To get ordering information on any title just click on the picture.
Many of the books we carry are rare and we have a very limited quantity. All books are sold on a first come first serve basis. All books are available for layaway.
We are always interested in buying Esoteric, Occult, Freemasonry, Alchemy, Golden Dawn, Hermetics, Ceremonial Magic, Witchcraft, Religious, Philosophy and Lovecraftian fiction. Feel free to contact us at miskatonicbooks@me.com
36 FACES The History, Astrology and Magic of the Decans by Austin Coppock (Special Hardcover Limited Edition in Custom Slipcase)
A special hardcover, handbound in full leather, with one of 36 unique talismanic enclosures depicting the genius of each of the decans, marbled endpapers, with custom slipcase.
Click on Images tab above to see more pictures of this unique title.
There is a thread that runs through over four millennia of astrological and magical history, a cord that binds ancient Egypt with the Hellenistic world, the Arabian empire, India, the European Renaissance and even touches the present. That thread is the Decans, a division of the earth’s sky into 36 sections. These 36 ‘Faces of Heaven’ are more than just a curious footnote in the history of archaeo-astronomy. First emerging in ancient Egypt, they have moved with the corpus of Hermetic material, reincarnating in the starry wisdom of culture after culture.
Ostensibly a gear in astrology’s encompassing clockworks, the Decans have also long been a key to accessing legions of spirits. For several millennia and in multiple cultures, magicians have looked at these 36 faces and seen gods, choirs of angels, hordes of demons, and a host of daimones staring back at them, each with its own unique powers. Far from going undocumented, this gallery of faces has been painted and drawn by a host of astrologers, sorcerers and artists, and they can be found on walls of Italian villas as well as in the pages of grimoires.
Weaving together astrology and magic, divination and sorcery, time and sky, this thread of esoteric history deserves more than the footnotes it has so far received. In this work, Austin Coppock follows the Decans through history, charting their trajectory through time and culture. Using the ring of keys which history provides, the 36 doors are flung open, revealing their mysteries to magician and astrologer alike. Each decan, its image, and its specific powers are examined in detail, as well as its permutations in the planetary aspects. Featuring original images specially created for each Decan by Bob Eames, 36 Faces is an invaluable resource for magicians, astrologers, and historians of magical semiotics.
ARS PHILTRON: Concerning the Aqueous Cunning Of the Potion And Its Praxis in the Green Arte Magica by Daniel Schulke (Limited Edition Hardcover)
Xoanon Publishing, 2008. Edition Codex Vasculum, Second Edition (special copy) Hardcover. 8vo. 304 pages. Casebound in black decorated rust-colored cloth. 33 illustrations. Colored endpapers. Lexicon, The greatly-expanded “Edition Codex Vasculum.” Limited to 720 “standard” numbered clothbound copies. Book is in fine condition. Click on the images tab above for more pictures.
The work examines “Wortcunning and Sabbatic-alchemical gnosis as manifested through the medium of potion-making. Its text treats of the eight principal Sabbatic-alchemic philtre types, their pharmacoepia and formulation. Evocations to aspects of the Sabbatic Guardians Lilith and Cain are also given to empower the revelation and reification of the Philtre Arcana.” The author was a friend of the late Andrew Chumbley, and is presently both the Magister of the Cultus Sabbati, as well as the Verdelet of the Tradition. It is from the Cultus Sabbati, in common with Chumbley’s “Azoetia,” that this book draws its inspiration.
OPUSCULA MAGICA Volume 1: Essays on Witchcraft and the Sabbatic Tradition by Andrew Chumbley (Deluxe, Quarter Bound In Leather with Custom Slipcase)
One of only 242 deluxe limited edition hardcovers, quarter bound in leather with custom slipcase. Book is in fine condition with a near fine slipcase with light shelf wear else fine.
Opuscula Volume One contains nine essays written between 1990 and 2003, including one previously unpublished. This volume also includes an Author’s Introduction never before published, as well as an expanded version of the interview with Chumbley in The Cauldron. The essays reflect a degree of magical insight, clarity of vision, and creativity seldom equaled in occult writing to this day.
