The Quija Board THE BOARD THAT SPEAKS A History of the Ouija Board How a parlour novelty became the world's most infamous conduit between the living and the not-quite-gone A COMPLETE HISTORY · FROM THE SPIRIT CABINET TO THE TOY SHOP It begins, as so many peculiar things do, with grief. The dead do not stay quiet. They never have. Across every culture, in every era, the living have found ways to listen for them — or at least to convince themselves they could. But the Ouija boa

Spinoza's God: The Almighty Who Doesn't Return Your Calls If you grew up imagining God as a sort of cosmic Father Christmas, keeping a list of who's been naughty and nice and occasionally parting a sea or two, Spinoza has some bad news for you. Also some good news. Mainly bad news first, though. The Divine Personality Bypass Spinoza's God is the deity equivalent of that friend who never replies to texts. Prayers? Unread. Sacrifices? Left on seen. Existential crises at 3am? Th

Astrology Is The Journey The Wheel Turns: Astrology as a Map, Not a Mugshot Let us begin by addressing the elephant in the celestial room. If you have ever opened a newspaper, glanced at the back of a women's magazine, or suffered through a conversation with someone who learned the word "Mercury retrograde" three weeks ago, you will have encountered something calling itself astrology. It usually involves a paragraph telling Geminis they will meet a tall stranger on Tuesday, a

Believers and Sceptics - UFOs and ETs A Sceptic's Affectionate Audit of Humanity's Best Evidence for Aliens Or: Why, after eighty years of looking, the smoking gun keeps turning out to be a weather balloon, a swamp gas hallucination, or a bloke called Bob. There is something genuinely poignant about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Billions of stars. Hundreds of billions of galaxies. A cosmic lottery so vast that the mathematical probability of us being alone is,

A Philosophical Etymology Gone Wrong Modern Psychics and Mediums: Divorced from their Philosophical origins Lost in Translation: The Unfortunate Philosophical Fate of "Psychic" & "Medium" How two perfectly respectable words, one beloved by Plato, one admired by Newton, were kidnapped by the Victorians and put to work in velvet-curtained parlours, reading the fortunes of credulous duchesses. Imagine, if you will, that the word “cardiac”. meaning of or pertaining to the heart.

Portrait, circa 1366 God in the Basement: The Radical Mysticism of Meister Eckhart How a fourteenth-century Dominican friar dissolved the self, annoyed the Pope, and accidentally invented half of Western philosophy Imagine you are a senior manager at one of the most powerful organisations in medieval Europe. You are respected, educated, articulate, and genuinely pious. You have a gift for preaching that fills churches to capacity. And then one day, after a long and distinguis

ALL SHALL BE WELL The Visions, the Wisdom, and the Magnificent Stubbornness of Julian of Norwich c. 1343 – c. 1416 In the year 1373, a thirty-year-old woman in Norwich lay dying. Or at least, everyone thought she was dying. Her priest had already arrived to administer the last rites, which in medieval England was less a hopeful sign than a polite farewell. Then something extraordinary happened. Instead of obligingly departing this mortal coil, she had sixteen visions of such

The Haunted House We Forgot We Lived In The West has spent half a century raiding other people’s sacred traditions whilst standing in a house of extraordinary spiritual richness it has entirely forgotten to inhabit. A guided tour of the rooms nobody visits. In the previous article, we considered the New Age movement’s remarkable talent for helping itself to other people’s sacred traditions. The vision quests sold at a premium in Sedona, the chakra diagrams on tote bags in Tot

How the West Learned to Plunder the Sacred Spiritual Shoplifting: How the West Learned to Plunder the Sacred When the New Age movement decided that indigenous traditions were a spiritual buffet, it forgot that some dishes belong to people who might object to having them stolen, repackaged, and sold at £180 a head. There is a peculiar kind of audacity that belongs almost exclusively to the Western spiritual seeker. It is the audacity of a person who, having grown bored with th

Poltergiest : A Kind of Haunting THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT - POLTERGIEST (And Throw Your Crockery at the Walls) A Rational Mystic's Guide to the Poltergeist Phenomenon Somewhere in Germany, in the year 1599, a farmer sat down to breakfast. Before he could reach his porridge, the bowl levitated off the table, sailed gracefully through the air, and deposited itself, with some force, on the back of his head. The farmer was not amused. Historians, however, very much are! W

