Occultism Simplified, or The Mystic Thesaurus

About this book

A single word can be a doorway into an entire occult vocabulary. Willis F. Whitehead sets out to make the language of esotericism less forbidding, moving among symbols, traditions and the ideas behind ceremonial and mystical study.

The book works as an introduction to the conceptual furniture of the late nineteenth-century occult revival. The same terms reappear across Hermetic and Rosicrucian writing, sometimes carrying strikingly different meanings. Its value lies partly in showing how those traditions tried to organise a bewildering body of inherited knowledge.