Come take a journey into the mind of madness, through the Chambers of Hell where no one can prepare you for what lurks in the darkness. Wandering the cemetery can be frightening; unfortunately, stumbling into the gates of Crowley’s Tomb will be the most disturbing moments of your life. Here, there are no places to run. Your prayers will fall on deaf ears, your screams ignored. A band of brothers called the Cemetery Boys will take you on a non-stop, heart-pounding ride through the underworld where they will battle against their own demons, the enemy and paranormal elements. Be Sure to Check Out Crowley's Tomb Terrifying and Mind-Blowing Trailer on YouTube.
Drawing from a rich corpus of art works, including sarcophagi, tomb paintings, and floor mosaics, Patrick R. Crowley investigates how something as insubstantial as a ghost could be made visible through the material grit of stone and paint. In this fresh and wide-ranging study, he uses the figure of the ghost to offer a new understanding of the status of the image in Roman art and visual culture. Tracing the shifting practices and debates in antiquity about the nature of vision and representation, Crowley shows how images of ghosts make visible structures of beholding and strategies of depiction. Yet the figure of the ghost simultaneously contributes to a broader conceptual history that accounts for how modalities of belief emerged and developed in antiquity. Neither illustrations of ancient beliefs in ghosts nor depictions of afterlife, these images show us something about the visual event of seeing itself. The Phantom Image offers essential insight into ancient art, visual culture, and the history of the image.
Examines Aleister Crowley’s 30-year-long intimate association with Paris • Investigates the tales of Crowley “raising Pan,” going mad, and working gay sex magick in Paris • Uncovers Crowley’s involvement in the Belle Époque with sculptor Auguste Rodin and other artists and in the 1920s with Berenice Abbott, Nancy Cunard, Man Ray, André Gide, and Aimée Crocker • Reveals Crowley’s “expulsion” from Paris in 1929 as a high-level conspiracy against Crowley Exploring occultist, magician, poet, painter, and writer Aleister Crowley’s longstanding and intimate association with Paris, Tobias Churton provides the first detailed account of Crowley’s activities in the City of Light. Using previously unpublished letters and diaries, Churton explores how Crowley was initiated into the Golden Dawn’s Inner Order in Paris in 1900 and how, in 1902, he relocated to Montparnasse. Soon engaged to Anglo-Irish artist Eileen Gray, Crowley pontificates and parties with English, American, and French artists gathered around sculptor Auguste Rodin: all keen to exhibit at Paris’s famed Salon d’Automne. In 1904—still dressed as “Prince Chioa Khan” and recently returned from his Book of the Law experience in Cairo—Crowleydines with novelist Arnold Bennett at Paillard’s. In 1908 Crowley is back in Paris to prove it’s possible to attain Samadhi (or “knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel”) while living a modern life in a busy metropolis. In 1913 he organizes a demonstration for artistic and sexual freedom at Oscar Wilde’s tomb. Until war spoils all in 1914, Paris is Crowley’s playground. The author details how, after returning from America in 1920, and though based at his “Abbey of Thelema” in Sicily, Crowley can’t leave Paris alone. When Mussolini expels him from Italy, Paris becomes his home from 1924 until 1929. Churton reveals Crowley’s part in the jazz-age explosion of modernism, as the lover of photographer Berenice Abbott and many others, and how he enjoyed camaraderie with Man Ray, Nancy Cunard, André Gide, and Aimée Crocker. The author explores Crowley’s adventures in Tunisia, Algeria, the Riviera,his battle with heroin addiction, his relationship with daughter Astarte Lulu—raised at Cefalù—and finally, a high-level ministerial conspiracy to get him out of Paris. Reconstructing Crowley’s heyday in the last decade and a half of France’s Belle Époque and the “roaring Twenties,” this book illuminates Crowley’s place within the artistic, literary, and spiritual ferment of the great City of Light.
