Magick Matters

“Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century” by Edward F. Kelly and Emily Williams Kelly

"Current mainstream opinion in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind holds that all aspects of human mind and consciousness are generated by physical processes occurring in brains. Views of this sort have dominated recent scholarly publication. The present volume, however, demonstrates empirically that this reductive materialism is not only incomplete but false. The authors systematically marshal evidence for a variety of psychological phenomena that are extremely difficult, and in some cases clearly impossible, to account for in conventional physicalist terms. Topics addressed include phenomena of extreme psychophysical influence, memory, psychological automatisms and secondary personality, near-death experiences and allied phenomena, genius-level creativity, and 'mystical' states of consciousness both spontaneous and drug-induced. The authors further show...>>

“The Price of Immortality: The Race to Live Forever” by Peter Ward

🕵️🐷🕵️ zero-day🕵️🐷🕵️ "In the tradition of Jon Ronson and Tim Wu, an absorbing and revelatory journey into the American Way of Defying Death . . . As longevity medicine revolutionizes the lives of many older people, the quest to take the next step—to live as long as we choose—has spurred a scientific arms race in search of the elixir of life, funded by Big Tech and Silicon Valley. Once the stuff of Mesopotamian mythology and episodes of Star Trek, the effort to make humans immortal is becoming increasingly credible as the pace of technological progress quickens. It has also empowered a wild-eyed fringe of pseudo-scientists, tech visionaries, scam-artists, and religious fanatics who...>>

“Scrying the Secrets of the Future: How to Use Crystal Ball, Fire, Wax, Mirrors, Shadows, and Spirit Guides to Reveal Your Destiny” by Cassandra Eason (incomplete)

"Scrying the Secrets of the Future offers practical, hands-on guidance to using a wide variety of methods from many cultures and ages-from Ancient Egypt, the Aztecs and Mayans, and Classical Greece and Rome to Medieval European magicians, village wise women and 21st century coffee-shop divination. Discussion of each method includes its history and cultural background, traditional practices, and how to adapt these techniques to the needs of the modern world and everyday decision making." ⚠️ This file was downloaded from Google Books and is missing about 20% of the pages....>>

“Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture” by Simone Natale

"In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed. Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the...>>

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

"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."...>>