiences that opened doors in the wall of Western rationalism and completed Daniel Pinchbeck's personal transformation from a jaded Manhattan journalist to shamanic initiate and grateful citizen of the cosmos.

    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.

    From the author of the best-selling Animal Speak comes the next step in understanding the meaning and language of animals. Discover the meaning of animals in dreams and life. Learn how to interpret the signs of nature. Find your animal guardians and messengers and awaken the inner totem pole. Through this book, you truly will become animal-wise.

    "To Ride a Silver Broomstick" presents both the science and religion of Witchcraft so you can become an active participant while growing at your own pace. This book is ideal for anyone, regardless of religious background: male or female, young or old, beginners and initiates.

    With artist Lady Frieda Harris, he condensed the core of his teaching into the 78 cards of the tarot. Although Crowley's own Book of Thoth provides insight into the cards, it is a complicated, dated book. Now, in clear language, Lon Milo DuQuette provides everything you need to know to get the most out of using the Thoth deck.

    By practicing the Great Work of the ancient alchemists and magicians, readers are guided into self-possession constant communication with their divine selves and connection with the Limitless Divine. Using the tools of energy and breath, shadow and dream work, tarot and meditation, readers will learn to open up "life power" and access breath, will, and desire the key components of effective magic to, quite literally, reshape the world.

    Until recently historians often dismissed these descriptions as elaborate fictions created by judicial interrogators eager to find evidence of stereotypical pacts with the Devil. Although this paradigm is now routinely questioned, and most historians acknowledge that there was a folkloric component to familiar lore in the period, these beliefs and the experiences reportedly associated with them, remain substantially unexamined. Cunning-Folk and Familiar Spirits examines the folkloric roots of familiar lore from historical, anthropological and comparative religious perspectives. It argues that beliefs about witches' familiars were rooted in beliefs surrounding the use of fairy familiars by beneficent magical practitioners or 'cunning folk', and corroborates this through a comparative analysis of familiar beliefs found in traditional native American and Siberian shamanism. The author explores the experiential dimension of familiar lore by drawing parallels between early modern familiar encounters and visionary mysticism as it appears in both tribal shamanism and medieval European contemplative traditions. These perspectives challenge the reductionist view of popular magic in early modern British often presented by historians.

     Take an enlightening journey through occult history, exploring 100 dramatic incidents, arcane knowledge, and key historical figures from around the world. John Michael Greer delves into two millennia of tradition, from the earliest alchemists to pagan rituals; from the Philosopher’s Stone to Cabala, the first tarot, and the Knights Templar; and from the first horoscopes to fortune-telling trials and the birth of modern witchcraft, or Wicca. Each entry features a stunning image or intriguing item of ephemera.

    The Lucifer Priciple is a revolutionary work that explores the intricate relationships among genetics, human behavior, and culture to put forth the thesis that “evil” is a by-product of nature’s strategies for creation and that it is woven into our most basic biological fabric.

    She takes us from the Paleolithic period and the myths of the hunters right up to the “Great Western Transformation” of the last five hundred years and the discrediting of myth by science. The history of myth is the history of humanity, our stories and beliefs, our curiosity and attempts to understand the world, which link us to our ancestors and each other. Heralding a major series of retellings of international myths by authors from around the world, Armstrong’s characteristically insightful and eloquent book serves as a brilliant and thought-provoking introduction to myth in the broadest sense—and explains why if we dismiss it, we do so at our peril.

    1 SOFTCOVER BOOK

    Complete with charts and graphs and instructive interdimensional physics, The Voudon Gnostic Workbook is an "object of desire" among students of the occult. Weiser's long-anticipated republication of this rare text will be an event in the annals of esoteric publishing, as the book itself is somewhat of an "unholy grail." There are listservers devoted to it and much discussion of the mysteries held within its pages. While The Voudon Gnostic Workbook has remained a controversial book considered important for masters of metaphysics, it recently came into popular culture and renewed popularity when Grant Morrison revealed it had been the inspiration for his cult comics 'The Invisibles', using the cribbed time travel from Bertiaux' s masterwork. Voodoo is not an evil religion and is much misunderstood. It derives from the Dahomean Gods called the "Loa." Esoteric voodoo is actually a highly practical procedure for leading us into making contact with the deepest levels of our being and most ancient modes of consciousness. Michael Bertiaux's Voudon Gnostic Workbook is the most comprehensive and illuminating contemporary book on the subject. Launched out of a correspondence course and series of classes for students and followers of Voudon Gnosticism and the O.T.O., this seminal text is at once one of the most mysterious and magnificent of all esoteric books.

    "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

    Magliocco examines the roots that this religious movement has in a Western spiritual tradition of mysticism disavowed by the Enlightenment. She explores, too, how modern Pagans and Witches are imaginatively reclaiming discarded practices and beliefs to create religions more in keeping with their personal experience of the world as sacred and filled with meaning. Neo-Pagan religions focus on experience, rather than belief, and many contemporary practitioners have had mystical experiences. They seek a context that normalizes them and creates in them new spiritual dimensions that involve change in ordinary consciousness.Magliocco analyzes magical practices and rituals of Neo-Paganism as art forms that reanimate the cosmos and stimulate the imagination of its practitioners. She discusses rituals that are put together using materials from a variety of cultural and historical sources, and examines the cultural politics surrounding the movement--how the Neo-Pagan movement creates identity by contrasting itself against the dominant culture and how it can be understood in the context of early twenty-first-century identity politics.Witching Culture is the first ethnography of this religious movement to focus specifically on the role of anthropology and folklore in its formation, on experiences that are central to its practice, and on what it reveals about identity and belief in twenty-first-century North America.

    Even historians of religion, whose work naturally attends to events beyond the realm of empirical science, have shown scant interest in the subject. But the history of psychical phenomena, Kripal contends, is an untapped source of insight into the sacred. By tracing that history thru the last two centuries of Western thought we can see its potential centrality to the critical study of religion. Kripal grounds his study in the work of four major figures in the history of paranormal research: psychical researcher Frederic Myers; writer Charles Fort; astronomer, computer scientist & ufologist Jacques Vallee; & philosopher & sociologist Bertrand Mheust. Thru incisive analyses of these thinkers, Kripal ushers readers into a beguiling world somewhere between fact, fiction & fraud. The cultural history of telepathy, teleportation & UFOs; a ghostly love story; the occult dimensions of sf; cold war psychic espionage; galactic colonialism; & the intimate relationship between consciousness & culture all come together in Authors of the Impossible, a look at how the paranormal bridges the sacred & the scientific.