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Celestial emissaries have inspired artists from every tradition to create artwork and decoration for temples, tapestries, miniatures, and manuscripts. Here is a dazzling array of angels in art, folklore, literature, and scripture, around the world and through the ages. Learned and lucid, the text illuminates the sacred origins of angels—from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim to Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, and Zoroastrian.
The New Nihilism is a group of 13 essays by anarchist author Peter Lamborn Wilson that discusses anarchy, medicine, crime, ecological sustainability, consciousness, modernity & Celtic revival.
Hermeticism, or alchemy, is the ancient, primordial mystery science of nature through which people in all times and places have, for the sake of world evolution, sought to unite Heaven and Earth--divinity, cosmos, earth, and humanity, as a single whole. Selfless, intimate, dedicated to healing and harmony, Hermeticism has accompanied and sustained every religious epoch and revelation. It may be found in all historical cultures, from the traditions of India and China in the East to the Judeo-Christian West. It could even be said that Hermeticism is the primal cosmological revelation and the common ground of all spiritual traditions. Nevertheless, in the great revival of mystical, esoteric tra...
Peter Lamborn Wilson proposes a set of heresies, a culture of resistance, that dispels the false image of Islam as monolithic, puritan, and two-dimensional. Here is the story of the African-American noble Drew Ali, the founder of “Black Islam” in this country, and of the violent end of his struggle for “love, truth, peace, freedom, and justice.” Another essay deals with Satan and “Satanism” in Esoteric Islam; and another offers a scathing critique of “Authority” and sexual misery in modern Puritanist Islam. “The Anti-caliph” evokes a hot mix of Ibn Arabi’s tantric mysticism and the revolutionary teachings of the “Assassins.” The title essay, “Sacred Drift,” rove...
An irresistible tome from the insurrectionist theoretician, Hakim Bey. His incendiary words are beautifully illustrated by the renowned collage artist Freddie Baer. The result is a delightful compilation by two talented artists. A must read for those who have followed their work for years. In this collection of essays, Bey expounds upon his ideas concerning radical social reorganization and the liberation of desire. Immediatism is another lyrical romp through intellectual corridors of spirituality and politics originally set forth in his groundbreaking book, TAZ. A stunning achievement from this prodigious author and scholar. "A Blake Angel on Acid."--Robert Anton Wilson "Fascinating..."--William S. Burroughs "Exquisite..."--Allen Ginsberg
'Peter Lamborn Wilson shows why we cherish pirates - and why, for the sake of the future, we must continue to do so. Interesting and compelling...a rollicking, adventurous book.'Marcus Rediker, author, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea'A chronicler, a historiographer, and a piratologist in the tradition of Defoe...with immense learning and interesting sympathies. His scholarship cuts through the seas of ignorance and prejudice with grace and power.'Peter Linebaugh, author, The London Hanged'One of those rare books which give historians new ideas to think about. It deals with 17th century European converts to Islam - usually but not always as pirates - whose numbers Wilson puts at thous...
• Explains how the Yezidis worship Melek Ta’us, the Peacock Angel, an enigmatic figure often identified as “the devil” or Satan, yet who has been redeemed by God to rule a world of beauty and spiritual realization • Examines Yezidi antinomian doctrines of opposition, their cosmogony, their magical lore and taboos, the role of angels, ritual, and symbology, and how the Yezidi faith relates to other occult traditions such as alchemy • Presents the first English translation of the poetry of Caliph Yazid ibn Muawiya, venerated by the Yezidis as Sultan Ezi The Yezidis are an ancient people who live in the mountainous regions on the borders of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. This secret...
The Rig Veda, written in India about 1500BC, praises a holy plant called Soma, which is sacrificed and consumed, granting the drinker an experience of enlightenment and ecstasy. The late Gordon Wasson identified Soma as a "magic mushroom," Amanita muscaria, and he and his followers discovered that such Indo-Europeans as the ancient Greeks, Iranians and Norse had also used a Soma-type plant. In Ploughing the Clouds Peter Lamborn Wilson investigates the probability of a Soma cult in ancient Ireland, tracing clues in Irish (and other Celtic) lore. By comparing Celtic folktales, romances, epics and topographic lore with the Rig Veda, he uncovers the Irish branch of the great Indo-European tradition of psychedelic (or "entheogenic") shamanism, and even reconstructs some of its secret rituals. He uses this comparative material to illuminate the deep meaning of the Soma-function in all cultures: the entheogenic origin of "poetic frenzy," the link between intoxication and inspiration.
Poetry. "Peter Lamborn Wilson - brilliant translator, poet, magpie scholar, anarchist, consummate cosmologist - offers up this raw bitter tender sequence for all humanity...We need his salient wisdom and bite more than ever under the dark gathering clouds of Empire & shackles that threaten all civil/sexual/human delights...Liberation now!"--Anne Waldman.
False Documents, by Peter Lamborn Wilson (Hakim Bey), is a series of "Borgesian" and "Nabokovian" fictions, each pretending to be a "document" from various literary, commercial, or otherwise culturally-pertinent contexts. Together they comprise an exciting, mysterious and mind-alteringly funny tour de force of structural imagination: an intricate reflection on the "alchemy" of creation and dissolution for a contemporary world whose discursive forms tend to obscure as often as illumine. We as readers journey through the layers of human consciousness into the arena of mythology, religion, conspiracy, history, sexuality and folklore, where fact and fiction meet in a collision of scholarly playful texts, covering centuries of forgotten or unknown windows, opening forth into a land that drips with forbidden knowledge, where true or false disappear into the yarn. Famous for his writings in anarchist philosophy and practice (including the coining of the phrase "Temporary Autonomous Zone," or TAZ), Peter Lamborn Wilson/Hakim Bey again illustrates that only a position outside of history can truly zero-in on its deformed heart, which he does with laughter, insight and poignant care.