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BELTAINE BLESSINGS!!!!!

Sir Edward Burne-Jones
WE'RE STILL HERE!

A MESSAGE FROM EDGE OF THE CIRCLE BOOKS REGARDING THE CORONA VIRUS AND CLOSURE OF ALL NON-ESSENTIAL BUSINNESSES:

We are closed until Gov. Jay Inlsee lifts the Stay at Home order for Seattle, and we will open again at that time. We are doing everything in our power to remain in business, so bear with us. We're now taking phone orders for books and supplies and will happily ship them to your door. 

If you'd like to order something, please Instant Message us on our Facebook page : https://www.facebook.com/groups/1000179343332589/

Until then, stay home, stay safe, stay healthy!

WELCOME to the Edge of the Circle Newsletter. This newsletter has come about as an effort to reach out to the Pagan/ Occult community (particularly in Seattle where we are based) to inform the community of what events are happening at our store. Without further ado, welcome, and enjoy.
Regards, Erica (Raven) Branch-Butler, Editrix- golanv1@yahoo.com

Edge of the Circle Books strives to be your ideal Magical Pagan store.
Open 7 days a week, Noon 'till 8pm.
Call: 206-PAN-1999 


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On Facebook:
Become a Fan, post your event on the discussion page!

Also on Facebook: THE SEATTLE PAGAN, OCCULT AND METAPHYSICAL RESOURCE BOARD has been created in order to facilitate networking throughout the Pacific Northwest. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1000179343332589/

If you have a Magical Group, Ritual Group, Pagan Church or organization, Druid Grove, please feel free to post your events and classes here. Meet-ups, talks, book signings, public rituals, etc—all are welcome here.
We'd prefer no advertisements for Professional Readers, Reiki practitioners, etc. However, if you are teaching a class, or giving a workshop or talk, feel free to post your event. This group is specifically for sharing events of interest to the local community, it is not meant for discussing magical paths and traditions, or asking general questions about magick or paganism. Please remain civil, do disparaging posts about groups or individuals. Off topic posts WILL be moderated.

TUMBLR:


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HERE ARE OUR OCCULT OFFERINGS FOR MAY:


NEW JEWELRY:
Sky Goddess Nuit, Kabbalistic Tree of Life, Thor's Hammer Mjölnir, Eshu Elegba, Aleister Crowley, Winter Awen, Triple Moon Pentacle, and Cimaruta pendants!





T-SHIRTS:
(some of which were designed by Robert!)






Maxine Miller's BAPHOMET Statue, Version #2 with Pentagram.





Prices subject to change without notice.



FOR THE OCCULT BIBLIOPHILE:


MYSTAI
Dancing Out The Mysteries of Dionysos
by Peter Mark Adams
Publisher: Scarlet Imprint
4vo (210 × 290 mm, Landscape), 192 pp
38 Images Including Full Colour Photographs of The Restored Frescoes

Standard Hardback Edition, with color illustrations
Limited to 900 copies; bound in purple cloth, blind debossed and stamped in gold, textured Pompeiian red endpapers.
List Price: $102.00

FROM THE PUBLISHER:
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. 

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.


CONTENTS:

Introduction


I · The Performative Nexus of the Mysteries

Dionysos
Orphism
The mysteries i: Myesis
The cultures of dance i: The Korybantic dance
The mysteries ii: Telete
The cultures of dance ii: The circular chorus
The mysteries iii: Epoptai
The cultures of dance iii: The chorus of the stars
The deixis of sacred choral dance


II · The Mysteries in their Campanian Social Milieu

Dionysos in Campania
Dionysian thiasoi and lineage holders


III · Reading the Frescoes’ Implicit Narratives

The Villa of the Mysteries
The rooms and their frescoes
Designing an esoteric narrative
Modes of visuality
Imagistic modes of religion and the theatre of memory
Heterotopias and the interstices of initiatory space
Chronotopic inversion
The frescoes’ exotopic female gaze


