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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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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
In the spring of 1576, a forty-eight-year-old mathematician named John Dee spent his days on board a cluster of ships tied up on the Thames, teaching…
In 1570 a Londoner who made his living in trade published the first complete English translation of Euclid's Elements, and he did something strange with the…
Modern readers who meet John Dee through legend expect a magician. The man who allegedly spoke with angels, folded into every story about Elizabethan…
In February 1570, a printer named John Day pushed through his presses an enormous English translation of Euclid, and pinned to the front of it a long essay…
In 1570, at the back of a book about triangles, one of England's greatest mathematicians paused to defend himself against the suspicion that he was a…
Somewhere in the middle decades of the thirteenth century, a single Latin sentence began to haunt the alchemists of Europe.
From Summa Perfectionis
In February 1570 a foldout sheet left John Day's London press tucked inside the first English translation of Euclid's Elements.
Open a copy of the 1570 English Euclid to the propositions on solid geometry and the page rises to meet you.
In the autumn of 1570 a Bologna professor of medicine in his late sixties was arrested by the Roman Inquisition, held until late December, and made to post…