Halloween, or All Hallow’s Eve: the wall between the earth and the Otherworld opens. Samhain: the Witches’ New Year, the first of the greater sabbats of Wicca. Día de Muertos: Mexico’s colourful celebration of the cycle of life and death. The hinge night approaches, a magical in-between place where time changes meaning, and past, present and future are one.
Many Halloween traditions originated from ancient Celtic harvest festivals. Our Gift Guide reflects this practice of abundance, bringing together objects and experiences to enrich the lives of your loved ones (or yourself) in preparation for the darker months of the year.
You will find reading on ancient and emerging mystical traditions from compelling contemporary voices, gorgeous music for earthly love, courses and events to enhance your daily practice, and suggestions for causes to donate to.
Give generously to yourself and loved ones this Halloween, with our Halloween bundle, offering 25% off the Ignota Diary 2021, Spells and your choice of the 2020 Interplanetary Cosmic Shitshow Longsleeve OR Leave Husband, Practice Witchcraft tote until midnight on 31 October (PDT)
Books
The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree
This richly illustrated publication includes essays by the curators and contributions from scholars on the key themes of The Botanical Mind exhibition – alchemy, art history, plant ontology, Gaian ecology, anthropology and ethnobotany – unifying philosophical, scientific, spiritual and artistic approaches to meditate on the cosmic significance of plants in different worldviews. The exhibition at Camden Art Centre presents an extraordinary array of artworks by over 70 surrealist, modern, visionary, outsider, indigenous Amazonian and contemporary artists, spanning more than 500 years.
(C.G. Jung, Systema Munditotus (The System of All Worlds), 1916)
Treadwell's Book of Plant Magic
by Christina Oakley Harrington
By the founder and presiding spirit of London's best magical bookshop, this beautiful book is full of the old ways plants have aided people in matters such as love, competitions, good luck, success, protection and much more.
The Black Books 1913-1932: Notebooks of Transformation
by C.G. Jung
In 1913, C.G. Jung started a self-experiment that he called his “confrontation with the unconscious”: an engagement with his fantasies, which he charted in a series of notebooks referred to as The Black Books. Publishing ten years after the landmark publication of The Red Book, The Black Books shed light on the elaboration of Jung’s personal cosmology and his attempts to embody insights from his self-investigation into his life and relationships.
Blockchain Chicken Farm
by Xiaowei Wang
From pork farmers using AI to produce the perfect pig, to disruptive luxury counterfeits and the political intersections of e-commerce villages, Wang unravels the ties between globalization, technology, agriculture, and commerce in unprecedented fashion. Accompanied by humorous “Sinofuturist” recipes that frame meals as they transform under new technology, Blockchain Chicken Farm is an original and probing look into innovation, connectivity, and collaboration in the digitized rural world.
Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain
by Johanna Hedva
In plays, performances, an encyclopaedia, essays, autohagiography, hypnagogic, and hypnapompic poems—in texts whose bodies drift and delight in form—Minerva tunnels into mysticism, madness, motherhood, and magic. 25% off at Parrhesiades for ticketholders of this event.
Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of The Fern Loved Gulley
by Amy Hale
Amy Hale's in-depth biographical study of British surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun’s unique vision and hermetic life examines the magical and cultural confluences that shaped her imaginative life and artistic vision.
Strangers
by Rebecca Tamás
Exploring where the human and nonhuman meet, and why this delicate connection just might be the most important relationship of our times, Tamás’s essays traverse the links between the environmental, the political, the folkloric and the historical. From thinking stones, to fairgrounds, from colliding planets to transformative cockroaches, Tamás’s lyrical perspective takes the reader on a journey between body, land and spirit—exploring a new ecological vision for our fractured, fragile world.
Records
The Practice of Love
by Jenny Hval
As Hval describes it, the album charts its own particular geography, a landscape in which multiple voices engage and disperse, and the question of connectedness—or lack thereof—hangs suspended in the architecture of every song. It is an album about “seeing things from above—almost like looking straight down into the ground, all of these vibrant forest landscapes.”