IV · The Initiatory Drama of the Mysteries

Reading the frescoes

The north wall

i · Family group of itinerant initiatrix
ii · Ritual of purification
iii · The rural idyll
iv · The ‘alarmed woman’

The east wall

i · The Korybantic scene
ii · The epiphany of the gods
On the epiphanies of gods
Monosandalos
Ariadne as protomystēs
Ariadne’s thread
iii · The initiatory crux

The south wall

i · Of this men shall know nothing
The role of entheogens in Bakkhic ritual
ii · The dance of the bakkhe
iii · The robing of the bride

The West Wall

The Domina

Glossary 




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THE MOONCHILD OF YESOD
By Karl Stone
Imaginary Book Co., MMXII [2012].
First Edition Hardcover. 8vo. [VI], 232pp, plate. Original sky blue cloth with silver titling to spine and device to upper board, patterned endpapers, colour frontis, colour and b&w plates, bibliography and index. Illustrated bookmark. Edition strictly limited to 418 signed and hand-numbered copies. Illustrated by Stafford Stone. NEW book. Fine in fine dust jacket.
List Price: $120.00

FROM THE PUBLISHER:   
Very rarely does a genuinely original occult book appear: this work, "The Moonchild of Yesod" (subtitled "A Grimoire of Occult Hyperchemistry, or Typhonian Sex Magick"), is just such a book. With an extraordinary use of language, the author builds on the work of Mme. Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, and Kenneth Grant to construct a Magickal Mirror that opens a genuine Gateway to Beyond. Covering both practical and theoretical aspects, the eleven chapters are titled Hierophantism, The Mystical Veil, The Outer Garment of the Mind, Elemental Invocation, The Key of Tarot Dynamics, The Metaphysic of the Tarot Keys and the 93 Current, Occult Anatomy, The 50 Gates of Understanding, Hierogamy, The Sexual Ritual of the Sepher Yetzirah and A Sabbatic Sexual Working.

"For the use of the practising occultist and hyperchemist, giving in a compendious form a full description of obscure rites and practices, and a complete explanation of metaphysical matters, hallucinatory vortices, tentacled antheridial gateways to other worlds, the dislocation of the mind, and the deep penetrative insight that arises from these territories, arranged in an entirely novel and interesting manner."

FROM THE COVER:
"Oracular gnosis, is the hypostatic precipitation of phantasma within the non-spatial stellar dimensions of the initiate. Traffick with praeter-human intelligences are received as a concussion of 'shadow signatures' which colour (Kalas) the magickal mirror experientially as a Somatonoësis.

Magickally, the crystallisation of this phantasma is a Lunar sexual operation. It occurs within the oneiric womb of Yesod, which receives the praeter-human spermatozoon via the lens of Daäth (The gateway to the 'Outer Ones'). Within this siderialised amnion, the spectral tinctures undergo a form of hyper-chemistry, whereby the colours (Kalas) out of space arouse a convolvulus within the 'Astral Light', manifesting an antheridial embryonate, the Moonchild (Homunculus), which consolidates it's prescience upon the substrate of the terrestrial sphere. The Moonchild is the vehicle of the Magickal Will i.e. making the word, flesh.

This grimoire is both a Theoretical and Practical exegesis of initiation, sexual magick, qabalah and sorcery. It elucidates the tangential and oblique method, whereby contact with the subtle occult forces are amplified from the deep soundless recesses of non-spatial stellar loci as a physicality (Somatonoësis). Such transmissions are approached indirectly and inferred by the magickal engine of the qabalah, whereby their gateways are represented as tauroid gestalts (Sephira) to the 'Outer Ones'. Such traffick can be used for mystical or magickal operations depending upon how the practitioner utilises these subtle intrusions (Kalas) of phantasma inspissated within the alembic of the adept’s occult anatomy as a Somatonoësis."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
On the Outer, Karl Stone is a discordian episkopos, Bone Setter, Tibetan medical practitioner, occult mycologist, and hyperchemist of the Trans-Himalayan system. He serves as a Hyadean emissary of The Cult of The Yellow Sign. The adepts of this Order are always masked and hidden in plain sight. They receive transmissions from the Hyades, which coalesce through the planes somatonoëtically into that Star Stone, the immortalised star crystal of the astral light, otherwise known as the Lapis Exellis (Stone of Lucifer).

