Hildegard of Bingen: the reflection of the living light
She saw one thing her whole life, and wrote it down in every language she could find.
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The journal
Long reads for slow evenings
Essays on folklore, tarot, ritual, plants and the history of this strange and durable tradition. Written to be read once carefully rather than scrolled past three times.
A series
The Lost Women of the Occult
A secret history of hidden knowledge
The history of this tradition has women at its load-bearing points, and the record filed them under wife, assistant, medium, madwoman or witch. This series calls them back by name: the seers, healers, alchemists and visionaries the world tried to hide. Each installment opens here; the full essays, with all their sources, live on my Substack.
No. I · The twelfth century
No. II · Alexandria
Maria the Jewess: the first of the alchemists
The earliest named alchemist in the West survives only in quotation, and her instrument is in your kitchen.
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No. III · Scotland, 1662
Isobel Gowdie: the confession nobody asked for
The clerk kept her voice and lost her fate.
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The full essays
Complete essays with full sources, for paid subscribers. Coming next: Pamela Colman Smith, Florence Farr, Hypatia of Alexandria.
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Folklore
What the second sight actually meant in the Highlands
An dà shealladh was never a party trick, and the people who had it rarely wanted it. What the seventeenth and eighteenth century accounts really describe.
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Hermeticism
The Kybalion: on the seven Hermetic principles
What the book actually is, who wrote it, and why that matters more once you love it.
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Astrology
The planetary hours and their influence
Calculating them by hand, why the week is named as it is, and choosing hours well in a working life.
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Occult history
Notes on the life and work of Éliphas Lévi
Seminarian, radical, prisoner, magus: the man who bent nineteenth century magic into our shape.
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Tarot
The Tower is not a punishment
Reading Atu XVI without dread: its lightning, its lineage from the Maison Dieu, and why the card so often arrives as a relief.
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Herbcraft
Mugwort, vervain and the trouble with flying ointments
The historical recipes, the pharmacology of what was actually in them, and the honest reason I will not be handing you one.
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Ceremonial
Why we bother with banishing
What a banishing ritual is really doing, from medieval exorcism to the Golden Dawn, and how to tell a working habit from a nervous one.
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Spirit work
Discernment: the skill nobody sells you
How to tell the difference between contact, imagination and wishful thinking, and why the answer is a notebook rather than a rule.
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Astrology
Elections for people with jobs
Choosing a decent moment for a working when you cannot wait three months for a perfect one.
Read more →Letters from the fireside
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