“In order to survive this [being Black in America], you have to really dig down into yourself and recreate yourself, really, according to no image which yet exists in America.” -James Baldwin In September 1919 The Wild West Weekly, a periodical specialising in adventure narratives of contemporary life in the American West, picked up on…
Shambhala, Avalon, the Blessed Isles and the like have inspired humans for millennia, and yet–mystical insights aside–no physical traces of any of these locations have ever been found. Writers on dark tourism, however, like Peter Hohenhaus, have meticulously tracked down and descended into all kinds of hellscapes–places much more familiar and accessible to mere mortals….
“With several sub-departments and a distinct division of work, the Venetian secret service was different to other, more rudimentary espionage networks created by rulers (and their rivals) in other parts of Italy and early modern Europe.” -Dr Ioanna Iordanou Giacomo Casanova–as is well known–was fiercely independent, possessing an untempered passion for high adventure, self-promotion, and…
“If they find any to be timorous and fearful, they admit not such a man to the secrets of magick…But such as appear to be of bold and undaunted spirits, they take especial notice of them, and reserve them for serious employments.” -from the English translation of Johann Cambilhon’s De studiis Jesuitarum abstrusioribus (1608) Sometime…
“I do not profess myself to be any great Statesman, or exactly to know what ever is secretly transacted among us: But this I can say…I have for many years last past been as curious an observer of all the great transactions of Affairs in Church or State, and of the instruments and means by…
“Pentecostals everywhere train themselves to hear, to see, or to feel God’s presence in their daily lives. That kind of intimate relationship…is one of the defining aspects of evangelical religiosity.” – Dr Naomi Richman Jesus famously predicted that the apocalypse would be preceded by “wars and rumours of wars”, pestilence, earthquakes, mass persecutions, and the…
“David Lazzaretti…his doctrines were a strange medley of Christianity and Socialism. He proclaimed the advent of the Divine Republic, the death of tyrants, and the triumph of eternal justice.” -From “Death of a Fanatic”, in The Cincinnati Evening Star, 26 November 1878 It’s been said that a prophet never achieves fame in his own homeland,…
“We may smile at the mystifying style of James the First, but it veils a dark truth: ‘You must not dip too deep in what kings reserve among themselves, among the arcana imperii.’” – from Commentaries on the life and reign of Charles the First, King of England, vol. I, by Isaac D’israeli As with…
“I have heard him [Napoleon] say, oftener than once…that four hostile newspapers were more to be feared than a hundred thousand troopers in battle array.” -from Evenings with Prince Evenings with Prince Cambacérès, Second Consul, Archchancellor of the Empire, Vol. 2, by Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon (1837) The very distant ancestors of today’s press, though constantly in…
“Man is himself the creator of his heaven and hell, and there are no demons except our own follies.” -from Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual by Eliphas Lévi (1896) Some of the most persuasive revolutionaries in history have been renegade clerics. Moses, for example, was said to be “learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians”….