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Read researched articles and historical primers on alchemy, Gnosticism, ceremonial magic, grimoires, and the Western esoteric tradition. Every article connects back to a book.
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Esoteric literature has a way of swallowing beginners whole. You pick up one book about alchemy, and within a week you have six tabs open about Renaissance…
From Gnosticism Explained
The Archive
New research, historical primers, and reading guides from across the catalog.
Somewhere around the year 1310, a Latin author sat down to write a book about furnaces.
From Summa Perfectionis
In 1908 a small book appeared in Chicago under the byline "Three Initiates." In 1912 a Russian journalist finished a treatise on the fourth dimension, a…
In January 1896 the German scholar Carl Reinhardt bought a Coptic papyrus codex in Cairo.
From The Gospel of Mary
Some books resist being read aloud. You can summarize a novel over dinner, and a history book lends itself to bullet points, but a certain strain of…
Every few decades, someone translates the esoteric classics again. New Enoches appear. New Pistis Sophias.
From The Book of Enoch
Pick a shelf of spiritual books at random and you will find, somewhere in the first twenty pages, the same accusation: you are not actually awake.
From The Dhammapada
Two books sit at the far ends of the esoteric shelf, and they answer the same question in opposite ways.
In the summer of 1552, two of the most restless minds in Europe were, as far as anyone can tell, in the same city at the same time.
A man walks down a street in St Petersburg, around 1916, trying to hold one unusual question in his mind: am I here?
Two texts, separated by something like two millennia and with no documented line of transmission between them, open with the same move.
Every few years someone rediscovers the Kybalion and announces, with the confidence of a person quoting scripture, that it preserves the ancient wisdom of…
The Dhammapada is one of the most widely read Buddhist scriptures, and it has probably been abandoned by more readers than any other short classic.
From The Dhammapada