The Philosophical Research Society

01/15/2026

LIBRARY DAY ORACLES by PRS librarian dama.

In these books each spine carries patience, humility, and a willingness to be undone by what does not immediately reveal itself: Falling Angels, hidden texts, exclusions, divine love and contradictions.

In Mysticism and Magic in Turkey the focus is on inner spiritual journeys (Sufism) vs. external magic, with themes of divine love, inner perception (the “third eye”), and the transformative power of faith. The wandering dervish appears as both threat and teacher: the one who refuses institutional certainty, whose devotion is lived through exile, contradiction, and fire. It reminds me that truth is rarely tidy, and that spiritual intensity often unsettles power before it enlightens it.

In an Eastern Rose Garden reads like a breath taken slowly and carries the rose not as ornament, but as discipline, a scent, a thorn, and beauty intertwined in spiral. This is knowledge cultivated inwardly, and prayer is not recitation but attention.

The Fourteen Books of the Apocrypha sits heavy with what was excluded, feared, or deemed excessive from what we know as The Bible. These texts hold stories that slipped through doctrinal borders and visions, feminine wisdoms, cosmic reckonings. Reading them feels like restoring a missing organ to the body of belief. Likewise, The Book of Enoch opened cautiously, like entering a charged atmosphere. Watchers fall. Knowledge burns. Heaven fractures. It’s an ancient Jewish apocalyptic text detailing fallen angels (Watchers) and Nephilim, revealing cosmic secrets, prophecies, and judgment.

And A Dictionary of Angels becomes an index of names whispered across centuries. The angel that appeared was Raphael, whose name means “God has healed” (from the Hebrew Rāfā’ = to heal + El = God). Raphael is the archangel of healing, restoration, and right guidance not only of the body, but of sight, memory, travel, and the soul’s passage through difficulty.

“The angel is not a creature to be worshipped, but a power to be understood.
It is a living symbol of divine law in operation,
a reminder that intelligence moves through the universe
with purpose, order, and compassion.” - MPH (The Blessed Angels)

01/14/2026

Our David Lynch Tribute Continues! Plus: Dive Poetry, Celebrating Poe, & More! - https://mailchi.mp/prs.org/weds1-13

01/13/2026

💎

The number five was peculiarly associated by the Pythagoreans with art of healing and the pentagram, or five-pointed star, was to them the symbol of health. The above figure represents magical ring set with a talismanic gem bearing the PENTALPHA. The Pythagoreans placed it at the beginning of their epistles as a greeting to invoke secured health to their correspondent. But its use was not confined to the disciples of Pythagoras. As a talisman, it was employed all over the East as a charm to resist evil spirits.

The ring has long been regarded as the symbol of attainment, perfection, and immortality-the last because the circlet of precious metal had neither beginning nor end. In the Mysteries, rings chased to resemble a serpent with its tail in its mouth were worn by the initiates as material evidence of the position reached by them in the order.

Signet rings, engraved with certain secret emblems, were worn by the hierophants, and it was not uncommon for a messenger to prove that he was the official representative of a prince or other dignitary by bringing with his message either an impression from his master’s ring or the signet itself.

The wedding ring originally was intended to imply that in the nature of the one who wore it the state of equilibrium and completion had been attained. This plain band of gold therefore bore witness of the union of the Higher Self (God) with the lower self (Nature) and the ceremony consummating this indissoluble blending of Divinity and humanity in the one nature of the initiated mystic constituted the Hermetic Marriage of the Mysteries.

H. P. Blavatsky declares that Orpheus taught his followers how to affect a whole audience by means of a lodestone, and that Pythagoras paid particular attention to the color and nature of precious stones. She adds: “The Buddhists assert that the sapphire produces peace of mind, equanimity, and chases all evil thoughts by establishing a healthy circulation in man.

