Take my hand. Trace the lines on my palm with your fingers. What size and shape are they? Take note of their form: are they forked, tasselled, wavy, chained, broken? Now examine my fingers. Tell me my disposition; tell me what beholds me.

Mapping the hand as cosmos as clinic as history as biography, hand reading is a technique suspended between medical and mystical judgement, empirical diagnosis and speculative divination. This book weaves the lives and work of the ‘reader’ and the ‘read’ together in an intricate fabric. The central ‘reader’ is Charlotte Wolff (1897–1986), a friend of Walter Benjamin, Helen Grund, and Ernst Schoen, who after fleeing from Germany’s new regime in 1933, took up hand reading in Paris to make ends meet. The ‘read’ are anonymous acrobats, dancers, and department-store managers, and members of the avant-gardes of Paris and London, from Antonin Artaud to Romola Nijinsky, Marcel Duchamp to Virginia Woolf. Arranged as an index, this book is both a guide to the techniques of hand reading and a critical theory of its history and practice, mixed with Wolff’s later work as a theorist of gender and sexuality.

"Hand That Touch This Fortune Will is a study devoted to friendship, refracted through the portal of the upturned palm. Charlotte Wolff met the world by examining what was written on the hands of the times.  What did she read in the landscapes of this intimate organ of touch, and what, through reading, was she fatally unable to see?  Through a gentle fragmentation reminiscent of The Arcades Project, Dolbear acts as a thoughtful guide through fascinating and nearly forgotten passages in the European history of palmistry under late capitalism—along with all the political uncertainties and faggy gestures that formed its nimbus.  With extraordinary attention to the peculiar experiments in living that have scarcely left a trace in the archive, Hand That Touch gathers the reader around those bars, clinics, and drawn curtains, where, under the shadow of fascist diagnosis, the occult comes palm to palm with the queer past." — M. Ty

Each book holds a very lovely insert of a hand reading chart, designed by Ana Cecilia Breña and Sam Dolbear. Printed on tracing paper, it allows the reader to read their hand as they read the book.

Sam Dolbear was a Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin from 2020 to 2024. His research addresses the life and work of Walter Benjamin and those around him. He has taught and published widely, including, with Esther Leslie, Dissonant Waves: Ernst Schoen and Experimental Sound in the 20th Century (2023). He is a co-founder of the sound and radio collective MayDay Radio.

Itinéraires Fantômes is an oracle deck created by Alexandra Grant with Hélène Cixous in celebration of H. Cixous' work.

The Itinéraires Fantômes deck consists of 72 cards in six categories: animots, creatures, and entities that include Those from Below, Those from Above, Those Who Fly/Steal, who travel via Portals, manipulate Messages and Symbols, and have Superpowers. The cards are accompanied by a booklet in English and French.

The images on these cards come from family, friends, and artists who have been inspired by Hélène Cixous' writing. Artists include: Adel Abdessemed, Pierre Alechinsky, Sara Barker, Gabrielle Berger, Louise Bourgeois, Leonardo Bravo, Maria Bussmann, Sarah Cain, Lewis Carroll, Bertrand Charneau, Maria Chevska, Michael Kennedy Costa, Laura Darbutaitė, Tacita Dean, Edgar Fabián Frías, Jeffrey Gibson, Francisco Goya, Alexandra Grant, Mathew Hale, Simon Hantaï, Johanna Hedva, Roni Horn, Victor Hugo, Hanna Hur, Franz Kafka, YeRin Kim, Lynn Marie Kirby, Jean-Jacques Lemêtre, Colin Lemoine, Laure Prouvost, Elsa Prudent, Addy Rabinovitch, Keanu Reeves, Cindy Rehm, Saranya Siegel-Berger, Shinique Smith, Nancy Spero, Luc Tuymans, Unyimeabasi Udoh, Roger Viollet, Anna Winger.

The book is a reprint of a cult text of post-1968 psychedelic culture: The Rainbow Book, published in 1975 in Berkeley, California, on the occasion of The Rainbow Show exhibition held at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

The Rainbow Book is a collection of essays and illustrations devoted to the rainbow and color spectra, analyzing the significance of color (both physical and metaphysical) from antiquity to modern times.

An encyclopedia of the cultural and artistic manifestations of the rainbow: in myth, magic and paintings, as well as in prints and poems. The book includes poems by Virgil, Dante, Blake, Keats, Wordsworth, and others; paintings by Giotto, Bosch, Van der Weyden, Dürer, Rubens, Blake, Turner, Constable, and Church; and the sacred art of Tibet.