A sweeping account of Medieval North America when Indigenous peoples confronted climate change. Few Americans today are aware of one of the most consequential periods in ancient North American history-the Medieval Warm Period of seven to twelve centuries ago (AD 800-1300 CE). On every page of this book, readers will be led down the same paths walked by Indigenous people a millennium ago, some trod by Spanish conquistadors just a few centuries later. The book will follow the footsteps of priests, pilgrims, traders, and farmers who took great journeys, made remarkable pilgrimages, and migrated long distances to new lands. Along the way, readers will discover a new history of a continent that, like today, was being shaped by climate change-or controlled by ancient gods of wind and water. Through such elemental powers, the history of Medieval America was a physical narrative, a long-term natural and cultural experience in which Native people were entwined long before Christopher Columbus arrived or Hernan Cortes conquered the Aztecs. The book's dozen chapters cover a lot of ground, focusing on some remarkable parallels between pre-contact American civilizations separated by a thousand miles or more. Key archaeological sites are featured in every chapter, all of which link in an evidentiary trail a great religious movement that swept Mesoamerica, the Southwest, and the Mississippi valley, sometimes because of worsening living conditions and sometimes by improved agricultural yields thanks to global warming a thousand years ago.
A circus-performer-turned-PI matches wits with an international assassin in another of Chesbro’s “wild roller-coaster rides” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine). With a genius IQ, a past career as a circus acrobat, and a black belt in karate, criminology professor Dr. Robert Frederickson—better known as “Mongo the Magnificent”—has a decidedly unusual background for a private investigator. He also just so happens to be a dwarf. Hired to investigate an audacious theft, Mongo travels to Zurich, Switzerland, where rich philanthropist Emmet P. Neuberger claims terrorist and criminal John “Chant” Sinclair has swindled his charitable organization, the Cornucopia Foundation, out of $10 million. Several agencies, including Interpol, are already on the case, but Neuberger wants a private eye to monitor the situation. It quickly becomes clear it’s much more than a simple case of embezzlement. As the bodies pile up and suspicions turn to Mongo himself, the detective decides to hunt down Chant on his own. But the deeper he digs into this peculiar case, the more he begins to think that Chant may not be the one to blame . . . This thrilling entry in the Mongo series introduces international assassin Chant, who goes on to star in his own series of adventures from the author who “writes wonderfully strange mystery novels . . . [with] perfectly calculated nail-biting tension” (Boston Sunday Herald). Dark Chant in a Crimson Key is the 11th book in the Mongo Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.
A circus-performer-turned-PI deals with sinister sleight of hand in a novel that “gleefully subvert[s] most of the rules of mystery fiction” (Publishers Weekly). With a genius IQ, a past career as a circus acrobat, and a black belt in karate, criminology professor Dr. Robert Frederickson—better known as “Mongo the Magnificent”—has a decidedly unusual background for a private investigator. He also just so happens to be a dwarf. Mongo and his brother, Garth, are experienced private detectives. So when Garth’s wife Mary’s strange ex-boyfriend shows up uninvited, they suspect he, the self-proclaimed magician Sacra Silver, is full of mumbo jumbo. But when a series of annoying pranks disrupts their lives, Mongo and Garth have to deal with Sacra’s attempts at black magic. Meanwhile, they’re also investigating a death involving a suspicious multinational corporation. Garth’s friend, environmental cop Tom Blaine, was found in the Hudson chopped to pieces by a boat propeller—just like the kind on the tanker the victim had seen dumping oil in the river . . . The two problems couldn’t be less alike, but soon Mongo learns the dirty dealings have a connection that could put everyone he loves in danger. An Incident at Bloodtide is the 12th book in the Mongo Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.
This is the masterpiece of occultist, magician and philosopher Aleister Crowley, introduced for the first time by one of the world's leading experts on Western esoteric traditions, Stephen Skinner. "Do what thou wilt." Written in the early twentieth century, the four books contained within this collection make up one of the most complete and groundbreaking works on the practice of magick ever written. They are considered to be the masterpiece of occultist, magician and philosopher Aleister Crowley and the core texts for the religion of Thelema. Their influence on alternative western thought and philosophy cannot be exaggerated. Also known as Book Four, or Liber ABA, the four parts bring together many rituals, received texts, theorems and unequalled insights into the practice of magick, culminating in The Book of the Law, the central, sacred text dictated to Crowley by a preternatural entity. Anyone interested in yoga, ceremonial magic, esoteric thought, invocation, divination and beyond, or those looking to delve into the fascinating, playful and illuminating writings of a unique man, will find inspiration. For the first time, one of the world's leading experts on Western esoteric traditions and magic, Dr. Stephen Skinner, introduces the text, sharing his insights into Crowley's take on yoga, ceremonial magick and Thelema. His long involvement with magick, both as an academic and as a practitioner, enabled Dr. Skinner to highlight the differences between the psychological and the spirit-orientated approaches to magick, and to show how that dilemma shaped Crowley's practice and his founding of Thelema, enlightening the reader to many previously unknown connections.
