In 2010, Richard Merrick took a family trip to Scotland's Rosslyn chapel—the enigmatic fifteenth-century temple made famous by Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Little did he know he was about to embark upon an intellectual and personal journey that would lead to the discovery of a real-life lost symbol—one that reveals the connection between the world's most sacred temples and opens up a treasure trove of lost science and ancient secrets. The symbol he discovers—the Venus Blueprint—is based on that planet's orbital pattern, which takes the shape of a five-pointed star when seen from Earth. As Merrick digs deeper, he realizes the Venus Blueprint was an integral part of the design template of some of the most significant religious architecture around the world--including St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, the Roman Pantheon, the Greek Parthenon, the Temple of Jerusalem, and the Great Pyramid of Giza, as well as many buildings designed by the secretive Freemason society. Upon further examination, Merrick is astounded to discover that temples designed using the Venus Blueprint are endowed with extraordinary acoustics that, when supplied with the right tones and frequencies, are capable of harmonizing with Earth's resonant frequencies and evoking altered states of consciousness. He then proposes a fascinating idea: Could it be that the ancients used these harmonics to enhance entheogenically induced visions—to commune with the divine and liberate the gods within? Supported by an impressive array of historical research and scientific analysis, The Venus Blueprint offers compelling evidence of an ancient lost culture that was both spiritually and scientifically advanced.

In Unwritten Rome, a new book by the author of Myths of Rome, T.P. Wiseman presents us with an imaginative and appealing picture of the early society of pre-literary Rome—as a free and uninhibited world in which the arts and popular entertainments flourished. This original angle allows the voice of the Roman people to be retrieved empathetically from contemporary artefacts and figured monuments, and from selected passages of later literature.How do you understand a society that didn’t write down its own history? That is the problem with early Rome, from the Bronze Age down to the conquest of Italy around 300 BC. The texts we have to use were all written centuries later, and their view of early Rome is impossibly anachronistic. But some possibly authentic evidence may survive, if we can only tease it out – like the old story of a Roman king acting as a magician, or the traditional custom that may originate in the practice of ritual prostitution. This book consists of eighteen attempts to find such material and make sense of it.

Aphrodite and Venus in Myth and Mimesis is a broad, flexible source book of comparative literature and cultural studies. It promotes the wide-ranging presence and impact of prominent idiosyncratic personalities in fabled goddess mythology and its emphatic notions of endearment and allure. The book brings together seven hundred acknowledged sources drawn from successive historical, global and literary eras, including principal commentaries, along with factual information and important renditions in art, prose and verse, within and beyond mainstream western culture. A lengthy, detailed introduction presents a copious documented preview of the viable adaptation and mimesis of ‘divine’ characterization and its respective centrality from the long distant past to the present day. Myth, rarely latent, demonstrates varied modes of expression and open-ended flexibility throughout the six comprehensive chapters which illuminate and probe, in turn, aspects of the ideological presence, sensibilities, trials and triumphs and interventions of the goddess, whether sacred or profane. Particular literary extracts and episodes range across ancient cultures alongside quite recent expressions of hermeneutics, blending myth with the contemporary in the multi-layered reception or admonishment of the goddess, whether by one designation or the other. As such, this book is wholly relevant to all stages of the evolution and expansion of a dynamic European literary culture and its leading authors and personalities.