A Witch’s Bestiary delves through ancient mythological records and esoteric occult sources to encounter and catalog the residents of the unknown. It takes the reader on a journey through the most fantastical tales of animals previously known to only a precious few. These supernatural beasts are strange reflections of the true nature of humanity and deserve intense study, lest we forget our primitive origins and the animals that live in us all.

This Chthonic adventure digs through both subconscious and conscious awareness, guiding us through suppressed instinctual emotions and feelings. The lessons of the animals from these ancient stories deepen our engagement with the earth, nature, and the living beings of our planet. A keen knowledge of these tales provides a weapon against missteps in our modern-day lives. Once you better acquaint yourself with these strangely familiar mythological beasts, you will understand how aspects of these beasts manifest in ourselves and other.

Maja D’Aoust is a scholar of alchemy and occult lore whose interest in the esoteric occult sciences spans her entire lifetime. After completing her Bachelor’s Degree in Biochemistry, Maja studied Oriental Medicine and acupuncture and later earned her Master’s degree in Transformational Psychology with a focus on Shamanism, the I Ching and ancestors in her Thesis work. Maja is the co-author of the book The Secret Source with Adam Parfrey and was the co-host of the radio show “Expanding Mind” with Erik Davis. Maja has published a Tarot deck called “The White Witch Tarot” though Red Feather Press. Maja lectures on mysterious topics in Los Angeles and educates the public community through her non-profit, The Well Wishers, which she established with Dr. Kelvin DeWolfe.

Bananas in Ham with Cheese Sauce? Meat Salad made of ground bologna and gelatin? Spend any time on the internet, and you’re bound to come across gross recipes from the past. How did anyone with a single taste bud in their mouth come up with this stuff?

American Advertising Cookbooks: How Corporations Taught Us to Love Spam®, Bananas, and Jell-O® is a deeply researched and entertaining survey of American food history; connecting cultural, social, and geopolitical events. Author Christina Ward (Preservation: The Art & Science of Canning, Fermentation, and Dehydration, Process, 2017) uses her vast collection of cookbooks to tell the fascinating and often infuriating story of corporate greed and advertising and the manipulation of American cuisine.

Academic researchers have published histories of American food and politics, but Ward brings all these elements together to tell the larger story of why we eat what we do. Though easy to mock, once you learn the real history, you will never look at Jell-O® the same way again! American Advertising Cookbooks, How Corporations Taught Us To Love Bananas, Spam®, and Jell-O® features full-color images and essays uncovering the origins of favorite foods.

Christina is a featured contributor to Serious Eats, Edible Milwaukee, The Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel, Remedy Quarterly, and Runcible Spoon magazines. Christina, despite klutziness, is often found in classrooms and community kitchens with sharp knives, spilling vinegar into unsuspecting handbags while wildly gesticulating as she teaches folks how to make perfect pickles. She is a featured guest food expert on Fox6 News Real Milwaukee and public radio stations across the United States.

Christina can trace her Wisconsin roots to the early 1800s. She prides herself on having a hungry mind interested in learning about people, the foods they eat, and the stories that arise from that convergence.

From the original release: On highly-detailed canvases that are packed to the margins with strange symbols, bleeding body parts, Bible verses, and nightmare genitalia, Joe Coleman paints the wondrous carnival of his psychotic universe. His work is even blessed by a blurb from Charles Manson: “His art is something else. Praise! Praise! Praise! He’s a caveman in a space ship.” 

This is an artist no horror fan can afford to miss: He does serial killers, sideshow freaks, deranged sex, evil doctors, and religious iconography like no one else on Earth. This is a superb introduction to Coleman’s world and work, with a biographical article, photos, 32 color plates, and numerous illustrations. Warning: Disturbing!

Twenty-six years later, Joe Coleman is recognized as a genius lauded by critics and collectors throughout the world.

For hard-working urban professionals Kristy Athens and husband Michael, living in the country was a romantic dream. After purchasing seven acres in Washington’s beautiful Columbia River Gorge, Athens and her husband were surprised to learn just how challenging rural life could be.

