SEEING THE LIGHT

Paul Kléber Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts: The Occult in the Age of Enlightenment, Yale University Press, 2013.

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John V. Fleming, The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason, W.W. Norton & Co., 2013

Since the 1970s there has been a gradual, if grudging, acknowledgement by academic historians that occult ideas and beliefs played a much more influential role in the Renaissance than previous generations would admit. Now, the same seems to be happening for the era to which the Renaissance gave way, the Enlightenment or Age of Reason.
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CREATION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Gary Lachman, Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World. Floris Books, 2013.

This is a cracking book on a cracking subject by a cracking author. Sadly it has a terrible subtitle – ‘Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World’ – which, in its implicit, almost finger-wagging, worthiness might well put you off so much as opening it. Don’t let it do that. Buy or borrow it. And, most importantly, read it.
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THE COOLEST MAN EVER?

Daniel Stolzenberg, Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the Secrets of Antiquity, University of Chicago Press, 2013.  Review by Clive Prince

The extraordinary seventeenth-century polymath Athanasius Kircher is one of the most fascinating and intriguing figures in history. The vast scope of his interests and learning has earned him the sobriquets of ‘the last Renaissance man’ and ‘the last man who knew everything’ – even, according to the title of a conference organised in 2002 by the New York Institute of the Humanities to marked the four-hundredth year of his birth, ‘the Coolest Guy Ever’.
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THE HERMETIC LINK

Jacob Slavenburg. The Hermetic Link: From Secret Tradition to Modern Thought. Ibis Press, 2012.

In recent years there has been an upswing of interest in Hermeticism, the metaphysical and magical system set down in a series of texts, collectively the Hermetica, composed in Hellenistic Egypt and attributed to the legendary Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus (‘Thrice-great Hermes’).
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A DANGEROUS GAME?

Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval. The Master Game: Unmasking the Secret Rulers of the World. The Disinformation Company, 2011.

Ever since Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval emerged as the stars of the pre-Millennium ‘alternative history’ boom – which they largely created through seminal books such as The Sign and the Seal and The Orion Mystery – their work has had a subtext. Although the main thrust of their solo and joint books is the challenging of conventional ideas about the origins of civilisation and championing the case for an advanced global culture in the ancient past, they set this against a more eschatological, indeed apocalyptic, background.
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REJECTED KNOWLEDGE

Wouter J Hanegraaff. Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

I think I had better start this review with a warning as to what this book is NOT about; despite the subtitle it is not about the wide range of ‘damned and excluded’ topics discussed by Forteans, psychical researchers and the like. Nor does it really cover the full range of ‘magical’ and ‘occult’ beliefs mentioned in the publisher’s blurb.
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TWO VIEWS ON THE THRICE-GREAT

Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince. The Forbidden Universe. Skyhorse Publishing, 2011.

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Gary Lachman. The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus Floris Books, 2011.

The Forbidden Universe is divided into two parts: the first shows how Hermetic doctrines, for example, heliocentricity, the notion of an infinite universe, the circulation of spirit moving in the blood, above all the notion that Man was a miraculous creation, divine, and capable in principle of working wonders, derived from an Ancient Egyptian theological school based in Heliopolis.
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