/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.16611853]

I finished isis unveiled and am in search for more esoteric books or maybe something about conspiracies. Any good recommendations? Something which seems "dumb", but is really argumentative?

[Anonymous No.16611994]

>>16611853
I'm reading "In Search of the Miraculous" and it's okay. A lot of it is similar to Theosophy. But as a rule I recommend Jung and Evola to all esotericists.

Can you tell me more about Isis Unveiled and what you thought of it?

[Anonymous No.16612044]

>>16611853
Whole collection, start with PicRel
https://archive.org/details/the-golden-cord-serrano_202008/

[Anonymous No.16612053]

>>16611853

[Anonymous No.16612085]

Illuminatus Trilogy
Foucault's Pendulum

[Anonymous No.16612089]

>>16611853
Great Occult+Conspiracy stuff by Levenda
>Sinister Forces trilogy (all kinds of stuff)
>The Dark Lord (hp lovecraft, Kenneth Grant, Crowley)
>The Angel And The Sorcerer (mormonism)
>The Secret Temple (freemasonry)

[Anonymous No.16612776]

Bump

[Anonymous No.16612823]

If you like Blavatsky there is some great exposé stuff on the Theosophical movement. I forget which book exactly but looking at the wikipedia page for the Masters of Ancient Wisdom, it might be Paul Johnson's The Masters Revealed. That will have a kind of tabloid feel to it. I remember also reading about Madame Blavatsky's Baboon. There is a whole genre of knocking down these guru movements. Masson's book on the Freud crowd, The Assault on Truth, is another one. That caused a really big stink.

But if you're looking more for exciting occult stuff, some of the classic names, from the same time that Blavatsky was doing the rounds, are Edouard Schure; a slightly more dilettantish Schure is Eliphas Levi; and Manly P. Hall will probably interest you. All were written and became sensations in the same era, characterised by a mood of "this is all knew and exciting and we take it completely seriously (although subsequent scholarship will significantly deflate our optimism)." You can still recapture that era pretty well by reading authors like these.

If you want a more recent general overview of occultism and new age, check out Colin Wilson's The Occult, and its sequel Beyond the Occult is just as good. He also has stuff on conspiracies. He has that wonderful journalistic but still serious and exploratory feel that some Anglo writers have. A lot of people got their start.

If you want an overview of modern occult movements specifically, check out Webb's Occult Underground. The sequel, Occult Establishment, is about the impact of occult movements on politics in the 20th century. Webb is very respectable and mainstream, not a kook. If you want more along these lines, Nicholas Goodrick-Clark's Occult Roots of Nazism and his later book Black Sun have a great mix of journalistic "wtf" and perfectly mainstream scholarly accreditation. He was a fascinating figure himself. So was Webb, who died believing he was being terrorised by occult conspiracies.

If you want some really easy pulpy stuff to jump right into, Gary Lachman writes similar books for more lay audiences. He kind of sees himself as the successor to Wilson I think. He has a couple on politics and the occult.

[Anonymous No.16612859]

>>16612089
Great recs, thanks. Been meaning to look into Grant for a long time.

Seconding also Illuminatus, anything by Anton Wilson really (although be careful not to get sucked in), seconding also something on Crowley.. Just go read Jack Parsons' wikipedia page if you don't believe me on Crowley. HR Wakefield has some interesting Crowley-inspired characters in his short stories, "He Cometh and he Passeth By" and "A Black Solitude":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUPlA8_nqJA
https://www.unz.com/print/WeirdTales-1951mar-00014

De Ropp's Master Game is fun.

Can't believe I forgot to recommend Gurdjieff.. Another rabbit hole. Be careful with this stuff OP.

A personal story to add: one of the few people I've ever met who genuinely seemed to have an aura of power or supernatural charisma about them, despite the fact that we spoke for all of five seconds, was a Theosophy guy I think. He saw me looking at some Bulwer-Lytton books he had piled up and asked me about my interest. It was benign but eerie, felt kind of transfixed.

[Anonymous No.16612952]

>>16612823
Based

[Anonymous No.16612960]

>>16612952
Those are really nice covers

[Anonymous No.16613001]

[Anonymous No.16613091]

>>16612859
Grant is something special. The first half of a given Typhonian Trilogy book, you'll want to throw it away, but the second half it all starts clicking and you can't put it down.
I'd recommend starting with Outside The Circles Of Time, even though it's deep in the series
(Thank fuck these expensive bitches are on libgen)