Our books

All our books are available directly from us via our website. Alternatively you can find them at most online retailers, including Amazon, or ask your local bookshop. Most of our esoteric titles are stocked by The Atlantis Bookshop, Watkins and Treadwell’s in London.

–

DIARY OF A BUSKER
The First Hundred Days
Marvin B. Naylor

After three decades as a professional musician, Marvin B Naylor took his talents out into the streets of Winchester, playing his fingerstyle guitar pieces to the sometimes adoring and often weirdly freakish British public. And so began this wry, engaging and beautifully observed diary of his life as a busker – the characters, triumphs, unsolicited sandwiches, shrapnel and the ever-present English weather.

182 pages
£13.00
ISBN: 978-1-908011-89-3

–

I, UNIVERSE
Darryl Sloan

What is the true underlying nature of reality and what is my place in it? Does my life have meaning, or am I a cosmic accident? Are the answers to these questions found in religion, or is science where the real enlightenment lies? Is it even possible to know? In this bewildering world of differing beliefs, what chance do I have of finding any genuine truth? And where do I even begin? With two words: question everything.

In childhood, we are all like sponges, soaking up information without any critical thinking. As adults, how much of our worldview reflects beliefs and assumptions from those early years that we have never reassessed? Darryl Sloan steps outside of conventional wisdom and brings together a wealth of insight from the spheres of religion, philosophy, science, psychology, parapsychology and occultism. A highly unusual, but deeply rational and life-enriching truth emerges from this esoteric study.

278 pages
£15.00
ISBN: 978-1-910098-04-2

–

BEYOND THE SUN
The History, Teachings and Rituals of the Last Golden Dawn Temple
Nick Farrell

This book contains the formerly unpublished Inner Order Teachings of the missing order of the Golden Dawn – Whare Ra. Whare Ra managed to keep secret and above all keep running long after the other Golden Dawn magical orders had given up the ghost. Closing in the late 1970s, the Order was founded by Dr Robert Felkin nearly 100 years ago. From its base in New Zealand, Whare Ra became a secret forefront of occult teaching.

Nick Farrell presents the Second Order Rituals of this Order including the 6=5 and 7=4 in their complete and unedited state as well as the 6=5 training papers and lectures. He also examines the history of Whare Ra and provides commentaries to the rituals. Contained in this book are the 6=5 experiences of the poet WB Yeats and other adepts who went through the various initiations. It also contains magical exercises inspired by the Whare Ra material.

286 pages
£14.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-96-1

–

SPARKS FROM THE COSMIC FLAME
Essays inspired by Dion Fortune’s The Cosmic Doctrine
edited by Wendy Berg

Dion Fortune’s The Cosmic Doctrine is a spiritual work that resulted from a psychic experiment between two friends in Glastonbury, 1923. It has since become one of the most important works in modern esoteric literature and a constant source of inspiration and instruction to many practitioners. Sparks from the Cosmic Flame, then, is a series of essays written by some of those inspired practitioners, which rather than seeking to ‘explain’ the work or re-write it in more modern vernacular, instead develops various and different aspects of its ideas that can be applied to one’s practice. It’s a book about how The Cosmic Doctrine can be used, or perhaps used differently and more flexibly.

 Wendy Berg, author of Red Tree, White Tree and Gwenevere and the Round Table has collated a series of illuminating essays by those who share a common enthusiasm for The Cosmic Doctrine and its applicability to contemporary practice.  The contributors include the editor as well as M. E. Beardsley, James North, Stuart Delacey, Dale Kendrick, J.R. Petrie, Derek Thompson, Gwen Blythe, Christian Gilson, Holly Mulhern and Alan Robinson. There is no single or orthodox interpretation but rather a call for individual imagination and intuition, as well as the reasoning mind. It is unlike any other book and the reader will find that the guidance and inspiration of the original Inner Plane communicators are still there to be contacted; the words are the catalyst. One needs only to read a portion of the text and hold the images and concepts in their mind for the magic to work.

234 pages
£13.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-86-2

–

EARTH GOD RISEN
Alan Richardson

The story of the Horned God can be heard in various mythologies from around the world and like the Goddess he has become part of our psychological and spiritual heritage. Alan Richardson revisits his previous work on the male mysteries, Earth God Rising, adding a new commentary alongside the original text.

His expertise on magical matters and its practitioners make for an insightful commentary on male deity – but always prodding readers to forge their own paths and make up their own minds. Earth God Risen is a tour through the origins and archetypes of male spirituality for both new seekers and seasoned practitioners (of both sexes).

“Richardson traces the presence of the male aspect of deity in Westerners through ancient Egypt and medieval metaphysics into modern mysticism and his own experience. This he does with scholarly skill and a pleasant fluency. A delight to read and a worthwhile asset to possess. So much has been written of our Primal Goddess that it is refreshing to read of Her consort, the Primal God – which the author eventually finds in himself after looking nearly everywhere else. Adventurous and fascinating.”  — William G. Gray

174 pages
£12.99
ISBN: 978-1-910098-00-4–

–

THE TESTAMENT OF MERLIN
Théophile Briant
translated by Gareth Knight

This evocative esoteric novel follows the life and work of Merlin as the founder of the Round Table fellowship, his return of Excalibur to the Lake, his safe conduct of Arthur to Avalon, his liaison with Viviane and the Faery powers in the Forest of Broceliande, and the resuscitation of his disciple Adragante in the Cauldron of Keridwen – including a remarkable sequence of initiations for the young knight. For it is Adragante who is called to bear witness to Merlin’s life, his death at the hands of some shepherds at Drumelzier on the Scottish borders, and his subsequent apotheosis.

Théophile Briant needs no introduction in France: from an old windmill and lighthouse in Brittany he published, between 1936 and his death in 1956, a remarkable journal (Le Goëland, or The Seagull) devoted to poetry, the arts and the esoteric. A great enthusiast of all things Breton and Celtic, he spent twelve years writing this powerfully esoteric novel, which was not published until nineteen years after his death and amazingly has not appeared in English until now. Gareth Knight, an established esoteric author in his own right, has translated a number of French esoteric books.

154 pages
£11.99
ISBN: 978-1-910098-02-8

–

LETTERS OF LIGHT
The Magical Letters of William G. Gray to Alan Richardson

As an “omniscient and obnoxious” teenager in 1969, Alan Richardson wrote to the occult author William G. Gray in pursuit of instant magical enlightenment. While he didn’t quite get that, it was the beginning of a correspondence lasting many years in which Gray generously shared his magical knowledge and experience. Gray’s letters, witty, ascerbic and blunt, contain a wealth of hints and tips on working with Qabalah, his views on Dion Fortune, sex magic, initiation, joining magical groups, and how to stay on the straight and true path to Light regardless of what life flings at you. How does free-will relate to Destiny? Why do many great Adepts behave like idiots if they’re in contact with Higher Powers? Is sex incompatible with a spiritual path? He addresses the questions which weigh on the mind of every magical seeker – always with the proviso that true wisdom can only be reached from within oneself. The letters are a delight to read and show the humour and understanding which shine through Gray’s famously unsentimental character. They will be of direct practical value to anyone pursuing a magical path of any kind, Qabalistic or otherwise, and his advice to his young apprentice is every bit as pertinent today as it was back then.

120 pages
£10.99
ISBN: 978-1-910098-01-1

–

TO THINK WITHOUT FEAR
The Challenge of the Extra-Terrestrial
Anthony Duncan

A new and previously unpublished book by the late Anthony Duncan, author of The Christ, Psychotherapy and Magic. In this extraordinary work Anthony Duncan openly and frankly examines the experience of communication with “extra-terrestrial” contacts, and the leaps of faith and mutual acceptance on which such contact depends. He considers that many reported experiences of the extra-terrestrial are essentially objective and real, and that there is a common, underlying dynamic which is prompting an increasing – and increasingly varied – pattern of visitations. But who or what are these visitors? Do they come from elsewhere in our Universe or from another Universe altogether? Do they travel here across space or by a shift of wavelengths? And how do they fit into the pattern set by the Incarnation of Christ? Duncan suggests that the first step towards an answer is to let go of our fear.

Also included is a previously unpublished essay on the same topic, The Liberation of the Imagination, and a personal account of the experiences with extra-terrestrial contacts which led Duncan to write the book. Presented from a Christian perspective, the book offers a sane and sensible discussion of a controversial subject by a priest and mystic who has never been afraid to think and minister beyond conventional boundaries.

202 pages
£12.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-63-3

–

THE FAIRY REALM
Ronan Coghlan

While examining various belief traditions across Europe and the United States, The Fairy Realm consults an assemblage of anecdotal evidence as to the existence of fairies and other creatures that appear in fairy tales – giants, ogres, trolls, mermaids, brownies, wildmen, kelpie, puca and other mythological beings.  Ronan Coghlan, whose works include The Encyclopaedia of Arthurian Legends, Handbook of Fairies, Irish Myth and Legend and The Grail, examines an array of alleged fairy sightings in a bold endeavour to find where fairies fit into the modern scientific concepts of the universe. Unlike myriad books churned out on ghosts and extraterrestrials, this book rigorously tackles the possibility of fairy existence, and in doing so dares to approach all manner of sceptical argument and ‘borderline science.’

174 pages
£11.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-90-9

–

THE CURVE OF THE LAND
Diana Durham

Set in 1980s Britain against the backdrop of ecological crisis, The Curve of the Land is a circumspect novel about our modern relationship with the Earth, which in this case is represented by the landscapes of western Britain. Jessica, an ardent but unfulfilled activist, joins a tour of megalithic sites hoping to find renewal from relationship burn-out and a sterile work environment. The characters on the tour are a good cross-section of the way ‘new age’, occult and mystical threads got grafted on to the more intellectual or ‘respectable’ British stock, throwing up eccentric cameos of people and comic situations. The mysterious atmosphere of the stones and her growing attraction for the charismatic tour leader builds to a final shamanic climax in the wilds of West Penwith, Cornwall.

Author of The Return of King Arthur: Completing the Quest for Wholeness, Diana Durham explores eco-shamanism, sex magic, goddess and ‘Gaia’ consciousness, as well as emerging archaeological and scientific findings pertaining to the sacred sites of Britain. The Curve of the Land follows the journey of a woman in contemporary society seeking to reconnect to an ancient land and share in its spiritual topography.

182 pages
£10.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-92-3

–

DU LAC
Alan Richardson

For those wild fey souls who are wearied by the spiritual tyranny and tedious minutiae of the Holy Grail, the great du Lac with his heart of diamond and heart of wax can show that there is always Another Way. His path is nothing to do with blood-dripping spears, floating bowls, high-born celebrity virgins of perfect beauty who selfishly bugger off into their heaven and don’t give a toss about the rest of us. It is everything to do with warmth, courage, gallantry, fumbling attempts at wisdom and all those senseless, stupid, impulsive acts of love between the low-born common folk that are the true Mysteries of the Wasteland.

A new novel from the author of On Winsley Hill and The Fat Git.

136 pages
£9.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-95-4

–

BRECCIA: Selected Poems 1972-1986
Pierre Joris

Breccia is an inspired grouping of poems from celebrated poet, translator, anthologist and essayist, Pierre Joris. After a limited initial publication by Station Hill/ Guernica, this wonderful collection will be finally be available once again.

“[Breccia] is a showcase for poems from roughly twenty, sometimes rather fugitive, volumes, written and published during a time when Joris was living as a kind of postmodern nomad. One of the virtues of this in-gathering of work is that it makes clear the extent to which a sense of ‘nomadism’ — of being intensely in a place because one knows one has already left it — marks Joris’ poetry…. The sense of immediacy in his work is striking. But the images of weather and shifting light and shade that give so many poems their climate of feeling, always play against a complex flow of conceptual activity and the possibility, but only the possibility, of archetypal permanence…” — Don Byrd

“…This is honest, radical work, close to the beginning of a poetic disenchanted with its own airs and graces…Pierre Joris is a wonderful poet of remarkable breadth of concern and lyric occasion.” — Robert Kelly

“…The scope of the work is large, the thrust is synthesizing, the idiom particular and rich…” — Jerome Rothenberg

214 pages
£12.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-88-6

–INITIATIONS
Paul Sédir
translated by Gareth Knight

Paul Sédir was one of the most important figures of the late 19th century occult renaissance in France, and yet he remains very little known in the English-speaking world. Born Yvon Le Loup in 1871, the young Breton moved to Paris and took up occultism as a teenager under the patronage of Papus (Gérard Encausse). Blessed with an exceptional memory and intuition, he embraced a diversity of paths and quickly rose through the ranks of a wide range of esoteric fraternities, authoring a number of books. From his home in Montmartre he held weekly open discussions on occultism and was well known for his exceptional knowledge and powerful presence. In later life, a significant mystical encounter led him to resign from his occult activities and focus solely on a Christian mystical path.

Adopting the name Sédir (an anagram of ‘désir’), he began writing his important work Initiations around 1901, and expanded it gradually over the following twenty-five years until his death in 1926. It follows the ‘initiations’, both occult and mystical, of a Paris doctor and his strange friend Andreas, nuanced by the enigmatic background presence of Theophane, the true healer. Presented in a deceptively simple narrative form, it distils and encodes a lifetime’s esoteric and mystical knowledge in a way which serves as a very real initiation for the perceptive reader.

