Ancient Wisdom for a Modern World.
An independent magazine on alchemy, consciousness, psychedelics, philosophy, mysticism and strange history. Old texts read closely, new research followed carefully.
Latest articles
- Hildegard of Bingen: The Abbess Who Saw the Living Light She said heaven dictated her books. A pope agreed, a neurologist diagnosed migraine, and neither account quite covers what she left behind.
- Where Tarot Actually Came From The cards were a trick-taking game for Italian dukes for three centuries. Then a Paris scholar looked at a pack in 1781 and saw ancient Egypt.
- María Sabina and the Mushroom Ceremony That Changed the West In 1955 a Mazatec healer let a New York banker join her mushroom rite. He became famous. Her house was burned.
- The Bicameral Mind: Julian Jaynes and the Voices of the Gods In 1976 a Princeton psychologist argued that the heroes of the Iliad were not conscious. Fifty years on, the idea refuses to die.
- The I Ching: How a Bronze Age Oracle Became a Book of Philosophy It began as a diviner's handbook of omens and verdicts. Centuries of commentary, and a false attribution to Confucius, made it a cosmos.
- Alice Coltrane's Turn Toward God After John Coltrane died in 1967, his widow went through an ordeal, found a guru, made two astonishing records and left the music business for an ashram.
- MKUltra: The CIA's Secret Psychedelic Experiments For twenty years the CIA tested LSD on Americans, some of them unwitting. Then it destroyed the files. Here is what survived.
- Isaac Newton's Secret Life as an Alchemist A 1936 auction revealed that the author of the Principia wrote about a million words on alchemy. Here is what the manuscripts really show.
- Gateway Process: The Army Report That Tried to Explain Consciousness In 1983 an Army officer wrote up astral travel in memo format. What the famous Gateway report says, what page 25 held, and what science supports.
- The Voynich Manuscript: The Book Nobody Can Read A fifteenth-century book in an unknown script has beaten codebreakers for a century. Here is what is known, and why every solution fails.
- What Is the Philosopher's Stone? It was a powder, a medicine, a symbol of Christ and a crime in England. What alchemists really claimed, and what historians now think they were doing.
- What Jung Actually Meant by the Shadow Jung's shadow was a moral problem, not a journaling prompt, and it held more than darkness.
Topics
- Alchemy
- Philosophy
- Magick
- Consciousness
- Psychedelics
- Strange History
- Mysticism
- Dharma
- Astrology
- Folklore
- Dreams