In 1776–the same year that the United States declared independence from England–the Illuminati Order was founded in Upper Bavaria by Adam Weishaupt (1748–1830), a professor of natural and canon law at the University of Ingolstadt. As a secret society of… Continue Reading
Psilocybin and psilocin are potent psychoactive tryptamine compounds with a rich history of shamanistic use. Psilocybe species of mushroom can be found to grow naturally near-globally and have existed at least as long as humans. The psychoactivity of psilocybin mushrooms was known by the… Continue Reading
The University of California Press just published a fascinating title, last month, Joseph P. Laycock’s Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds. Their site describes the book’s topic thus: “The 1980s… Continue Reading
As previously noted on this site, the University of Pennsylvania recently acquired a collection of manuscripts, fifty-eight to be exact, from Alnwick Castle in England. I was fortunate enough to be able to examine a number of them while on… Continue Reading
The University of Penssylvania has just recently acquired over fifty manuscripts from Ralph George Algernon Percy, the 12th Duke of Northumberland. The collection includes many volumes of interest to the esoteric-minded. A portion of the collection is comprised of texts copied… Continue Reading
A perfectly preserved amber fossil from Myanmar has been found that provides evidence of the earliest grass specimen ever discovered — about 100 million years old — and even then it was topped by a fungus similar to ergot, a… Continue Reading
Soror Hypatia sent me a link to a fascinating article about a renaissance in above-ground, scientific research into the clinical use of psychedelic drugs. Much of the piece discusses their use in relieving the anxiety of terminal cancer patients but… Continue Reading
The results of a 50 year project to find every word used in the English language for the past 1000 years is now available online. For example: How many words are there for being drunk? Answer – 193, including whittled,… Continue Reading
The Warburg Institute in London houses one of the largest collections of Aleister Crowley’s writings in the world, the “Gerald York Collection.” The fate of this institution therefore is of no small interest to many Thelemites. The Warburg recently posted… Continue Reading
With reference to past discussion of OTO policy re: access to material it holds copyright to, Ania Orzech recently posted a link [ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OCDry32ccgEDRtfcaBV4COL707xTcHl5QhGQoaoZlGg/edit?pli=1] to what she describes as an “incomplete” bibliography of work acknowledging access given and research done by… Continue Reading