Published on Lughnasadh 2012, in a strictly limited edition of 418 copies, this book is beautifully designed to reflect the Golden Age of Victorian publishing, bound in pale blue buckram with silver foil blocking, printed on Favini Alga Carta White 120gsm, and features full-colour illustrations by Stafford Stone (no relation). Each copy is signed and numbered by the author, and comes with a specially designed bookmark.

"This publication removes much of the long established vagary and obfuscation about the actual process involved in sex magickal/alchemical work... These writings are a great service to anyone sincerely attempting to broach these mysteries. It's a great irony that the great sex magickal secrets can be shouted from the rooftops yet the work is completely self protecting. Not through any form of intellectual elitism that occultists might proffer but simply the fact that the 'magical engine' must be constructed correctly at each stage. This book gives some of the clearest explanations of the means to construct the 'magical engine' that I've come across in recent years."  Amodali Zain

"... anyone interested seriously in the work of Kenneth Grant, sex magick and processes of establishing contact with zones of praeternatural consciousness needs to take notice of this book."  Stephen Dziklewicz







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DEAREST VERA: 
A Kaleidoscope of Facsimile Holograph Letters to his friend, the Poet and Painter Vera Wainwright
Assembled by Kenneth and Steffi Grant
Fulgur Limited Publishers
Coloured plates, profusely illustrated, Hardcover, with Dust-Jacket 170+ pages
List Price: $69.95

FROM THE PUBLISHER: 
In his later creative life, Spare was sought out by artists and writers eager to receive insights of experience from the ‘Walworth Road Surrealist.’ And yet, there were very few indeed who became good friends. Vera Wainwright was one such friend. She arrived in Spare’s life as the clouds of war cast a long shadow over South London, and sought him out amid the debris of the blitz to offer her support and affection. Dearest Vera is an account of their friendship told by Spare himself, through the many letters sent to his new pupil.


Those familiar with Spare will find new insights to his life and theories on art, while newcomers will discover an eccentric and gifted artist sharing a lifetime’s experience with an eager pupil. Compiled by Kenneth and Steffi Grant, this kaleidoscope of correspondence is a rare treat, and a major resource for those seeking to better understand this complex and neglected genius.






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ARCANUM
Ethereal’ Edition
by Daniel Yates
List Price: $76.50
signed and numbered, standard hardcover (Anathema Publishing)
'ETHEREAL' Hardcover Edition (Limited to 200 copies):
6 x 9 inches. 210 pages. Hardbound 90pts, Lustrous Buckram Bookcloth (Light Champagne colour) covers. Silver foil blocking on rounded spine and on the cover. Full-Colour interior (illustrations and photography), with Antique Marble (Lazuli) Endpapers. Fine typography, printed on EuroArt 200M (thick) archive-quality paper. Individually hand-numbered.

FROM THE PUBLISHER: 
Arcanum serves as a photographic exploration of its namesake, a journey into the other through the vision of another. In a world shaped by textual forms, Arcanum aims to delineate expectations and to open a window into a more fluid and dynamic world where interpretation is truly left to the beholder.

“Everything from colour, form, concept, and action must be allowed to unfold, to manifest in the way it wants to present itself to you. Exposure to the multitude of occult streams that have revealed themselves can make this act more difficult as these influences promote specific ideas, images, colours, and forms that apply to the work they do, much like language.” ~Daniel Yates

 This work aims to challenge the accepted norms of how the occult is perceived and rendered in image. By passing light through the forge of the lens, Daniel Yates teases out from the shadows a world that lies hidden in plain sight, exposing concepts that are often elusive and intangible, yet ever-present. Each image in this work is a window into a much deeper stratum of awareness and understanding; the contemplation of the image over time will reveal to the onlooker an arcanum that is purely their own.

