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Ancient Civilizations,
Fine & Antiquarian,
Magick & Occult
Mystai (deluxe edition) by Peter Mark Adams
£595.00
The Dionysian themed frescos of Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries constitute the single most important theurgical narrative to have survived in the Western esoteric tradition. No other practitioner account of the ritual process for conducting a mystery rite has survived down to today. The frescoes’ vivid and allusive imagery illuminates both the ritual activity of the participants as well as its esoteric import.
The frescoes, created in the most private rooms of the extensive Roman villa, were never meant to be seen by anyone other than the members of the all-female Bakkhic thiasos who conducted their most secret rites within them. Buried and preserved for posterity by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, these stunning proto-Renaissance images guide the viewer through the consecutive stages of a theurgic rite of initiation into the mysteries of Dionysos.
Arising from within the unique interface between Greek and Roman culture in Southern Italy, the frescoes attest to the survival of an unbroken initiatic tradition of Bakkhic mystery rites on the Italian peninsula stretching back to the fifth century BCE.
The recent restoration of the frescoes has provided a fresh opportunity to elucidate the ritual processes hidden in plain sight. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Peter Mark Adams draws on current scholarship on dithyrambic performance; the ritual dress of Greco-Roman priestesses; classical philology and the comparative ethnography of rites of higher initiation. With the same attention to detail which he demonstrated in The Game of Saturn, Adams reveals the stages of initiation encoded and accomplished in dance, gesture, ordeal and sign.
Adams interprets the frescoes through the distinct performative lens of the ritualist, throwing light, for the first time, on the significance of the ritual vocabulary and the phenomenology of ritual participation. We are pulled into the dance ourselves, and emerge transfigured by the experience.
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Ritual & Epiphany in the Mysteries of Mithras by Peter Mark Adams
£66.99
Fine Hardback edition, limited to 888 copies.
From acclaimed esoteric scholar Peter Mark Adams—author of The Game of Saturn, Mystai, Hagia Sophia / Sanctum of Kronos, Two Esoteric Tarots (with Christophe Poncet), and The Power of the Healing Field—comes a landmark study that redefines our understanding of Western Europe’s most enigmatic mystery cult.
Ritual & Epiphany in the Mysteries of Mithras – The Secret Cult of Saturn in Imperial Rome takes readers deep into the heart of the Mithraic mysteries, offering a profound exploration of the cult’s ritual practices and transformative visionary experiences. Blending cutting-edge scholarship with first-hand accounts of initiation and contemporary ethnographies of ritual performance, Adams provides an unparalleled glimpse into this ancient esoteric tradition.
Approaching the material from an emic (insider’s) perspective, the author examines the cult’s hierarchical grade structure, ceremonial roles, and ritual mechanics—revealing how initiates invoked the serpent power and encountered the awe-inspiring epiphany of Saturn-Kronos, the sovereign time-deity.
Through a richly interdisciplinary lens—drawing on Orphic metaphysics, Greco-Roman ritual theory, art history, and comparative ethnographies of initiation—Adams vividly animates Mithraic iconography, frescoes, and reliefs as ritual grammar encoding the lived phenomenology of participation.
Richly illustrated and deeply insightful, this volume revives the Cult of Mithras as Western Europe’s preeminent mystery tradition, offering readers both scholarly rigor and spiritual resonance.
Initiation into Dream Mysteries by Sarah Janes
£14.99
Invoking Mnemosyne--Greek goddess of memory and eloquence, daughter of Heaven and Earth, mother of the Muses, and archetypal deity of the Asklepion dream temple tradition--this book initiates you into full dream consciousness, offering a lucid-dreaming ritual experience in the spirit of the Mystery Schools of antiquity. Explaining how a conscious dream life is essential for self-discovery, deep integration, and healing, lucid-dreaming instructor Sarah Janes presents exercises, techniques, and initiations to help you explore the inner depths of your psyche. These realms, accessible through dreams, can help you to form a better understanding of who you are.
Sharing her more than a decade of research on Sleep Temples and Mystery Schools of the Esoteric Tradition, Sarah explores the evolution of imagination, memory, and consciousness throughout the ages and proposes that dreams have been fundamental in the creation and development of culture. Dreams play an important role in ancestor worship, afterlife beliefs, animism, religion, and wisdom traditions. Sarah reveals how dreams offer us an opportunity to remember and directly experience our divinity, to transcend the limitations of our mortality and enter timeless, imaginal realms.
Employing the power of story to affect the mind and lay down new neural pathways--as if one were really living the story--Sarah begins each initiatory chapter with a psychodramatic narrative. Using symbolism and powerful imagery, these stories help you generate the perfect dreams for each stage in the initiation. And by becoming a better dreamer, you can make better, more aware decisions in your waking life.
The Great Migrations to Britain of 1527 B.C. and 485 B.C. by Marchell Abrahams
out of stock - £30.00
Myth . . . legend . . . or history so steeped in antiquity that we know it in our bones to be true? From Ur in the marshes of 16th-century B. C. Sumer to Troy in the Fenlands of England and the beginnings of London, Marchell Abrahams peels back the centuries to reveal the founding of our country by the Sumerian princess whom the British histories call Albyne. She takes us from the end of Roman kingship in Italy to the quelling of a savage civil war in 5th-century B. C. Britain by Brutus, descendant of King Leir, and his assumption, a thousand years after Albyne, of the High Kingship of an already ancient nation. This is British history.
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