This short novel of 1670 gave the literary world a lasting gift: the doctrine of Elementary Spirits (Gnomes, Nymphs or Undines, Sylphs, and Salamanders) and their relations with humans from Adam’s time to the present.

The Vampyre is the first Vampire story published in English, a novella written by John Polidori, physician to Lord Byron. The Vampyre appeared in England’s New Monthly Magazine in April 1819.

Timoleon & Other Ventures in Minor Verse is a collection of poems by Herman Melville, privately published by the Caxton Press in 1891 in an edition of only twenty-five copies.

Written while Irving was living in Birmingham, England, and then published in 1819. Along with Irving’s companion piece Rip Van Winkle

In 1609, Galileo constructed the first powerful telescope and started observing the heavens, which led to many monumental discoveries.

The Red Dragon, also known as "The Grand Grimoire" is one of the most sensational and notorious black magic Grimoires. It gives explicit instructions on how to call up and make a pact with the Devil’s prime minister in Hell, Lucifuge Rofocale.

In 1577, Johann Weyer appended a short work titled Pseudomonarchia Daemonum to his treatise on the falsehoods of witchcraft and the magical arts, De Praestigiis Daemonum.

In some respects, Le Petit Albert was the epitome of the Bibliothèque Bleue grimoires: it appeared from virtually nowhere in the early eighteenth century, was almost immediately condemned by the censor, and was spread across France by itinerant booksellers passing from village to village, town to town.

Pantographia by Edmund Fry, London 1799, contains more than two hundred alphabets.
This book is full of curiosities, like Chaldean 1. Fry traces this to the French scholar and astrologer Jacques Gaffarel (1601 - 1681).

Dark Romanticism loved the irrational, the scary spooky and the demonic Grosteske. The fallen writers explored the worlds of nightmares, psychic disturbances, fears and dark sides of the human, as far as possible. They did not want to show the boundaries between nightmare and reality, but rather to blurr those limit in their works.

Written just eighty-four years before Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, this is a Victorian collection of moon lore: myths, folklore, superstitions and just plain whimsy from all lands.

Matthew Gregory Lewis was in his late teens when he composed and published The Monk. Like Shelley, the Gothic had set his imagination alight, but while with Shelley this flowed into a Neo-Platonic Anarchism, Lewis detonated into a tendrilled three-volumes of sex, satan and unease.

In the 5th century Aelia Eudocia, the Empress of Byzantium, composed an epic poem on the crimes and salvation of Cyprian, a professional magician who is presented as the embodiment of everything a magician can be, who ran up against a devout teen in Antioch.

Gustav Fechner (1881 - 1887) was a pioneer in the emerging field of scientific psychology and the philosophy of mind, but like many of his peers, he also applied his intellect to the question of the survival of the human personality after death.

Emily Dickinson, unrecognized in her own time, is known posthumously for her innovative use of form and syntax.

The Golem (original German title: Der Golem) is a novel written by Gustav Meyrink between 1907 and 1914. The novel centers on the life of Athanasius Pernath, a jeweler and art restorer who lives in the ghetto of Prague.

Baudelaire’s most famous poetical effort is the result of a slow and immersed work. The poems focus is on death, of disease, of prostitution, of the ordinary street life of Paris, of everything that shed light or spoke to humanity.

When Marie Bosse was arrested in Paris, in January 1679, among her possessions was a copy of an unusual magical text. The Enchiridion Leonis Papae — Pope Leo's Handbook — has since acquired notoriety as a work of 'black magic', largely due to its association with the subsequent 'Affair of the Poisons', and the aura it acquired among 19th-century occult revivalists.

Alciato was a jurist and writer, born in Milan in 1492, he is the founder of the school of legal humanists, but his most famous work remains the Emblemata, first published in 1531. This emblem book combines Latin verses with accompanying woodcuts creating a new genre that reached enormous popularity.

The peculiar and startling effect of morphine on a person unaccustomed to its administration was happily illustrated in the instance of a gentleman to whom, under its influence (about three-eighths of a grain,) the dream to be related occurred.

The evocative work of Hans Holbein, known as Der Totentanz or The Dance of Death, stands as a testament to artistic mastery and social commentary.

Der Tod is the second volume in our series of books exploring the poetry of death, transience, and transition with a focus on the nineteenth century (but not only!).

Abū Yaʿqūb ibn Ishāq al-Kindī (c.800-870CE) De Radiis (On The Stellar Rays) proposes that all things emit rays that operate on all other things, producing an interplay of causes and effects from the stars down to material objects.

The Cloud of Unknowing is a pillar of medieval mystic writing, written as a 'how to' guide for a first-hand encounter with God.
The approach is surprisingly ecumenical, with the author recommending that all that the candidate thinks he or she knows about God to be discarded before any attempt can made at the described exercise.

"The Castle of Otranto," written by Horace Walpole in 1764, is often regarded as the first Gothic novel. Its initial edition claimed to be a translation of a 1529 Naples manuscript found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in northern England.

Dismissed by A.E. Waite as the probable work of mischievous priests in Rome, The Black Pullet is a ‘novella of ideas’ grounded in the Egyptomania that gripped France in the 1820s.

A Season in Hell is an extended poem in prose written and published in 1873 by French writer Arthur Rimbaud.

This compelling and occasionally comic study of melancholy became cult reading in the 17th century and has inspired artists from Keats (who said it was his favourite book) over Cy Twombly to Nick Cave." Robert McCrum, The GuardianThe Anatomy of Melancholy was first published in 1621.

Scholars of poetry don’t often follow Yeats out onto the treacherous ground of his esotericism, and yet doing so is one of the main interpretative keys to the Yeatsian worldview.

In Spiritus Mundi, there is, according to William Butler Yeats, ''a universal memory and a muse of sorts that provides inspiration to the poet or writer.'' To Yeats, Spiritus Mundi is the source of all ''images'' and ''symbols,'' a ''collective unconscious.''