01/11/2026

🪽
“We live in a very workaday world. One by one we are drawn into the wheels of that great human machine which we call civilization. Our dreams are shattered, our ideals collapse before necessity, and all too often we become rutted. Day after day we do the same thing, until we lose the power to do anything different. That individuality which God has given us we lose. We become just parts of the great machine; we think as we are told to think; we do what we are told to do. A harness is placed upon us and blinders over our eyes, and we become burden-bearers, valuable only for our pay check at the end of the week.“
— p. 5

“Wise men realize that this incident we call life is only one trip to the bottom of the sea; that we have been down many times before and must go down many times again before we find the treasure.

“The philosopher knows that the spirit of man is immortal, that it will never die; but like a wanderer who moves from city to city in his quest for knowledge, so the spirit passes from body to body in its search for understanding.“
— p. 11

“There is but a step from the beast to the man. The world is largely composed of human creatures hitched to the plow of necessity - creatures who drag vans and trucks after them and feel upon their backs the whiplash of privation and necessity. But struggle on they must because of those dependent upon them until, like the beaten horse, they drop in their tracks.”
— p. 5

“It is strange but true that Christians fear death more than any other religious cult. In spite of their great claims to faith, they seem afraid to launch their souls into the presence of their heavenly Father. A great mystic on his deathbed told his children that he had lived all his life in the realization of the infinite goodness and the infinite wisdom of God, and now that he was journeying to a distant land he know he could not go where God was not.”
— p.7

MANLY P. HALL
“Death And After”
©️1983

01/11/2026

01/10/2026

Bookstore Picks by dama

LD Deutsch places us alongside the ruptures of modernity: Pluto’s discovery in 1930, the rise of nuclear power, the emergence of computation, simulation, and artificial intelligence. These are not merely technological milestones; they are mythic achievements.

Pluto, the underworld god, enters astronomical consciousness precisely as humanity confronts mass death, annihilation, and unseen forces capable of unmaking the world. Myth crosses this history and history begins to feel unreal.

In Technomythology, the computer becomes a new mirror. The question “Are we living in a simulation?” echoes ancient metaphysical doubts about appearance and reality, illusion and essence. Here, Deutsch moves in quiet conversation with Albert Einstein, whose theories dismantled absolute time and replaced it with time as relational, elastic, contingent on perception and motion.

Physics begins to sound like mysticism; mysticism begins to resemble science.

What emerges across these books is a radical continuity: myth, science, and technology are not opposites but successive languages attempting to describe the same unfathomable thing: that consciousness moves through time. Each era invents the metaphors it needs. Today, we speak in simulations, code, recursion. Yesterday, we spoke in gods, cycles, descents, and returns.

Deutsch reminds us that when myth is ignored, it doesn’t disappear but reasserts itself through catastrophe, fantasy, and shadow.

“We must go forward to go back, and our existence, in some way, may be both the snake’s head and tail at the same time.”

TOMORROW, Jan 11 at 7pm you can join us for a lecture and conversation with the author LD Deutsch: A Drop in the Continuum at PRS.

01/10/2026

1. Justice ♎️
2. The Tower 🔥
3. The Emperor ♈️
4. 3. The Hanged Man 😶‍🌫️
5. The Wheel of Fortune 🎡
6. The Empress pregnant 🤰🏽
7. The Magician ⚡️
8. The Devil ♑️
9. The Sun 🌞

Today our Sun was in Capricorn ☀️ ♑️
Our Moon was in Libra ♎️
Mars and Venus surround the Sun 🔥 🤰🏽
Mercury approaches Mars & Venus ⚡️
Neptune prepares to enter Aries 😶‍🌫️ ♈️

The Wheel of Fortune Spins for Us All 🎡

A wheel with 8 spokes
The Cycle of Necessity
Anubis and Typhon cling to the wheel
The Sphinx presides at the top - sword in hand
Universal Justice cycle of Good & Evil paddle
High Above the Ocean of Illusion

— C X X X I

“Secret Teachings of All Ages”
An Analysis of the Tarot Cards

PRS is currently running a sale on “Secret Teachings”.
For more info:— PRS.org

01/09/2026

A Drop in the Continuum, The Cosmic Threshold, & More! - https://mailchi.mp/prs.org/fri1-9

01/08/2026

LIBRARY DAY ORACLES by PRS Librarian dama.

