We like to see the ancient world as filled with a lot of certain religions, all somehow clear and authentic in themselves. But the reality is more complex, for sure. Muslims, Christians, and Jews debated each other at times, and their religions affected

It may seem unlikely that a scientist and a theologian would discuss angels in the twenty-first century. Both disciplines at the end of the modern era appear equally embarrassed by this subject. For theologians it became an embarrassment for three hundred years even to mention angels. During the Newtonian-Cartesian industrial age, angels were banished, trivialized. The Baroque churches built in the seventeenth century, the same century that science and religion split, depicted angels as chubby

How I found my way out of depression, thanks to the writings of the English priest who brought Buddhism to the West.Ever since I was a child, I have been acutely sensitive to the idea — in the way that other people seem to feel only after bereavement or some shocking unexpected event — that the human intellect is unable, finally, to make sense of the world: everything is contradiction and paradox, and no one really knows much for sure, however loudly they profess to the contrary. It is an

Pathways in Modern Western Magic is Concrescent Press’s reply to the conditions of contemporary academic publishing—an activity that, especially for scholars of area studies, is at best difficult and at worst, financially untenable. The book is the first

A Brazilian student has mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind a locked room covered in encrypted texts, 14 handwritten books and a massive statue of occultist Giordano Bruno.Bruno Borges, a 24-year-old student from Brazil, reportedly vanished on March 27th after completing a secretive project consisting of thousands of pages of encrypted texts combined with mysterious symbols. Along with references to the Bible, alchemy, demonology and Leonardo da Vinci, Borges left a bizarre painting of him

It is perhaps fitting that the ancient ouroboros marks the beginning – and end – of Never Ending Stories, a major exhibition currently showing at Germany’s Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. Spanning multiple mediums, time periods, and fields, the exhibition explores the concept of the loop on a hitherto unseen scale. “The loop is very telling for our times,” says curator Ralf Beil, “and the concept of the loop has never been presented in a larger consideration of time and space.” Organised into 14

Over the centuries a lot of books have been written stating that loyal readers and followers of the text will be gifted with magical powers. In some cases these books are meant to invoke demons or angels. In other cases they promise to allow the reader