The book is printed on sheets of different colors, according to the rainbow spectrum, and reports notions of increasing complexity, accessible at first to younger readers and later to the more experienced and interested in the subject.

The reprint accompanies the exhibition Rainbow. Colors and Wonders between Myths, Arts and Science at MUDEC in Milan (February 16–July 2, 2023), and the release of the first issue of MUdec United.

An anthology of occult resistance: unpredictable and fascinating, at times hallucinatory, sullying politics, philosophy, cybertheory, religion, and music.

The End Times are here. The Digital Middle Ages approaches, the plague reaps its deadly harvest, climate apocalypse is around the corner, and fanaticism, fascism, and madness are rampant. The idea that we might gain the upper hand over the dark abyss into which the planet is tumbling is a form of magical thinking, laboring under the delusion that we can subdue eternity with relentless bloodlust, brutish exploitation, abuse of power, and violence. Revolutionary Demonology responds to this ritual of control, typical of what esoteric tradition calls the “Dogma of the Right Hand,” by reactivating the occult forces of a Left Hand Path that strives for the entropic disintegration of all creation, so as to make peace with the darkness and nourish the Great Beast that will finally break the seals of Cosmic Love.

Unpredictable and fascinating, genuinely bizarre, at times hallucinatory, sullying politics, philosophy, cybertheory, religion, and music alike with its fevered touch, this “anthology of occult resistance” collects together the communiqués of an arcane group who are already being hailed as the first morbid blossoming of “Italian Weird Theory”: a rogue contingent of theorists, witches, and sorcerers who heretically remix gothic accelerationism with satanic occultism and insurrectional necromancy.

A significantly expanded edition of Carrington's acclaimed Tarot series, featuring new archival images and research.

The British-born Mexican surrealist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) spent a lifetime exploring the esoteric traditions of diverse cultures, and incorporated their ideas and symbols into her artistic and literary oeuvre. Tibetan Buddhism, the Kabbalah, ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian magic, Celtic mythology, witchcraft, astrology and the Tarot were filtered through her feminist lens to create a visionary, woman-centered worldview.

Carrington created a spectacular Major Arcana Tarot deck sometime during the 1950s, laying gold and silver leaf over brilliant color. Exhibited for the first time during her centennial exhibition Leonora Carrington: Magical Tales in 2018, this extraordinary work was a revelation for the public and inspired the publication of The Tarot of Leonora Carrington.

This beautifully designed diary and week-to-view planner is filled with historically significant magical and sacred dates from around the world. Drawn from events such as the Buddha’s birthday, esoteric festivals and artistic and occult history, the diary touches on the lives of characters such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Ithell Colquhoun, Zora Neale Hurston, Carl Jung, Simone Weil, Leonora Carrington, Maya Deren, Aleister Crowley, George Bataille, Timothy Leary, Hilma af Klint, Saint Hildegard of Bingen, William Blake, W.B. Yeats and Octavia Butler.

Contributors:
Acupressure by Maria Christofi, Astrology by SJ Anderson, Ayurveda and Prajna by Mira Manek, Dreamwork by Jennifer Dumpert, Herbal Remedies by Paige Emery, Kriya Yoga by Rachel Okimo, Korean Ink Illustrations by Jungran Kim, Mushroom Guide by Ellen Percival, Prayer Guide by K Allado-McDowell, Regenerative Farming by Elias Haase, Rituals by Pam Grossman and Himali Singh Soin, Ritual Spaces by Leila Sadeghee Seed Bombs by Jenna Sutela, Soji by Shoukei Matsumoto, Sonic Meditation by Pauline Oliveros, Spellcraft by Bones Tan-Jones, Tarot by CAConrad and T. Susan Chang, Weather by Jay Drinkall

The first in a series of publications emerging from the transoceanic platform Kal, Kal Rituals proposes queer and trans feminist ecologies, embodiments and mythmaking.

The contributions trace and disrupt cross-colonial legacies through bodies of water lapping at the shorelines of the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Atlantic.Kal Rituals is an ode to transterritorial alliances that disrupt binary contours of time and being. Kal Rituals assembles practices of queer world building in extended pandemic time, amidst deep ecological and social transformations, offering an expression of anti-colonial resistance and joy.

Kal is a transoceanic platform enacting queer-feminist pasts and futures and decolonialecologies from South Asia and its diasporas and post migrant Europe.

Surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a master of the macabre, of gorgeous tableaus, biting satire, roguish comedy, and brilliant, effortless flights of the imagination. Nowhere are these qualities more ingeniously brought together than in the works of short fiction she wrote throughout her life. 

Published to coincide with the centennial of her birth, THE COMPLETE STORIES OF LEONORA CARRINGTON collects for the first time all of her stories, including several never before seen in print. With a startling range of styles, subjects, and even languages (several of the stories are translated from French or Spanish), THE COMPLETE STORIES captures the genius and irrepressible spirit of an amazing artist's life.

Hunters Follow Harpy Shadows is an experimental work featuring a series of poetic writings that explore fantasy narratives of rewritten mythologies. Mixing re-imagined trans Korean folklore, queered Biblical storytelling and pirate lore, the publication is an amalgamation of writing delivered from the lips of the artist as a genderfluid seraphim that has left heaven to tell mortals of the other worlds.

Across twenty-five chapters, Rin Kim’s text recounts the tangled, cosmic history of shapeshifting goddexes intermixed with an otherworldly cast of demis, dryads, wraiths, satyrs, tieflings and sirens. Taking cues from the Old Testament, fantasy storytelling, and the depths of fanfiction forums online, the project alternates between narrative storytelling in the direct mode of epic religious texts and a series of Psalmic interventions spoken in the innermost voice of the gods. Like a series of connected visions, Hunters Follow Harpy Shadows hands down the origin stories of distant worlds — of clashing immortals, species dying out, and deities fading from power. It is both a fantasy saga beset by violence, warfare and blood sacrifice, and a lovers’ song of longing and transcendence.

During the origins of the earth, mortals sacrificed their children to the belly of the depths, to Yawong: god of subservience and singularity…

Central to the project are new images by Oliver Davis, shot on 35mm film, which offer views of a fragmented landscape — jewel-like glimpses of sunlit trees, river stones, and murky underbrush. The lush world seen in these photographs, a version of earth devoid of all humans and figures, provides a quiet space outside of time for staging the mythic struggles of the gods. The book’s typography suggests perhaps an ancient document or illustrated manuscript; the sharp, secret lettering carrying the magic properties of a blade used to split worlds.

Design: Rin Kim
Photography: Oliver Davis
Editing: Olivia Ross
Production: The Uses of Literacy
Cloth-bound hardcover (Feincanvas), with cover tip-in and metallic foil stamping

Rin Kim, born in 1997 in Watertown, New York; is a multi-diciplinary trans chimera, demi, hydra, mutt, graphic designer, filmmaker, alchemist, performance artist, writer, and yong working around non-binary mythologies, ritual storytelling, and fantasy. Their work is a hyperfocused movement of a particular upheaval, an ongoing irruption that re-arranges every assumption of the equivalence of subjectivity and identity.

In Água Viva Clarice Lispector aims to 'capture the present'. Her direct, confessional and unfiltered meditations on everything from life and time to perfume and sleep are strange and hypnotic in their emotional power and have been a huge influence on many artists and writers, including one Brazilian musician who read it one hundred and eleven times. Despite its apparent spontaneity, this is a masterly work of art, which rearranges language and plays in the gaps between reality and fiction.

Clarice Lispector (December 10, 1920 – December 9, 1977) was a Brazilian writer acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, as an infant she moved to Brazil with her family, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War. 

Strangling vines and meat-hungry flora fill this unruly garden of strange stories, selected for their significance as the seeds of the "killer plant" trope in fiction, film, and video games.

Before the Demogorgon of Stranger Things and the appearance of Mario's iconic foe the Piranha Plant, writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries were exploring the lethal potential of vegetable life, inspired by new carnivorous species discovered on expeditions into the deep jungles of the world and breakthroughs in the grafting and genetics disciplines of botany. Suddenly, the exotic orchid could become a curiously alluring, yet unsettlingly bloodthirsty menace; the beautifully sprawling wisteria of the stately home could become anything but civilized, and the experimentation of botanists weening new shoots on their own blood could become fuel for a new genre of horticultural nightmare.

Every strain of vegetable threat (and one deadly fungus) can be found within this new collection, representing the very best tales from the undergrowth.

Daisy Butcher is a Gothic and Horror scholar attached to The Open Graves, Open Minds project. Her research focuses on the monstrous feminine and body horror from the 19th century Gothic short story to modern film and TV.

