“At some future day—I cannot say when and where—it will be proved that the human soul is…already in an uninterrupted communication with those living in another world; that the human soul can act upon those beings, and receive, in return, impressions of them…” – Immanuel Kant Humanity’s first attempts to contact otherworldly intelligences date back…
Sleep’s importance to early modern life and culture can hardly be overstated and yet the history of this vital and ubiquitous human experience has barely been told. -Professor Sasha Handley How has climate impacted historical sleeping patterns? How did early peoples interpret and customise their own sleep environments? These are some of the questions that…
“I had previously stumbled across book curses when leafing through manuscripts and, as an avid fan of folk horror literature, was interested in the intersection of the macabre and book history.” -Dr Eleanor Baker Modern libraries do not suffer fools gladly. To protect their collections from ambitious thieves, they frequently rely on a multipronged strategy,…
“The primary focus of the book is to shed light on the concepts of indigenous and trans-cultural shamanism within the Italian context, while also delving into the fascinating realm of Italian folk magic tradition that I systematised as the Tradition of Segnature.” -Dr Angela Puca In the late 1890s, Eustace Neville-Rolfe–an acquaintance of Charles Godfrey…
“My entire life has been guided by an enthusiasm for dreaming and the dream aesthetic…As a child, my intuition told me that lucid dreaming offered an opportunity to expand the human experience and transcend the mortal realm.” -from Initiation into Dream Mysteries: Drinking from the Pool of Mnemosyne (2023) by Sarah Janes For the ancients,…
In January 2023, the University of Copenhagen launched the Dark Arts Research Group (DARG). Covering the period from 1750 to the present, the project will take an in-depth look at the global public’s “fascination with otherworldly entities and the macabre”. The DARG is specifically interested in exploring the varied ways horror, gothic, and other esoteric…
“From a historical point of view, astrology is a fascinating subject…it has traversed not only time but also many cultures with different philosophical and religious views. -Dr Luís Ribeiro Astrology remains one of humanity’s most enduring and enchanting interests. Like stars, coruscating in the darkness infinite, it has been a guide to all civilizations, casting…
“Dowsing rods and transmutative alchemy, mining tools and popular magic have all been analysed by modern historians. Mathematics, on the other hand, is surprisingly missing from historical accounts of mines, caves, and the underground world.” -from Underground Mathematics (2022) by Dr Thomas Morel In early March, a team from the ScanPyramids project confirmed the existence…
“It is…no wonder that sun, moon, and star-rises and -sets are the most widespread celestial phenomena encoded in alignments of structures.” – Dr Fabio Silva Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Raiders of the Lost Ark is a film buff’s dream: full of clever dialogue, imaginative history, and eye-popping (sometimes literally) sequences–all brought to life by John Williams’s…
“A better understanding of the history of some of the mystical techniques found in Kabbalah will show that some of them stem from magical sources. Likewise, neglected texts found in manuscripts related to [Jewish] ‘saintly’ mystical figures…will reveal a much greater role played by magic in their activities than previously suspected.” -Moshe Idel Wizards, said…