Magick Matters

20.04.2022

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

Magick Matters

🕵️🐷🕵️ 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...>>

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20.04.2022

“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)

Magick Matters

"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....>>

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20.04.2022

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

Magick Matters

"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...>>

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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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