Published 2020

At a time when few women could write and most were denied a formal education, Hildegard von Bingen became a legendary healer, visionary, musician, artist, poet, and saint. In Physica, Hildegard presents nine "books" of healing systems: Plants, Elements, Trees, Stones, Fish, Birds, Animals, Reptiles, and Metals. In each book she discusses the qualities of these natural creations and elaborates on their medicinal use, explaining how to prepare and apply different remedies. With its emphasis on balancing the humors, Physica has strong affinity with the Oriental medical approaches gaining great respect today.

The modern reader interested in natural healing will recognize the enormous truth in the theories of this twelth-century physician, many of which prove effective today, serving as a reminder that our cures for illness depend on our natural world and our place in it.

As Hildegard states in Physica, "With earth was the human being created. All the elements served mankind and, sensing that he was alive, they busied themselves in aiding his life in every way."

Translated by Priscilla Throop a Latin and Greek scholar, she holds a master's degree from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, as well as a Certificate of Advanced Theological Studies from the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge. She is a member of the Vermont Classical Language Association and is currently translating Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae. She lives in Charlotte, Vermont.

In her first book You Were Born For This, Chani shows how your birth chart, a snapshot of the sky at the moment you took your first breath, reveals your unique talents, challenges, and opportunities. Fortified with this knowledge, you can live out the life you were born to. Marrying the historic traditions of astrology with a modern approach, You Were Born for This explains the key components of your birth chart in an easy to use, choose your own adventure style. With journal prompts, reflection questions, and affirmations personal to your astrological makeup, this book guides you along the path your chart has laid out for you.

Chani makes the wisdom of your birth chart accessible with three foundational keys:

The First Key: Your Sun (Your Life's Purpose)
The Second Key: Your Moon (Your Physical and Emotional Needs)
The Third Key: Your Ascendant and Its Ruler (Your Motivation for Life and the Steersperson of Your Ship)

Chani Nicolas is a Los Angeles-based, Webby award-winning astrologer with a community of over 1 million monthly readers. She has been a counseling astrologer for more than 20 years, guiding people to discover and live out their life's purpose through understanding their birth chart. She has been featured in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and on Netflix.

Published February 2021.

Reflecting on recent ecological shifts at both local and global scales, Energy Systems explores the systems that dominate global infrastructure and the consequences of connectivism under late capitalism; probing correlations between the worldwide drive for connectivity and the emergence of severe environmental rifts.

Energy Systems seeks to find ways of replacing ‘network’ orientated capital accumulation and socio environmental exploitation with ‘metabolisms’ which are orientated toward reciprocal models of coexistence. Through newly commissioned and existing text works by 19 artists and academics, Energy Systems explores a new architecture of values and begins to build stepping stones toward addressing the systemic alienation of the environment.

Energy Systems is released as part of Well Project’s 2020 exhibition programme of the same name. You can find documentation from each exhibition held as part of the programme at: www.wellprojects.xyz

Contributors:

Verity Birt, Dimitrios Bormpoudakis, Louise Beer, Milo Creese, Joachim Coucke, Kyriaki Costa, Hector Campbell, Jack Clarke, Sophie Dyer, Sasha Englemann, Billy Fraser, Nicolette Clara Illes, Melanie King, Ruth Pilston, Lou Lou Sainsbury, Tom Sewell, Sissel Marie Tonn & Rosie Grace Ward.

The world is witnessing a new surge of interpersonal and institutional violence against women, including new witch hunts. This surge of violence has occurred alongside an expansion of capitalist social relation. In this new work, Silvia Federici examines the root causes of these developments and outlines the consequences for the women affected and their communities. She argues, that this new war on women, a mirror of witch hunts in 16th- and 17th-century Europe and the "New World," is a structural element of the new forms of capitalist accumulation. These processes are founded on the destruction of people's most basic means of reproduction. Like at the dawn of capitalism, the factors behind today's violence against women are processes of enclosure, land dispossession, and the remolding of women's reproductive activities and subjectivity.

Silvia Federici is a feminist writer, teacher, and militant. In 1972 she was co-founder of the International Feminist Collective that launched the campaign for Wages for Housework internationally. Her previous books include Caliban and the Witch and Revolution at Point Zero. She is a professor emerita at Hofstra University, where she was a social science professor.

Caliban and The Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation is a history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages to the witch-hunts and the rise of mechanical philosophy, Federici investigates the capitalist rationalization of social reproduction. She shows how the battle against the rebel body and the conflict between body and mind are essential conditions for the development of labor power and self-ownership, two central principles of modern social organization.