Gareth Knight brings the benefit of 60 years’ experience in practical occultism to this new translation of Sédir’s work. He has translated a number of French esoteric texts, as well as being a renowned author in his own right.

210 pages
£12.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-99-2

–

SEASONAL OCCULT RITUALS
William G. Gray

Seasonal rites are as old as the hills on which they were once practised by most of humanity. Periodically, in accordance with the natural tides of nature and the times indicated by the sun and moon, people came together to make dedicated representations of the things that bound them closest to the cosmic wheel of life.

In this absorbing work, William G. Gray demonstrates the continuing relevance of such practices in modern society. The actions of the rites are performed in a circle which symbolises the cosmic course, the magical practices consisting of music, movement, meditation and meaning. Detailed scripts are given for conducting the quarterly rites of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, with complete texts of the chants, songs and invocations for each season.

Seasonal Occult Rituals was originally published in 1970, now available again for the first time in forty years.

116 pages
£10.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-80-0

–

LIBER NOX: A Traditional Witch’s Gramarye
Michael Howard
illustrated by Gemma Gary

In this new concise and important treatise Michael Howard delineates between various modern neo-pagan Wiccan traditions, cunning folk traditions, heathen folk or the ‘pagani,’ and an assortment of ritual magicians and pathworkers in order to present a ‘gramarye’ distinctly for those who aspire to the ‘Old Craft.’ An experienced practitioner, writer, researcher, folklorist and magazine editor of the respected witchcraft magazine, The Cauldron (since 1976), Howard elucidates important elements of the Traditional Craft, including preparation rituals, tools of ‘the Arte,’ fellowship of the coven and the casting of circles, finally taking us through the ‘Great Wheel of the Year’ and the assortment of sacred rites as performed within. The seasonal rituals are based on traditional witchcraft and folklore sources and have been specially written for this book.

218 pages
£12.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-85-5

–

FOAM OF THE PAST
Fiona Macleod
edited by Steve Blamires

…Fiona Macleod was clearly a gentlelady of breeding and intellect. She could be trusted. She was almost ‘one of us’ – but not quite. It was this slight difference that allowed her to deal with dark and frightening characters and subjects in a way that gave them the glamour of the Celtic Otherworld in an intriguing and believable manner. She was not threatening or dangerous in herself and she opened up a whole new world of language, ancient songs, poems and proverbs that had never before been presented to the English-speaking peoples south of the Scottish Highlands. Her subjects were taboo for other writers but she dealt with them in such a matter-of-fact way they came across as completely normal and routine. This somewhat disturbing treatment gave them an edge, an excitement, which was captured in her eloquence and strong use of dialogue.

Who better to present a new anthology of Fiona Macleod’s writings than Steve Blamires, author of The Little Book of Great Enchantment, a wonderful biography of William Sharp, and The Chronicles of the Sidhe, a ground-breaking analysis of Fiona Macleod’s entire oeuvre? Foam of the Past is the ‘selected writings’ of Sharp’s channelled pseudonym, who became a darling of Victorian readers and one earnestly courted by the fin-de-siècle ‘Celtic Twilight’ movement. Both writers, whether flesh or spirit, can be said to be prolific and Blamires collates a unique selection that mines a rich seam of popular work as well as previously unpublished material. This collection, not to be missed, includes provocative dark tales, early church musings, mystical ecritures, reveries of nature, political polemics, and various delightful vignettes. A gleaming new jewel for Scottish literature and Gaelic culture.

340 pages
£14.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-73-2

–

THE TALKING TREE
William G. Gray

In The Talking Tree (also formerly titled Growing the Tree Within) W.G. Gray presents an encyclopaedic and systematic analysis of the 22 Paths of the Qabalistic Tree of Life and the archetypal principles underlying them in each of the ‘four worlds’. This unique work by a leading Qabalist of his generation includes a detailed and comprehensive study of the symbolism of the Tarot, in which he offers an alternative method of allocating the Major Arcana to the Paths in place of the commonly used Golden Dawn system. He also explains how the Western alphabet can be applied to the Tree of Life as a viable alternative to Hebrew letters.

This book is a priceless reference work for the serious Qabalah student who has already studied the ten Sephiroth and is looking to move on to the Paths. As well as explaining the function of God-names, archangels, angelic orders and mundane archetypes for each Path, Gray seeks to demonstrate that the Tree of Life is in a continual state of growth and evolution, and that those who study and work with the Qabalah should not be afraid to apply new correspondences to it and rethink some of the traditional assumptions.

410 pages
£17.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-75-6

–

GARDEN ALCHEMY: THE LOST ART OF POTATO BREEDING
Rebsie Fairholm

Ever wondered why supermarket potatoes are so bland and boring? In the Andes, where potatoes originate, there are thousands of varieties with bright colours, beautiful markings, unusual shapes and variations of flavour and cooking quality. In the modern world, industrialised monoculture has reduced all this diversity down to a handful of near identical varieties. However, it’s incredibly easy to grow potatoes from seed, and every seed is full of unexplored diversity.

Best known for her Daughter of the Soil blog, Rebsie Fairholm gives clear and practical instructions for how to make seeds from potato berries, how to cross different varieties, how to choose which ones to experiment with, and how to keep your newly created varieties growing into the future. She gives examples from her own experiences with all kinds of potatoes, from ordinary garden varieties to historic Scottish heirlooms and rare Andean landraces, and explores the different colour possibilities, from orange flesh to purple flesh.

Our ancestors created their own vegetable varieties in their gardens and took it for granted as a completely normal thing to do; and then the commercial age came along and changed our habits, and so it became something of a lost art. This unique book is a small step towards changing that.

164 pages
£12.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-19-0

PUBLISHED DECEMBER 2013

–

ESOTERIC TRAINING IN EVERYDAY LIFE
Gareth Knight

A series of essays covering a wide spectrum of knowledge and experience, whose underlying theme is to show how our daily lives can be made a training ground for adepthood. It explains the different kinds of meditation and how to find the right esoteric teachers. Essays on the Tree of Life explain the evolution of modern esoteric Qabalah and how it has evolved from an image of God to a map of the created universe. A careful elucidation of the philosophy of Coleridge, and its relevance for today, is followed by a chapter on bridging the gap between psychology and occultism, with examples from the life of Dion Fortune and the ‘ghost’ of her Sea Priestess. Written by one of the world’s foremost experts on Western Esoteric Traditions, this book is full of wisdom and insights that will help readers apply spiritual, magical and Qabalistic principles to their everyday life.

118 pages
£10.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-34-3

PUBLISHED DECEMBER 2013

–

MELUSINE OF LUSIGNAN & THE CULT OF THE FAERY WOMAN
Gareth Knight

Potent medieval faery lore and hidden goddess traditions for the 21st century. Gareth Knight explores and reveals the hidden mystery of the Faery Melusine, a major figure in medieval French lore and legend. Through vivid interpretation of original source texts, Gareth Knight shows that the Melusine story is a powerful initiatory legend emerging from the deeply transformative Faery Tradition of ancient Europe. Furthermore he demonstrates how such legends manifest as history: the innate sacromagical power of Melusine affected key places and events in the development of the medieval world and from there reached far into the shaping of the modern world through the conflicts for Jerusalem and the Middle East. Gareth Knight is the author of many books on magic, occultism, and esoteric tradition. His work is known world-wide and has been influential in the development of the contemporary magical revival.

108 pages
£10.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-28-2

PUBLISHED DECEMBER 2013

–

BEFORE THE DAWN
Rupert Copping

The Arayana are an indigenous people descended from an ancient empire living contentedly in the remote mountain forests. With scant knowledge of the outside modernising world they cling to their ancestral traditions and seek to pass on the wisdom of their elders undisturbed. Before the Dawn is their story, a story of drama, intrigue, foreboding, and the painful invasion of a group consciousness, beautifully rendered by landscape painter Rupert Copping. Although told entirely from their point of view this is no patronising post-colonial ‘innocence to experience’ yarn nor is their world an idyllic Eden in some virginal state before the Fall. Copping explores the complexities of tribal life through four main characters; a chief, his wife, his mistress, and a disgraced elder. Much of what they seek to protect seems no less dark and cruel than the ways of the outside world – but it is their sphere. The forces that swirl around and seep into their isolated enclave are complicated and circuitous, pitting native, invader, revolutionary and reactionary against each other. Copping takes the reader from the dark cave of ancient ritual to the mindless carnage of the ‘Radiant War’ – mirroring the psychological journey that the Arayana must take. With stark guerrilla brushstrokes and fresh environmental impetus he tells the age-old story of conquest and loss.

202 pages
£9.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-73-2

PUBLISHED DECEMBER 2013

–

GEORDIE’S WAR
Alan Richardson
Foreword by Sting

This is the story of one man who served throughout the Great War, at the very front of the Fronts in the most brutal battles in history, and achieved that most astonishing feat of all – he survived. His name was George Matthew Richardson. He won the Military Medal and Bar and was nominated for the Distinguished Conduct Medal, yet was completely forgotten by his country, his clan, his hometown and – almost – his own family.

Thus begins Geordie’s War, a new intertextual memoir from Alan Richardson, biographer of Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley and author of On Winsley Hill and The Fat Git. Full of the wonderful wit and charm we’ve come to expect from this author, a lingering memory that starts with a grandfather’s watch commences a journey to the Western Front to offer what Richardson terms “A Plain Man’s Guide to the Great War.” A must for Geordies everywhere and for anyone whose family has been touched by the Great War, with a foreword by Sting, Geordie’s War scintillates with over-the-top historical, cultural and regional resonances that will leave the reader longing for more.

176 pages
£11.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-74-9

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 2013

–

CHRIST & QABALAH
The Mind in the Heart
Gareth Knight with Anthony Duncan

By the time we met, he was a newly ordained curate and I was scratching a living in the esoteric world, had written a book on the Qabalah and ran an occult magazine. We were thus inhabitants of two worlds that were never supposed to meet – at least by popular convention – of if they did, to be diametrically opposed to each other.

The catalyst for such a meeting of the minds was the provocative poetry of Anthony Duncan, hitherto little known to the world but privately praised by the likes of Kathleen Raine. Following on from the “Lord of the Dance” chapter in his recent autobiography, I Called it Magic, and various entries in his book of collected letters, Yours Very Truly, Gareth Knight muses on the esoteric resonances resulting from his unlikely friendship with the Reverend Anthony Duncan. Their intellectual sharing of ideas led to Duncan’s The Christ, Psychotherapy and Magic and Knight’s Experience of the Inner Worlds, which have become companion texts of esoteric Christianity often read and taught together. The pair had planned to co-author a book before Duncan’s untimely passing in 2003 so Christ & Qabalah comes as a fulfilment of a long-held promise. The book will delight admirers of both authors with its intertextual interplay as well as a fresh exploration of the differences and similarities between a cleric and an occultist. Knight has described the book as an “organic process, almost an initiation, that has left me with a somewhat expanded consciousness.” Readers are invited to share in the various machinations that sparked this dynamic relationship – one that keeps on giving.

222 pages
£12.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-68-8

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 2013

–

DION FORTUNE’S RITES OF ISIS AND OF PAN
edited by Gareth Knight

Dion Fortune encoded much practical magical lore within her novels, leaving it up to the reader to work out how to make use of it. Now for the first time, her original Rite of Isis and Rite of Pan have been released from her society’s archive, with previously unpublished commentary on how to make use of them. Edited and explained by Gareth Knight, this book contains the full text of the magical workings which formed the basis for Dion Fortune’s Moon Magic, The Goat-Foot God, and others.

“The clearest, simplest – and best – analysis and explanation of what magic is and how it works that I have ever come across. Gareth Knight shows that DF’s novels are initiatory and were intended to be so. He supplements his exposition with DF’s own commentaries on her work and reveals the secret methods she employed in her art to link the reader’s imagination to spiritual and cosmic realities in order to activate the powers of the soul.”
— The Warden, Society of the Inner Light

Initially released as a limited edition hardback (sold out)
ISBN: 978-1-908011-87-9

140 pages
£11.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-77-0

PUBLISHED OCTOBER 2013

–

WINDLEROOT
Gordon Strong

“Windleroot was permanently a wasps’ nest of rumour and scandal. Gobbets of gossip continually dripped from the awnings of the establishments in Lowe Street. An innocent remark made at the top end became a slanderous accusation by the time it arrived at the horse trough at the bottom. Making the most trivial observation about anyone in the town was like playing hopscotch in a minefield.”

Dick Symes leads a cast of Dickensian characters in this rollicking esoterically-tinged tale. After cavorting with strange beings from the 27th Dimension and inheriting an empowering object, the hero leads a campy caper to the town of Windleroot and its various peculiar environs such as the Nob, the Isle of Teflon, and the Crumpled Horn. Gordon Strong, a multifarious author, delivers a sumptuous modern phantasmagoria full of dithering magi, musty grimoires, chortling gods and dodgy magick – sprinkled evenly with wit, irony, allegory and pastiche. Laughs to be had a plenty but readers will discern deeper meanings undulating beneath the lithe narrative. This book will appeal to those that enjoyed Alan Richardson’s The Fat Git.

