The Garden of Hermetic Dreams (Dedalus Occult Reader)
by Gary Lachman
Category: Fiction

People have enjoyed stories of magic and the supernatural for ages, but in the late 18th century, occult tales became more than thrilling entertainment. At the dawn of the modern age, many writers found the occult a powerful antidote to the rising scientification of human experience. In these reports from the dark side, the weird, enigmatic and unexplainable became symbols of the human spirit's resistance to a new, mechanistic, more rational world. The Dedalus Occult Reader brings together for the first time a unique collection of European fiction, including passages from Valery Bruisov, Andre Bely, William Beckford, Jacques Cazotte, Bulwer-Lytton, de Maupassant, de Nerval, Goethe, and Arthur Machen, offering some of the finest flowers from the hermetic gardens of literary occultism.