Earthly Love
by Qenric
An open-hearted journey into the mysterious, cosmic nature of everyday Earthly Love by Qenric, aka K Allado-McDowell. A tincture of dream pop and folk adorned with electronic details, the album plays at the border between the romantic and the transpersonal. Enhanced by immersive production and arrangement, Qenric’s thoughtful songwriting finds transcendence in the challenge of relating in complex times.
ORCORARA 2010
by Elysia Crampton
This album follows intergenerational trauma, fugitives of Christian violence in a twilight called Puruma, returning to Mama Cocha, the sea that theorists call Nowhere. Dedicated to the life of Paul Sousa, Sage LaPena and Dr. Gretel Mendizabal Nolte. Not one, not world, not body, not God, not salvation, not zero; only a ceaseless approaching toward, with, and as the great mystery, Great Condor, by Grace, Tatamama. Jallalla.
Objects
Incense
by Incausa
These incenses are suitable for a variety of ritual practices. Incausa (‘In cause of’) was established to facilitate the fair trading of indigenous artisanship and heritage, 100% of the proceeds received from the sale of indigenous products are returned to the artisans makers. These exceptionally crafted medicine bundles are like nothing you will have encountered before. On the night in which not all spirits that enter are entirely welcome, we can recommend both the Palo Santo and the Pure Breu Resin; extracted from the Almacega tree of the Amazon rainforest, sacred Breu is used in healing rituals to ward off dark spirits and invite good energy.
A blend of herbs to facilitate conscious dreaming and better dream recall. For journeying into the dark months of the year and summoning the necessary insight to carry you into the next.
Gift certificates
by Sphere + Sundry
For those looking to give the gift of magic this holiday season (or for any other occasion!), Sphere + Sundry by Kaitlin Coppock offers artisinal, handcrafted gifts created in a genuine magical context for the purposes of similar application, using the highest and most thorough of standard protocol – precise timing, prayer, suffumigation, ingredients of genuine correspondence and sympathy, reputable seals and sigils, magic squares/ kameas, applicable numbers and colours, etc.
Events and courses
Jessica Dore's Tarot Skills course: November 1
Incorporating insights from the fields of psychology and behavioral science, this class will explore principles for reading tarot in a way that is effective, engaging and trauma-informed. Geared toward readers who wish to use cards to facilitate an experience that is truly supportive and potentially transformative.
The Grove: 25 October, The Fragment: A Studio Practice for the As-Yet-To-Be Book with Bhanu Kapil
In this workshop, you’re invited to bring content (of any length) from a failed or abandoned project of any genre. Perhaps what you have are fragments or notes as yet not extended towards a completed or even partial work. We will reach into the messy, rough shapes of this as-yet-to-be work, selecting fragments to rotate, hold up to the sun or moon, immerse in other materials, or touch. Can revision practice be conceived of as a ritual of the fragment? How can we install these fragments, or think of installing them, in a different way?
Online Tarot Readings
by Treadwells
Treadwells’ in-depth Tarot readings are now available online seven days a week from approachable, experienced readers.
Acupuncture
by Maria Christofi
Maria Christofi, author of the acupressure guide in the Ignota Diary 2020 and forthcoming Ignota Diary 2021, provides simple and effective practices to alleviate and rebalance. She has been practising Traditional Chinese Medicine and massage for twenty years. Offering a range of acupuncture treatments, Maria specialises in women’s wellness and comes highly recommended for treating menstrual issues, anxiety, stress, exhaustion and burnout.
Causes
In Native culture, Elders are the keepers of all the wisdom and knowledge of the people. Without them, we lose some of the very things that make us who we are. Right now we are responding to a crisis. It threatens those who are most vulnerable and precious. This virus could decimate a generation of Native Elders and destroy a rich culture that has been passed down for countless generations. Native Americans are disproportionately affected by COVID-19 in across America.
Rainforest Foundation US is tackling the world’s most urgent challenges — biodiversity loss, climate change, and human rights — guided by these priorities: healthy rainforests, Indigenous rights, climate action, sustainable development.
Treating mental health must be a priority in the fight for equality and welfare of black people in the UK. Linking as many black individuals and families in the UK with certified, professional, black practitioners for sessions as soon as possible, these funds raised will pay in full for therapy sessions for those in need. Black Lives Matter. Black Minds Matter.