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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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The Archive
New research, historical primers, and reading guides from across the catalog.
The Dhammapada is everywhere now. It fits in a pocket, loads free onto any e-reader, and turns up in bookstore poetry sections between Rumi and Mary Oliver.
From The Dhammapada
In 1936, C. G. Jung began a seminar in Zurich on children's dreams. Over the following years it grew into something larger: a survey, delivered to a circle…
You wake with an image in your head: a staircase, a stranger's face, an eclipse. Days later something happens and the image seems to have known it first.
For roughly seventeen centuries, if you wanted to know what the Gnostics taught, you had to ask the people who wanted them destroyed.
From Gnosticism Explained
In the southern wetlands of Iraq and Iran, where the Tigris and Euphrates slow into reed beds before reaching the sea, a small people has spent something…
From Gnosticism Explained
The Pistis Sophia has been drowning readers for the better part of two centuries.
In 1785 the British Museum paid the heirs of a dead London physician for a damaged Coptic manuscript that almost no one in England could read.
A single sentence from a fragmented Coptic gospel has done strange work in the modern imagination.
From The Gospel of Mary
For roughly thirty years, a running argument in the study of early Christianity has held that the field's favorite word should be retired.
From Gnosticism Explained
Open a modern edition of A True and Faithful Relation and you meet a problem before you meet a single angel.
Sometime around the end of the thirteenth century, a writer working in Latin composed a long, disciplined treatise on the art of alchemy.
From Summa Perfectionis
There is a story about alchemy that almost everyone knows. For centuries, so it goes, clever men wasted their lives stirring molten metals and muttering…
From Summa Perfectionis