This year in Tarot is represented by the Wheel of Fortune: uneven, accelerated, beyond our control. We are reminded again that history does not move in straight lines, but in spirals, reversals, descents, and returns.

In S. L. MacGregor Mathers’ The Tarot, the Wheel is inevitable. A turning that carries both ascent and fall, crowned by figures who rise and descend bound to the same motion. Fortune is not moral but movement. What matters is how we remain oriented while it turns.

That question echoes through Horace Beck’s Folklore and the Sea, where navigation becomes more than a technique, it’s devotion. Sailors crossed impossible distances not with certainty, but with story, prayer, and inherited knowledge.

Prayer enters here not as dogma, but as practice. In Prayer Explained and Simplified, devotion is framed as something from the body and intentional, as something learned through repetition and attention and as a way of staying present inside difficulty.

Likewise, What Is Buddhism? reminds us that contemplation is not withdrawal from the world but a disciplined way of seeing it clearly. Meditation becomes an act of learning how to sit with impermanence rather than resist it.

And then there is nourishment. Abundancia: My Life in Recipes by Natália Pereira, a recent acquisition of our library from one of the artists in the exhibition Myth of Descent (closing January 10 at PRS). This book offers ritual through the domestic and the ancestral: cooking, remembering, feeding one another. Recipes as spells. The kitchen as altar. Care as inheritance. Abundance not as excess, but as continuity.

By returning to the gestures that have always held people together: reading, praying, cooking, remembering, orienting ourselves to forces larger than us. The wheel turns. We light a candle. We feed each other. We keep going.

01/07/2026

The Magic of Books Lecture Series Returns! Plus: Electric Soundbaths, Special Screenings, & More! - https://mailchi.mp/prs.org/weds1-7

01/06/2026

🐌 🎋
“As I entered the antique shop, I could see no signs of the proprietor. Waiting a few seconds in the complete silence of the store, I then called out,
“Are you there, Mr. Nakamura?,
Immediately, the voice of my friend sounded from the depth of his private sanctuary behind the heavily draped door. “Oh, Haru-san, excuse please, you are ever welcome. Come join me in the back room. On this occasion, we shall celebrate a minor success and explore a major mystery.”

🇯🇵 📘

Mr. K. Nakamura is introduced to the reader as a Japanese art dealer doing business in the city of Kyoto, Japan. He is a man of varied and unusual accomplishments, and his establishment is well stocked with valuable oriental antiques. In the course of his long and remarkable life, Mr. Nakamura has accumulated many kinds of knowledge. He is well acquainted with the legendry and lore of his country, and combines the shrewdness of a successful business man with his own natural religious beliefs and a quiet acknowledgment of mystical and magical factors in daily life. Against the background of Mr. Nakamura’s world of art the reader becomes quickly involved in miraculous circumstances.
There is no clear line of demarcation between the commonplace and the supernatural.”

— Manly P. Hall
©️1976

“VERY UNUSUAL: THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF
MR. K. NAKAMURA

A series of related short stories by Manly P. Hall

01/04/2026

“CONX OM PAX”
🌾
“One of the teachings of the initiate tradition in Greece related to the mystery of time. The temple did not divide duration into past, present, and future. Divine and universal laws manifest themselves in an eternal now. Enlightenment belongs to no generation, nor does it increase or diminish. It is always and everywhere. Those who deserve it receive it and, if institutions fade away, the individual remains leader of his own destiny. The illumined ones by walking along the path of merit attain that sublime estate which is without beginning or end. In any land, in any generation, those who ascend to the sovereign truths of existence are the true initiates of the great Mystery System.”

MANLY P. HALL
©️1981
The Adepts in the Esoteric Classical Tradition 🇬🇷 🇮🇹