Recent volumes in the Aries Book Series

Wouter Hanegraff, Amsterdam

The Aries Book Series: Texts and Studies in Western Esotericism was launched by Brill last year as a companion series to the journal Aries. The editor-in-chief is Wouter J. Hanegraaff, and the Editorial Board presently consists of Jean-Pierre Brach and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke.

Volumes in this series can be bought by members of ESSWE at a 25% discount.

Five volumes have been published so far:

1. Urszula Szulakowska, The Sacrificial Body and the Day of Doom: Alchemy and Apocalyptic Discourse in the Protestant Reformation (2006).
   This study positions Paracelsian alchemy, medicine and medical physiology within the apocalyptic discourse of the Protestant Reformation, with special attention to the role of alchemical engravings notably in the work of Heinrich Khunrath, Stefan Michelspacher, Jacob Boehme, Abraham von Franckenberg and Robert Fludd.


2. Katherine Barnes, The Higher Self in Christopher Brennan’s Poems: Esotericism, Romanticism, Symbolism (2006).
   This is the first major study of the important Australian poet Christopher Brennan, whose Poems were published in 1914. This study shows how Brennan melded Western esoteric currents such as alchemy and rosicrucianism with Romantic literature and French Symbolist theory.


3. F.M. van Helmont, The Alphabet of Nature (annotated translation with annotations, Allison P. Coudert & Taylor Corse) (2007).
   This volume contains the Latin text of Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont’s Alphabeti vere Naturalis Hebraici (1667), with a annotated facing-page English translation. Van Helmont’s Alphabet of Nature is an important text for the debate on natural versus artificial or conventional language in the early modern period.


4. Renko D. Geffarth, Religion und arkane Hierarchie: Der Orden der Gold- und Rosenkreuzer als Geheime Kirche im 18. Jahrhundert (2007).
   This is the most comprehensive study so far of the 18th-century Order of the Gold and Rosy Cross. On the basis of extensive archival research, it traces the history of the Order, its hierarchical and initiatory system, and its relation to the churches in the era of the Enlightenment.


5. Paracelsus, Essential Theoretical Writings (edited & translated, with introduction and commentary, by Andrew Weeks) (forthcoming).
   This is the first English translation of some of the major writings of Paracelsus, alongside a critical edition of the German originals according to the authoritative 1589 Huser edition. Almost one thousand pages long, it makes this central figure in the history of Western esotericism available to the anglophone world.


6. Olav Hammer & Kocku von Stuckrad (eds.), Polemical Encounters: Esoteric Discourse and Its Others (2007).
   This volumes engages the polemical structures that underlie both the identities within and the controversies about esoteric currents in Western history. Contributions by Konstantin Burmistrov, Dylan Burns, Renko Geffarth, Olav Hammer, Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Titus Hjelm, Boaz Huss, Brannon Ingram, Hanns-Peter Neumann, Peter Hanns Reill, Kocku von Stuckrad, and Steven M. Wasserstrom.

Among planned forthcoming volumes are Brendan French’s definitive study of the Theosophical Masters, and an updated edition of J.E. Fletcher’s classic but so far unpublished dissertation on Athanasius Kircher.