“Through such contemplation the images observed become transformed, and whilst each viewing yields new insight, others remain yet hidden – so it is that the living image remains forever familiar yet unfamiliar, known but unknown, worldly yet ‘other’.” ~Martin Duffy

 CONTENTS:
Foreword - Martin Duffy
Aspectu - To glimpse a sight beyond the known
To Enter the Hall of Two Truths - Embracing the psychopomp
Philosophicus - Concept as image
Icons of Nature - The embodiments of Elphame
Praxis - Methods unto the arte
Emanations - Creation descending
Spiritu - Those who stand before us
Masks of Misrule - A light upon the faceless
Crwca - To walk upon the crooked path

Odyssey of the Compass - The transfiguring landscape







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THE BRAZEN VESSEL: 
Collected Works 2008 – 2018 
Alkistis Dimech ☩ Peter Grey
List Price: $89.95  
Standard Edition Hardcover (Scarlet Imprint)
Limited to 1225 copies; bound in red linen cloth charged with a cross potent in copper, textured white endpapers, white and red silk ribbons, and copper dust jacket. 
A Venus kamea is placed within each book. 
List Price: $89.95  

FROM THE PUBLISHER: 
The Brazen Vessel documents the creative, magical partnership of Alkistis Dimech and Peter Grey from 2008 to 2018. It comprises selected texts, essays and presentations, including many previously unpublished works, essays which have fallen out of print and texts that were only published online. The anthology marks the first appearance in print of such pivotal texts as Rewilding Witchcraft, a translation of the critical goetic source Le livre des esperitz, and an extended and original treatment of the witches’ dance. The Brazen Vessel testifies to the prescient, provocative and influential nature of their work.

From the invocation of Babalon, given at the Thelemic Symposium in Oxford in 2008, to the eschatology of Babalon given at Occulture Berlin in 2018, the 35 works gathered here give insight into the process, thought and praxis of the authors, both as individuals with distinct bodies of work, and as a dynamic magical union. The works in The Brazen Vessel cast significant light on ideas developed through The Red Goddess (2007), Apocalyptic Witchcraft (2013) and Lucifer: Princeps (2015), and prefigures some of the material in Lucifer: Praxis (forthcoming).

The texts reveal the continuities and evolution of the authors’ work over a decade. Taken as a whole, their work proposes unorthodox and undogmatic understandings of Lucifer and Babalon, as demonised divine figures, as the sources of transmission of the western traditions of magic and witchcraft. A shared love of poetry and the magical power of the word is evident in their distinctive voices. Both have given primacy to the living body in their practice, through dance, performance, ritual and rites of devotion and ordeal. Both situate their magical work within the wider ecological and political environment. In a polyphony of texts, the ongoing dialogue between two practitioners is made apparent, and the important and innovative work of Alkistis given its due.

During the ten years documented in the anthology, Scarlet Imprint led a nomadic existence, moving from Brighton to Dover, the French Alps and the Welsh Borders, and finally to West Cornwall; these liminal landscapes and their denizens people the book. The texts evidence a second web of journeys to conferences, gatherings and symposia in London, Glastonbury, Brighton, Cornwall, Scotland, Norway, Belgium, Portland and Seattle. Overlapping with these are a series of pilgrimages to sacred sites from Patmos to Cefalù, to standing stones, stone circles, cliffs, caves and the wilds.

The Brazen Vessel is a work of process, experiment and risk, written by practitioners at the leading edge of the magical revival.

