To say what the Philosophers’ Stone – the great goal of alchemy – is, one has to know. And to know, one must have attained it. I cannot claim to have done this, so what follows must be speculation. The mystery grows […]
Richard Smoley
Ritual Magic in Theory & Practice
Several years ago I decided to do an evening-long introduction to ritual magic at the New York Open Center, one of the city’s best-known gathering places for mind, body, and spirit activities. Soon before it was about to start I […]
Spaceship Earth: The Visionary Ideas of the Russian Cosmists
From New Dawn 140 (Sept-Oct 2014) Winston Churchill famously characterised Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” It’s apt, then, that the father of the Russian space program – perhaps of all space programs – was an ascetic […]
Cultivating Consciousness in an Unconscious World
Politicians constantly evade the truth. Why can they get away with it? According to a recent study conducted at Harvard University, it’s because people have such terrible attention spans. Behavioural scientist Todd Rogers of the Harvard Kennedy School and Michael […]
Madame Blavatsky & the Spirit World
Séances. Mediums. Apparitions. And fraud. These are a few of the things that come to mind when the subject of Spiritualism comes up. Like so many things in the world of the occult, Spiritualism presents a dual face of mystery […]