Item #63813 Tartaros. On the Orphic and Pythagorean Underworld, and the Pythagorean Pentagram. James Dunk, Illustrated by Timo Ketola.

Tartaros. On the Orphic and Pythagorean Underworld, and the Pythagorean Pentagram.

Richmond Vista, CA: Three Hands Press, 2013. "Special" edition. Hardcover. Octavo. 264pp. Custom bound in sumptuous full grey leather with raised bands & black titling to spine, black Pythagorean symbol impressed on the front board, shimmering black endpapers, ribbon marker, eight b&w illustrations, including original artwork by James Dunk and Timo Ketola. "The "Special" edition of this title, limited to 25 hand numbered & signed copies. In an original interpretation & synthesis for today’s student of ancient mysticism and the occult, the author advances a new conception of the ancient mystery-cults and their sublime doctrines of Chaos, Darkness and Light. A foundational part of these ancient Greek mystery-cults was the concept of Tartaros. As the abyss of primeval darkness and chaos, Tartaros was, in its most ancient conception, the birthplace of the human soul and the cosmos itself. This vast and incomprehensible dominion held at its center a great fire, an Axis Mundi about which the universe was arranged. In later eras, it passed into myth as a vast and voidful underworld; a place of binding for condemned souls and the enemies of gods, sealed fast with barriers of bronze and iron. Christians later appropriated it as a partition of their own concept of eternal punishment, a division of hell which constrained no less than the fallen angels. An equally enigmatic Pythagorean cipher is the symbol of the Pentagram, or five-fold star, whose form has been revered in western magic for some three millennia, but whose origins and original attributes are shrouded in mystery. Its attribution to the four elements, joined together with aither, was popularized in the middle ages and is its best-known meaning in modern occult sciences. However, its earlier Pythagorean usage was related to health and well-being, and almost certainly adumbrated another retinue of arcana, one which was ancient even at the time of Pythagoras. Exhuming the scattered fragments of these two elder doctrines of Tartaros and the Pentagram, Alm examines their reverberation as occult –and occluded-- concepts through centuries of philosophical thought, in a line connecting the shadowy teachings of such ‘dark traditions’ as the Orphics and the Pythagoreans, later penetrating the adyta of Neoplatonism. Arguing for a new understanding of the Pentagram, he connects its fivefold mystery to the great powers of Tartaros, and also to such terrifying gods such as Hecate, Nyx, Erebos, Typhon, Cerberus, and the Erinyes." A lovely copy in pristine Fine condition. Very scarce due to the tiny limitation. Item #63813

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