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…
“Throughout my childhood and adolescence I was an avid reader of folklore and mythology…it’s very apparent that this interest had a huge and long lasting impact on my life and the path it’s taken.” -Darragh Mason International travel these days seems like a thing of the past, a dream known only by faint remembrances or…
“De Morgan was a spiritualist, meaning she believed that after the death of an individual’s body, their soul or spirit continued to live and operate in the world, and that individuals beyond the grave could thus be contacted. Such…ideas dominate her mature oeuvre.” -Emma Merkling In an article published in the New York Tribune about…
“Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century occultism was…heavily influenced by popular fiction, which often benefited from the generic fluidity that flourished at the chiasma of literary and Egyptological culture.” -Dr Eleanor Dobson For ages Egypt was regarded as a land of occult wisdom. In his Timaeus, Plato suggested that the Egyptians–the only people with knowledge of…
“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”….
“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…
FANTAST IN FOCUS: DARRAGH MASON “O’er space immense of seas and lands to go Will be your fate, and realms unknown explore Far as the confines of Earth’s utmost shore.” -from Jersusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso, trans. by J.H. Hunt (1822). Darragh Mason is a photographer, writer, and occultist. His wanderlust has driven him to some…
FANTAST IN FOCUS: DANIEL HARMS “They are either not mortal, or their date of life is indeterminately long; they are of a nature superior to man, and speak with contempt of human follies. By night they revel beneath the light of the moon and stars…” -from The Fairy Mythology: Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various…
ODD TRUTHS: ISLAMIC MAGIC IN MALTA Maltese folk magic has been studied in detail by scholars such as Francis Ciappara and Carmel Cassar. However, in 2014, a research team at the University of Exeter led by Professor Dionisius Agius, Dr Catherine Rider, and Dr Alex Mallett, recovered seventeenth-century court documents about an Egyptian slave who was accused of giving…
ODD TRUTHS: NOBLE DREW ALI, A JAZZ AGE PROPHET Timothy Drew (also known as Noble Drew Ali) rose to prominence in the midst of the Roaring Twenties, the era of bootleggers, speakeasies, and flappers. Although he was part of this milieu, Drew was destined to be the spokesman for what he saw as a spiritual answer…