This title explores the history and development of the Tarot, from its 15th-century beginnings as a conjunct to playing cards to the explosion of its popularity as a system of occult symbolism, with an emphasis on the use of Tarot in modern magical practice.

In this book Gareth Knight takes the most famous and most haunting of all British legends and places it in its rightful position as the core of the Western Mystery Tradition, which draws its inspiration from Greek, Irish and even Atlantean myth. The central Arthurian themes and characters are brought to life with clear and thorough explanations, while the carefully woven pattern that has developed around the Arthuriad is carefully unravelled and its full esoteric significance revealed. This fascinating study, which builds on the work of Dion Fortune and Margaret Lumley Brown, takes the reader...

The Faery Melusine of Lusignan was the subject of a prose romance by Jean d'Arras at the end of the 14th century, swiftly followed by one in verse by Couldrette. This book provides a collection of material from various sources, including translations from French texts, to give an all round picture of the remarkable faery, her town, her church, and the great Lusignan dynasty she founded.

The knights of King Arthur's Round Table - Erec, Lancelot, Yvain, Perceval and Gawain - first appeared in the works of Chretien de Troyes, who cast into Old French stories told by Welsh and Breton story tellers which had their origin in Celtic myth and legend. Chretien wrote at a time when faery lore was still taken seriously - some leading families even claimed descent from faery ancestors So we do well to look again at these early stories, for they were written not so much in terms of mystical quests or examples of military chivalry but records of initiation into Otherworld dynamics....

Dion Fortune encoded much practical magical lore within her novels, leaving it up to the reader to work out how to make use of it. Behind the novels were two major rituals, the Rite of Isis and the Rite of Pan, which Dion Fortune occasionally performed in public in the 1930s as part of her drive to open up occultism beyond the closed walls of esoteric fraternities. Now for the first time, these important magical workings have been released from her society's archive in their complete and original form. Edited and explained by Gareth Knight, this book contains the full text of the original...

By the time we met, he was a newly ordained curate and I was scratching a living in the esoteric world, had written a book on the Qabalah and ran an occult magazine. We were thus inhabitants of two worlds that were never supposed to meet - at least by popular convention - or if they did, to be diametrically opposed to each other. The catalyst for such a meeting of the minds was the provocative poetry of Anthony Duncan, hitherto little known to the world but privately praised by Kathleen Raine. Following on from the Lord of the Dance chapter in his recent autobiography, I Called it Magic, and...

Potent medieval faery lore and hidden goddess traditions for the 21st century. Gareth Knight explores and reveals the hidden mystery of the Faery Melusine, a major figure in medieval French lore and legend. Through vivid interpretation of original source texts, Gareth Knight shows that the Melusine story is a powerful initiatory legend emerging from the deeply transformative Faery Tradition of ancient Europe. Furthermore he demonstrates how such legends manifest as history: the innate sacromagical power of Melusine affected key places and events in the development of the medieval world and...

A series of essays covering a wide spectrum of knowledge and experience, whose underlying theme is to show how our daily lives can be made a training ground for adepthood. It explains the different kinds of meditation and how to find the right esoteric teachers. Essays on the Tree of Life explain the evolution of modern esoteric Qabalah and how it has evolved from an image of God to a map of the created universe. A careful elucidation of the philosophy of Coleridge, and its relevance for today, is followed by a chapter on bridging the gap between psychology and occultism, with examples from...

In what appears on the surface to be a children's story, Gareth Knight, using Tarot imagery, conducts a guided visualisation through the Tree of Life from the homely Cottage of Heart's Desire to the Heart of the Rainbow ... and back again. Richard and Rebecca meet the Joker of their granny's pack of cards, and guided by his dog, embark on an adventure through the Inner Worlds in search of their True Names. To those attuned to its deeper symbolism, the story forms an imaginative journey along the serpentine path of the Tree of Life, conducted via the Tarot archetypes, which when read with...

Paul Sedir was one of the most important figures of the late 19th century occult renaissance in France, and yet he remains very little known in the English-speaking world. Born Yvon Le Loup in 1871, the young Breton moved to Paris and took up occultism as a teenager under the patronage of Papus (Gerard Encausse). Blessed with an exceptional memory and intuition, he embraced a diversity of paths and quickly rose through the ranks of a wide range of esoteric fraternities, authoring a number of books. From his home in Montmartre he held weekly open discussions on occultism and was well known for...