202 pages
£9.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-70-1

PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 2013

–

…AND EGYPT IS THE RIVER
Michael S. Judge

…And Egypt Is the River is a collection of mystical prose-poems which the author describes as an attempt, based on the linguistic theories of R.W. Emerson, Ernest Fenollosa, and Hugh Kenner, among others, to trace the evolution of cosmology and myth as derived from a people’s immediate sensory experience. In one sense it is an exploration of the genesis of language, the primal utterances that transcend from the physical world of sound denoting object to how images come to bring about self-awareness and fuse shared mythologies; or as the poet would say – “impact that compels words, that collect in fossil tidepools of the skull.”

Explore the world of Hibou, the experiential, Klang, the experienced, and the 3rd, who oscillates somewhere in between. The reader will embark upon a brave and exploratory work in which he or she will have to embrace a new language, one that evolves as a physiological outgrowth of such a world. In good literary company, Michael S. Judge deftly manages to dispense with the cloying parameters of time and place and send the reader into a world of strange amalgamated scopes and scapes. Of his work he says coyly – “you could say it takes place in the pharaohs’ Egypt, though it doesn’t; or in Pisistratian Greece, though it doesn’t; or for that matter in Missouri, say around 2666, which it might.”

“If Egypt was a river, then it would eddy and flux, and sinuously expand like MSJ’s hypnotic language. This is something rare and dangerous. Rich, sensuous and edgy, an unfurling scroll or a besotted map, powering Conrad up inside a post colonial Kubla Khan. Let it read you and be transformed.”
— Brian Catling

“Riffs of heightened prose pleasure the senses, with auditory, tactile, and hallucinatory provocations. To endure such a rigorous and sustained assault on the essential poetic metaphors is a fierce initiation. This Egypt of the Mental Traveller is a dream of the true path, subtle and dangerous and undeceived.”
— Iain Sinclair

114 pages
£9.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-27-5

PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 2013

–

SUICIDE BRIDGE
Iain Sinclair

This classic text has in recent times been fused to its contemporaneous volume, Lud Heat, but very much deserves to stand on its own. Suicide Bridge was originally published by Albion Village Press in 1979 with the sub-title A Book of the Furies, A Mythology of the South & East – Autumn 1973 to Spring 1978. As elsewhere, Sinclair saunters into the shadowy city underworld with his ever-watchful eye and roving syntax, this time probing the mythic figures from William Blake’s Jerusalem and the mythical king Bladud. Previously text-bound entities such as Hand, Hyle and Kotope are made flesh and and given to foggy breath in the contemporary landscape. Addressed to “the enemy” the reader is precariously perched on the teetering bridge while the author kicks at the mythic spindles that hold it up. Sinclair’s alternating, inter-penetrating prose and poetry become the uneven struts and pylons of a new concrete/abstract literary edifice.

‘One of the cliffs of Blake’s and Coleridge’s Albion sweeping against the walls of Everywhere…
This is the landscape of another realm. We are walking over a raw and smoking surface filled with surprises. All around are the possibilities of lost tribes quietly bustling in the shadows… This is a rare jewel.’
— Michael McClure

‘Vitality is one of the many qualities radiating from Iain Sinclair’s superb collection, Suicide Bridge… Sinclair’s is a cerebral flame ignited by political anger… He is utterly traditional, his roots extending back through Ginsberg and Dorn, and beyond that, to Blake. His method is to appoint a cast of archetypes, Skofeld, Bladud, Coban, Atum, Kotope, and have them prance, like Sweeney, Ignu or Rintrah, through the wreckage of capitalism, manipulated by powerful rhythmic lines…’
— Jeff Nuttall, The Guardian

‘The book is an excitement to read. Always strong, always compelling, like a good thriller. How he can actually handle all the dark stuff, the mantic utterances, within his own being, I can’t say. He must have a strong psychic interface to deal with the Intruder who gives him these tales, who compels the knowledge, traces the dark patterns in the grass… Read it, for a totally other experience of hidden Albion.’
— Chris Torrance

204 pages
£11.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-61-9

PUBLISHED AUGUST 2013

–
THE LITTLE BOOK OF THE GREAT ENCHANTMENT
Steve Blamires

William Sharp (1855-1905) was the pen behind the writings of the mysterious Fiona Macleod. He kept her true identity a closely guarded secret. Many famous people - W.B. Yeats, “AE”, MacGregor Mathers, Dante Gabriel Rossetti – were involved in Sharp’s short life; he was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Yeats’ secret Celtic Mystical Order. For the first time this book reveals previously unknown secrets from the life of William Sharp and shows clearly how to recover the Faery lore contained in Fiona Macleod’s literary output. These writings are not only about the Realm of Faery, they are the first authentic first-hand accounts from the Realm of Faery, revealing previously unknown Faery gods and goddesses, Faery belief, lore and magic.

338 pages
£15.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-83-1

PUBLISHED JUNE 2013

–

MAGICAL IMAGINATION
The Keys to Magic
Nick Farrell

Imagination is our inner vision, our human skill to see different realities. It can take us to the throne of God, it can connect us to the stream of infinity and allow us to see the universe for what it really is. Controlled use of the imagination is fundamental to magical practice, and this comprehensive study by an experienced practitioner provides the keys to understanding and using these powerful inner techniques. Based on Nick Farrell’s previous book Magical Pathworking, this greatly revised and expanded edition includes new chapters which further develop the techniques of pathworking for magical and spiritual purposes. It covers group work, divination, visiting other inner world dimensions and working towards what Farrell calls ‘objective pathworking.’

“Even if you think you know all about visualisation, pathworking and the magical key of imagination – even if you teach the subjects – this book will astound you. Nick Farrell explores magical imagination with depth and discernment, revealing principles and methods that will enrich and transform your magical and spiritual practice. Quite simply, this book is the best of its kind and extends the magical use of imagination to new heights and insights. It is an essential book for all magicians, Pagans and anyone who works with the inner realms.” — Peregrin Wildoak, author of By Names and Images

254 pages
£14.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-72-5

PUBLISHED JUNE 2013

–
STEWART FARRAR: Writer on a Broomstick
Elizabeth Guerra and Janet Farrar

Elizabeth Guerra and Janet Farrar have collaborated to record and explore Stewart Farrar’s life and career in detail. This book tracks Farrar’s development from an eager and talented adolescent to a gifted journalist and television, radio and film script writer and finally to his later life as a practitioner of Wicca and author of many non-fiction books and science fiction novels. In 1969, at the age of 53, Stewart met Alex Sanders – the infamous “King of the Witches” – and his wife Maxine while interviewing the couple for Reveille. The encounter introduced him to a world of Witchcraft and magic and changed the course of his life. Stewart Farrar found Witchcraft by accident but devoted the rest of his life to the subject by educating others. He became one of the most prolific and much loved writers on the subject, and in doing so, helped to make Wicca a viable and accessible spiritual path for many.

232 pages
£12.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-84-8

PUBLISHED JULY 2013

–

THE SAVOY TRUFFLE
Patrick Harpur

Meet the aptly named Blytes in this delectable story full of Dickensian characterisation and black comedy. The Savoy Truffle is a witty, dramatic novel about life in Britain’s richest, wildest Surrey suburb in the early 1960s, and comes to us from an acclaimed author best known for his philosophical works, including The Philosophers’ Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination and Mercurius: The Marriage of Heaven and Earth. Instead of the blissed-out revisionist nostalgia you get in most re-enactments of the 60s Harpur dares to portray the generational clashes and awkward transitioning from Britain’s post-war era. Passages of rip-roaring rompery are deftly infused with stark realisations pertaining to the gender and class issues of that time. The Savoy Truffle is a literary treat, choc full of historical anecdotes and cultural associations – a veritable truffle worth digging through the layers of our past for.

272 pages
£9.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-65-7

PUBLISHED JUNE 2013

–

THE FAERY GATES OF AVALON
Gareth Knight

The knights of King Arthur’s Round Table – Erec, Lancelot, Yvain, Perceval and Gawain – first appeared in the works of Chrétien de Troyes, who cast into Old French stories told by Welsh and Breton story tellers which had their origin in Celtic myth and legend. Chrétien wrote at a time when faery lore was still taken seriously – some leading families even claimed descent from faery ancestors! So we do well to look again at these early stories, for they were written not so much in terms of mystical quests or examples of military chivalry but records of initiation into Otherworld dynamics. Gareth Knight, an acknowledged expert on spiritual and magical traditions and a student of medieval French, goes to the well spring of Arthurian tradition to unveil these original principles. What is more, he shows how they can be regenerated today. “Opening the faery gates” can have its reward not only in terms of personal satisfaction and spiritual growth but as part of a much needed realignment of our spiritual responsibilities as human beings on planet Earth.

220 pages
£12.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-40-4

PUBLISHED 21st JUNE 2013

–

THE BOOK OF MELUSINE OF LUSIGNAN
in History, Legend and Romance
edited and translated by Gareth Knight

Considerable interest in faery tradition has grown up in recent years and not least in the story of Melusine of Lusignan, the subject of a prose romance by Jean d’Arras at the end of the 14^th century, swiftly followed by one in verse by Couldrette. This book provides a collection of material from various sources to give an all round picture of the remarkable faery, her town, her church, her immediate family, and the great Lusignan dynasty she founded.

An established authority on Melusine, Gareth Knight collects together all the best source material, which he translates from the French, and presents his own researches into the Lusignan family of the 12th century, whose dynasty included kings of Cyprus and Jerusalem, examining the possibility of a familiar spirit guiding the family in its destiny.

222 pages
£15.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-67-1

PUBLISHED 18th APRIL 2013

–

THE GROUNDLINGS OF DIVINE WILL
Daniel Staniforth

From the author of Weaver in the Sluices and Diddle comes this controversial, self-reflexive, ironic and humorous response to the way that Shakespeare is so often taught in contemporary academia. The works of ‘Divine Will,’ as he is referred to throughout, have been confined to a vacuum, and almost biblically so in how the scripts have become wilfully detached from their moorings of time and place. In this hybridised long ‘Proem,’ Staniforth goes to absurd lengths of reattachment, gladly playing havoc with the swirling dictums and counter-dictums of his time, gleefully seeking to subvert the tautological authority of the neck-frilled academicians over the historical groundlings of the pit. Elements of satire, parody and burlesque are interposed as hagiographical substitutions made for the purposes of irony and deconstruction. The reader will be initiated into the amalgamated and timeless world of the Groundlings to see how their invective gospel simply illustrates how discourse, rhetoric and that grandiloquent power of oration serves as the strongest definition for our collective place in history.

104 pages
£8.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-66-4

PUBLISHED 26th MARCH 2013

–

ANTIPHONAL AIRS
Joseph Noble

Antiphonal Airs is a mixilating series of poems from poet-musician Joseph Noble. Some are improvisational riffs on specific composers, their lives and work, and some imitate the sonic movement and aleatoric rhythm of music itself. Noble works between polyphony and monody, his poetic lines mirroring the development of the seconda practica of the Baroque, in which the form of vocal music was made reflect and fit the meaning of the words. He follows the Orphic muse through music’s different phases and stylings, from the primal to the ornate, always following Hazrat Inayat Khan’s dictum that the world and its language come to us through sound and vibrations. Antiphonal Airs follows An Ives Set, which explored mercurial compositions of Charles Ives, and about which Andrew Joron wrote – “Noble has somehow tinkered a radio out of words, and tuned it to receive transmissions from a lost paradise of music. Yet Noble’s line is listening, not to sound alone, but to pure pattern. Here, writing itself is graphically recast as a rhythmics of perception.”

A sumptuous collection by poet-musician Joseph Noble.  The certainty of his pitch & intonation reveals a distinct tender voice.  Measured, graceful, his work sustains its depth throughout.  The first section on “early music” is revelatory in its range & insight.  Rich in historical acumen, musical heart, Antiphonal Airs an impressive body of work.
— David Meltzer

126 pages
£9.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-64-0

–

THE FORGOTTEN FAITH
The Witness of Celtic Saints
Anthony Duncan

Celtic spirituality is the “forgotten faith” of the West. It is essentially joyful and holistic and holds together the two human faculties of reason and intuition. There is no New Age mysticism in it and there is no spirit-numbing rationalism either.

The Celtic saints were intuitives whose feet were very firmly planted on the ground. It is their equilibrium as human beings that gives much of their appeal, and in this, as in the holiness their lives display, they are Christlike.

This book examines the lives and legacies of the Celtic saints and the sacred places in the landscape that have become associated with them.

126 pages
£10.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-71-8

–

KALEIDOSCOPIC OMNISCIENCE
Will Alexander

“Let us recall the illusion: the thousands murdered – the texts exploded – and the sun become a mechanical sub rosa…”

Kaleidoscopic Omniscience is a new collection from lingual contortionist and poetic sage Will Alexander, featuring his early works – Asia & Haiti, Stratospheric Canticles, and Impulse & Nothingness. Alexander’s prismatic and oracular voice cascades around the bi-geographic confrontations, painterly morphologies, and the cosmology of the void.

“[Alexander is] acutely conscious of the issue of poetic voice, and is unwilling to let poetry’s potential for ventriloquizing or exploring the voices of others be subsumed in an impersonal écriture or ultimately homogenous montage. He seems as well interested in the spiritual dimension of poetry, especially in the degrees to which poetry can give us access to spiritual or emotional states beyond those we normally experience.”
– Mark Scroggins, American Book Review

“… multiplicity, simultaneity, collapsing of interior/exterior boundaries, restless migratory intelligence … An uncancelled wavering and a “brimstone fire” of focus, unflinchingly alert to the vast sentient suffering, also to the astonishing resourcefulness and the yet unimagined forms of life on this planet at the edge of the Milky Way.”
– Jonathan Skinner

274 pages
£13.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-49-7

–

MAGICAL IMAGES AND THE MAGICAL IMAGINATION
third edition
Gareth Knight

The knowledge and use of magical images was once a closely guarded secret of initiates and adepts in the Mystery Schools. Gareth Knight gives easy-to-follow classifications of the various kinds of magical image, along with instructions for their use as agents of self realisation and spiritual service.

