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Gnosis 18: Middle Ages. A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions - REPRINT

Gnosis 18: Middle Ages. A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions - REPRINT (New)

by Gnosis

Publisher: Gnosis

Binding: Magazine

Book ID: GNO18R, GNO18R

Price: $20.00

Description



"When we look at the Tarot for what it apparently is, we look into a mental map of the time when the Italian and French Middle Ages were poised on the cusp of the Renaissance - a time that is actually stranger and intellectually more foreign to us than we tend to think."
- Chas S. Clifton, from The Unexamined Tarot

Contents -- Winter 1991

1
Editorial


2
News


3
Study Groups


4
Forum


10
Alternative Realities

A Sage for All Seasons
A column by Stephan A. Hoeller

12
Skeptic's Corner

Inner and Outer Realms
A column by Ted Schultz

14
Century of Marvels, Century of Light: The Esoteric Treasures of the Twelfth Century

by Timothy O'Neill
From Grail lore to Gothic cathedrals, from Muslims to monks, it was a century of rich spiritual development.

19
The Birth Within: Meister Eckhart and the Knowing of God

by Theodore J. Nottingham
An introduction to the unsurpassed German mystic.

24
The Code of Love: Troubadours, Cathars, and Ezra Pound

by John Kimsey
Did the poets of courtly love and the gnostic heretics of medieval Provence share the same esoteric perspective?

32
Unlocking Alchemy's Secrets: A Conversation with Adam MacLean

by Jay Kinney
The editor of the Hermetic Journal discusses his insights into alchemical symbolism.

38
Fire, Breath, & Silence: The Kabbalistic Meditations of Abraham Abulafia

by Avram Davis
The mystical techniques of the thirteenth century Jewish visionary.

44
The Unexamined Tarot

by Chas S. Clifton
What are the real origins of this most popular of oracles?

52
Doctor Illuminatus: The Achievements of Raymond Lully

by Charles Coulombe
A look at the life and work of one of the greatest minds of the Middle Ages.

57
Book Reviews

  • The Secret Zodiac: The Hidden Art in Medieval Astrology by Fred Gettings
  • Rose Windows by Painton Cowen
  • The Tres Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry introduction and legends by Jean Longnon and Raymond Lazelles, translation by Victoria Benedict
  • The Truing of Christianity: Visions of Life and Thought for the Future by John C. Meagher
  • Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid by Moshe Idel
  • An Arthurian Dictionary by Ruth Minary and Charles Moorman, preface by Geoffrey Ashe
  • Boadicea: Warrior Queen of the Celts by John Matthews, illustrated by James Field
  • King Arthur: The Dream of a Golden Age by Geoffrey Ashe
  • An Arthurian Reader: Selections from Arthurian Legend, Scholarship, and Story selected and edited by John Matthews
  • Gawain: Knight of the Goddess: Restoring an Archetype by John Matthews, foreword by Mildred Leake Day
  • The New Tarot: Modern Variations of Ancient Images by Rachel Pollack
  • The Encyclopedia of Tarot, Volume III by Stuart R. Kaplan
  • The Tarot: Art, Mysticism, Divination by Sylvie Simon, translated by William S. Konecky
  • The Modern Mystic: A New Collection of the Early Writings of Alan Watts edited by John Snelling and Mark Watts
  • The Gnostic Pynchon by Dwight Eddins
  • Synchronicity: The Intuitive Decision Making Tool by Visionary Software
  • The Poetics of Ascent: Theories of Language in a Rabbinic Ascent Text by Naomi Janowitz
  • The Mysteries of Yesod: The Foundation of Spiritual Life by Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov
  • Looking into the Invisible: Intuition, Clairvoyance, and Dreams by Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov
  • Prophecy: The History of the Future by Mobius Rex
  • Sorceress directed by Suzanne Schiffman, screenplay by Pamela Berger and Suzanne Schiffman
  • Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey by Alex Grey with essays by Ken Wilber and Carlo McCormick
  • Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy by Ottavia Niccoli, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane
  • Avalanche: Heretical Reflections on the Dark and the Light by W. Brugh Joy

69
The GNOSIS Office Soundtrack


Make Magic of Your Life: Passion, Purpose, and the Power of Desire Make Magic of Your Life: Passion, Purpose, and the Power of Desire
Coyle, T Thorn
Red Wheel/Weiser

"Working magic means showing up with your demons and your divinity, your sorrow and your joy. Alchemy only happens when we are willing to go through the processes of gathering together, refining, pouring, and solidifying. In the end, we have something fine to hold."

For pagans or anyone with magickal leanings everywhere, internationally known pagan and mystic T. Thorn Coyle offers a unique path to make everything in one's life alive with magic in Make Magic of Your Life.

Coyle shows how to achieve harmony and balance, and find your true purpose by activating the magical Qabalistic formula known as The Four Powers of the Sphinx: to know, to will, to dare, and to keep silent.

Coyle shows readers how to draw on the four powers of the sphinx to discover their "soul's possibility," their life's work, that which they most long to do.

In Make Magic of Your Life, Coyle explains how our deepest failings are often the very things that fuel our life's work, keep us human and whole, and even make us act as though -- like Prometheus -- we can steal fire from the Gods.