Get Your Pitchfork On! provides the hard-learned nuts-and-bolts of rural living from city folk who were in over their heads. Practical and often hilarious, Get Your Pitchfork On! reads like a twenty-first century The Egg and I. (more…)

Hardcore Vegetarian is a celebration of food and love for everyone!

Hardcore Vegetarian is a journey into vegetarianism led by someone who fell into it inadvertently and is happily still learning as she goes. As a passionate home cook, Flanagan became what she describes as a “lazy vegetarian” while figuring out how to cook for herself and her vegetarian husband, musician Harley Flanagan. It is a narrative guide for the vegetarian-curious, for home cooks who want to explore vegetarianism and introduce plant-based recipes into their households. It explores the meaning of food in our lives, how we interact with it, and how our relationship to it evolves as over time. Included are short personal accounts, as Flanagan engages readers as she gently and humorously shares her own learning curve, along with road-tested, beloved, and delicious recipes. Hardcore Vegetarian brings readers along for the successes and sometimes failures as Flanagan overhauls her kitchen and recipes from meaty to beety. She shares tips and insights from the people who taught her how to cook for the people she loves. Hardcore Vegetarian is organized into easily digestible sections that cover every meal and includes a guide to vegetarian pantry essentials. As she writes, “Food is a primordial expression of love,” and there is nothing more Hardcore than love.

Here is a lost illustrated masterpiece, a book so rare and sought-after that only two copies can be found in world libraries. For the first time this classic work on a forgotten Arabian legend has been translated into English. This illustrated novel is presented as a “pictorial opera” of love, hashish, and tragedy in the time of Victorian erotica, and it contains the first known illustrations and descriptions of true hashish hallucinations. This high quality case-bound and slipcased limited edition reproduces all fifty original erotic illustrations and colorful extras by illustrator Gottfried Sieben, and it is limited to only 418 copies, all signed by Ronald K. Siegel. This book will appeal to readers of Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s Hasheesh Eater, Charles Baudelaire’s Artificial Paradise, High Times magazine, and marijuana users everywhere.

Fritz Lemmermayer was born in Vienna in 1857, became a writer, poet, and journalist, and maintained close relationships with Gustav Mahler and Richard Wagner.

Ronald K. Siegel is a recognized world authority on drugs and drug literature. A former research professor at UCLA, he is the author of numerous books including the critically acclaimed Intoxication. Siegel was featured in several Time magazine cover stories, and has been a consultant to presidential commissions and the World Health Organization. He is currently curator of the RKS Library of Drug Literature, one of the largest such libraries in the world.

“Some novels die and justifiably remain dead. A few are resurrected by bookish saviors and, re-examined, rise to deserved new life. Haschisch by Fritz Lemmermayer is one such literary Lazarus.” — Stephen J. Gertz

Does God have a recipe?

“Holy Food is a titanic feat of research and a fascinating exploration of American faith and culinary rites. Christina Ward is the perfect guide – generous, wise, and ecumenical.” — Adam Chandler, author of Drive-Thru Dreams

“Holy Food doesn’t just trace the influence that preachers, gurus, and cult leaders have had on American cuisine. It offers a unique look at the ways spirituality—whether in the form of fringe cults or major religions—has shaped our culture. Christina Ward has gone spelunking into some very odd corners of American history to unearth this fascinating collection of stories and recipes.” — Jonathan Kauffmann, author of Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat

“An engaging book that shares everything from little-known facts to illuminating profiles of historical figures. Best of all, Ward shares recipes from historic religious communities, updated to reflect modern cooking technology. A must-have for food historians, religious historians, or just the curious and hungry folks in your life. ” — Dr. Julia Skinner, author of Our Fermented Lives

Independent food historian Christina Ward’s highly anticipated Holy Food explores the influence of mainstream to fringe religious beliefs on modern American food culture. Author Christina Ward unravels the numerous ways religious beliefs intersect with politics and economics and, of course, food to tell a different story of America. It’s the story of true believers and charlatans, of idealists and visionaries, and of the everyday people who followed them—often at their peril. Holy Food explains how faith pioneers used societal woes and cultural trends to create new pathways of belief and reveals the interconnectivity between sects and their leaders.