Indispensible for beginners and advanced practitioners alike, this book presents the theory and techniques of creative visualisation and meditation. These practical teachings range from the circulation of force within the aura for the purpose of balancing the personality to the development of a full magical system of pathworking, enabling contact with inner sources of wisdom.

Now in its third edition, a new section is included on magical applications of the Tarot images, plus an extensive chapter on Qabalistic pathworking in the Western Mystery Tradition.

120 pages
£11.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-52-7

–

THE SECRET TRADITION IN ARTHURIAN LEGEND
Gareth Knight

In this book Gareth Knight explores the archetypal themes, images and characters of the Arthurian cycle and their place in the Western magical tradition.

The Arthurian stories are the most famous and most haunting of all British legends, which draw their inspiration from Greek, Irish and even Atlantean myth. This book takes in turn the core grades of Arthur, Merlin, Guenevere and the Holy Grail to build a complete magical tradition. The central themes and characters are brought to life with clear and thorough explanations of their underlying symbolism, while the ancient pattern that is woven around the Arthuriad is carefully unravelled and its full esoteric significance revealed. This fascinating study takes the reader beyond the world of medieval literature and unfolds an inner landscape as real as the isles in which it was created.

270 pages
£13.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-62-6

–

THE CHRONICLES OF THE SIDHE
Steve Blamires

For a thirteen-year period, the reclusive Scottish writer Fiona Macleod enthralled the Victorian reading public with a deluge of stories, novels, poems and essays drawn from the wildly romantic Highland and Island landscape. Although it was later revealed that these works had issued from the pen of William Sharp, it was clear that Fiona Macleod was more than a pseudonym; to Sharp she was very much an autonomous entity. What’s more, the wealth of previously unknown and unheard of myths, names, traditions and beliefs in her writings, while shone through a Celtic prism, show every sign of having emanated from the Realm of Faery.

Steve Blamires presents a ground-breaking assessment of the Faery lore within Fiona Macleod’s literary output as part of his ongoing study of this enigmatic writer. Building on the established groundwork of his biography of Sharp, The Little Book of the Great Enchantment, he explores the mythology and traditions of Faery, their symbolic and magical significance, and the devices employed by Fiona in the transmission of Faery teachings and inspirations. Using examples from Fiona’s rich and resonant body of work, his detailed interpretation will enable the reader to tease out the Faery gems that are still to be found woven into the lines and verse of her writings.

200 pages
£12.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-59-6

–

SONG OF THE SEA GOD
Chris Hill

Along with the strange flotsam of the sea, the aptly named John Love drifts in on the grey tide to grace an island off the English coast. The stranger, both bedazzling and unnerving, effects an immediate messianic glow upon the bladder-wracked community of odds and sods, making disciples of the most unlikely characters.

Chris Hill’s visionary and delightfully bizarre novel reads like the gospel for a neophyte religion spawning in the sea foam among strange goings-on. It examines how destiny is the result of the collective will, especially among tribal folk who forever yearn to conform to ancient cants and creeds.

Song of the Sea God comes from both the ancient incantations of history and mythology and the awkward cadences of the modern age. The plot is riddled with humour and pathos, which will delight fans of the contemporary British literary novel. With rich symbolism and delicious twists of irony, Hill takes the reader on a microcosmic wild ride in a story told by a mute that starts in a pub called The Vengeance. Along the way the reader is treated to a feast of psychotic musings that somehow manages to include miracles, Tip Rats, plastic ducks, the life of pebbles, and a Diary of Stools.

214 pages
£9.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-55-8

–

THE SACRED STONE CIRCLES OF STANTON DREW
Gordon Strong

The village of Stanton Drew in north Somerset is host to a remarkable group of ancient monuments which together comprise the third largest collection of standing stones in England. The Great Circle, the largest of its three stone circles, encloses an area of 2000 square metres, exceeding the dimensions of Stonehenge. It was once approached by an avenue of standing stones, now lost. A smaller Southwest circle is aligned to The Quoit and The Cove nearby. Recent archaeology has revealed evidence of a substantial woodhenge at Stanton Drew, underlining its importance as a major ritual centre of the Neolithic age.

Gordon Strong, author of Stanton Drew and its Ancient Stone Circles and a regular lecturer on the subject, has spent many years exploring this fascinating site on multiple levels. In this book he presents the available archaeological detail along with local folklore and the testimonies of various commentators, from 18th century antiquarians to modern dowsing surveys, discussing ritual, mediumship, earth energies and mythology. He also gives his own observations and insights gleaned from his “long love-affair” with the site, interpreted through the Western esoteric tradition and British Mysteries. Most importantly, he offers the visitor some clues for making their own inner connection to this unique monument which still vibrates with ancient magic.

100 pages
£9.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-58-9

–

INTERLOCUTORS OF PARADISE
Martin Anderson

Interlocutors of Paradise is a collection of five short meditations on colonialism and the Western mind by a British poet. Written as a series of provocative, symbolist-tinged prose-poems, each section situates the reader in beautifully crafted spaces, hollows to be filled either by spiritual purpose or wilful invasion. It begins by evoking the historical formation and expression of national identity – an identity predicated on past colonial and imperial activities. This is followed by three meditations that are largely situated within that region of the Thames estuary where Joseph Conrad lived, set and conceived Heart of Darkness. The Thames, that river in the book on which floated “The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empire”, figures prominently also in the book’s opening meditation, where it is the setting of, amongst other things, Edmund Spenser’s poem Prothalamion and his friend Sir Walter Raleigh’s departure and voyage to Roanoke in the New World. In the final meditation its presence fades giving way, instead, to the aspirant spaces of a settled New World. But a world not ‘settled’ enough to have eradicated restlessness.

Martin Anderson, author of various books of poetry, including The Ash Circle and Belonging, delivers another collection of poignant but elegantly powerful and sensitive poems.

“Great purity and acuity, and a perfect ear. A wonderful poet.”
— Gustaf Sobin

“Beautiful writing — treasure trove of emanations: orchards, hedgerows, meadows, coastlines, a land I used to know and still love in the nerves. A stilling for the nerves. The texture thick with an ancient country’s history now learning to trace back, through all its exploitations, the sources of an elegy for lost empire. Has English poetry made the best out of that drawn-out loss?”
— Nathaniel Tarn

104 pages
£9.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-56-5

–

STONING THE DEVIL
Garry Craig Powell

Stoning the Devil is a short story/novel set in the United Arab Emirates, a country of paradoxes, of seediness and glamour, of desert grandeur and Disneyland vulgarity, where public executions and other barbaric customs are winked at by the western expats who run the economy. Colin, a professor of literature, is not the ‘typical’ expat, ignorant and interested only in pleasure and his stock portfolio, but a speaker of Arabic and an admirer of Arab culture – or is he? To his Arab wife, he is an Orientalist who exoticizes and patronises the locals, unaware of his latent racism. Powell presents a complex and contradictory set of Arab characters, who are a far cry from fundamentalist stereotypes. He also gives women in the Gulf a voice –as none are completely submissive.

Garry Craig Powell delivers a powerful novel-in-stories and perhaps the first work of literary fiction set in the Persian Gulf by a westerner since Hilary Mantel’s Eight Months on Ghazzah Street. It echoes all the concerns of the great Arab writers, Mahfouz, Munif, and Kanafani regarding the post-colonial world. Written by an author that spent a good deal of time in that part of the world, the Gulf is presented as a crucible in which people of different races and religions are forging a new humanity, in spite of the abysses between them.

“Stoning the Devil is a mesmerizing read. You will not find another book like this one. Garry Craig Powell has an astonishing ability to create characters with swift and haunting power. His intricately linked stories travel to the dark side of human behaviour without losing essential tenderness or desire for meaning and connection. They are unpredictable and wild. Is this book upsetting? Will it make some people mad? Possibly. But you will not be able to put it down.” – Naomi Shihab Nye

“The astounding characters that recur in Garry Craig Powell’s Stoning the Devil are no different than, say, Sherwood Anderson’s characters in Winesburg, Ohio. These characters have needs and dreams. They have their share of existential moments. They’re all doing the best they can. These linked stories are utterly mesmerizing and exotic. With a keen ear for dialogue, and a sensibility of the best Conrad, Kipling, Orwell and Achebe, Garry Craig Powell has pulled off a masterful feat.” – George Singleton, Stray Decorum

150 pages
£9.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-54-1

–

THE CHRIST, PSYCHOTHERAPY AND MAGIC
A Christian Appreciation of Occultism
Anthony Duncan

The Christ, Psychotherapy and Magic is a Christian priest’s appreciation of occultism, with a particular focus on the Qabalah. Far from condemning occult thinking, he finds it has much common ground with the Christian perspective and contemporary developments in psychotherapy. Drawing on the works of Dion Fortune, Gareth Knight and others, he appraises the theology and assumptions of occultists and examines how Christian mysticism coheres with the Tree of Life. While his ideas may be challenging and thought-provoking for many occultists as well as for many Christians, his spectrum is broad and his criticisms carefully considered. He also provides a lucid overview of the Tree of Life which makes the book an incredibly valuable introduction to the Qabalah, especially as a guide for aspiring “Christian Qabalists”.

Originally published in 1969, this book came about through Anthony Duncan’s friendship with occultist Gareth Knight, and directly inspired Knight’s major work Experience of the Inner Worlds.

“Now at least one clergyman has got the point and in this book urges his fellow Christians not to dismiss occultism either as a cranky fad or as ‘a black art’.”
— The Guardian

200 pages
£12.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-51-0

–

THE WAY OF MAGIC
Gordon Strong

The multiple strands which make up the Western Mystery Tradition can present a bewildering tangle of paths for the seeker to negotiate – and this book provides the roadmap by exploring them with clarity and insight. Gordon Strong, who has written various books on the Arthurian legends, Tarot, the goddess and sacred stone circles, is uniquely placed to offer this journeyman’s guide to magic. Meditation and contacts, Tarot, Qabalah, shamanism and polarity magic are covered, as are the British and Egyptian mysteries. The Way of Magic explores the path of ancient secrets as well as more modern adaptations of them, winding through the enigmatic codices of Egypt and the early shamen through to the modern use of Qabalah and practical magic today. Strong follows an established path with the fervour of a pioneer, making new connections and bringing fresh insights to age-old teachings. He contends that “wisdom does not automatically follow in the wake of a great deal of information, no matter how comprehensive” and proceeds to offer a practitioner’s manual for ritual magic that emphasises commitment and self-discipline.

This book will be an invaluable guide to any student of the mysteries looking to find some clarity in making their way forward. It will also appeal to those interested in the history of various mystery schools and their impact upon philosophical thought.

120 pages
£10.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-53-4

–

THE IRISH CELTIC MAGICAL TRADITION
Steve Blamires

The Irish Celtic Magical Tradition explores the wealth of spiritual philosophy locked into Celtic legend in The Battle of Moytura (Cath Maige Tuired), a historical-mythological account of the conflict, both physical and Otherworldly, between the Fomoire and the Tuatha Dé Danann. This legend contains within it the essence of the Celtic spiritual and magical system, from Creation Myth to practical instruction and information. Alongside a translation of The Battle of Moytura, Steve Blamires provides a series of keys to facilitate understanding of the legend and sets out an effective magical system based upon it, including interpretations of the symbolism, meditation exercises and suggestions for its practical use. The book offers a powerful and illuminating method of working with ancient Celtic legendary material in the context of modern magic.

Originally published in 1992, the text has been revised, updated and expanded to incorporate two decades of new insights and suggestions.

Steve Blamires is a well-known authority on Celtic traditions and founder of the Celtic Research and Folklore Society in Scotland. He is also an authority on the work of William Sharp and Fiona Macleod, and has written a biography of Sharp, The Little Book of the Great Enchantment.

236 pages
£13.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-57-2

–

TAROT & MAGIC: THE TREASURE HOUSE OF IMAGES
Second edition
Gareth Knight

Far from being a simple fortune telling device, the Tarot is a profound and powerful system of High Renaissance magic. Here is unfolded the fascinating story of the Tarot, from its fifteenth-century beginnings as a conjunct to the playing cards newly imported from Egypt and Persia, to the massive explosion of its popularity as a system of occult symbolism. Gareth Knight presents his analysis of the basic archetypal principle behind each card and gives practical examples of magical work with the Tarot images in pathworkings and rituals, much of which is open to be used and developed further.

Originally published in 1986 as The Treasure House of Images, and later re-issued in the USA as Tarot & Magic, this new, revised and expanded edition includes a substantial additional section, pulling together many of the new insights Gareth Knight has garnered over the 25 years since it was first published.

