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Monday, April 26, 2027
7pm ET (NYC time)
PLEASE NOTE: Video playback of free events is only available to Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanatomy.org.
With the warning on its title page — “Touch Me Not!” — slyly tempting the reader to taste the forbidden fruit of black magic, the late eighteenth-century Austrian grimoire A Most Rare Compendium of the Whole Magical Art is a fundamentally deceptive work. At first sight, it appears to be a sorcerer’s manual. Its pages depict a variety of transgressive magical procedures: psychoactive drug use, masturbation fantasy, animal sacrifice, and the necromantic manipulation of corpses. With the help of these techniques, hidden treasures are wrested from guardian spirits, and the black magician fulfils their highest ambition: an infernal transfiguration and union with the Devil.
Yet the true nature of A Most Rare Compendium is betrayed by its vivid necrophilic images of horror, which lure us to lonely sepulchres at the dead of night, and to gallows where mandrake roots sprout from the semen of hanged men. Rather than a practical magical manual, this shrewdly illustrated curio was created in the 1790s to exploit the Dark Romantic aesthetic then emerging in the German cultural sphere.
In this free lecture, historian of Western esotericism Dr. Hereward Tilton explores this strange manuscript’s tropes and their fascinating folk-magical background. Entering the world of the Faustian Höllenzwang (‘coercion of hell’) grimoires and the early modern vogue for magical treasure hunting, we’ll examine the Compendium’s recipes for hallucinogenic fumigations (which include a little-known European source of DMT!) and discover the very real perils of treasure hunting with psychoactive nightshades. We’ll also consider the appeal of manuscripts like A Most Rare Compendium to Enlightened gentlemen such as Goethe, who drew inspiration from a similarly confected grimoire when writing part one of his Faust.
Hereward Tilton is a religious studies scholar specialising in Rosicrucian history, psychedelic magic, and Jung’s gnostic heritage. His publications include The Quest for the Phoenix and The Path of the Serpent: Psychedelics and the Neuropsychology of Gnosis. He has taught on Western esotericism at the Universities of Amsterdam and Exeter.
Monday, April 26, 2027
7pm ET (NYC time)
PLEASE NOTE: Video playback of free events is only available to Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanatomy.org.
With the warning on its title page — “Touch Me Not!” — slyly tempting the reader to taste the forbidden fruit of black magic, the late eighteenth-century Austrian grimoire A Most Rare Compendium of the Whole Magical Art is a fundamentally deceptive work. At first sight, it appears to be a sorcerer’s manual. Its pages depict a variety of transgressive magical procedures: psychoactive drug use, masturbation fantasy, animal sacrifice, and the necromantic manipulation of corpses. With the help of these techniques, hidden treasures are wrested from guardian spirits, and the black magician fulfils their highest ambition: an infernal transfiguration and union with the Devil.
Yet the true nature of A Most Rare Compendium is betrayed by its vivid necrophilic images of horror, which lure us to lonely sepulchres at the dead of night, and to gallows where mandrake roots sprout from the semen of hanged men. Rather than a practical magical manual, this shrewdly illustrated curio was created in the 1790s to exploit the Dark Romantic aesthetic then emerging in the German cultural sphere.
In this free lecture, historian of Western esotericism Dr. Hereward Tilton explores this strange manuscript’s tropes and their fascinating folk-magical background. Entering the world of the Faustian Höllenzwang (‘coercion of hell’) grimoires and the early modern vogue for magical treasure hunting, we’ll examine the Compendium’s recipes for hallucinogenic fumigations (which include a little-known European source of DMT!) and discover the very real perils of treasure hunting with psychoactive nightshades. We’ll also consider the appeal of manuscripts like A Most Rare Compendium to Enlightened gentlemen such as Goethe, who drew inspiration from a similarly confected grimoire when writing part one of his Faust.
Hereward Tilton is a religious studies scholar specialising in Rosicrucian history, psychedelic magic, and Jung’s gnostic heritage. His publications include The Quest for the Phoenix and The Path of the Serpent: Psychedelics and the Neuropsychology of Gnosis. He has taught on Western esotericism at the Universities of Amsterdam and Exeter.