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Tag: history

Early Modern Witch-Stories: An Interview with Dr Jan Machielsen

Posted on June 22, 2020October 8, 2020 by TheCustodian

“You have witnessed something of which everyone talks without knowledge; you have been initiated into secrets no less terrible than the grotto of Trophonius; you have been present at the Sabbath.” -from Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual (1896)  by Eliphas Levi  The witches’ sabbath has long been a source of fascination and debate. Sphinx-like,…

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The Heroine Cults of Ancient Greece

Posted on June 12, 2017October 8, 2020 by TheCustodian

“They say that there is a shrine also of the heroine Iphigenia…Hesiod, in his Catalogue of Women, says that Iphigenia did not die, but by the will of Artemis became Hecate.” -from Pausanias’s Description of Greece, vol. 1, trans. with a commentary by James George Frazer (1898).  To the Ancient Greeks, heroes and heroines were exalted beings—a…

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Thomas Tryon, The Pythagoras of London

Posted on January 24, 2017October 8, 2020 by TheCustodian

ODD TRUTHS: THOMAS TRYON, THE PYTHAGORAS OF LONDON “Cast thy Eyes round about thee, and enter into the inside of Things, and with a silent distinguishing Thought, and earnest sedate Meditation, and Contemplation, behold the wonderful Operations of the serene silent magick Powers of the Coelestials, and also of the Terrestials…” -from The Knowledge of a…

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The Adventures of Charles Godfrey Leland

Posted on October 14, 2016July 17, 2020 by TheCustodian

“You will remember that Albertus Magnus…adds emphatically, that the process will instruct and avail only to the few— that a man must be born a magician!” -from The Haunters and the Haunted by Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1859). In 1870, Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton hosted a quirky American man of letters named Charles Godfrey Leland at his manor house in Knebworth, Hertfordshire. The two thinkers were…

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The Angel Gunslingers of Peru

Posted on September 16, 2016July 31, 2020 by TheCustodian

“Painting was, from the very beginning, one of the most important instruments of conquest in the sphere of thinking, the mind.” – Guy Brett, “Being Drawn to an Image”, in Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1991). The airy cities of the Altiplano region in South America were once at the forefront of a major culture war. Strangely enough,…

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Paracelsus the Rebel

Posted on July 12, 2016October 8, 2020 by TheCustodian

ODD TRUTHS: PARACELSUS THE REBEL The nineteenth-century occultist Eliphas Levi praised Paracelsus as a kind of crazy wisdom guru. He pictured the Swiss doctor and alchemist as a frequently drunk “maniac”, who had been more powerful than the most “celebrated magnetists”. Levi’s views were typical of the romanticism of his era, but similar sentiments were…

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Zora the Explorer

Posted on June 26, 2016August 7, 2020 by TheCustodian

Earlier this year, National Geographic reported that a team of archaeologists had discovered a legendary city in the remote La Mosquitia Valley of Honduras. The expedition’s ethnobotanist is quoted as saying that the area is “the most undisturbed rain forest in Central America”. Amazingly the ruins—which are still being excavated—point to the existence of a…

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Fantast in Focus: Mike Jay

Posted on December 19, 2014September 18, 2016 by TheCustodian

FANTAST IN FOCUS: MIKE JAY Mike Jay is a cultural historian who hounds the maddening stories of the people who ventured to bizarre borderlands of consciousness. Praised by the Guardian, The Independent, and the New Statesmen, Mike has written about nineteenth-century drug culture, the Illuminati, and the earliest claims of machine-based brainwashing. Mike currently curates…

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