Magick Matters

20.04.2022

“Science of the Seance: Transnational Networks and Gendered Bodies in the Study of Psychic Phenomena, 1918-40” by Beth A. Robertson

Magick Matters

"Beth A. Robertson resurrects the story of a group of men and women who sought to transform the seance into a laboratory of the spirits and a transnational empirical project. Her findings cast new light on how science, metaphysics, and the senses collided to inform gendered norms in the 1920s and ’30s. She reveals a world inhabited, on one side, by psychical researchers who represented themselves as masters of the senses, untainted by the effeminized subjectivity of the body and, on the other, by mediums and ghostly subjects who could and did challenge the researchers’ exclusive claims to scientific expertise and authority."...>>

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19.04.2022

“Dread and Hope: Christian Eschatology and Pop Culture” by Joshua Wise

Magick Matters

"Christianity was born in the midst of great expectation and fear about the world’s future. The existing Jewish paradigm of the coming Messiah, his antithesis, and the initiation of the coming age set the stage for Christian beliefs about the end of the current age. However, the unexpected death and resurrection of Jesus caused that paradigm to be reformed within the burgeoning Christian faith, reshaping hopes, and reworking old patterns. Dread and Hope explores the ways in which those old paradigms were challenged by Jesus’s death and resurrection, how the resulting eschatological landscape was understood within Christianity, and how modern popular culture has consumed and modified various components of Christian Hope. Joshua Wise examines how...>>

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19.04.2022

“The Hidden Levels of the Mind: Swedenborg’s Theory of Consciousness” by Douglas Taylor

Magick Matters

"At the core of Swedenborg’s thought is the understanding that our purpose in this life is to progress spiritually—to learn, to grow, to do good works, and, ultimately, to allow as much of God’s love as possible to enter into us and manifest through us. Scattered throughout his works are descriptions of our mind and how it relates to both the physical and spiritual worlds. In this book, Taylor pulls these loose threads together and weaves them into a simple, coherent whole, presenting Swedenborg’s teachings as a system that anyone can follow. Taylor describes the external or natural mind as primarily concerned with material things, and the inner mind, in its essence, as love. As...>>

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19.04.2022

“The Religious Revolution: The Birth of Modern Spirituality, 1848-1898” by Dominic Green

Magick Matters

🕵️🐷🕵️ zero-day🕵️🐷🕵️ "The late nineteenth century was an age of grand ideas and great expectations fueled by rapid scientific and technological innovation. In Europe, the ancient authority of church and crown was overthrown for the volatile gambles of democracy and the capitalist market. If it was an age that claimed to liberate women, slaves, and serfs, it also harnessed children to its factories and subjected entire peoples to its empires. Amid this tumult, another sea change was underway: the religious revolution. In The Religious Revolution, Dominic Green charts this profound cultural and political shift, taking us on a whirlwind journey through the lives and ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman; of Éliphas Lévi and...>>

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19.04.2022

“The Spiritual Power of Masks: Doorways to Realms Unseen” by Nigel Pennick

Magick Matters

🕵️🐷🕵️ zero-day🕵️🐷🕵️ "There is a spiritual power in masks that transports one into realms unseen and gives voice to things unspoken. Within the context of ritual, putting on a mask places the wearer at the intersection between the present and the past, the living and the dead, this world and the Otherworld. Masks make it possible to activate ancient archetypes, with the mask wearer reanimating or personifying an ancestral presence or spirit, a deity or power, an animal or a being of the eldritch world. In this illustrated study, Nigel Pennick explores the magical and spiritual aspects of mask wearing from ancient times to the present. He examines the many mask traditions around Europe and shows...>>

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