Imagine you are walking through a dense forest. The light falls through thick crowns in sharply cut shadows, and everything seems to be in motion. You sense the scent of mosses, of rotting leaves and damp earth, and with no particular destination in mind, you walk deeper and deeper into this forest. Now imagine that every tree you encounter on this walk, whether old or young, small or large, represents the human belief in a particular truth. Here is the grove of the Christian truths, and there, without the beginning and the end being distinguishable in any way, it merges s ..read more

     View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize   Thank you for your interest in my upcoming book, Holy Heretics. Ideally this week people would have received their preorders. Unfortunately, though, the cloth for the hardcover edition was damaged in transit, and now shipping is delayed to begin on Monday, November 17th. To shorten the waiting time a bit, Scarlet Imprint and I have decided to offer you to open the book together in advance.... So on this page you will find the complete introduction to Holy Heretics - before the release and for free. I also h ..read more

  Gerión, © Julian de la Mota, for more information see here.  What good… … is the knowledge of what holds the world together at its core if we continue to destroy it? More important than the knowledge of the innermost might be the knowledge of partaking. Before all abstract knowledge, we might want to seek a living relationship with the world right around us. The concept of human freedom can seem immensely overrated in the Western world, when we compare it to the concept of embeddedness. Lucifer is the mythical being that represents for many the epiphany of the intrepid individuali ..read more

   Introduction Historical research in the field of the occult is a strange thing. It requires an equal measure of openness to deviate from preconceived itineraries, as well as determination not to be seduced by the lure of ubiquitous anecdotes. All too quickly, a curious aside can take on a life of its own. Like a walk in the woods at night, we find ourselves surrounded by strange noises and a wide-open space that invites further and further exploration. The unknown wishes to be discovered. The ambiguous wishes to be clothed in form and story. And yet, every little anecdote can bec ..read more

    Let me take a moment to share a long overdue book update. Let me cover both the writing I have been doing over the last years and projects I aim to complete before the end of 2022. And if you don’t have time to read it all, I’ll make it really short. Here is the Paracelsian trilogy I am close to completing: HOLY HERETICS - is a book of Promethean spirit and a primer on stealing the mago-mystical fire from the tombs of the Christian churches. It culminates in a restored Paracelsian initiation ritual with the Olympic Spirits. It is focussed to generate inner fire and magical conta ..read more

  © JULIAN DE LA MOTA, Lucifer, 2020 - click to purchase print  Introduction This is a very personal post. It is also a post that has some rather disturbing content. Not in images, but in words. I am offering reflections on the difficult topic of attempting to understand an aggressor; much more remains to be said about standing with their victims of course. I have to apologise especially to all my Jewish friends for returning to this open wound. If I do so, it is in the spirit of never allowing myself or my people to forget. It is also in the spirit of making the poison of our past ..read more

  Download PDF The Egyptian Sorcerer - A Maqamah Parable In 1847, the famous Jewish scholar Moritz Steinschneider presented his wife with a special wedding gift: a selection of Maqamah parables he had newly translated from Hebrew. Based upon Arabic sources of the 11th to 13th centuries, these tales waft a breath of Arabian desert culture into medieval Europe. Originally published under the title Manna, they were reprinted in 1920 by Steinschneider's heirs under the title The Sorcerer. – Here we present for the first time an English translation of the titular story The Egyptian Sorcerer ..read more

    [Extract of a Manuscript on the Paracelsian Olympic Spirits] I. The Curtain Rises. Once upon a time, in the now dark tail of the years 1510 to 1516, a young, short, half-bald hermaphrodite [0] visited a man in his abbey St. James to Würzburg, whom they called the Black Abbot. There, the young man sat, almost still a boy in his body, and yet the piercing bright light of a star pushed over the horizon line of his mind, entirely wrapped up in the process of becoming. Silently, he looked at the old man, whom others had called “pansophiae splendor magus”[1], the mage shining with the ..read more

  View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize View fullsize Here is how I think about a good book, as in, about the body of a written text. Most spirits live happily without ever becoming embodied. Others take on an entirely different life once they incarnate. The latter is certainly true for the spirit of the written word: When a text steps over the threshold of becoming a physical object, it seeks its place in the material world. What has lived in our heads, on our s ..read more

   I. The Olympic Spirits. Paracelsus (1493-1541) coined the term of the Olympic Spirit(s) in 1531/1532 when he wrote De causis morborum invisibilium, which was printed posthumously in 1564. He expanded on the nature of these spirit(s) in his opus magnus, the Philosophia sagax, written in 1537 and first printed in 1571. Four years later, in 1575, the Olympic Spirit(s) received the ‘grimoire treatment’ with the original publication of the Arbatel. From this moment onwards in the late 16th century and all through the 17th century, the Olympic Spirit(s) quickly establish ..read more