Texts & the Canon

This section holds the written sources of the Western esoteric tradition: the Hermetic corpus, the alchemical and magical treatises, the grimoires, and the foundational works of modern occultism. It is the library behind much of the rest of the atlas, the books in which the systems of magic, alchemy and Kabbalah were set down.

The canonical scriptures of the world's religions (the Vedas, the Torah, the Gospels, the Quran, the Pali Canon and the rest), are gathered separately under the scripture category within Traditions & Paths; this section concentrates on the esoteric and occult literature.

A defining problem of this literature is that authorship and date are uncertain or disputed for a great many of its works. Much of it is pseudonymous (attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, to Solomon, to Moses), or circulated anonymously, and the traditional ascriptions are often centuries out from the real date of composition.

The entries record what each text is, who wrote or compiled it where that can be established, roughly when, and what it contains, and they flag the many cases where the traditional attribution is legend rather than fact. This is history-of-the-book as much as doctrine.