Price: $18.95

The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness
Watts, Alan W
New World Library

In describing the effects of mescaline, Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception literally opened a door. Watts walked through it with this classic account of the levels of insight consciousness-changing drugs can facilitate "when accompanied with sustained philosophical reflection by a person who is in search, not of kicks, but of understanding." Watts and peers including foreword authors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (then Harvard professors) anticipated physicists recognizing the individuals "inseparability from the rest of the world," the work of New Age thinkers who combine scientific findings and spiritual experiences, and federally funded clinical trials utilizing psilocybin to treat a variety of conditions. More than an artifact, The Joyous Cosmology is both a riveting memoir of Watts’ personal experiments and a profound meditation on our perennial questions about the nature of existence and the existence of the sacred.

Includes Watts's article "Psychedelics and Religious Experience"

Price: $14.00

Arcanum Bestiarum: Of The Subtil And Occult Virtues Of Divers Beasts Arcanum Bestiarum: Of The Subtil And Occult Virtues Of Divers Beasts
Fitzgerald, Robert
Three Hands Press

Written in the great tradition of the medieval bestiaries, Robert Fitzgerald's long-awaited new work Arcanum Bestiarum re-imagines the animal menagerie in the context of bestial mystery and atavistic power. Written for the modern magical practitioner and zoophile, the 272-page volume examines the occult virtues and totemic majesties of fifty animals, theriomorphs, and their kindred. Correspondences with deific powers, atavistic wisdom, and mythopoetic emanation are examined, especially in light of the tutelary powers all animals possess.

The Tetramorph -- essentially an animalic ‘crown of creation’ -- is here transformed into the far broader and innovative concept of the ‘Theriomorph’, or, the Zodiak Entire of Creation as an apotheosis of the animal form and zoötype… One of the greatest of virtues possessed by the Human is its bestial heritage, both spiritually and genetically. These attributes are often seen as primitive, chaotic and dangerous to civilized culture by the custodians of moralism and religion today, but the fact remains that it is our animal heritage that makes us what we are, or, more accurately, what we should and can be.

Special attention is given to the zoomorphic aspects of alchemy, which historically used the bestial emblemata as veils of the stages of the Great Work, as well as shamanism and witchcraft, bodies of knowledge particularly rich in the lore of animals as spirit-helpers. The work is an emergent strand of magical investigation long part of the author’s private life, where he has worked in the ecological field of wildlife rehabilitation, especially raptors.

The text is graced with fifty-five original woodcut illustrations by artist Liv Rainey-Smith, prepared especially for this title in close collaboration with the author. Amongst the more ambitious renderings in the work are the occult cryptofauna Homunculus, Manticore, Ouroboros, and Basilisk, as well as animals prominent in the ancient dawn of magick: the Bear, Goat, Viper, Peacock, and more. Completing the design elements is an original typeface designed for the work by calligrapher Gail Coppock, serving to illuminate this grimoire of the Magician’s Primal Eden.

The book is 272 pages, printed in two colour ink on heavy stock, and illustrated throughout.

Standard Edition: 1400 copies, in hardcover with dust jacket.

Price: $75.00

Scottish Witches and Warlocks. (Witchcraft of the British Isles Series, Book III) Scottish Witches and Warlocks. (Witchcraft of the British Isles Series, Book III)
Howard, Michael
Three Hands Press

In the village of at Cullen in Forfarshire, an arrest warrant was served in January 1657 for one Margaret Philp, accused of practicing witchcraft. Her servant, Isobel Imblaugh, testified she had seen her mistress have dealings with a spirit taking the form of a talking hare. Imblaugh said she had seen Philp put out a bannock, a jug of beer and a piece of meat for the sprite, and the next morning all was gone. On another occasion the spirit-hare allegedly entered the house through an open window and drank beer left out for it in a bowl. Far from an isolated account, magical traffic with such spirits was well-documented into the 19th century, when Highlanders left offerings of milk at prehistoric burial mounds and standing stones for the faeries known as brownies. Magical intercourse with fairies was but a small part of Scottish witchcraft belief, which also held that witches stole milk from their neighbor’s cows, raised storms to drown those at sea they disliked, produced wasting diseases to make their enemies fall ill or die, keep a baby inside its mother’s womb beyond her normal term, and transform themselves into animal forms so they could roam the countryside causing mischief and mayhem.

Scottish Witches and Warlocks examines the folk beliefs and magical practices of early modern Scotland, constellated especially around witchcraft. Treating matters of spirit-conjuring, herb-magic, and the Diabolical pact itself, it includes accounts of such peculiar personages as Isobel Gowdie, the Aberdeen Witches, Dr. John Fian and the North Berwick coven, Sir Robert Gordon of Gourdeston, and the Witches of Auldearn. Containing a number of illustrations, it is the third book in Michael Howard's Witchcraft in the British Isles series.

Also available as Deluxe hardcover, limited to 250 copies

Price: $23.50

Cave and Cosmos: Shamanic Encounters with Another Reality Cave and Cosmos: Shamanic Encounters with Another Reality
Harner, Michael
North Atlantic Books

In 1980, Michael Harner blazed the trail for the worldwide revival of shamanism with his seminal classic The Way of the Shaman. In this long-awaited sequel, he provides new evidence of the reality of heavens.

Drawing from a lifetime of personal shamanic experiences and more than 2,500 reports of Westerners' experiences during shamanic ascension, Harner highlights the striking similarities between their discoveries, indicating that the heavens and spirits they've encountered do indeed exist. He also provides instructions on his innovative core-shamanism techniques, so that readers too can ascend to heavenly realms, seek spirit teachers, and return later at will for additional healing and advice.

Written by the leading authority on shamanism, Cave and Cosmos is a must-read not only for those interested in shamanism, but also for those interested in spirituality, comparative religion, near-death experiences, healing, consciousness, anthropology, and the nature of reality.

Price: $19.95