Magick Matters

18.07.2021

“The Penguin Book of Mermaids” edited by Christina Bacchilega and Marie Alohalani Brown

Magick Matters

"Among the oldest and most popular mythical beings, mermaids and other merfolk have captured the imagination since long before Ariel sold her voice to a sea witch in the beloved Disney film adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. As far back as the eighth century B.C., sailors in Homer's Odyssey stuffed wax in their ears to resist the Sirens, who lured men to their watery deaths with song. More than two thousand years later, the gullible New York public lined up to witness a mummified "mermaid" specimen that the enterprising showman P. T. Barnum swore was real. The Penguin Book of Mermaids is a treasury of such tales about merfolk and water spirits...>>

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18.07.2021

“The Hermetic Qabalah” by Paul A. Clark

Magick Matters

"There has always existed a system of teaching that has been sourced in the direct, personal experience of seekers dedicated to discovering the meaning of life. These adepts, both men and women of exceptional quality, are known as the "esoteric teachers." Through the ages, they have adopted and codified various means and methods of transmitting this knowledge, thus making their revelations and wisdom available to generations of aspirants. This is, for the present age of seekers, the purpose of this work. These teachings did not originate with the author. He is merely the scribe. In the West, one of the greatest vehicles for the transmission of this knowledge is the Qabalistic Tree of Life....>>

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18.07.2021

“Technologies for Intuition: Cold War Circles and Telepathic Rays” by Alaina Lemon

Magick Matters

"Since the Cold War, Americans and Russians have together cultivated fascination with the workings and failures of communicative channels. Each accuses the other of media jamming and propaganda, and each proclaims its own communication practices better for expression and creativity. Technologies for Intuition theorizes phaticity—the processes by which people make, check, discern, or describe channels and contacts, judging them weak or strong, blocked or open. This historical ethnography of intuition juxtaposes telepathy experiments and theatrical empathy drills, passing through settings where media and performance professionals encounter neophytes, where locals open channels with foreigners, and where skeptics of contact debate naifs. Tacking across geopolitical borders, the book demonstrates how contact and channel shift in significance...>>

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18.07.2021

“Medieval Ghost Stories: An Anthology of Miracles, Marvels and Prodigies” by Andrew Joynes

Magick Matters

"Stories of spirits returning from the afterlife are as old as storytelling: accounts of ghosts and revenants which have crossed the mysterious border between the living and the dead are a dominant theme in many cultures, and in medieval Europe ghosts, nightstalkers, wild hunts and unearthly visitors from parallel worlds have figured in stories already in circulation before the coming of Christianity. Medieval Ghost Stories is a collection of ghostly occurrences from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries; they have been found in monastic chronicles and preaching manuals, in sagas and heroic poetry, and in medieval romances. In a religious age, the tales bore a peculiar freight of spooks and spirituality which can still...>>

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18.07.2021

“Consciousness and the Source of Reality: The PEAR Odyssey” by Robert G. Jahn and Brenda J. Dunne

Magick Matters

"When Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne first embarked on their exotic scholarly journey more than three decades ago, their aspirations were little higher than to attempt replication of some previously asserted anomalous results that might conceivably impact future engineering practice, either negatively or positively, and to pursue those ramifications to some appropriate extent. But as they followed that tortuous research path deeper into its metaphysical forest, it became clear that far more fundamental epistemological issues were at stake, and far stranger phenomenological creatures were on the prowl, than they had originally envisaged, and that a substantially broader range of intellectual and cultural perspectives would be required to pursue that trek productively. This text is their attempt...>>

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