Topics

• Alchemy The real history of the art of transformation: what alchemists claimed, what they did at the furnace, and how their search for gold became chemistry and a language for inner change.
• Consciousness The oldest open question there is: what awareness is, where it comes from, and the scientists, soldiers and philosophers who went looking for an answer.
• Psychedelics The documented history, science, culture and law of mind-altering substances, from ancient rites to Cold War laboratories, with the legends checked against the record.
• Jung Carl Jung's boldest ideas, the shadow, alchemy and synchronicity, read against what he wrote and what the evidence supports.
• Mysticism The direct-experience end of religion: visions, silences and unknowing, from medieval monks to jazz ashrams, told with the sources showing.
• Magick Ceremonial magic and the people who practiced it, from John Dee's angel diaries to the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley, with the documented history kept apart from the legend.
• Philosophy The ideas behind the Hermetic tradition, traced to their real sources: who wrote what, when, and how old texts were reinvented along the way.
• Strange History Psychic spies, unreadable books and the eye on the dollar: the odd corners of the past, checked against the documents and told straight.
• Dreams What happens when the mind wakes up inside sleep: the lab science of lucid dreaming, the rival theories of Freud and Jung, and the dream yogas of Tibet.