A Manifesto for the Rational Mystic I think, therefore I am confused I think thereore Iam Confused On Why the Universe Probably Doesn't Exist — But You Should Probably Still Pay Your Council Tax "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." — Philip K. Dick (A man who spent considerable time testing this hypothesis personally) The Problem With Reality (Besides Everything Else) Let us begin, as all good philosophical investigations must, with an admi

High Magic and Low Magic : Mage and Cunning Woman High Magic vs Low Magic: A Beginner's Guide to Mystical Snobbery Or: Why Some Wizards Think They're Better Than Other Wizards There is, within the world of occultism, a class system so entrenched it would make a Victorian aristocrat weep with recognition. On one side, you have the High Magicians: robed, educated, probably fluent in at least three dead languages, and deeply, deeply serious about their relationship with the cos

The Reptillians are Here according to David Icke The Icke Files: A Critical Examination of Britain's Most Prolific Conspiracy Theorist David Icke presents a fascinating case study in how conspiracy theories evolve, merge, and metastasise. The former footballer and sports broadcaster has built a lucrative career promoting an elaborate cosmology that encompasses everything from shape-shifting reptilians to Saturn broadcasting a false reality. Let's examine the key claims and th

A "representation" of old documents: Not the original "Protocols" The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: History's Most Influential Fanfiction A Forgery for the Ages If you're going to fabricate a world-dominating conspiracy, you might as well go big. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion didn't just go big—it went apocalyptic, becoming perhaps the most consequential literary fraud in human history. This toxic masterpiece of paranoid fiction has inspired pogroms, influenced Nazi

The Witch The Witch's Two-Century Makeover Introduction: The Devil's Housewife Gets a Rebrand Two hundred years ago, if you'd called someone a witch, you were essentially accusing them of having signed a dodgy contract with Satan, murdered babies, and ruined the neighbours' crops—all whilst wearing unflattering headgear. Today, you might be complimenting their Instagram aesthetic, their small business selling crystals, or their ability to manifest abundance through the power

Howling at the Moon - The Werewolf Werewolves and Lycanthropy Introduction: More Than Just a Bad Hair Day There's something deeply unsettling about the idea that your friendly neighbourhood accountant might, come the full moon, sprout fangs and develop an unfortunate craving for your jugular. Yet the werewolf has endured as one of humanity's most persistent and popular monsters, prowling through folklore from ancient Greece to modern cinema, leaving a trail of torn clothing a

A Journey from Lurid Fantasy to Mundane Reality The Occultist The Occultist The Popular Imagination: Sex, Drugs, and Summoning Things Ask the average person what occultists get up to, and you'll receive a delightfully lurid catalogue of activities that would make even the most dedicated practitioner wonder where they're supposed to find the time. According to popular perception, occultists spend their evenings: Summoning demons in chalk circles whilst wearing dramatically hoo

The Necronomicon - The Book of Dead Names The Necronomicon: Examining Fiction, Forgery, and Functional Magic The Necronomicon occupies a peculiar position in the landscape of Western occultism—a grimoire that shouldn't exist, yet somehow does. To address whether it constitutes a "valid system for occult practice" requires us to navigate the tangled waters between literary fiction, deliberate fabrication, and the curious alchemy by which imagined texts can acquire genuine magi

The Vampire of "Romantic" Fiction The Undead Through the Ages: A History of Vampire Lore and Myth The vampire stands as one of humanity's most enduring monsters, a creature that has stalked the collective imagination for millennia. Yet the suave, aristocratic bloodsucker of modern fiction bears little resemblance to the bloated, plague-spreading revenants that terrorised medieval villages. The history of vampire lore reveals not a single coherent tradition, but a complex tape

Heremtic Knowledge: The Thrice-Greatest Heremes The Thrice-Greatest Wisdom: A Journey into Hermeticism Picture this: It's 1462 in Renaissance Florence, and Marsilio Ficino, the brilliant translator working for the powerful Cosimo de' Medici, is labouring over a Latin translation of Plato's complete works. Suddenly, a manuscript arrives that causes him to drop Plato immediately—despite having promised his patron he'd finish the job. What could be so compelling that even Plato