Magick Matters

“The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English” by Hana Videen

"An entertaining and illuminating collection of weird, wonderful, and downright baffling words from the origins of English―and what they reveal about the lives of the earliest English speakers Old English is the language you think you know until you actually hear or see it. Unlike Shakespearean English or even Chaucer’s Middle English, Old English―the language of Beowulf―defies comprehension by untrained modern readers. Used throughout much of Britain more than a thousand years ago, it is rich with words that haven’t changed (like word), others that are unrecognizable (such as neorxnawang, or paradise), and some that are mystifying even in translation (gafol-fisc, or tax-fish). In this delightful book, Hana Videen gathers a glorious trove of these...>>

“Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages” by David Keck

"Recently angels have made a remarkable comeback in the popular imagination; their real heyday, however, was the Middle Ages. From the great shrines dedicated to Michael the Archangel at Mont-St-Michel and Monte Garano to the elaborate metaphysical speculations of the great thirteenth-century scholastics, angels dominated the physical, temporal, and intellectual landscape of the medieval West. This book offers a full-scale study of angels and angelology in the Middle Ages. Seeking to discover how and why angels became so important in medieval society, David Keck considers a wide range of fascinating questions such as: Why do angels appear on baptismal fonts? How and why did angels become normative for certain members of the church? How did...>>

“Glimpses of the Unknown: Lost Ghost Stories” edited by Mike Ashley

"A figure emerges from a painting to pursue a bitter vengeance; the last transmission of a dying man haunts the airwaves, seeking to reveal his murderer; a treasure hunt disturbs an ancient presence in the silence of a lost tomb. From the vaults of the British Library comes a new anthology celebrating the best works of forgotten, never since republished, supernatural fiction from the early XX century. Waiting within are malevolent spirits eager to possess the living and mysterious spectral guardians—a diverse host of phantoms exhumed from the rare pages of literary magazines and newspaper serials to thrill once more."...>>

“The Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend: The Magical and Mystical Power Sources Within the Mysteries of Britain” by Gareth Knight

"In this book Gareth Knight takes the most famous and most haunting of all British legends and places it in its rightful position as the core of the Western Mystery Tradition, which draws its inspiration from Greek, Irish and even Atlantean myth. The central Arthurian themes and characters are brought to life with clear and thorough explanations, while the carefully woven pattern that has developed around the Arthuriad is carefully unravelled and its full esoteric significance revealed. This fascinating study, which builds on the work of Dion Fortune and Margaret Lumley Brown, takes the reader beyond the world of Malory and unfolds an inner landscape as real as the isles in which it was created."...>>