Religious beliefs have been the source of food “rules” since Pythagoras told his followers not to eat beans (they contain souls), Kosher and Halal rules forbade the shrimp cocktail (shellfish are scavengers, or maybe G-d just said “no”). A long-ago Pope forbade Catholics from eating meat on Fridays (fasting to atone for committed sins). Rules about eating are present in nearly every American belief, from high-control groups that ban everything except air to the infamous strawberry shortcake that sated visitors to the Oneida Community in the late 1800s. In America, where the freedom to worship the god of your choice and sometimes of your own making, embraced old traditions and invented new ones.

Holy Food looks at how the explosion of religious movements since the Great Awakenings (the nationwide religious revivals in the 1730s-40s and 1795-1835) birthed a cottage industry of food fads that gained mainstream acceptance. And at the obscure sects and communities of the 20th Century who dabbled in vague spirituality that used food to both entice and control followers. Ward skillfully navigates between academic studies, interviews, cookbooks, and religious texts to make sharp observations with new insights into American history in this highly readable journey through the American kitchen.

Holy Food features over 75 recipes from religious and communal groups tested and updated for modern cooks. Also includes over 100 historic black-and-white images.

“Everything one does in life occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke [Cannabis, marijuana, opium] is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.” -Jean Cocteau

Among the native tribesmen in the Rif region of Morocco who have been smoking a cannabis preparation known as kif for over 800 years, it is accepted as part of the magic and sorcery in everyday life. This seemingly supernatural effect is neither physical nor psychological. Rather, it is an unconscious cognitive process involving perception, thinking and learning. The cognitive process was given the name “Kif Wisdom.”

In Timothy Wilfred Coakley’s novel Keef: A Story of Intoxication, Love & Death, written in the witchy style of an Edgar Allan Poe horror story, the narrator, a kif smoker, takes us through his supernatural search for love powered by his “Kif Wisdom” growing from his chronic smoking. At maturity, the wisdom allows him to see that the path to love goes beyond death.

Coakley’s novel, in the form of an illustrated memoir, was heralded as one of the most important publishing events of 1897. It made the list with H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man and Rudyard Kipling’s Captain Courageous. Since average marijuana potency is now approaching kif levels, this book about toxic kif experiences may more applicable to today’s audience than those of 1897.

Dr. Ronald K. Siegel is a psychopharmacologist and former research professor at UCLA School of Medicine, author of several books including the acclaimed Intoxication, numerous journal articles based on translations of lost and forgotten works in drug literature, and currently curator of the RKS Library of Drug Literature.

Revised Edition includes never-before-seen personal letters and the master’s influence on metaphysical history

Manly Hall was the first to popularize ancient wisdom and obscure mysteries for large twentieth century audiences.

“Louis Sahagun’s gripping biography is an insightful look at the life and times of one of the last century’s most important mystical thinkers.”—The Fortean Times

In 1919, a Canadian teenager with a sixth grade education arrived by train to the wilds of Los Angeles. Within a decade he had transformed himself into a world-renowned occult scholar.

His name was Manly Palmer Hall, author of the landmark publication The Secret Teachings of All Ages, widely regarded as the best introduction to Western esoteric ideas, and the founder of the Philosophical Research Society, which housed one of the biggest occult libraries in the United States.

Hall became the twentieth century’s most prolific writer and speaker on ancient philosophies, mysticism, and magic, and a confidant of Hollywood celebrities and politicians. In 1990, he died due to “suspicious circumstances,” which remains an open homicide case at the Los Angeles Police Department.

This new edition contains dozens of previously unknown love letters from his wife Marie Bauer. They are the closest we will come to an autobiographical portrait of these Los Angeles mystics in love.

Author Louis Sahagan is an award-winning journalist for the Los Angeles Times.