What's New

Ancient Prophecy

Listen to Mitch Horowitz's podcast on ancient prophecy and the twenty-first century at the website of The Montel Williams Show. Just click www.montelshow.com and at the drop-down menu go to "Season 17: Close Encounters." 

The Mail-Order Prophet

In the years between the onset of the Great Depression and the end of World War II, an Idaho druggist named Frank B. Robinson used the U.S. mails to create a “mind power” ministry that, in its day, could have been considered the eighth largest religion on earth. The rise and fall of Robinson’s Psychiana movement is among the most fascinating – and overlooked – chapters in the drama of America’s religious development. Click here to read The Mail-Order Prophet by Mitch Horowitz

Ouija: The Strangest Game

Once a staple of every toy-cluttered basement in America, Ouija boards have attracted a history like no other “game.”  For generations, Ouija’s mysterious messages have inspired shrieks of fright and delight at pajama parties. Less known is Ouija’s role as the force behind Pulitzer-winning poetry, or the ongoing controversy over its origin. Discover the strange history of this oddest of curios in Ouija! by Mitch Horowitz

Arcane America

The occult and mysticism possess a deeper history in America than most people suspect. Click below to read Mitch Horowitz’s guest commentary for the Religion News Service, The Occult Isn’t Just a Batty Idea in America’s Attic 

New in Paperback in January 2008: In this rare work of public disclosure, filmmaker David Lynch describes his personal methods of capturing and working with ideas, and the immense creative benefits he has experienced from the practice of meditation.

Over the last four decades, David Lynch has created some of the best known and widely discussed screen works of our time. This distinctive writer-director’s art bears not only the mark of box office success but also critical acclaim and cultural posterity.

Yet Lynch generally reveals little of himself, or the ideas behind his work. Now he provides a rare window into his methods as an artist and his personal working style.

In Catching the Big Fish, Lynch writes candidly about the tremendous creative benefits he has gained from his thirty-three year commitment to practicing Transcendental Meditation. In brief chapters, Lynch describes the experience of “diving within” and “catching” ideas like fish — and then preparing them for the television or movie screens, and other mediums in which Lynch works, such as photography and painting.

Lynch discusses the development of his ideas — where they come from, how he grasps them, and which ones appeal to him the most. He shares his passion for “the doing” — whether moviemaking, painting, or other creative expressions. Lynch talks specifically about how he puts his thoughts into action and how he engages with others around him. Finally, he discusses the self and the surrounding world — and how the process of “diving within” that has so deeply affected his own work can directly benefit others.

Catching the Big Fish provides unprecedented insight into Lynch’s methods, as it also offers a set of practical ideas that speak to matters of personal fulfillment, increased creativity, and greater harmony with one’s surroundings. 

The book comes as a revelation to the legion of fans who have longed to better understand Lynch’s deeply personal vision. And it is equally intriguing to anyone who grapples with questions such as:  “Where do ideas come from?” and “How can I nurture creativity?”

New in Paperback in February 2008: The widely respected social philosopher embarks on his most gripping and broadly appealing work, asking the ultimate question of human nature: Why do we repeatedly violate our most deeply held values and beliefs?

For all our therapies, resolutions, self-help programs, and the vast religious and ethical literature available to men and women today, we return again and again to the same limiting and predictable behaviors, vowing to do better “next time.”

And far beyond the travails of our everyday existence — although sometimes intruding upon it with a ghastly shock — we witness a world twisted in conflict and warfare in which religious systems are continually used to justify slaughter.

For sensitive people everywhere, the question resounds: Why can’t we be good?

After nearly forty years of weighing humanity’s deepest dilemmas — working in settings ranging from university and high school classrooms to corporate offices and hospitals — bestselling author, philosopher, and religious scholar Jacob Needleman presents the most urgent, deeply felt, and widely accessible work of his career. In Why Can’t We Be Good? Needleman identifies the core problem that therapists and social philosophers fail to see. He depicts the individual human as a being who knows what is good, yet who remains mysteriously helpless to innerly adopt the ethical, moral, and religious ideas that are bequeathed to him.

In his jarring depiction of this most misunderstood of dilemmas, Needleman takes the reader through various settings and case studies: a college classroom, where students of all ages and backgrounds agonize to define goodness in an era marked by relativism and fundamentalism; a chilling psychological experiment from a generation earlier that reveals the capacity for brutality that lurks within us all—and our inability to see it; ancient stories from Rabbinic Judaism and mystical Christianity where, possibly, esoteric schools have left fragments of their own deep inner understanding of humanity’s predicament and how to begin addressing it; and the words of Socrates, which lay bare the problems of the human psyche while hinting at a missing element that would serve to instruct us not merely on that which is good, but on how to commence our own efforts toward becoming the kinds of men and women we are capable of being.

Steely eyed, yet hopeful, Needleman provides ideas, and even exercises, that can start to show us the largeness of this problem — the problem of our inability to be good — and the precious early steps toward struggling with it.

Now in Paperback: This literary and metaphysical epic unifies the cosmological phenomena of our time – from crop circles to quantum mechanics to the worldwide resurgence of shamanism – in support of the Mayan prophecy that the year 2012 portends an unprecedented global shift.

Cross Umberto Eco, Aldous Huxley, and Carlos Castaneda and you get the voice of Daniel Pinchbeck. And yet nothing quite prepares you for the lucidity, rationality, and informed audacity of this seeker, skeptic, and cartographer of hidden realms.

In tracing the meaning of the end of the Mayan Calendar in 2012, and the imminent transition from one world to another prophesied by the Hopi Indians of Arizona, Pinchbeck synthesizes indigenous cosmology, alien abductions, shamanic revivalism, crop circles, psychedelic visions, the current ecological crisis and the Judeo-Christian Apocalypse into a new vision for our time. The result is an unprecedented and riveting inquiry into where humanity is immediately headed – and its strange and startling congruence with the ideas of the mysterious civilization of the Classical Maya. 

Throughout the 1990s, Pinchbeck had been a member of New York’s literary select. He wrote for publications like ArtForum, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine. Critics acclaimed his first book, Breaking Open the Head, as the most significant contribution to psychedelic literature since the work of Terence McKenna.

But the unexpected occurred: Pinchbeck found himself increasingly pulled into the shamanic and metaphysical realms he was reporting on as a journalist. As his mind opened to new and sometimes threatening experiences, disparate threads and synchronicities made new sense: Humanity, every sign suggested, faces an imminent decision between greater self-potential and environmental ruin. The Mayan “birth date” of 2012 could herald the close of one way of existence and the beginning of another, symbolized by the prophesied return of the Mesoamerican deity Quetzalcoatl, the mysterious “Plumed Serpent” of ancient myth. In just the nick of time, the skeptical modern mind can reclaim the suppressed psychic, intuitive, and mystical dimensions of being, and institute a new planetary culture. But it is only – and by no means assuredly – possible if we confront the environmental catastrophe staring us in the face.

Something is in the air: many, if not most, of us feel that real change – for good or ill – is afoot. Pinchbeck’s journey – a metaphysical opus that takes the reader from the endangered rain forests of the Amazon, to the stone megaliths of the English plains, to the Burning Man festival in the Black Rock desert of Nevada – tells the tale of a single man in whose trials we ultimately recognize our own secret thoughts and unease over modern life. And a redemptive vision of where we are heading.

“The effort of seeing the truth, no matter what that truth is, is the real seed for the higher self. And this effort we can make, no matter what life offers us. When a man or woman makes this effort, a certain self respect begins to appear…”

– Jacob Needleman, from Money and the Meaning of Life