SPECIAL
ADDENDUM: MARCH, 2014
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WE ARE
PROUD TO PRESENT THE FOLLOWING
NEW COLLECTIBLE TITLES FROM THREE HANDS PRESS !
CLAVIS JOURNAL VOLUME 2
Standard Edition — List Price: $40.00
216 pages,
Softcover, sewn, heavy stock, black and white and full colour illustrations,
featuring the cover image Wish You Were Here by Tom Allen.
FROM THE
PUBLISHER:
Volume 2 of
Clavis Journal .
At 216 pages,
the new volume of Clavis features an outstanding grouping of authors and
image-makers. Articles in this issue include ‘Our Lady Babalon and Her Cup of
Fornications” by Gordan Djurdjevic, and esoteric astrologer Austin Coppock’s
paean to dark and baneful starlight, “Death From Above”. Three adepts of the
German magical order Fraternitas Saturni give voice to the magisterial arcanum
of Saturn in the article ‘Listening to the Voice of Silence’. We are pleased to
include ‘Rite of the Graal Evolute’, a previously unpublished
ritual and art by
the late English magus and scholar Andrew D. Chumbley. Gemma Gary invokes
Bucca, the Cornish Witch-God in image, rite and magical exposition; Robert Hull
examines the Qabalah of Quantum Physics in ‘Unity and Division’. Michael Howard
explores the role of the first artificer of metal in ‘Masonic Mysteries of
Tubal-Cain’, and Henrik Bogdan considers the esoteric role of Secrecy, the very
flower of the Occult itself, in occult orders. In addition, we are also pleased
to include rare occult texts relating to cheiromancy, witchcraft and the lore
and magic of Mandragora – the Shrieking Root of the sorcerers.
 |
| Death-Capsule, by Jose Luis Rodriguez Guerra |
CLAVIS 2 journal
features haunting and provocative visuals from many contemporary artists
imaging the esoteric: by Benjamin Vierling, Madeline von Foerster, Richard
Kirk, Carolyn Hamilton-Giles, Tom Allen, Hagen von Tulien, Jamie Sweetman,
Billy Davis, John Kleckner, Carlos Melgoza, Joseph Uccello, Raven Ebner, Brigid
Marlin, Timo Ketola, Ilyas Phaizulline, José Luis
RodrÃguez Guerra, and many more.
TARTAROS
On the Orphic and Pythagorean Underworld,
and the Pythagorean Pentagram
By Johan August Alm
264 pages, with
eight illustrations, including original artwork by James Dunk and Timo Ketola.
Limited standard hardcover edition in full bronze cloth with dust jacket,
limited to 625 hand-numbered copies:
List Price: $65.00
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
The magical
doctrines of the ancient Orphics and Pythagoreans are poorly understood by
modern scholars, in part because they were secretive in their own time.
Well-known for
speaking in riddles and complex ciphers, its adepts were bound by strict taboo
and silence, the breaking of which was punishable by death. The enigma of the
cult’s teachings was further shrouded by centuries of suppression, and, in some
cases, appropriation or misrepresentation, by the growing forces of
Christianity. What remains today are the fragments of its lost books, together
with the words of those who, for good or ill, wrote about them. In an original
interpretation and synthesis apt for today’s student of ancient mysticism and
the occult, August Alm advances a new conception of these ancient mystery-cults
and their sublime doctrines of Chaos, Darkness and Light.
A foundational
part of these ancient Greek mystery-cults was the concept of Tartaros. As the
abyss of primeval darkness and chaos, Tartaros was, in its most ancient
conception, the birthplace of the human soul and the cosmos itself. This vast
and incomprehensible dominion held at its center a great fire, an Axis Mundi
about which the universe was arranged. In later eras, it passed into myth as a
vast and voidful underworld; a place of binding for condemned souls and the
enemies of gods, sealed fast with barriers of bronze and iron. Christians later
appropriated it as a partition of their own concept of eternal punishment, a
division of hell which constrained no less than the fallen angels.
An equally
enigmatic Pythagorean cipher is the symbol of the Pentagram, or five-fold star,
whose form has been revered in western magic for some three millennia, but
whose origins and original attributes are shrouded in
mystery. Its attribution to the four elements, joined together with aither, was
popularized in the middle ages and is its best-known meaning in modern occult
sciences. However, its earlier Pythagorean usage was related to health and
well-being, and almost certainly adumbrated another retinue of arcana, one
which was ancient even at the time of Pythagoras.
Exhuming the
scattered fragments of these two elder doctrines of Tartaros and the Pentagram,
Alm examines their reverberation as occult –and occluded-- concepts through
centuries of philosophical thought, in a line connecting the shadowy teachings
of such ‘dark traditions’ as the Orphics and the Pythagoreans, later
penetrating the adyta of Neoplatonism. Arguing for a new undertanding of the
Pentagram, he connects its fivefold mystery to the great powers of Tartaros,
and also to such terrifying gods such as Hecate, Nyx, Erebos, Typhon, Cerberus,
and the Erinyes. This strand of mystery touches upon such related concepts as
the high theogony implicit within the Platonic Solids, the shadowy influence of
the Cult of the Idaean Dactyls on Pythagoreanism, the Light which is rooted in
Darkness, and the magical pathology of the ‘Unrooted Tree’.
**
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