occult.guru · the library

Everything that was ever hidden, in one place

The Hermetica and the grimoires, the sky and the furnace, the Tree and the tarot, the mediums and the men who tested them. The occult tradition of the world, written out whole, with the claims reported as claims and the dates put back where they belong.

The word occult means only hidden. For most of its history it was not the name of a subject but a description of a property: an occult quality was one that acted without being seen, as a magnet draws iron or the moon draws the tide. The magnet has since been explained and the moon has not stopped, and between the two lies everything on this site.

What I have tried to build here is the library I wanted and could not find: a single place that treats Hermes Trismegistus and the Society for Psychical Research, the Zohar and the Ouija patent, Paracelsus and the Fox sisters as parts of one long story, told by someone who has read the primary texts and does not need you to believe anything in particular. The believers' books will not tell you that the Corpus Hermeticum was redated in 1614, or that the tarot was a card game for three centuries before anyone called it Egyptian. The debunkers' books will not tell you that Isaac Newton wrote more on alchemy than on optics, or that the most careful psychologist in America spent twenty-five years with a trance medium and could not dismiss her. Both are true. Both are here.

It is written by one hand, the same hand that has made instruments of this tradition for more than twenty years. Every discipline below ends by naming the workshop where its instruments are made, because a library that only describes a board or a talisman is half a library. The other half is on the bench.

The MapFourteen Disciplines

01HermeticismThe books of Thrice-Great Hermes, and the most consequential misdating in intellectual history.02AstrologyFive thousand years of reading the sky, and the arguments that have never ended.03AlchemyThe Great Work: metals, medicines, the soul, and the laboratory notebooks of Isaac Newton.04KabbalahThe ten sefirot and twenty-two paths, from Provence to Safed to the Golden Dawn.05Ritual MagicThe grimoires, the circle, the seal and the operator, from the papyri to chaos magic.06DivinationEvery method ever used to ask a question of the world, and Cicero's verdict on all of them.07The TarotHow a Milanese card game became the Book of Thoth in three hundred and fifty years.08Spirit CommunicationFrom the pit at Endor to the Ouija patent, and what actually moves the pointer.09The MediumsThe men and women who were tested, caught, vindicated and never explained.10Amulets and TalismansThe object worn against harm and the object made to draw power, and why they are not the same.11Stones and MateriaStones, resins and roots in the lapidaries, with the chemistry put back.12Psychical ResearchA century and a half of trying to settle it in a laboratory.13WitchcraftThe trials, the numbers, the myth of the old religion and the religion that grew from the myth.14The OrdersRosicrucians, Masons, Theosophists and the Golden Dawn: the brotherhoods and their paper.

The ApparatusLexicon, Chronology, Reading List

Behind the fourteen disciplines stand the tools of any serious library. The Lexicon defines some hundred and seventy terms, from abracadabra to the Zohar, with dates and cross-references, and can be searched as you type. The Chronology runs from the painted caves to the replication crisis in a single line. The Reading List names the primary texts in editions you can actually obtain, and the scholarship that made the field respectable. Start anywhere. Everything links to everything else, because in this subject it all does.

Quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius, et quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius, ad perpetranda miracula rei unius.The Emerald Tablet, Latin vulgate. That which is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below, to accomplish the miracles of the one thing.

**John Dee's Sigillum Dei Aemeth**The wax seal that stood under Dee's shewstone, now in the British Museum. Its names came through Edward Kelley's scrying between 1582 and 1589. Via Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

**The magic squares of the planets**Francis Barrett, The Magus, 1801, copying Agrippa. Every row, column and diagonal sums to the planet's constant; sigils are traced across them. Via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.

The HousesWhere the Instruments Are Made

Twelve houses stand behind this library. Each is a workshop and a site of its own, and each is the best place on the internet for the thing it makes. These four are the pillars.

paranormalproducts.comParanormal ProductsThe flagship: talking boards gilded in 24 carat, planchettes, dial plates, dowsing rods, pendulum boards and the exotic tier, numbered, cased and entered in a register.Enter the house →channeling.guruThe ChannelSeventeen thousand words on every voice that ever spoke through a human being, from the painted caves to the keyboard, with the method in full and the warnings in fuller.Enter the house →talismans.guruTalismansThe made object: timed, engraved and consecrated. The seven planetary squares drawn correctly, a working sigil generator, and pieces cut in the planetary hour for your latitude.Enter the house →amulets.guruAmuletsFive thousand years of the object worn against harm, catalogued by people and by purpose, and cast to the museum originals in sterling, bronze and true faience.Enter the house →

crystals.guruCrystals GuruFifty-two stones with their chemistry, their history, their lore, and exactly what each one does inside an instrument, from the pivot stone of a board to the bob of a pendulum.Enter the house →planchettes.comPlanchettesThe little board of 1853 made as it should have been made then: cut to phi in bloodwood, purpleheart and dragon's blood, on brass feet, by the same hand for twenty-three years.Enter the house →skeletalplanchettes.comSkeletal PlanchettesA human hand in bone china, twenty-seven bones modelled from the skeleton, that rides the talking board and taps the letter it stops on. Kept in its Ossuary.Enter the house →pendulumboards.comPendulum BoardsCharts laid out with a compass and inlaid rather than printed, a stone at the pivot, and sterling pendulums with every link of the chain soldered shut.Enter the house →talktothedead.orgTalk to the DeadThirty-four thousand years of trying to get an answer from the other side: what was done, with what, by whom, and what came of it.Enter the house →spiritoscopes.comSpiritoscopesRobert Hare's instruments of 1855, the first attempt to bring the séance under laboratory control, rebuilt from his own plates for the first time since he died.Enter the house →psychicappliances.comPsychic AppliancesWhat the instruments actually measure: amplifiers, recorders and detectors separated at last, from the scrying mirror to the random event generator.Enter the house →jesusboards.comJesus BoardsScripture and prayer lettered by hand onto hardwood: verses, blessings and dedications, in any translation, made to hang in a house for a lifetime.Enter the house →

The full account of every house →

The Reading RoomWrite to the Librarian

Corrections, questions, a source I have missed, or a commission for one of the houses. I read everything and answer most of it.