238 pages
£13.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-35-0

–

LUD HEAT
Iain Sinclair

introduction by Allen Fisher
afterword by Michael Moorcock

Iain Sinclair’s classic early text, Lud Heat, explores mysterious cartographic connections between the six Hawksmoor churches in London. In a unique fusion of prose and poetry, Sinclair invokes the mythic realm of King Lud, who according to legend was one of the founders of London, as well as the notion of psychic ‘heat’ as an enigmatic energy contained in many of its places. The book’s many different voices, including the incantatory whispers of Blake and Pound, combine in an amalgamated shamanic sense that somehow works to transcend time. The transmogrifying intonations and rhythms slowly incorporate new signs, symbols and sigils into the poem that further work on the senses. This was the work that set the ‘psychogeographical’ tone for much of Sinclair’s mature work, as well as inspiring novels like Hawksmoor and Gloriana from his peers Peter Ackroyd and Michael Moorcock, and Alan Moore’s From Hell.

This new re-issue includes the illustrations and photographs from the original 1975 edition, which were absent from some later editions.

“Lud Heat combines researches into the sinister dotted lines which link up the Hawksmoor churches of East London – complete with a very fine diagram displaying the pentacles and triangulations which connect churches to plague pits to the sites of the notorious Whitechapel and Ratclyffe Highway murders – with a broken sequence of breathtakingly lovely modern freeverse lyrics.”
– Jenny Turner, London Review of Books

“Lud Heat is ostensibly a narrative of a period of employment in the Parks Department of an East London borough; this temporal location, however, receives less stress than the spatial one with which it intersects: that of the pattern imposed on the townscape by Nicholas Hawksmoor’s churches, potent presences in the poet’s working environment, around which accretes a second temporal dimension, historical and mythological … When Sinclair writes of the modern city that ‘natural & ancient rhythms are perverted in Golgonooza’s architecture’ it is as part of a firmly patterned written structure that we have first of all to take his words. Only thus, sustained by powerful written ligatures, can the arrangement of the poet’s information command any credence as argument.”
– Andrew Crozier

140 pages
£9.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-60-2

–

FAERY LOVES AND FAERY LAIS
A collection of Breton lais as told by
Gareth Knight

The Breton lai is a narrative poem, usually accompanied by music, that appeared in France about the middle of the 12th century, carried by travelling musicians and storytellers called jongleurs. What is important about them is that they contain a great deal of faery and supernatural lore deriving from Celtic myth, legend and folktale.

This collection of twelve tales focuses on faery lore in the lai tradition. Nine are taken from anonymous medieval jongleur sources; the other three are from the more courtly tales collected by Marie de France in the late 12th century. Gareth Knight, a scholar of medieval French as well as an established author on esoteric faery lore, provides a vivid and lively translation of each lai along with a commentary which takes a perspective both historic and esoteric.

130 pages
£10.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-48-0

–

THE CULT OF SEIZURE
Rikki Ducornet

“The lunatic algebra of Love. The frenzied orbits of Mood. The malarial temperatures of Wound, Symbols of the Cult of Seizure: This flesh, this amulet incised. This hot spoor of predators. This zodiac savaged in the sky.”

The Cult of Seizure is a work of lyrical mesmerism and animal magnetism from acclaimed novelist and artist Rikki Ducornet, which displays a lush poesis and visionary soul. Jane Urquhart describes it as a “combination of the bestial and the bestiary; of terror and of tenderness.” Although an earlier work it contains all the evocative tapestries of her finest novels.

“Sharp, haunting poetry from a fine practitioner of the art. If you read only one book of poetry this year …” – Globe & Mail

“…If you’re willing to take the plunge into poetry that cuts close to the bone of our dreams and obsessions, The Cult of Seizure contains some absolutely stunning examples of how language can transform actuality. Using as her model the medieval bestiary, wherein natural and imaginary animals mingled in glorious confusion, Ducornet… has mixed the rivetingly graphic and the ferociously fanciful into a striking volume of verse.” – Toronto Star

“Rikki Ducornet is such a writer, mercifully and productively out of step with her time. She brings to her work a sense of curiosity that many contemporary writers have forgotten. Every object for her, as for Blake, has the potential to be an immense world of delight, opening perpetually up, with this delight being mirrored in the twists and turns of the language that both reveals and evokes it.” – Brian Evenson

92 pages
£8.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-46-6

–

THE SIGNATORY
Kirk Marshall

The Signatory is a wild and enthralling novella from Kirk Marshall, an emerging Australian writer and editor of the Red Leaves bi-lingual literary journal. This mind-bending tale of Scottish cryptozoology must be read to be believed as it blusters and dallies with the mad antics of the strange British dilettante, Sebastian Sackworth. It is at times reminiscent of the nonsense literature of Lewis Carroll et al – and yet displaying more contemporary (dare we say) “borgesian” stylistics. A delightfully absurd dramatis personae pits together a misanthropic anthropologist and a lusty Italian ornithologist on a madcap search for a rare Red Swan, soon to be joined by an Icelandic recluse, a chimpanzee, and a notorious pirate, to name a few. Along the way, Marshall manages somehow to mix in odd polemics on public transport sex, the science of moats, and the mysterious highland landscape.

Labyrinthine and surreal fiction is little-explored territory but those that dabble in such refinery will be delighted by this offering. Marshall’s polyglot mind and gymnastic vocabulary make this a novel to be savoured in miniature bites. In such, perhaps the author provides the best summary in his own words: “The Signatory is a phantasmagoric comedy that offers readers a cautionary tale of Scotland, the Scotland of dislocated nightmare, of demented cryptozoology, and it signifies the closest result to an end product if César Aira and Charles Portis collaborated on the screenplay for Withnail & I.”

“Kirk Marshall is a literary machine redlining audacity.”
— A.S. Patrić, author of The Rattler & other stories (Spineless Wonders) and Las Vegas for Vegans (Transit Lounge)

“In an age of endless diaspora, The Signatory draws new spatial patterns of the sciences across the Scottish Lowlands. We’re all looking for our own red swan round here. This is fierce work composed by the heart of a luchador versus everything else. Kirk Marshall is the real deal.”
— Jeremy Balius, author of wherein? he asks of memory (Knives Forks and Spoons Press)

“Kirk Marshall has plucked another beguiling and bristling tale from his beard of words. His writing is fiercely experimental with whimsical detours and stylistic roundabouts. Marshall works harder at the craft of writing than most people. He is a musketeer.”
— Eric Yoshiaki Dando, author of snail (Penguin) and Oink, Oink, Oink: A savage modern fable (Hunter Publishers)

128 pages
£9.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-41-1

–

BY NAMES AND IMAGES: BRINGING THE GOLDEN DAWN TO LIFE
Peregrin Wildoak

The Golden Dawn (GD) system of magic is the main source of the esoteric and magical wisdom and techniques practiced in the West today. While the rituals and bare teachings of the tradition have been published for sixty years, the inner workings and esoteric keys that empower those rituals have largely remained unpublished or unexplored in contemporary works. By Names and Images remedies this lack by providing detailed and clear instructions for the visualisations, spiritual connections and energetic practices required for every major GD practice and ritual, as well as several unpublished techniques.

Focusing on the meanings and use of sacred names and practical techniques of visualisation, the book thoroughly explores meditation and divination, purification ritual, invocation and evocation, grades of initiation, and direct experience of the inner realms. Also covered is an explanation of the Qabalah and its use as a magical framework.

While the book is sufficiently practical and clearly explained to be of huge benefit to a newcomer to magic, its primary aim is to allow people already practicing the Golden Dawn system to do so more effectively, and to be touched by the amazing spiritual blessings the rituals offer.

“The book is the finest introduction to the Golden Dawn system yet penned and includes many never before seen highlights from the author’s years of oral instruction and training. A “must have” for every student of the Golden Dawn, beginning and advanced.”
– Tony DeLuce, Initiate of the Rosicrucian Order of the Golden Dawn

“Peregrin’s reader-friendly style of teaching displays a joyous sharing of knowledge that demystifies complex teachings, revealing the ‘heart and soul’ of the Work. This book will be a treasured addition to every Golden Dawn magician’s library.”
– Charles “Chic” Cicero and Sandra “Tabatha” Cicero, Chief Adepts of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

372 pages
£16.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-50-3

–

THE MAGICAL BATTLE OF BRITAIN
Dion Fortune
edited by Gareth Knight

Immediately following Britain’s declaration of war in 1939, Dion Fortune began a series of regular letters to members of her magical order, the Fraternity of the Inner Light, who were unable to hold meetings due to wartime travel restrictions. With enemy planes rumbling overhead, she organised a series of visualisations to formulate “seed ideas in the group mind of the race”, archetypal visions to invoke angelic protection and uphold British morale under fire. “The war has to be fought and won on the physical plane,” she wrote, “before physical manifestation can be given to the archetypal ideals. What was sown will grow and bear seed.” As the war developed, this was consolidated with further work for the renewal of national and international accord. For the first time the Fraternity’s doors were opened to anyone who wanted to join in and learn the previously secret methods of esoteric mind-working. With unswerving optimism she guided her fraternity through the dark days of the London Blitz, continuing her weekly letters even when the bombs came through her own roof.

Long out of print and much sought after, Skylight Press is very pleased to be re-issuing this fascinating and important book.

“A compelling portrait of an adept practising the magic of the light for the sake of the nation.” – Alan Richardson

184 pages
£12.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-45-9

–

GWENEVERE AND THE ROUND TABLE
Wendy Berg

The new book by Wendy Berg puts her acclaimed Red Tree, White Tree into practice. It shows how the Round Table was an actual, practical system of magic, demonstrated by Gwenevere, who was its prime interpreter within the court of the Round Table. Central to the book is the concept of five Faery kingdoms described in the legends, with which Gwenevere was closely associated: Lyonesse, Sorelois, Gorre and Oriande, about the central Grail kingdom of Listenois.

The book comprises a graded series of meditations, practical magical exercises, guided visualisations and a full ritual, which take the reader into each of the Faery kingdoms in turn, guided by Gwenevere, to experience the various challenges and gifts that they each represent. The fourth kingdom, Oriande, takes the reader into the Round Table of the Stars, an experiential journey through 12 constellations, which very neatly and remarkably demonstrates the continuing work of the Round Table into the future.

“A classic! Not only a lucid guide to faery dynamics in Arthurian and Grail legend but what to do about it, why, and how. A practical follow up to Wendy’s mind blowing Red Tree, White Tree. Highly recommended.” – Gareth Knight

“This is an important book … Whereas the main focus for mystics and magicians alike has always been the Holy Grail, Wendy Berg now draws our attention to the previously unrecognized complex and deeply powerful Mysteries of the Round Table. This contribution to the on-going practical work of the Arthuriad will be of great importance to not only Grail-Seekers but anyone interested in the Arthurian legends, the Western Mystery Tradition, Faery lore and the vital role of women in the Mysteries today.”
– Steve Blamires

“Wendy is unsurpassed at explaining Gwenevere’s true role in the Arthurian legends and the importance of Faery to our very existence … This book speaks to the Soul – read, experience, be joyous and be forever changed.”
— Maddy Johnson, Founder/Leader of S.O.N.G. Druid Order

190 pages
£12.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-47-3

–

VISIONS OF THE DROWNING MAN
Dee Sunshine
illustrated by the author

Visions of the Drowning Man is the third book of poetry from Glaswegian poet, musician and visual artist, Dee Sunshine. This series of poems reads like the last chimerical oracles of a doomed soul, pawing at the final waves of some foisted ontology. Sunshine submerges the reader in loosely unravelling contrapuntal rhythms and the breathless language that swirls between anguish and release. But the journey down the Dantean whirlpool is not all despair; there is the topography of Blake’s archetypal grandeur to luxuriate in, as well as Baudelaire’s dolorous sensuality. It is the poetic language of asphyxiation.

This edition includes 21 spectacular full-page ink drawings.

“His work reminds me of Blake’s proverb about the road of excess leading to the palace of wisdom.” – D.M. Thomas

“… Dee Sunshine is the poetic equivalent of Hieronymus Bosch (one look at Gardens of Earthly Delight and you will understand).” – Des Dillon

140 pages
£10.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-42-8

–

THE FAT GIT
Alan Richardson

“If Strathnaddair exists in another realm, and yet is also a real place that we have all visited, then so are The Arthur, The Merlin and all the rest real people, with addresses, postcodes, mortgages, debts, and all the troubles and triumphs of modern life. You can find them in any phone book, just look under your own name. For there are moments when, if only for the blink of an eye and on the canvas behind its lid, we become them…”

Alan Richardson is back with a ground-breaking esoteric satire, The Fat Git, with a rip-roaring cast of characters including Ambrose Hart, the Merlin of Strathnaddair; his reluctant nephew, Arthur; the mythical seductress, Vivienne, and the dastardly evil Vortig. Richardson takes no prisoners with his take on psychic pretentiousness, taking mythical simulacra and Arthurian archetypes to levels of absurdity, yet always displaying trenchant psychological insights and a sound background in the deeper aspects of occultism. This mix of mundane and fantastic, at wild odds with each other, is reminiscent of the work of Charles Williams, and perhaps one or two of his fellow Inklings. Richardson does not hold back from lambasting certain quarters with his iconoclastic wit but seems to be saying something that needs to be said. With great humour and panache, he provides a riveting burlesque of modern magic and the Arthurian Mysteries.

