gnosticism – Painted Blind Publishing

SO YOU’VE REMEMBERED YOU’VE ALWAYS BEEN A MAGICIAN: 15 Tips, Tricks and Intuition Games for the Internet Age Occultist

Hello, regular reader. Welcome to 2019’s brand new season of bi-weekly essays, brought to you by author M. F. Sullivan. To support her continued production of these essays and enjoy far more polished forms of her work, check out her fiction–and preorder The Hierophant’s Daughter by clicking this link, or one of the links in the sidebar or footer. Thank you as always for your continued support, and hang in

January 12, 2019

This Man Who Disappeared Was The Devil: Shirley Jackson’s Lottery Collection and The Occult

A friend of mine—whose last name is literally ‘Friend’, because sometimes the Universe feels the need to make things obvious for us—contacted me early one morning to say, “Reread the short stories in The Lottery by Shirley Jackson and watch out for James or Jim Harris,” and I, sufficiently intrigued, and not having read much Jackson since finishing We Have Always Lived In The Castle, opened the book and recalled,

October 21, 2016

The Xanthosis of Tobit: The Hidden Alchemy of The Bible’s Most Under-Appreciated Book

Have you ever read The Book of Tobit? If you’re a Protestant, the answer is probably no, because it was rendered apocryphal; if you’re a Catholic, the odds are higher, but it’s increasingly hard to find a practicing Catholic these days who’s actually read the book outside of what was proscribed to them in Sunday school. Considered non-canonical also by Judaism, it’s tucked away amid more popular Biblical books, coincidentally

September 9, 2016

The Alchemical Devilry Series, Part III: The Master and Margarita, The Man Who Sold The World, And The Nature of Artwork As Faustian Contract

You look like a perfectly rational sort of person, and I certainly know that I am, which is why I am always a little flabbergasted to find myself sitting down and writing essays about contacting the Devil. Again, when I say ‘the Devil’, I mean the chthonic personification of the unconscious, a Mercurial archetype which both favors and tests man. When I talk about artists ‘contacting the Devil’, or the

August 5, 2016

Saturnism In The Emerald City: The Alchemical Symbolism Of Return To Oz

Even the most painful-to-watch, trashy piece of cinema can be littered with accidental (or, perhaps, intentional) symbolism enough to trigger a serious acid flashback or psycho-spiritual experience otherwise unlabeled. Barbarella, for God’s sake, is a pretty profound (well, ‘thoughtful’, say) exploration of a woman’s emerging sexuality and her embrace of the power it gives her. But I think a better, and safer place to start touching on this subject is

July 16, 2016