Myles Donne is certain of nothing except that he can never return to Oxford. Two years ago, as a much-admired Jesuit at the threshold of prestige and possibility, he made two irredeemable mistakes: he fell in love with the perfect woman and then killed her in a motorcycle accident. Shattered, he lost his faith, left the priesthood, abandoned his career and decamped to his birthplace in Colorado, where he’s been working in a hardware store, languishing in ignominious limbo. When he receives a dire and dubious plea from his late beloved’s brother Jeremy—a Jesuit and Myles’ estranged friend—against nearly every impulse within him he reluctantly agrees to return to the place of his greatest joy and hardest fall. Jeremy, a genial but lackluster Oxford don, has stumbled upon a tattered and unpublished manuscript by Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Though the unfinished poem has been ignored for well over a century, Jeremy believes it contains a series of word puzzles indicating the location of the Cuxham Chalice, a legendary treasure dating to England’s medieval past. Jeremy wants Myles’ help to decode the enigmatic sonnet, locate the chalice and, above all, to keep Jeremy safe from an unknown and dangerous adversary. Upon Myles’ arrival, Oxford is convulsing from the beheading of an innocent boy in an apparent act of Islamist terror and besieged by riots and violent reprisals. Two days into his visit, as Myles faces the discomfiting realization that his friend has exaggerated the sonnet's importance and his personal peril, Jeremy disappears. Myles soon realizes that persons other than Jeremy and his good friend Eva Bashir, college librarian and a secularized Muslim, are interested in the sonnet and its riddles. Myles and Eva appeal to police investigators who are now consumed with another wave of religious violence after a second beheading and cannot be bothered with a missing Jesuit. Determined that Jeremy’s whereabouts must hinge on something in the vexing manuscript, they strive to decipher its layered and intricate adumbrations. Nimble and unyielding interrogation of the sonnet eventually convinces Myles and Eva that Jeremy has been abducted and will be ritually murdered within a matter of hours. They’re equally stunned to discover a seminal connection between the murderer terrorizing Oxford and the cryptic Hopkins sonnet—why he wrote it on his deathbed and the chilling parallels that it draws to the present-day slayings. Interspersed throughout the twenty-first century narrative, a handful of chapters set in the nineteenth century unfold Hopkins’ story in the present tense. In revealing the origins of the poem, this parallel narrative also unveils the unlikely genesis of the serial murders tormenting Oxford. Myles and Eva decode the poem, and in finding where Hopkins hid the chalice they find Jeremy barely alive in a long-abandoned crypt. The discovery that a factotum from Jeremy’s own college is the villain comes as a shock: no one suspected the bland John Brooke of murder, racism and xenophobia, let alone a monomaniacal plot to scapegoat Muslims. Outwardly a treasure hunt, Dark Sonnet’s underlying trajectory is toward redemption: Hopkins’ painful and long-buried secret is told; Jeremy has revived his career and redeemed himself to all doubters; Eva comes to peace with her Muslim roots and agrees to support her daughter’s exploration of Islam; widespread efforts are under way in Oxford to address systemic prejudice and heal wounds through inter-religious dialogue on a grass-roots level; Myles saves Jeremy and heals the wounds from his sister’s untimely death by invoking the kinship and hope he had forsaken upon leaving Oxford. Before the novel’s end, Myles and Eva develop a gradually deepening connection and intensifying physical frisson. For Myles, their painful parting in the penultimate scene is mitigated by his receiving an astonishing and life-changing job offer, a position that would exploit his unusual skill set to investigate and recover historically significant artifacts around the globe.
Do the numbers suffusing the day of September 11th have occult significance? Why are the numbers 11, 77, 93, and 175 extremely significant in understanding the event? How did Aleister Crowley influence the events of 9/11, considering the fact that he died in 1947? How did Aleister Crowley inspire the doctrines of the New World Order? The answers to these questions is contained in the riveting book Prophet of Evil: Aleister Crowley, 9/11 and the New World Order.