146 pages
£9.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-31-2

–

MERLIN AND THE GRAIL TRADITION
Gareth Knight

Few figures from myth and legend have impressed the imagination like that of Merlin, Archmage of the land of Logres, whose shadowy, compelling presence plays a key part in the tales of Arthurian legend and the Quest of the Holy Grail.

In this lively collection of essays, Gareth Knight traces the historical importance and esoteric influence of Merlin and the Grail tradition from its mythological beginnings right down to modern times. Topics covered include Dion Fortune’s grail work at Glastonbury, the Merlin archetype, the “Elizabethan Merlin” John Dee, the blue stones of Preseli (which were used to build Stonehenge), and the connection between Merlin and Tolkien’s figure of Gandalf. This new edition of the book is expanded and has three additional articles, including an esoteric analysis of the legend of Sir Gareth which has not been published before.

124 pages
£10.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-33-6

–
THE PASSENGER
Richard Froude

Native Bristolian now living in Colorado, Richard Froude is The Passenger, serving up a unique collection of writings that navigates both duelling states and hybrid forms. This poetic map charts the space between continents, where tectonic shifting plates transliterate a new amalgamated psychic zone between the root and newly adopted margins. Froude’s new/old world is peopled with dislocated figures in some absurd geo-spiritual collage. Following from his recently published Fabric, Froude continues to explore peculiar immigrant pathology on a journey that likely has no end.

The Passenger is a two-part work, previously published as The Margaret Thatcher Trilogy (Catfish Press) and The History of Zero (Candle Aria Press). Of the former, Robb St. Lawrence wrote tellingly in Phoebe Literary Journal: “Froude’s management of repeating themes, fugue-like in their harmonization, is powerful and suggestive. He extracts the certainties of voice from the declaratives he deploys and ultimately turns that certainty against itself. Froude’s collection reads as the utterances of a speaker who dwells always in the midst of the words to which he is giving voice, head turning one way and then another, startled to catch them wavering as they float by, but utterly convinced of the seriousness of his operation.”

“Richard Froude was grown from film stills. Above all he was a mirror. Much of his soil was gathered from conversation. Nothing is outside the screen. His house was built entirely of redirected rivers. This caused a book of between, a book of plywood and polymers, a book we are never finished reading.” – Eric Baus

“The wild mind and language keeps coming. Richard Froude always surprises and The Passenger is no exception. Characters with terrific allegorical names like Design and Zero romp in the skies. (“My limbs are cirrus clouds”). America is a linguistic map of fleeting yet marvellous accounting. “Here, existence as repetition,” we note as we converse within the Q&As and trajectories of futuristic twists and boggle. Kudos to this rich, hilarious mental acumen.” – Anne Waldman

104 pages
£9.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-38-1

–

AWEN: THE QUEST OF THE CELTIC MYSTERIES
Mike Harris

It was the Celtic bards who laid down the foundation of inner wisdom that has come down to us as Arthurian legend, passing their traditions to the Arthurian romancers of the 12th and 13th centuries. Thus the Celts provide an immediate bridge that leads to a very ancient world. Focusing on the Brythonic Celtic material and the “Taliesin” cult whose lineage preserved the mysteries through the Mabinogion and other texts, Awen: the Quest of the Celtic Mysteries reveals the sources of the British sacred tradition right back to the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, and, as some believe, further back still to even more ancient sources.

Awen is a Welsh word often translated as “inspiration”. However, in its fullness it has a much deeper meaning, an irradiation of the soul from paradisal origins. In the context of the Celtic folk-soul it casts the paradisal pattern by which the people and the land were harmonised. Through the aligned symbolism of the goddess, the sacred king and the stars, a compelling picture is built of a thriving mystery tradition which marries the constellations to the landscape, exploring as an example the interwoven five-fold and seven-fold stellar geometry of Moel ty Uchaf stone circle in North Wales, and the stellar alignments on the landscape of Cadair Idris.

Mike Harris is a well-established authority on the Welsh mystery traditions, having lived for many years in the area of Gwynedd where the Mabinogi and Taliesin myths arose, where he developed an acute sense of the Celtic and pre-Celtic mystery cults and their relationship with the landscape. He is the author of Merlin’s Chess, co-author of Polarity Magic, and founder of the Company of Avalon.

266 pages
£13.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-36-7

–

THE DREAM OF THE BLACK TOPAZE CHAMBER
Hugh Fox

“The moonlight hums around them, bodies give way to ectoplasmic spirit-forces, Inside oozes delicately-featured Out, the thousand-petalled lotus blooms on their foreheads, cross-legged on the bed factory-time stops, time becomes TIME, even when Magda puts the lights on again and there’s this enormous spider on the window screen. She touches its underside with her fingernail and it disappears away, under the Hood of Moon.”

An intellectual confrontation with aging ontology meets with the insulating veneer of superficiality and consumerism. Deep enlightenment is somehow woven into fixations with the superficial and trashy, a protective skin graft to keep their eking existence intact. As escapists from escapism they are poured into a mould of black lycra and worship their outer sheen, coercing a second youth out of old conventionalised bodies. Their jungle paradise is full of beautiful colours and textures but most often expressed by its extremes of climate or its coterie of invasive snakes and spiders. The women experience a ‘coming out’ only to have to re-shut themselves in, cocooning within their middle aged paranoia, making silk purses while they plan face lifts and belly tucks. Their story is an experiential foray into a ménage-à-trois – three women opting out of the conventions of life and love to create their own sensual world on the fringes of the Brazilian jungle, a life which suspends desire, imagination and passion through a silky black dreamland of heightened reality.

The Dream of the Black Topaze Chamber shows the late Hugh Fox at his most sublime. With so many eminently quotable aphorisms and moments of bard-like inspiration he is able to explore the subtle underpinnings of relationships, the minute unspoken thought-flashes between friends, and the mute electricity of shared moments. He moves from the intimate to the universal seamlessly, where inert trivialities can explode into a political treatise or a sublime poetic reflection within a single breath. The Black Topaze Chamber becomes the hub of isolated souls finding some last spiritual union through the open eroticism of their bodies. What results is a lyrical novel of ecstatic sexual and sensual metamorphosis rendered through a poetic alchemy of Brazilian gemstones.

112 pages
£8.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-39-8

–

I CALLED IT MAGIC
Gareth Knight
PAPERBACK EDITION

“I called it magic – Kathleen Raine called it poetry – J. R. R. Tolkien called it enchantment – others have called it a variety of things – from mysticism to mumbo jumbo. All I know is that it works – and that for better or worse I have lived most of my life by it.”

The esoteric autobiography of Gareth Knight covers six decades of magical work, beginning with his induction into the Society of the Inner Light in the early 1950s, his resignation and founding of his own magical group, and subsequent return to the Society. It traces his series of legendary Hawkwood meetings working with Arthurian, Rosicrucian, Celtic and Greek archetypes, the powers of Merlin, the Tarot, the Qabalah, the Goddess and Tolkien’s elves. His journey takes in the Christian mystical tradition and the shining allure of Faery – all told through the warmth, wit, wisdom and humour of one who has never been afraid to plough his own furrow.

224 pages
£12.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-15-2

–

THE ABBEY PAPERS
Gareth Knight & Rebecca Wilby

For a period of ninety days in 1993, Gareth Knight received a sequence of communications which seemed to come from three inner plane communicators who had worked regularly with Dion Fortune for much of her life. Forming a series of teachings and practical meditations which later became important knowledge papers issued to the Gareth Knight Group, the scripts construct an elaborate and multi-faceted magical image of an “Inner Abbey” which serves as a focal point for a wide variety of magical purposes and the evolution of consciousness. As well as providing vivid magical forms and pathworkings within the structure of the abbey, the papers discuss at length the development and use of such magical images and how to establish the magical vortex which empowers them.

Three years later, while working with the Inner Abbey papers, Knight’s daughter Rebecca received a further series of communications which augment the original material and add a practical example of its use, culminating in the Chapel of Remembrance ritual, a magical vortex focused on spiritual resolution for war victims.

Now published together for the first time, the scripts provide a tried and trusted construct for personal magical work along with a fair amount of practical advice on occult and mystical techniques. It is open to the reader to follow up on this to find their own way into the Inner Abbey and come to a personal judgement of its experiential validity.

240 pages
£13.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-44-2

–

FAVERSHAM’S DREAM
Anthony Duncan

In Faversham’s Dream, notable theologian Anthony Duncan spins spools of modern spirituality into an enticing historical yarn.

Whether by fixed chance or divine providence, John Faversham comes across a volume of poems by a little known but enchanting 19th Century poet. Well rooted in the logical empiricism of his day, John is astonished to learn that this poet was not only a previous tenant of the very house in which he lives but also the sharer of a very specific dream.

Thus opens a psychic porthole through which protagonist and reader are transported alike, to an alluring parallel story in the 16th Century. The characters reach across time in the weaving of this magical parable, one that doesn’t conform to easy dualisms or a prescribed sense of ethics. The scientific mind must meet with its own Reformation of sorts as histories are made to confront themselves in the mirror.

John Selby described the late Father Duncan as “surprisingly open to the idea of inner spiritual directors” – an openness that was most readily explored through his fiction.

226 pages
£11.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-11-4

–

LEARNING TO DRAW / A HISTORY
Basil King
edited by Daniel Staniforth

From London’s East End to Black Mountain College to the New York Art scene, Basil King can people a canvas like no other. Learning to Draw / A History is an evolving and transformative narrative sketch, alternately prose and poetry, that that serves to document a personal and yet collective history with a roving artist’s eye. Previously serialised in a number of small journals and zines, the work has met with some acclaim and Skylight Press is pleased to offer the first complete version in a new architectural alignment. Although from post-war Britain, King’s literary lineage harkens back to the projective verse style of Pound and Williams, sweetened through his working associations with the likes of Blackburn, Ginsberg and Baraka. The weaving of subjects in this work is not unlike the purposeful mixing of colours on an artist’s palette, which other notable poets have also been quick to praise:

“The poems, rather than acting as an extended narrative (which is what I’d at first assumed they would do) interlace, so that the structure is like an evolving web. What is at stake here is a history, but history being a fluid thing, is never going to appear the same no matter how often the survivors tell their tales. With each new piece of information the whole is altered: not just by addition, but by complication.” – Laurie Duggan

“Essential symmetry of experience which has gone against both the metronome and arrhythmia and beyond the ornamentation of inessentials in so much present writing. It helps to have had one’s hands covered with paint. Someone, after a long life, is standing at the door of some facet of wisdom.” – Nathaniel Tarn

270 pages
£13.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-30-5

–

I CALLED IT MAGIC
Gareth Knight

“I called it magic – Kathleen Raine called it poetry – J. R. R. Tolkien called it enchantment – others have called it a variety of things – from mysticism to mumbo jumbo. All I know is that it works – and that for better or worse I have lived most of my life by it. Now seems the time to take stock of it – not so much in self justification – but in order to dust it off, look it up and down, and make some kind of appraisal of what it was all about. Was it all worth it? What did it serve? Was it a public service for the greater good or a fanciful diversion – a flight from the real in pursuit of the ideal?”

The long-awaited magical autobiography of Gareth Knight covers a long career in pursuit of the Mysteries, from the adventures of New Dimensions magazine to the calling of King Arthur, from the rituals of Sherwood Forest to the Somme, from the wrath of fellow ritual magicians to the shining allure of Faery.

This initial release is a clothbound hardback edition, limited to 150 individually numbered copies. Some copies will be signed. Available only direct from the publishers.

224 pages
SOLD OUT
ISBN: 978-1-908011-43-5

 

BOTH SIDES OF THE DOOR
Margaret Lumley Brown

A re-issue of a remarkable little novella published in 1918, which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle praised as “a unique experience”.

It comprises a fictionalised account of a psychic upheaval the young Margaret went through in 1913 while living in a disturbed house in Bayswater, London, with her sister. A casual experiment with table-turning triggered an intense and terrifying haunting, beginning with odd patches of shadow and light and soon developing into a full blown poltergeist manifestation – household items vanishing and reappearing in odd places, writing appearing on window blinds, and malevolent presences who began to materialise in various disturbing forms. Margaret Lumley Brown went on to become a significant figure in the Western Mysteries revival, and her remarkable mediumship gift was sparked by the experiences described in Both Sides of the Door.

Margaret Lumley Brown (1886-1975) is best known as resident trance medium at the Society of the Inner Light, where she took over the role of arch-pythoness after Dion Fortune’s death in 1946. In her youth she published this novella and a book of poetry, both originally under the pen-name of Irene Hay. This re-issue includes an Introduction by Gareth Knight and an essay by Rebecca Wilby explaining the locations and historical background to the story.

112 pages
£10.95
ISBN: 978-1-908011-37-4

–

THE ROMANCE OF THE FAERY MELUSINE
translated by Gareth Knight
from a novel by André Lebey

Springing from the heart of medieval France, The Romance of the Faery Melusine tells the story of Raymondin of Poitiers who accidentally kills his uncle while out hunting, and flees deep into the forest until he encounters a faery by a fountain. Struck by mutual soul-love, the faery Melusine agrees to help him, and to become his wife, on condition that he makes no attempt to see her between dusk and dawn each Saturday. On this basis the house of Lusignan magically thrives, until a treachery tempts Raymondin to violate his promise and shatter the magic which holds his faery wife to the human world.

First rendered into written form in a text by Jean d’Arras in 1393, the legend of the Faery Melusine is well established in France, where she is credited with having founded the family, town and castle of Lusignan. However, it is very little known in the English-speaking world, despite the fact that Melusine originally hailed from Scotland.

