Imagine you're a bookish paleface wandering through the stained and musty halls of Western civilization, sick to death of the endless tales of bloody conquests, heinous Churchman, and the ominous march of abstract and manipulative reason. Just when you're ready to cash in you chips and join the barbarians and bodhisattvas at the gate, you stumble across some moldering sidedoor, thick with sigils and glyphs and glints of otherworldly light. The door opens unbeckoned, and you stumble past animated statues of Egyptian gods into basements packed with arcana: astrological diagrams, alchemical flowcharts, magical cook-books and Hermetic texts, organized not by the Dewey decimal system but by the blazing rainbow filing system of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Isaac Newton's alchemical library is here, along with the hermetic troves of Breton and Blake, Walter Benjamin and Umberto Eco. You wander like a half-blind Argentinian sage through this iconic museum, each tome vibrating with its neighbors until the texts become a hieroglyphic hall of mirrors that reflect anew yourself and the world that made you.
Erik Davis, Hermes on the Seine