“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…
“A sudden shift in our relationship with the dead, or in the geography of the afterlife, can have unthinkable consequences…” -Ivan Cenzi The University of Padua has long been associated with daring research. In the early modern era especially, the school was a bastion of learning that attracted experimental thinkers who passionately investigated and dissected…
“He lived with such intensity that people have stayed fascinated by him. They’ve told his story over and over again–for different reasons and in different ways.” -from Magic and the Dignity of Man: Pico della Mirandola and His Oration in Modern Memory (2019) by Professor Brian Copenhaver It would not be an exaggeration to call…
“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…
“Praetorius’s world and his work were constructed of wonderment at the magical universe and of the speculations of the new science.” -from Ways of Knowing in Early Modern Germany: Johannes Praetorius as a Witness to His Time (2006) by Gerhild Scholz Williams Among Germany’s many legendary sites, the Brocken (formerly known as the Blocksberg) is…
“The occult sciences are part of Islamic intellectual history..they constituted a primary mode by which people thought about the hidden, the extraordinary, and their potential for partaking in the divine and wondrous.” -from “From Ġāyat al-ḥakīm to Šams al-maʿārif wa laṭāʾif al-ʿawārif: Ways of Knowing and Paths of Power” by Liana Saif In 2015, Dr…
“They can assume all manner of shapes at their pleasure, appear in what likeness they will themselves…they are most swift in motion, can pass many miles in an instant…” -from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1621) Almost four hundred years ago, a young Oxford graduate named Joseph Glanvill published The Vanity of Dogmatizing, a…
“To reveal and discover conspiracies, and to govern the greater things of life; as to blast or succeed the enterprises of princes and people; to tell and foretell the success of such and such undertakings; and even to influence the undertakers…” -from A Compleat System of Magick: or, The History of the Black Art by Daniel Defoe…