BEYOND THE MAUVE ZONE by Kenneth Grant (First Edition Hardcover) Import
This is a first edition hardcover. Published in 1999 by Starfire Publications. Book is in near fine condition in like dust jacket. Light shelf wear else fine!
The penultimate volume in Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian Trilogies, deals with various magickal systems and rites of sex magick, as worked by contemporary adepts such as Michael Bertiaux, Nema, Jeffrey & Ruth Evans, and Zivorad Mihajlovic (the Patriarch of the Ecclesia Gnostica Alba). The contents includes chapters on the Kaula Rite of the Fire Snake, the Rite of the K’rla Cell, the Fire Snake & Parasexual Orgasm, The Typhonian Bases of the Mysteries of Maat, and much more.
This book gives rare and detailed insight into the workings of these modern sorcerers. Also contains over 23 plates & illustrations, including artwork by Steffi Grant, Linda Falorio, Nema, Mark Bell, Mishlen Linden and many more.
THE NINTH ARCH by Kenneth Grant (First Edition Hardcover) Import
This is a first edition hardcover. Published in 2002 by Starfire Publications. Book is in near fine condition in like dust jacket. Light shelf wear else fine! Click on images tab above for more pictures.
One of only 1000 copies published.
Starfire Publishing, London, 2002. First Edition. Hardcover. Large 8vo. xxxviii + 604pp. The ‘standard’ or ‘trade’ issue of the first edition limited to 903 copies bound in black Wibalin cloth. Colour frontispiece of an artwork in pastel by Austin Osman Spare. 26 black and white plates of work by Kenneth & Steffi Grant, Pete Smith, Hiruyuli Fukuda, Alfred Floki, Brian Ward, Ellerina Mortier, Mark Bell, Morn Morgan, Sidney Sime and Judith Page. A coloured plate bound in at the rear reproduces the front panel designs of the dustwrappers of the nine books which make up Grant’s three trilogies. Index, glossary and appendices.
“The Ninth Arch” contains the text and commentary on the “Book of the Spider,” a ‘received’ text revealed to members of the Nu Isis Lodge of Grant’s Typhonian O.T.O. The work completes Grant’s trilogy of trilogies (The Magical Revival, Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, & Cults of the Shadow) + (Nightside of Eden, Outside the Circles of Time, Hecate’s Fountain) + (Outer Gateways, Beyond the Mauve Zone, Ninth Arch).
The Ninth Arch is an extended analysis of and commentary upon Liber OKBISh, The Book of the Spider, a transmitted text which was received in the course of Workings of the New Isis Lodge in the 1950s. Grant’s novella Against the Light (Starfire Publishing, London, 1997) cast some of the themes of Liber OKBISh into fictional form.The New Isis Lodge was the final name given to a magical group developed by Kenneth and Steffi Grant over several years in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The main body of work by New Isis Lodge extended over the years 1955 to 1962, and it was on the basis of his experiences within this Lodge that Grant was later to publish his monumental series of nine volumes which has come to be known as the Typhonian Trilogies.
OUTSIDE THE CIRCLES OF TIME by Kenneth Grant (Deluxe, Signed, Quarter Bound in Morocco in Custom Slipcase)
One of only 111 deluxe, signed, quarter bound in morocco leather in custom slipcase. Book is in near fine condition. This is number 63 of 111. Click on the images tab above for more pictures of this unique rare title.
Plus a signed and inscribed postcard by the publisher.
Starfire Publishing, London, 2008. 332 pages, with a frontispiece, a section of twenty-six plates (many in colour) and illustrated endpapers. Sewn hardback with boards bound in black cloth, protected with an attractive full-colour dust-jacket designed by Steffi Grant.
