Showing posts with label 1890s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1890s. Show all posts

Friday, February 14, 2020

The Occult Family Physician: Now Available!



This fairly long book is a tome of medical and herbal lore which combines multiple distinct elements of literature into one semi-condensed volume. Often, in the 19th century, the Materia Medica was separate from social tracts or only contained herbs and their uses or recipes. This contains all of the above, as well as dietary content, all from the backdrop of the botanic method, which stressed proper living, "natural" remedies, and was altogether an objective improvement on the prior era of mercury based medicine, antimonial injections into wounds, and other pseudo-alchemical snake oil.

It is interesting to note that by this time, while lobelia (formerly heralded as a sort of cure-all) was continued in use for many complaints, it had lost ground against chamomile, st johns wort, artemesia absinthium, and a few other species which were rising in prominence.

Of interest as well here is a short tract against onanism ("self pollution"!) and material involving spiritism.

307 pages.

Friday, February 9, 2018

Mysteries of the Rosie Cross: Now Available!



This work comes from a rather expansive (and otherwise mostly one-minded) collection of texts from the golden period of both real and quack-like academia involving occultism, from that special era in the 1890s; specifically, this is one of the better titles within the Phallism series that almost certainly was created by Hargrave at the time. Unlike most entries in that series, this one has nothing to do with symbology and everything to do with the Rosicrucians' own then-translated purported literary history, with some alchemy and other subjects tossed in. The only other entry in the series that deviates from that one taboo subject of reproductive spiritual material is Ophiolatreia (which I edited quite some time ago.)

It's quite good, actually, despite the fact that parts of it are a bit dense and difficult to fit into a linear sort of system; most of the content here was copied by the author verbatim into the work; some of that content is quite strange and fantastical, almost Atlantean. Nonetheless it is academically sound.

134 pages.