Or ARCANA VIRIDIA; A GRANARY OF THE FAUNS, BEING AN OCCULT HERBARIUM. Images by Benjamin A. Vierling It is a truism that for much of humanity’s existence its medicines have been derived from Nature. For, from where else would they be obtained? Over millennia, the slow and no-doubt fraught process of discerning the medicinal benefits of the world’s 400,000 plant species (of these, only 15,000 have been used for medicinal purposes at some point in history) has resulted in a […]
Tag: occult books
REVIEW: ANARCH BY GAST BOUSCHET
What is the role of the artist? Answers to this question are often framed in terms of utility: the artist’s role is to provide service to the society in which they operate; to record and document, to communicate, to interpret, to impart meaning – all for the benefit of the community. But what happens when the artist rejects society; it’s norms, morals and its values? Or extracts themselves from it, becoming located in a place outside and beyond? What is […]
REVIEW: PIRANESI BY SUSANNA CLARKE
Piranesi is a work of occult fiction inasmuch as magickal concepts are absolutely fundamental to the fabric of the story. But it is also an occult work in the sense that it is deeply strange, unsettling, otherworldly and revelatory; reality is transformed in its reading. Even though ‘magic’ is the central topic in Susanna Clarke’s first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and despite the fact that it flirts with some esoteric ideas (to a similar extent as, say, Philip […]
REVIEW: AJAR TO THE NIGHT BY AUTUMN RICHARDSON
Ajar to the Night by Autumn Richardson, a work of three linked poems, is concerned with metempsychosis – the transmigration of the soul (psyche) from one physical body (soma) to another following death. Its western origins can be traced to Orphism, where the eternal cycle of metempsychosis can only be broken by initiation into the Dionysian Mysteries. Orpheus himself was celebrated by the Greeks as the greatest magician, musician and poet who ever lived, so it is entirely appropriate that the topic […]