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"The Society for Psychical Research was established in 1882 to further the scientific study of consciousness, but it arose in the surf of a larger cultural need. Victorians were on the hunt for self-understanding. Mesmerists, spiritualists, and other romantic seekers roamed sunken landscapes of entrancement, and when psychology was finally ready to confront these altered states, psychical research was adopted as an experimental vanguard. Far from a rejected science, it was a necessary heterodoxy, probing mysteries as diverse as telepathy, hypnosis, and even séance phenomena. Its investigators sought facts far afield of physical laws: evidence of a transcendent, irreducible mind.
The New Prometheans traces the evolution of psychical research through the intertwining biographies of...>>
"Night’s Black Agents offers a lucid and highly readable introduction to the world of witches and wizards in Greek and Roman antiquity, and to the ghosts of the dead that were often associated with them. In its pages Daniel Ogden introduces us to the ancient equivalents, and often the actual prototypes, of the cherished ingredients of the modern horror movie: the witch, beautiful and lovelorn or ugly and gruesome, the venerable sorcerer, the haunted house, the werewolf, the dragon, the vampire, the zombie, the Frankenstein’s monster and even the Island of Dr. Moreau. The book allows the lively ancient texts to speak for themselves as much as possible: we hear testimony from long-buried curse...>>
