The Tantric Alchemist is a work on alchemy as decoded by Tantra and a work on Tantra as understood by alchemists. It uncovers works by Thomas Vaughan and suggests how he and his wife—a 17th-century Welsh couple unique in the history of western alchemy—met their fate when dealing with forces they knew only too well, but which were stronger than their ability to control them. Using the works of Vaughan as his text, Levenda applies the “twilight language” of Tantra to the surreal prose of the alchemist and in the process lays bare the lineaments of the arcane tradition that gave rise to the legend of Christian Rosenkreutz, the reputed founder of Rosicrucianism who learned his art in the East; and to the 19th- and 20th-century occult movements lead by such luminaries as P.B. Randolph, Theodore Reuss, Helena Blavatsky, and Aleister Crowley who also sought (and discovered) this technology in the religions and cultures of Asia. Readers will find that the many disparate threads of an authentic spiritual tradition are woven together here in a startling tapestry that reveals—without pretense or euphemism—the psycho-sexual technique that is at the root of both Tantra and alchemy: that is to say, of both Asian and European forms of esoteric praxis.

"This work postulates that the set of 116 designs by William Blake, illustrated herein, is not a series of individual responses to the pieces of text they accompany, nor is it a series of responses to the individual poems of Thomas Gray. The designs are also more than illustrations, or corrections, of Gray's speakers or of Gray himself. In the Gray designs, Blake was using the opportunity given him by John and Ann Flaxman in 1797 to explore and explain visually the reformist malaise in the reactionary nineties when the general economic well-being and optimism had been replaced by the effects of war and fear. For Blake, the collapse into the later 1790s is the failure of the imaginative will to sustain the impetus that the American and French Revolutions had begun." "Blake saw several causes for this failure of will and created a set of designs rich in allusions and dense with visual conventions. These visual topoi are personal, topical, classical, biblical, and literary." "Thus, there is a need for a study of the Gray designs that sees them as they are: a unity rich with visual conventions partaking of Blake's revolutionary pattern of development and desire to reshape in specific ways the mind of his audience."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved