Magick Matters

“The Moon-Eyed People: Folk Tales from Welsh America” by Peter Stevenson

"A lone man wanders from swamp to swamp searching for himself, a wolf-girl visits Wales and eats the sheep, a Welsh criminal marries an "Indian Princess", Lakota men re-enact the Wounded Knee Massacre in Cardiff and, all the while, mountain women practise Appalachian hoodoo, native healing and Welsh witchcraft. These stories are a mixture of true tales, tall tales and folk tales, that tell of the lives of migrants who left Wales and settled in America, of the native and enslaved people who had long been living there, and those curious travellers who returned to find their roots in the old country. They were explorers, miners, dreamers, hobos, tourists, farmers, radicals, showmen, sailors, soldiers, witches,...>>

“Boggarts, Trolls and Tylwyth Teg: Folk Tales of Hidden People & Lost Lands” by Peter Stevenson

"The Grimms called them The Quiet Folk, in Maori they are Patupaiarehe, in Wales Y Tylwyth Teg: hidden people who live unseen, speak their own languages and move around like migrants, shrouded from our eyes — like those who lived in the utopian world of Plant Rhys Ddwfn off the west Welsh coast, where this book begins. In mythology, lost lands are coral castles beneath the sea, ancient forests where spirits live, and mountain swamps where trolls lurk. Strip away the mythology, and they become valleys and villages flooded to provide drinking water to neighbouring kingdoms, campsites where travellers are told they can’t travel, and reservations where the rights of first nations people are ignored. The...>>

“The Secret Crypt” by Salvador Elizondo

"Originally published in 1968, The Secret Crypt is something of a cult classic in Mexican literature. Elizondo’s impassioned, breathless prose launches the reader into a labyrinth that is also a hall of mirrors. Here, we find a small group of characters who are part of an underground sect called Urkreis, one of whose aims is to discover the identity of the sect’s founder, known only as "the Imagined". The identities of narrator, author, and characters blur into one another as the narrative moves between the two worlds of the novel and the author writing the novel—an unclassifiable masterpiece containing initiation rites, sacrificial murder, conspiracy, and delirium."...>>

“Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science & Religion” by Nicholas Spencer

🕵️🐷🕵️ zero-day🕵️🐷🕵️ "Science and religion have always been at each other’s throats, right? Most things you "know" about science and religion are myths or half-truths that grew up in the last years of the nineteenth century and remain widespread today. The true history of science and religion is a human one. It’s about the role of religion in inspiring, and strangling, science before the scientific revolution. It’s about the sincere but eccentric faith and the quiet, creeping doubts of the most brilliant scientists in history — Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein. Above all it’s about the question of what it means to be human and who gets to say — a question that is more...>>