This new translation by Gareth Knight of André Lebey’s 1920s novel Le Roman de la Mélusine captures the freshness of Lebey’s retelling of the legend and brings the benefit of Knight’s expertise both in French literature and in the esoteric faery tradition. Gareth Knight is the author of The Faery Gates of Avalon and Melusine of Lusignan and the Cult of the Faery Woman.

152 pages
£10.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-32-9

–
DIDDLE
Daniel Staniforth

Diddle is a sequence of absurd, impossible, but faintly connected stories about immigrants living in the USA that serves to deconstruct the “American Dream” mythos. Each story exemplifies the experience of life for outsiders in the US, along with the impossibility of absolute acculturation. A dozen short stories are each generated out of a line from the old nursery rhyme, laced with double entendres, multiple meanings and overlaps. Written by a poet with a rich touch of language, these tales question the very notion of identity and belonging, presenting instead the amalgamated state that most people are forced to live in.

Daniel Staniforth is the author of Weaver in the Sluices, a collection of poems also published by Skylight Press.

“Diddle is packed with stories that fully articulate their premise and characters, coil like a spring, and then come to fruition when you least expect it. They have a genuine and original rhythm, one that will make you think differently about what fiction can do.”
— Brian Evenson (Author of Fugue State, Last Days, and The Open Curtain)

“With the poise and spark of a master storyteller, Daniel Staniforth presents an alchemical phantasmagoria of loosely connecting figures moving like ghosts on the liminality of their adopted culture. Tempered always with warmth and wit, Diddle achieves a lightness of narrative touch which shimmers over the profundity of human experience for the detached and displaced.”
— Rebecca Wilby (Author of In Different Skies and This Wretched Splendour)

80 pages
£8.25
ISBN: 978-1-908011-18-3

–

WORKING WITH INNER LIGHT: The Magical Journal of William G. Gray
Edited by Jo Clark & Alan Richardson

As the New Age seemed to explode into being from the late 1960s onward, everything spiritual had to be Eastern. Psychedelic artwork showed Glastonbury Tor overshadowed by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, or Stonehenge sending its energies up to Lord Krishna – imagery which Bill Gray summed up quite simply as “Balls.” He was working hard at making sure that our weakened (or slumbering) Western Traditions would survive.

Now, nineteen years after his death, a new manuscript has come to light representing some of his vintage work on the inner and outer practicalities of ritual magic. On what turned out to be his last visit to Bill, Alan Richardson was given a ring binder containing what seemed to be an occasional Journal-cum-Magical Diary for 1965. However it is far more than a journal; it is a detailed course in modern Qabalistic magic. Now published for the first time, this advanced but practical text will be of immense value to esoteric students and practitioners working within the Western Mysteries today.

At the editors’ request, all royalties from the sale of this book, and
any earnings of any kind accrued by them in relation to it, will be paid
to the charity Cancer and Leukaemia in Childhood (CLICSargent).
www.clicsargent.org.uk

208 pages
£14.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-14-5

–

DIARY AS SIN
Will Alexander

“I am not of one persona, not of one mystery, but arrayed with intransigent neurons and timings. … I’ve splintered my own trajectory from a fissioning of threats which have issued from my great monomial leprosy. Which has created in me a raw ascensional vastitude, allowing me further millennia although the bodies about me will all have been destroyed. Because I speak out of blindness I am able to respond to spiritual extremity, which has transmuted dearth and soulless nightmare relations. Of course I am speaking from auto-causality, from an enriched alkaline insurrection, altricial, haunted, partaking cacophony from the cinders of nauseous aeronautics. Because I am Mexican and Seminole I breed schisms, I breed eloquent ransacking laws.”

Diary as Sin is the powerful and evocative story of a sand-blind girl, Rosanna Galvez. Confined to a private Catholic home in New Mexico, she unveils her beginnings as an incest baby – and moves through the odyssey beyond – with powerful incantatory language. Through poetic and often painful recall, Rosanna weaves a diary that will spellbind the reader with its imagistic and visionary prowess. Alexander cites Beckett, Bernhard and Goytisolo as an “ancestral trilology” for the work, living up to his forebears with some aplomb.

Will Alexander is known to the literary world as the avant garde poet that continually defies easy classification. Though a Los Angeles native, his work more resembles Breton, Paz, Cesaire, or Gascoyne more than anything in contemporary US poetics. Even such comparisons are glib as Alexander is that rare voice that must be experienced in its own right. For Andrew Joron he is “the fiery trickster leaping between frozen and fragmented realia, the universal translator of the multitude of tongues (both human and inhuman) emitted by the Signal of signals.” For Harryette Mullen he is “a poet whose lexicon, a ‘glossary of vertigo,’ might be culled from the complete holdings of a reconstituted Alexandrian library endowed for the next millennium.” For Nathaniel Mackey his “thicketed prose advances lexical ignitions of astounding angle and amplitude.”

172 pages
£11.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-13-8

–
AT THE GATES OF DAWN: A Collection of Writings by Ella Young
Edited by John Matthews and Denise Sallee

The sea lay basking on a slant of ivory sand, spreading and stretching itself like a huge dragon that feels the sun; drawing long breaths, lazily conscious of its own bulk and the strength it had. It was of a wonderful colour, like the sky at dawn, like a lapis-stone bathed in honey.

 “Heart of my Life,” cried the Son of the Gubbaun Saor, “it is not enough to be blue: if you could see the light filtering through the young leaves in a beechwood — that greenness as of fire, that motion, that pulse of colour, you would not bask so easily. Stir yourself, Heart of my Life!”

In early Irish society there existed an honoured group of people called the “Filid.” They preserved the native stories and they were learned in the magical arts. It is within this ancient tradition that Ella Young (1867-1956) lived her unique and creative life. In the late 1800s Ella began to gather the old tales that had been handed down from family to family for centuries. She lived among the rural folk in the West of Ireland and in the hills south of Dublin. As part of her devotion to Irish culture she learned Gaelic and, as a major contributor to the Celtic Revival, she taught classes in the language and the myths.

Ella’s spirituality reached deep into the land and into the heart of ancient Ireland. Others have called her a seeress, a druidess, or a witch – the magical name she gave herself was “Airmid” – the goddess of healing who drew her powers from the fertile green earth. She knew first-hand about the faery folk of Ireland – she heard their music and listened to their stories.

This new collection of her writings, edited and introduced by John Matthews and Denise Sallee, is a deeply magical and evocative tribute to Ella’s many gifts, featuring some of the best of her poetry and mythical storytelling.

“There is a spell upon her prose, a real enchantment, that echoes through the mind like remembered music…to read the prose books of Ella Young…is to move in a world of epic proportion, heroic deed and heroic character, set against a background of warm earth, where even the gods delight in the small intimacy of blossom and flower…These tales are told with great conviction, as if they were rooted in the experience of the storyteller.” — Frances Clarke Sayers

220 pages
£11.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-16-9

–

A HISTORY OF WHITE MAGIC
Gareth Knight

The world of magic is one of high imagination. In this wide-ranging historical survey Gareth Knight shows how the higher imagination has been used as an aid to the evolution of consciousness, from the ancient Mystery Religions, through Alchemy, Renaissance Magic, the Rosicrucian Manifestos, Freemasonry and 19th century Magical Fraternities, up to the modern era.

Knight considers magic as a middle ground between science and religion, reconciling them in a technology of the imagination, which properly used, can bring about personal regeneration and spiritual fulfilment. He uses Coleridge’s theory of the imagination as a basis for the validity of magic as science and art in its own right. Many systems and structures have come down through the ages slightly shoddy, misrepresented, maligned, misaligned. With this book a deconstruction becomes a recycling of raw material for the purposes of re-ordering and re-configuring – a righted prism, a shored up temple, a foundational re-ballasting.

“It is obvious from the beginning that we have here a work revealing the author’s spiritual maturity, a work with a definite message and structure, rather than the piecemeal gathering of snippets of information which often is offered in books with this sort of title, by inferior authors with little occult understanding.”
— The Hermetic Journal

“As a chronicle of the evolution of consciousness and culture in Western Europe this may be compared favorably to Bronowski’s Ascent of Man. The chapter on medieval magic, alchemy and the Visions of the Quest is particularly illuminating, covering as it does the Grail and Arthurian legends and the cult of the Virgin Mary.”
— Sangreal Magazine

208 pages
£13.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-04-6

–
IMMORTAL JAGUAR
Hugh Fox

Immortal Jaguar is Hugh Fox’s account of his experiences with the inner worlds and ancient powers unleashed by his use of traditional South American spiritual hallucinogenics. After consuming psychoactive plants in Peru he is gripped by visionary experiences and finds a dazzling magical world of Immortals opening up, a whirl of ancient knowledge pouring through his consciousness. On his return to academic life in the US he finds that having a shamanic gift which he is unable to switch off is something of a dangerous liability.

Part memoir, part archaeology, this fusion of visions and ideas into fictional narrative is among the most excitingly readable presentations of the spiritual underworld of the Andes and its expression through sacred hallucinogens. The vision extends outward across the ancient world through language and legend, all leading to a voyage to the house of the Sun-King – Tiawanaku in Bolivia. Fox, a major authority on the Pre-Columbian Americas, and a true visionary to boot, makes a compelling case for the connection of myths and cultures around the world in deepest antiquity.

“Hugh Fox has long been a legend in the annals of contemporary American
poetry, a poet who is unafraid to explore the deeper fodder of the human
psyche …. there are no barriers here for Fox is a shaman who walks through
walls, ignoring all social rules and regulations.” — B.L. Kennedy, Rattlesnake Review

172 pages
£10.95
ISBN: 978-1-908011-09-1

–

THE ROLLRIGHT RITUAL
William G. Gray

In the early 1970s the redoubtable old occultist William G. Gray bicycled from his Gloucestershire home to the Rollright stone circle in Oxfordshire on a clear and full-mooned summer night. The visionary experiences he encountered on that night and in other similar visits resulted in the writing of this book, originally published by Helios Books in 1975 and now a classic among pagan and craft traditions. The text of the ritual is given in full, along with a discussion of its pattern and purpose.

The Rollright Ritual is a powerful initiatory rite for attuning oneself to a personal and communal path of spiritual growth, presented here with an explanatory text and a discussion of the spiritual lives and practices of the stone circle builders of Great Britain.

“Somehow, we ought to get away from ideas that a Standing Stone is only an outworn sign of our past, and see it as an upraised Finger of Fate beckoning us ahead toward our future. The Stone is not merely a memorial of bygone beliefs, but a pointer that should raise our highest hopes of finding faith in all the Life that lies ahead of us.”

William G. Gray is a well established author of many books on Qabalah and ritual magic. He also worked with many practitioners of traditional witchcraft including Doreen Valiente, Pat Crowther and notably Robert Cochrane, in whose memory The Rollright Ritual was written.

The original 1973 audio recording made to accompany the book, featuring the voices of William G. Gray and R.J. Stewart with powerfully evocative music, is also now available on CD from R.J. Stewart Books.

142 pages
£10.95
ISBN: 978-1-908011-17-6

–
THE OLD SOD: The Odd Life and Inner Work of William G. Gray
Alan Richardson & Marcus Claridge

William G. Gray was a real magician, a kind of primeval spirit who worked his magic as an extension of the Life Force, not as a sop to ego. He reeked of psychism like he often reeked of incense, could give you the uncomfortable feeling that he could see right through you and beyond, and had been to places in spirit that we could scarcely imagine. Many of the books on magic and the Qabalah which appear today owe a huge if unrecognised debt to his pioneering writing. If there is anything evolutionary about the current urge to work with harmonic energies within the Earth and ourselves – whether through green eco-movements, the Celtic Revival or the Wiccan arts – then it is due in no small degree to the work that was done by an old bastard who lived near the bus station in a town in Gloucestershire.

Bill Gray met and worked with many of the most important figures in the British esoteric scene. His boyhood meetings with Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley are described here in his own words, along with his personal recollections of working magic with Pat Crowther, Doreen Valiente, Ronald Heaver, Robert Cochrane and many others. This lively, entertaining and authoritative biography tells the story of how a difficult, psychic child grew into a powerful adept who was equally at home in Hermetic and Craft traditions, and who challenged established assumptions within paganism and Qabalah alike and revitalised them from within – often falling out with those he worked with but maintaining their affection and respect. Generously illustrated with photographs, many never published before, the book also includes contributions by R.J. Stewart, Gareth Knight, Evan John Jones, Marcia Pickands and Jacobus Swart, plus, of course, W.G. Gray himself.

206 pages
£12.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-12-1

–

SOMETHING’S WRONG WITH THE CORNFIELDS
Margaret Randall
Illustrated by Barbara Byers

Margaret Randall is a feminist poet, writer, photographer and social activist born in New York City, and author of more than 80 published books.

“I think of these as my ‘impossible poems,’ poems made from the battered language they are leaving us with, the torn and devastated language, the words twisted to mean the opposite of what they have always meant… turning language back on itself, as if going home… ”

Margaret Randall’s Something’s Wrong with the Cornfields offers an array of
sacred spaces, evocative landscapes, historical acts, and personal infusions. The poems augur around the ability to alternate between the universal and the obscure, between personal orbit and cultural aura. Some poems constrict like bloodward spirals…. and others unravel from their topical moorings. As with earlier volumes like Stones Witness, hers is a language in flux, where the willingness to yield alephs and symbols over time gives the poet a new scope to write beyond fixity.

