Crossing the Borderlines by Nigel Pennick

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.

Óðinn’s identity as the Ecstatic God of the Tethers of Law and Death, is least recognised through his Skin-Turning and Shape-shifting techniques as gifts of the highest craft he imparts to a shamanic warrior elite. Those themes are explored in this volume, alighting upon a wide range of magics and histories identified within the Óðinnic cultus. Medieval source materials yield a wealth of information relating to Totemism; Ritual Guising; the Berserkir and Úlfhéðnar as Óðinn’s True Wolf Warriors; Motifs of Magical Beasts in Battle; the Wælceasega as Carrion Host; the Law and Covenants relating to Wǽr-loga; Outlawry; She-Wulves; The Red Thread of Wyrd, Warding and Binding the Dead, Varðlo(k)kur - the call to spirit; Dragons, the Wyrm, and finally, to the malefic sorcery of the Dog Heads of War, The Zmei, The Roggenwolf and the Bukka, whose presence in the wheat, rye and barley knots of the blessed harvest grains, all wend a path through to the real St George, to Green George. 

Enchanted thread, girdles, withies and staves, seiðr and the völur are woven through the time-honoured mysteries shared by Beowulf, Grendel and his brimwylf (‘sea-wolf’) mother. Nordic culture drew inspiration and influence from the magical and martial disciplines of the Sámi, Slavic, north-European and Eurasian peoples. Invoking the divine ecstasy of creation, Shamen priests and warriors, stand ‘outside’ time. Óðinn’s antinomian challenges generated considerable friction within societal ‘law.’ The dehumanisation of the skóggarmaðr (wild men of the forest) outlawed for following his rule, rendered them indistinct from the forest-wolf’s status, and were perceived as equal quarry. Transpersonal experiences shaped their realities, relating to identification through a clan totem, namely the wolf, and later the dragon, wyrm and raven, not merely as wild beasts of battle, but of ancestry, mind, of wit and wisdom.  Couched in ambiguities, the role of the Valkyrjur,’ the ‘handmaidens of Óðinn is re-evaluated, leading to a new conclusion for their association with (battle) carnage and the ‘Cult of the Dead.’