Xognosis EsotericaArcane Publishing StudioJournal
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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Matching Alchemy.
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
Somewhere around the year 1310, a Latin author sat down to write a book about furnaces.
From Summa Perfectionis
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
Ask most people who Jabir ibn Hayyan was and you will get a biography with the confidence of an encyclopedia entry: born at Tus in 721, son of a druggist,…
From Summa Perfectionis
Somewhere in Europe, probably in Italy, in the first decade of the fourteenth century, an alchemist sat down and wrote one of the most detailed laboratory…
From Summa Perfectionis
A book with no sentences is a bold wager. In 1677, at La Rochelle on the French Atlantic coast, the publisher Pierre Savouret printed a slim volume of…
In 1677 a small book left a press in the Huguenot port of La Rochelle and said almost nothing.
Open an old alchemical text expecting dragons, celestial spheres, and hermetic thunder, and you will often find yourself instead in a house.
Open a page of John Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica at random and you see a strange object: a single compound sign, part astronomical, part alchemical, drawn once…
From Monas Hieroglyphica
In thirteen days of January 1564, John Dee wrote one of the strangest books in the history of science.
From Monas Hieroglyphica
Somewhere in the middle decades of the thirteenth century, a single Latin sentence began to haunt the alchemists of Europe.
From Summa Perfectionis