TABLE OF CONTENTS: 
Preface
Incant! Incant! (After Salvator Rosa’s Cantata)
The figures and the signs of night
Invocation of Babalon
Embodiment of mystery
Rewilding witchcraft
On sabbatic dance: An interview with Vanessa Irena for New Jack Witch
Raw power: Babalon, witchcraft and female sexuality
Volant: the birdwoman
The Luciferian revolt
Lucifer in a walnut shell
Death mask: The road, wildflowers and blood mysteries
The face utterly unlike itself: The ecstasy and passion of Colette Peignot
Strange suppers and spells diverse: Jack Parsons and the origins of The Witchcraft
Beneath the rose
Fly the light: A litany of shadows
The book of spirits: A translation of Le livre des esperitz
The stifling air
The submerged word: Conversing with demons
In the skin of the beast
In the realm of the senses: Towards an embodied psychedelic consciousness
Dynamics of the occulted body
Forging the body of the witch
Demonic voices
Becoming no-man: The blooded path to Babalon
Satan’s treasures: Dragons, books and the volatilised landscape
The shining land: A foray into the ritual landscape of Cornwall
The pact, or, the embrace of the witch and the devil
The witches’ dance
Cocytus defrosted
Black mass, bright angel
The sacred conspiracy
Seeing through apocalypse
The Amfortas wound
Outside the temple
My time is come: An erotic eschatology of Babalon

Timeline





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TAROT OF THE EMISSARY
By Sean Woodward
PUBLISHER: Design By ZosHouse/Sean Woodward, 2014
List Price: $84.50

FROM THE PUBLISHER:
"Although many elements in the gallery of this Tarot may seem very esoteric, Sean is keenly aware of the practical use of the tarot to speak to people at every level. With his commentary, he provides questions and keys whereby anyone may be guided into the wisdom of the oracle. Beyond this is his Vuduverse, ever-extending and penetrating deep realms of magical research. 


Enter these realms and you will find yourself coming into your OWN."
- Sovereign Grand Master, OTOA-LCN



80 Cards, 2.75 x 4.75 inches, front and back printed full-colour deck with 20-page booklet and card box.

Designed by Sean Woodward, an initiate of the OTOA-LCN, the Tarot of the Emissary utilises the framework of a traditional 78 card tarot, whilst exploring Voudon Gnostic fields of research that include H.P. Lovecraft, Thelema, Witchcraft, Qabala, Quantum Physics, Gholems and Trans-Yuggothian mechanics. It enters into the mythos of a Vuduverse explored in his essays and prose in publications such as Qliphoth, Sabbatica, Thirteenth Path and Silver Star.





FOR THE DISCERNING TAROT AFICIONADO:


MADAME LE MARCHAND’S CLASSIC FORTUNE TELLER

DELUXE BOXED KIT WITH DICE!




MADAME LE MARCHAND’S CLASSIC FORTUNE TELLER
DELUXE BOXED KIT WITH DICE
by Madame Le Marchand / Translated by JeanChristoph DuFau,
Including Guidebooks: The Amusements of Cartomancy and The Fortune Teller & Dreamers’ Dictionary bound as one
Also Included: the book, Introducing the Astrological Dice by Victoria Akins ,
Art for Tarot Deck by Anna Dorzhieva ,
With Editing of Books and Design for Kit by Michael Coles
Publisher: (Abracax House)
List Price $84.50




FROM THE PUBLISHER:

Includes a “Tarot Le Marchand” card deck reconstructed according to Le Marchand’s instructions by Anna Dorzhieva, a standard playing card deck, 3 six-sided dice & 3 twelve-sided Astrological Dice, a little bag, the book “Introducing the Astrological Dice” by Victoria Akins, and the book “Madame Le Marchand's Classic Fortune Teller” that combines the celebrated 19th century Parisian fortune teller’s own The Amusements of Cartomancy (in which she defines a classic tarot system) and The Fortune Teller & Dreamers' Dictionary (in which she describes methods of divination using dice and standard playing cards, as well as dream interpretation), all in a handsome foil-stamped padded organizer case.












This concludes our Newsletter for this month.
Look for us again in JUNEst, 2020!
Stay Home and Stay Safe!
See you soon.

Erica (Raven) Branch-Butler, Editrix, Edge of the Circle Books Newsletter



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