What happens when historians, occultists, artists, and independent researchers gather in the attic of Jiřího Mahen Memorial to discuss topics related to the Occult, Magical Traditions, and Esoteric practices that attract social science researchers and practitioners? What conversations emerge when academic investigation meets the living traditions of Hermeticism, Alchemy, Ceremonial Magic, Tarot, and alternative Religious…

There’s no Great Work if only for ourselves. When we speak of theurgy, we often imagine a highly individual spiritual practice: prayer, invocation, meditation, sacred symbols, ritual, and the attempt to establish a relationship with the divine. Yet in both the ancient theurgical tradition and later Western esotericism, we can understand the purpose of such…

The concept of Western Esotericism is notoriously difficult to define, not least because it encompasses a heterogeneous range of historical currents, practices, texts, and modes of religious and philosophical inquiry. Among the influential scholarly approaches are those associated with Antoine Faivre and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, whose respective formulations provide useful points of departure for examining the…

Ritual Mediation, Correspondence, and the Transformation of Consciousness Prayer beads are among the simplest ritual technologies found across religious traditions. Their apparent simplicity, however, conceals a sophisticated relationship between material objects, repetitive prayer, embodied attention, symbolic correspondence, and altered states of consciousness. In the Western esoteric context, this relationship becomes particularly significant when prayer beads…

When we speak of the Tarot as an instrument of initiation, we must also distinguish this conception from its modern use, primarily as a system of divination. Within a particular stream of Western esotericism, the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot have been interpreted quite differently and not principally as a means of predicting events,…