Here is the occult as you've never seen it before! A history of magic framed as a travel guide featuring 10 magical tours through history and across the globe. Packed with fascinating information and illustrated with Shell guide-style collage artworks, retro-looking postcard imagery and route maps. This terrific book is a guide to the occult world, featuring 10 itineraries and maps of magical tours across the globe. Spanning countries and continents in pursuit of occult themes, it is meant to be pursued by the astral or armchair traveller rather than on the ground, although we expect readers to be inspired to plan epic trips of their own. It takes a fantastically fresh approach to the occult, with a nod to the retro Shell Guides in the use of collage artwork and humorous, on-point suggestions of places to stay and eat. Expand your occult horizons by trying these tours – and many more! Necromancy through the Ages Tour: Travel from Ancient Nineveh to northern England, tracing sites of necromantic practice. Crowley & Choronzon Desert Tour: Hike across the Algerian desert in the footsteps of the magicians Aleister Crowley and Victor Neuburg, invoking angels and meeting the terrifying demon Choronzon. The Descent & Rise of Witchcraft Tour: Visit the temples of Hekate and Circe in Turkey and Italy, the Spanish sites of the Inquisition's witch-hunts, and the haunts of the Norse sorceresses. Curse, Protect and Divine Tour: Travel across Europe to the United States and Kenya unearthing buried curses and counter-magic, from tiny frog coffins in Finnish churches to sinister village hexes. After completing the journeys, the book offers the unique Geonomicon – a simple divinatory and meditational tool that invites the reader to develop their own creative approach to magical practice.

From its inaugural Black Plaque in honour of Witchfinder General director Michael Reeves, this unique collection follows a veridical trajectory to the frontiers of belief. Reeves' film becomes a conspiratorial cauldron drawing in a host of tragic players in the end game of the Sixties. The Cornwall of Du Maurier's The Birds is ploughed to reveal the hidden psychic codes of our Blitz spirit. In a powerfully relevant occult rendering of a bruised Island, the myth of Churchill is dissected and re-animalised. New maps of hell are drawn by colliding the forensic vision of JG Ballard and Lovecraftian magic. Actors, witches and psychopaths maraud across a nightmare terrain of murderous henges and abandoned military bases; conflating creative research into a surreal documentary, history as hallucination. Geography becomes an alchemical alembic, a vale of soul-making distilled by the lysergic psychobiology of Stanislav Grof, the alcoholic lyricism of Malcolm Lowry, and the convulsive travelogues of the Marquis de Sade. If history is revealed as paranoid ritual, how do we escape its time traps to wild new imaginative geographies? The English Heretic collection is a darkly comical, urgently lyrical, mental escape hatch from the hells of our own making.

American spirituality—with its focus on individual meaning, experience, and exploration—is usually thought to be a product of the postmodern era. But, as The New Metaphysicals makes clear, contemporary American spirituality has historic roots in the nineteenth century and a great deal in common with traditional religious movements. To explore this world, Courtney Bender combines research into the history of the movement with fieldwork in Cambridge, Massachusetts—a key site of alternative religious inquiry from Emerson and William James to today. Through her ethnographic analysis, Bender discovers that a focus on the new, on progress, and on the way spiritual beliefs intersect with science obscures the historical roots of spirituality from its practitioners and those who study it alike—and shape an enduring set of modern religious possibilities in the process.

In 1624 Pope Urban VIII appointed Marcello Sacchetti depositary general and secret treasurer of the Apostolic Chamber, and Giulio Sacchetti bishop of Gravina. Urban later gave Marcello the lease on the alum mines of Tolfa and raised Giulio to the cardinalate. To assert their new power, the Sacchetti began commissioning works of art. Marcello discovered and promoted leading Baroque masters, such as Pietro da Cortona and Nicolas Poussin, while Giulio purchased works from previous generations. In the eighteenth century, Pope Benedict XIV bought the collection and housed it in the Capitoline Museum, where it is now a substantial portion of the collection. By focusing on the relationship between the artists in service and the Sacchetti, this study expands our knowledge of the artists and the complexity of the processes of agency in the fulfillment of commissions. In so doing, it underlines how the Sacchetti used art to proclaim a certain public image and to promote Cardinal Giulio as a candidate to the papal throne.