Ancient Wisdom for a Modern World.
An independent magazine on alchemy, consciousness, psychedelics, philosophy, mysticism and strange history. Old texts read closely, new research followed carefully.
Latest articles
- The Key of Solomon: The Magic Book Europe Kept Copying Europe copied this book of spirit magic by hand for centuries and credited it to King Solomon. Its manuscripts tell a messier story.
- Maria the Jewess and the Bath That Bears Her Name The bain-marie is named for an alchemist of Roman Egypt. She almost certainly did not invent it, and almost nothing she wrote survives.
- The Wild Hunt: Europe's Ghostly Riders of the Night From Peterborough to Bohemia, people heard a spectral hunt pass overhead. Its famous name, and much of its shape, came from Jacob Grimm.
- Día de los Muertos: What Is Aztec and What Is Catholic Marigolds, sugar skulls, all-night vigils, La Catrina. Some come from the Aztecs, some from Catholic Europe, and historians still fight over which is which.
- Samhain: What We Actually Know About the Celtic New Year Samhain was real. The Celtic New Year and the pagan feast of the dead owe more to Victorian scholars than to any ancient record.
- War of the Worlds, 1938: Did America Really Panic? Orson Welles's Martian invasion made headlines as a nationwide panic. The ratings, the hospitals and the listener mail tell a much smaller story.
- Gurdjieff and the Idea That Most People Are Asleep George Gurdjieff taught that ordinary life is a kind of waking sleep. The idea outlived him; his own biography is much harder to pin down.
- Why Witches Ride Broomsticks: The Flying Ointment Theory, Checked Every Halloween the drugged broomstick story returns. The plants were real and dangerous. Most of the rest comes from confessions extracted under torture.
- October 27, 1970: The Law That Put Psychedelics in Schedule I Nixon's signing remarks covered heroin and pep pills. The law he signed put LSD, peyote and psilocybin in the strictest drug category there is.
- Zosimos of Panopolis: The First Real Alchemist and His Nightmare Around 300, an Egyptian alchemist described stills, furnaces and a dream of a priest cut apart at an altar. To him, all of it was chemistry.
- Houdini Versus the Mediums Harry Houdini once staged séances himself. Then he spent his last six years exposing mediums, from a Boston parlor to a hearing room in Congress.
- Mercury Retrograde: What Is Actually Happening Up There Three or four times a year, Mercury seems to stop and back up across the sky. It never does. The truth is geometry, and an ancient puzzle.
Topics
- Alchemy
- Philosophy
- Magick
- Consciousness
- Psychedelics
- Strange History
- Mysticism
- Dharma
- Astrology
- Folklore
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