"In the neoliberal era of postmodernism, the proletariat is whited-out from the pages of history. Federici recovers its historical substance by telling its story starting at the beginning, with the throes of its birth. This is a book of remembrance, of a trauma burned into the body of women, which left a scar on humanity's memory as deep and painful as those caused by famine, slaughter, and enslavement." — Peter Linebaugh

Silvia Federici is a longtime feminist activist and teacher. In 1972 she was among the founders of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the Campaign for Wages For Housework in the US and abroad. She has also been active in the anti-globalization movement and the anti-death penalty movement. Silvia Federici was a founding member of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, which for more than ten years documented the struggle of African students against the austerity programs imposed by the IMF and the World Bank on African countries. She has taught in the US and in Nigeria and is Emerita Professor of Political Philosophy and International Studies at Hofstra University (Hempstead, New York). Federici is the author of many book and essays on political philosophy, feminist theory, political philosophy, cultural studies, and education.

Published 2004.

Taking inspiration from the history and identity of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall, this series of books seeks dialogue with the culture and folklore of magical practice. A range of artists were asked to create new work and collaborate on four publications that take their shape through this fascinating alternative history.

‘Empty Aphrodite’ is a radical imagining of the gods of antiquity as archetypal powers and forces that people often encounter in their lives. Organised as an alphabetic poetic sourcebook, it combines magic and inspiration in a series of surrealist portraits. The encyclopaedia comes with five random stickers with which you can choose your fate.

Taking inspiration from the history and identity of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall, this series of books seeks dialogue with the culture and folklore of magical practice. A range of artists were asked to create new work and collaborate on four publications that take their shape through this fascinating alternative history.

‘Satan is Real’ comprises two short stories by Wendy Erskine, who lives in Belfast, and illustrations by London-based artist and illustrator Stephanie von Reiswitz. A missing boyfriend in Amsterdam leads to new, uncontrollable powers being unleashed. A young member of a country gospel act has a penchant for black metal. What could go wrong?

Taking inspiration from the history and identity of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall, this series of books seeks dialogue with the culture and folklore of magical practice. A range of artists were asked to create new work and collaborate on four publications that take their shape through this fascinating alternative history.

‘The Cult of Water’ began as an experimental radio programme conceived by singer-songwriter and author David Bramwell. Aided by a witch and the magician Alan Moore, he takes an occult journey back in time, in search of the supernatural secrets of our waterways – and to solve the haunting mystery of a drowned village. But can he face his demons?

A genre-warping, time-travelling horror novel-slash-feminist manifesto for fans of Clarice Lispector and Jeanette Winterson. 

Welcome to 1990s Norway. White picket fences run in neat rows and Christian conservatism runs deep. But as the Artist considers her work, things start stirring themselves up. In a corner of Oslo a coven of witches begin cooking up some curses. A time-travelling Edvard Munch arrives in town to join a death metal band, closely pursued by the teenaged subject of his painting Puberty, who has murder on her mind. Meanwhile, out deep in the forest, a group of school girls get very lost and things get very strange. And awful things happen in aspic.

In her first book You Were Born For This, Chani shows how your birth chart--a snapshot of the sky at the moment you took your first breath--reveals your unique talents, challenges, and opportunities. Fortified with this knowledge, you can live out the life you were born to. Marrying the historic traditions of astrology with a modern approach, You Were Born for This explains the key components of your birth chart in an easy to use, choose your own adventure style. With journal prompts, reflection questions, and affirmations personal to your astrological makeup, this book guides you along the path your chart has laid out for you.

Chani makes the wisdom of your birth chart accessible with three foundational keys:

• The First Key: Your Sun (Your Life's Purpose)
• The Second Key: Your Moon (Your Physical and Emotional Needs)
• The Third Key: Your Ascendant and Its Ruler (Your Motivation for Life and the Steersperson of Your Ship)

Astrology is not therapy, but it is therapeutic. In a world in which we are taught to look outside of ourselves for validation, You Were Born for This brings us inward to commit to ourselves and our life's purpose.

Be Here Now, or Remember, Be Here Now, is a 1971 book on spirituality, yoga and meditation by the American yogi and spiritual teacher Ram Dass. The core book was first printed in 1970 as From Bindu to Ojas, while the title of the 1971 publication comes from a statement his guide, Bhagavan Das, made during Ram Dass's journeys in India. The cover features a mandala incorporating the title, a chair, radial lines, and the word "Remember" repeated four times.