Emma Hardinge Britten

Art Magic: The Annotated Edition


First published in 1876, Art Magic is one of the founding documents of the Victorian occult revival.  Published under mysterious circumstances, the book was controversial in its own day, and has intrigued and infuriated students of the occult for nearly 150 years. Regarded for years merely as a supplement to the more famous Ghost Land (1876), Art Magic is actually the more important work: closely connected to the founding and early teachings of the Theosophical Society, to Helene Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled (1877), and to the teachings of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, as well as to the work of J. C. Street, R. Swinburne Clymer and other occult figures. 


Emma Hardinge Britten (1823-1899) was one of the most influential Spiritualist and occult propagandists of the nineteenth century.  Her work informs modern-day organizations as diverse as the international Spiritualist movement, the Theosophical Society, esoteric Freemasonry, and the Church of Light.


This definitive, corrected edition of the text includes an in-depth bibliographical and historical introduction, as well as extensive annotations to the text, by the curator of the Emma Hardinge Britten Archive.


Printed texts are available from CreateSpace or Amazon.


E-books are available for the Kindle and the Nook.


An e-book will also be available from iBooks at some point in the future. Contact the press in the interim to arrange to purchase an e-book for iBooks directly, or to request versions for other readers not currently supported.

IN PRINT

IN PREPARATION

Emma Hardinge Britten

Ghost Land: The Critical Edition

Paul Johnson and Marc Demarest, editors


Containing Ghost Land Volumes 1 and 2, this edition brings all the Ghost Land material together in print for the first time, integrates the 1872 and 1876 variants of Ghost Land Volume 1, and includes an introduction and annotations by Paul Johnson and Marc Demarest, as well as critical essays by Jay Kinney, John Patrick Deveney and other well-known occult scholars.



Con Artists, Enthusiasts and True Believers

Jay Kinney, editor


Containing a series of biographical and critical essays on lesser-known figures of Modern Spiritualism and the modern occult movements, this anthology offers students of Spiritualism and the occult a rich and rare view of the schemers, believers and fanatics who worked in the fields of the occult in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.



Emma Hardinge Britten

The Faiths, Facts and Frauds of Religious History

Marc Demarest, editor


Britten’s 1878 text -- the third in a series of theoretical works including Six Lectures on Theology and Nature (1860) and Art Magic (1876) -- is resurrected, with extensive annotations and a critical introduction by Marc Demarest.



Sarah Stanley Grimké

Esoteric Lessons

Paul Johnson, editor


Published posthumously in 1900, Esoteric Lessons combined three shorter works: Personified Unthinkables, First Lessons in Reality, and A Tour Through the Zodiac. A companion volume to the better known text The Light of Egypt (1889), Esoteric Lessons is an important artifact of the collaboration between Sarah Stanley Grimké and Thomas H. Burgoyne, a central figure in the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.


Sarah Stanley Grimké (1850-1898) was an obscure member of a celebrated literary family. Her husband Archibald Henry Grimké authored two biographies, and her daughter Angelina Weld Grimké was a playwright and poet.


This edition includes an in-depth bibliographical and historical introduction, as well as extensive annotations to the text. It represents the author’s first return to print in more than a century.



William Richardson Hayden

Seven Years with the Spirits

Nancy Gray Schoonmaker and Marc Demarest, editors


Maria Hayden’s trip to England in 1853 brought American Spiritualist manifestations to England for the first time, and seeded English soil with what would become, by the end of the 1850s, a uniquely English variety of Spiritualism. William Hayden’s account of his wife’s work in England in 1852 and 1853 -- including séances with Edward Bulwer Lytton, Dr. John Ashburner, Dr. John Elliotson, George Henry Lewes, members of the editorial staff of Charles Dickens’ Household Words, and more than a dozen members of the British aristocracy is republished in this volume for the first time in more than 150 years, with annotations by Marc Demarest and a critical introduction by Nancy Gray Schoonmaker.