Outside the Circles of Time was first published in 1980. It has been newly typeset, with some of the original illustrations now in colour, and augmented with previously unpublished artwork by Steffi Grant. The fifth volume in the series of Grant’s Typhonian Trilogies, this is a work that covers an extremely wide area and exposes – to quote from the jacket of the 1980 edition – “a network more complex than was ever imagined: a network not unlike H.P. Lovecraft’s dark vision of sinister forces lurking at the rim of the universe”. Outside the Circles of Time explores a complex of such ideas, from Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, Crowley’s Book of the Law, Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, and Frater Achad’s researches. It also explores the work of Soror Andahadna, a contemporary Priestess of Maat whose work has parallels with that of Frater Achad some decades previously when he announced the inauguration of the Aeon of Maat in 1948. On the more orthodox premise that each Aeon lasts 2,000 years, we are at the beginning of the Aeon of Horus, so the Aeon of Maat might appear a long way off yet. However, the following passage from Outside the Circles of Time puts the matter in a different light:
Myths and legends are of the past, but Maat should not be thought of in terms of past or future aeons. Maat is present now for those who, knowing the ‘sacred alignments’ and the ‘Gateway of Inbetweenness’, experience the Word ever coming, ever emaning, from the Mouth, in the ever new and ever present forms that are continually being generated from the mystical Atu or House of Maat, the Ma-atu . . .
But the book is not simply or even primarily about the Aeon of Maat. It is a potent weaving of a host of apparently diverse strands into a broad, deep and powerful current. Though Grant’s volumes in the Typhonian Trilogies have each a unique flavour, Outside the Circles of Time seemed to herald a jump into a different dimension. To round off this synopsis, the closing paragraphs are taken from the Introduction. They convey at once the direction and flavour of this rich and powerful book:
One final point is here relevant, and I state it without apology. It is not my purpose to try to prove anything; my aim is to construct a magical mirror capable of expressing some of the less elusive images seen as shadows of a future aeon. This I do by means of suggestion, evocation, and by those oblique and ‘inbetweenness concepts’ that Austin Spare defined as ‘Neither-Neither’. When this is understood, the reader’s mind becomes receptive to the influx of certain concepts that can, if received undistortedly, fertilize the unknown dimensions of his consciousness. In order to achieve this aim a new manner of communication has to be evolved; language itself has to be reborn, revivified, and given a new direction and a new momentum. The truly creative image is born of creative imagining, and this is – ultimately – an irrational process that transcends the grasp of human logic.
It is well known that scientists and mathematicians have evolved a cryptic language, a language so elusive, so fugitive, and yet so essentially cosmic that it forms an almost qabalistic mode of communication, often misinterpreted by its own initiates! Our position is not quite as desperate, for we are dealing primarily with the body-mind complex in its relation to the universe, and the body-aspect is deeply rooted in the soil of sentiency. Our minds may not understand, but in the deeper layers of subconsciousness where humanity shares a common bed, there is instant recognition. Similarly, a magician devises his ceremony in harmony with the forces he wills to invoke, so an author must pay considerable attention to the creation of an atmosphere that is suitable for his operations. Words are his magical instruments, and their vibrations must produce not a merely arbitrary noise, but an elaborate symphony of tonal reverberations that trigger a series of increasingly profound echoes in the consciousness of his readers. One cannot over-emphasize or over-estimate the importance of this subtle form of alchemy, for it is in the nuances, and not necessarily in the rational meanings of the words and numbers employed, that the magick resides. Furthermore, it is very often in the suggestion of certain words not used, yet indicated or employed by other words having no direct relation to them, that produce the most precise definitions. The edifice of a reality-construct may sometimes be reared only by an architecture of absence, whereby the real building is at one and the same time revealed and concealed by an alien structure haunted by probabilities. These are legion, and it is the creative faculty of the reader – awake and active – that can people the house with souls. So then, this book may mean many things to many readers, and different things to all; but to none can it mean nothing at all, for the house is constructed in such a manner that no echo can be lost.
Filed under: Miskatonic Books Tagged: Aleister Crowley, Andrew chumbley, Austin Coppock, Daniel Schulke, H. P. Lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, Starfire Publications, Three Hands Press / Xoanon