The Secret City: London's Hidden History of Magic, Mystery, and the Occult.

  Buy Now (Book Link) While the spiritualist movement was bringing the seance to the masses, a different and far more sophisticated magical revival was taking place in the hidden temples of late Victorian London. This was the world of high ceremonial magic, a world of complex rituals, of secret initiations, and of a new and powerful synthesis of Western esoteric traditions. At the heart of this revival was a single, extraordinary organisation: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, was arguably the most influential magical society of the modern era. It was a magical university, a school of the occult sciences that sought to systematically train its members in the theory and practice of ceremonial magic. In its short but brilliant existence, the Golden Dawn would lay the foundations for much of modern Western occultism, and its influence can still be felt in the magical practices of today. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn The Founders: A Trio o...

  Buy Now (Book Link) The 19th century was an age of contradictions. It was an era of the Industrial Revolution, marked by scientific progress and a vast and powerful British Empire that controlled a quarter of the globe. It was an age of material confidence, of rationalism, of a seemingly unshakeable belief in progress. And yet, in the very heart of this modern, industrial empire, a strange and powerful occult revival was taking place. While the engineers were building railways and the politicians were carving up continents, a significant portion of the population, from the highest levels of society to the lowest, was obsessed with talking to the dead. The Rise of Spiritualism: A New Religion of the Seance Spiritualism, the belief that the living can communicate with the spirits of the departed, was not a new idea. But in the mid-19th century, it exploded into a mass movement, a new religion for a new, scientific age. The movement began in America in 1848 with the Fox sisters, who...

  Buy Now (Click Link) In the same city where the cynical aristocrats of the Hellfire Club performed their blasphemous rites, a man of humble birth was experiencing a different and far more profound reality. William Blake, a poet, painter, and engraver, was a visionary in the truest sense of the word. For him, the spiritual world was not a matter of belief or speculation; it was a directly perceived reality. He saw angels in the trees of Peckham Rye, the ghost of a flea, and the ancient, mythological Albion on the hills of London. Blake’s London was not the mundane, material city of the Enlightenment; it was a living, breathing, and often terrifying spiritual entity. A Prophet in the Modern Babylon Blake was born and lived almost his entire life in London, and the city is the central character in his complex, personal mythology. He saw it not as a centre of progress and enlightenment, but as a new Babylon, a place of spiritual oppression, of “dark Satanic Mills,” where the human im...