‘Poet Margaret Randall says “these are the impossible poems.” But she goes ahead and says them because they are hers and they are from her cultural community in which they were forged. These are poems from her person as a female, child, adult, marginal, concerned, urgent, afraid, angry. And, yes, loving, gentle, strong, solid, yet, also, always afraid, angry. And even then, she says “thank you for caring, really caring.” To herself for reassurance and reaffirmation. And to the cultural-social-political source in this too-present world that angers us and makes us afraid. So these poems are not impossible because they are the voice we need to say. So we can truly and necessarily face the 21^st century. And, like the poet, say what must be said. And do what must be done.’ – Simon J. Ortiz, author of Out There Somewhere, The Good Rainbow Road, from Sand Creek

‘Better than a memoir, Margaret Randall’s collection of unpublished poems, “Something’s Wrong with the Cornfields” celebrates the lives she has observed, of workers and oppressed peoples, as well as poets and intellectuals. The passion expressed in Meg Randall’s long career as a poet, editor, and activist comes tumbling out of this huge collection, brimming over the edges of every poem.’ – Diane Wakoski, author of The Diamond Dog

120 pages
£9.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-10-7

–

EXPERIENCE OF THE INNER WORLDS
Gareth Knight

Originally published in 1975, Experience of the Inner Worlds is a classic magical textbook of the Western Mystery Tradition.

Covering a wide range of topics within a Christian-oriented Qabalistic framework, Gareth Knight explains the difference between magic and mysticism, natural and revealed religion, monism and theism. He also covers the practicalities, examining methods of inner plane communication, contact with the Masters, the ‘consciousness’ approach of Carl Jung, the vision of Dante and the archetypal power of the Hebrew alphabet – all within the context of the Qabalistic Tree of Life. The book also contains powerful visualisation exercises and examples of communication with angelic and elemental contacts.

While this book can be used as a course of self-instruction, it is also an important modern reference book of magical theory and practice, and has been used for decades by students of Western Qabalah and magic.

244 pages
£14.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-03-9

–

YOURS VERY TRULY – GARETH KNIGHT
Gareth Knight

Selected letters of occult author Gareth Knight, written over a period of forty years and to over seventy different people. These include learned discourse with academics, exchanges of strange experiences with esoteric colleagues, and advice to seekers trying to find their path. The letters reveal extraordinary, entertaining and personal details of the life and work of a contemporary occultist.

“One fault of many occult students is to read too much … all too often the new student is so interested in reading the latest thing that he never gets round to actually doing any of it.”

“I suppose you can at least feel what it is like to be ‘a lone voice crying in the wilderness’ … I think even John the Baptist, in time, would have packed up his traps, said ‘Sod it’ (or ‘Sod them’) and gone home, maybe to start a locust and wild honey farm.”

“I am, I suppose, trying to pass myself off as a grand old man these days, after a long career as a slowly maturing and now possibly decaying enfant terrible.”

“Your remark that the devil works by compromise and subtlety is altogether too glib a simplification. He works equally well through uncompromising ‘principles’ very often. The thing that bothers me though is your preoccupation with the insinuations of the devil, which seems at times to verge on ‘old maid’s insanity’. I get the impression – I hope wrongly – that I stand a good chance of being cast in the role of the serpent offering the poisoned, or forbidden fruit.”

218 pages
£13.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-05-3

–

WEAVER IN THE SLUICES
Selected Poems
Daniel Staniforth

‪“Daniel Staniforth’s book of poems Weaver in the Sluices is an intermixing of zones where the light of the waking body rises and transmixes its power with falling uranian whispers. These poems exist at the cusp where both realities overspill and condense, making fleeting forays into the unsayable.”
— Will Alexander, author of The Sri Lankan Loxodrome and Above the Human Nerve Domain

“In Weaver in the Sluices, Daniel Staniforth pulls variously from Bardic tradition, contemporary lament, and surrealist landscapes to ‘filter the nutrients of thought.’ The poet invokes erotic passion and political protest alike, all while navigating the ‘midriff of the sun,’ ‘star-widths of fancy’ and the ‘nape of the sea.’ In these poems, such wonders shift continually between foreground and background to portray a world where, ultimately, ‘the hollows subsume the shape.’ ”
— Elizabeth Robinson, author of Inaudible Trumpeters and The Orphan & its Relations

“Composer and musical producer as well as poet, what strikes me most profoundly about Staniforth’s work is his training as a musical instrument luthier, a skill as sensitive as it is intuitive. For it is this sensitivity and intuition, this fine-tuning, that is most uniquely present in Weaver in the Sluices. These poems spring resonant from the page. It is especially in the imagery of the longer pieces that the poet’s originality shines. A book to be savoured!”
— Margaret Randall, author of Stones Witness and Ruins

“There is a strong current of Englishness weaving through Daniel’s work and a deep connection with natural magic and the soul of the land, but it is diverse enough to take in the bleak and the gritty as well as his finely crafted dreamworlds.”
— Rebecca Wilby, author of In Different Skies and This Wretched Splendour

128 pages
£9.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-08-4

–

DEPTHS AND DRAGONS
Hugh Fox

Visionary poet and archaeologist Hugh Fox excavates the fragile human psyche and its need for spiritual belonging in his new novel, Depths and Dragons. The reader will be swept along on a cosmopolitan excursion that skirts variant cultural scapes and languages as it lurches toward some unknown existential destination. The story is told evocatively through a clever synthesis of the tragi-comic and the author’s kaleidoscopic stream of consciousness style. Fox is a consummate master of collagist inner monologues that teeter somewhere between the conscious and subconscious without ever fully yielding to either.

The aptly named Miriam must undergo a journey of violent displacement between the worlds of Jew and gentile, rabbi and priest, orthodoxy and heresy. Along the way she is made to pay the ultimate price of familial sacrifice, degenerative diaspora, and the loss of her spiritual moorings. The novel battles states of inner and outer terrorism, from physical death to an exalted denial of the flesh, but all the while retaining precious wit and jocularity. The twists and turns of this self-pilgrimage lead to a surprising outcome, and one that will be well worth sharing.

“The latest from Hugh Fox, DEPTHS and DRAGONS, is a novel of obsessions: religion and sex; the quest for spiritual significance amidst the demands to satisfy lust; “why are we here?” interspersed with the drive to orgasm. Fans will smile at familiar Fox themes in this romp from Tel Aviv to Paris to Provence, through a Jewish woman’s conversion to Catholicism, flirtation with Albigensians, and spiritual re-emergence. Those new to Fox will be amazed by the depth and breadth of the poet-storywriter-reviewer-essayist’s knowledge of religion, Israel, and France and his ability to inhabit a complex female artist who travels from wife to mother to widow to burying her children in her search for meaning and belonging.” — Angela Consolo Mankiewicz

146 pages
£7.99
978-1-908011-07-7

–

RED TREE, WHITE TREE
Faeries and Humans in Partnership
Wendy Berg
foreword by Gareth Knight

The relationship between human and Faery lies at the very core of the Arthurian stories. In this radical re-evaluation of the Grail legends, Wendy Berg brings some meaningful light to the ancient mythology of the British Isles, centred around the marriage of King Arthur to the Faery Gwenevere. Drawing upon numerous Arthurian sources and other related texts, from the Book of Genesis to The Lord of the Rings, she explores the magical ritual underpinning of the legends and their connection to the ancient stellar deities of Britain. “When these stories are read with the additional level of understanding that they are for the most part a record of the lives and relationships of Faeries and humans working together about the Round Table, they immediately become not only a great deal more interesting, but also acquire a new and vivid relevance for the present day.”

Wendy Berg has thirty years’ experience of all aspects of the Western Mystery Tradition and is an authority on Egyptian, Celtic, Arthurian and Grail magical traditions. She blends a thorough knowledge and experience of the Qabala and formal ritual magic with Christian Mysticism and modern Paganism. She currently runs the Avalon Group, the magical fraternity founded by Gareth Knight.

Wendy is co-author with Mike Harris of Polarity Magic: the Secret History of Western Religion (Llewellyn Publications, 2003) and was a major contributor to Alan Richardson’s Spirits of the Stones (Virgin Publishing Ltd, 2001).

“This is the most important and challenging book on Arthurian and Grail tradition for many a long year. Wendy Berg is not afraid to ask fundamental questions or to challenge facile assumptions that have for long simply ignored or plastered over many contradictions in the stories – particularly relating to Arthur’s queen and the origin and destiny of the Grail Hallows. Wendy has certainly changed the direction of my own thought and research into matters Arthurian and pointed me in the direction of the greatly ignored wealth of tradition that is held in the lore of Faery. The search for the true Grail and its custodians starts here!” – Gareth Knight

198 pages
£12.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-06-0

–

IN DIFFERENT SKIES
Rebecca Wilby

A novel by the author of This Wretched Splendour.

In the trenches of Loos and the Somme, two disaffected young subalterns, Munro and Tate, struggle to find humour and purpose in a rapidly disintegrating world; brothers unto death – with a firmer bond than anything in their real families.

A world away, in another time and place, Katherine is startled when she starts to recover memories – someone else’s memories – of the first world war trenches. These involuntary glimpses into the life of a lost soldier open up a visionary world and a search across the fields of northern Europe for the historical truth behind it.
A powerful story – fused with many realities.

288 pages
£9.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-02-2

–

THE MAGICAL WORLD OF THE INKLINGS
Second edition
Gareth Knight
Foreword by Owen Barfield

The Inklings were a small group of friends and writers who set out to explore the ‘mythopoeic’ or myth making element in imaginative fiction.

The works of J R R Tolkien, C S Lewis, Charles Williams and Owen Barfield have made a profound impact on the contemporary world. The Magical World of the Inklings reveals how each created a ‘magical world’ which initiates the reader into the hidden and powerful realms of the creative imagination.

The original edition, first published in 1990, met with great acclaim including an endorsement from Owen Barfield. This new edition has been substantially revised and expanded.

304 pages
£16.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-01-5

–
ON WINSLEY HILL
Alan Richardson

A novella

“Alan Richardson needs no introduction, as the biographer of various major figures on the occult scene, who also has a reputation as a highly amusing, well informed and down to earth speaker. His specialist knowledge is brilliantly exploited in this vivid evocation of the west country world of 1908 in the moving story of a psychically gifted young girl exploited and abused by an academic researcher. This finely observed tale not only captivated me but taught me a great deal about psychic and psychological fact and human nature in general. Highly recommended, and I look forward to more of the same.” – Gareth Knight

On Winsley Hill is set in a very real location, a plateau near Bath. Within the chronicles of old light ever stirring on the hill is the story of Rosie Chant, a young farmworker who, aged 17 in 1908, falls in love with a visiting American folklorist and archaeologist called Edward Grahl, triggering a fierce soul love which entangles her through nine decades.

Grahl recognises Rosie’s unique otherworldly talents. She is a visionary and can pick up impressions from objects and places. As part of his research for a book he is writing, he uses her to tell him about the era of standing stones, long barrows, and sacred wells. She doesn’t complain when he uses her in other ways, and through Grahl she gets to mix society life with the darker side of her gift, with devastating consequences.

116 pages
£8.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-00-8

–

TO THE HEART OF THE RAINBOW
Gareth Knight

An esoteric novel, with illustrations by Libby Travassos Valdez

In what appears on the surface to be a children’s story, Gareth Knight, using Tarot imagery, conducts a guided visualisation through the Tree of Life from the homely Cottage of Heart’s Desire to the Heart of the Rainbow … and back again.

Richard and Rebecca meet the Joker of their granny’s pack of cards, and guided by his dog, embark on an adventure through the Inner Worlds in search of their True Names. To those attuned to its deeper symbolism, the story forms an imaginative journey along the serpentine path of the Tree of Life, conducted via the Tarot archetypes, which when read with openness and imagination may serve as a powerful key to intuitive understanding of the Western Mystery Tradition.

Gareth Knight is one of the world’s leading authorities on modern esoteric studies and the Western Mystery Tradition, with a career as an author, publisher and lecturer which spans more than 50 years.

168 pages
£10.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-94-7

–

THIS WRETCHED SPLENDOUR
& WILD WITH ALL REGRETS
Rebecca Wilby

Two First World War plays

Seven bored and demoralised survivors in a Flanders trench in 1916 find their lives transformed by the arrival of a new officer, David Cartwright. With his bright charisma and subversive approach to authority he inspires them to face their seemingly inevitable fate with courage, high-spirited stoicism and a sanguine sense of humour – the only defence against a bleak and mindless war.

This new edition of This Wretched Splendour includes a one-act play, Wild With All Regrets, an evocative biographical drama woven from the words and experiences of Wilfred Owen on the Western Front.

“The standard first world war play is still RC Sherriff’s Journey’s End. But Rebecca Wilby, a 29-year-old from Cheltenham, knocks it into a cocked hat with This Wretched Splendour. Where Sherriff’s play is steeped in the public-school ethos, this one conveys the eccentric humanity and the tragedy of life at the front line.”
Michael Billington, The Guardian

“an engaging, affectionate foray into an alien world.”
Time Out

108 pages
£9.99
ISBN: 978-1-908011-93-0