February 11, 2026

Some New Resources for 2026

Gentle Readers,

New resources for the study of western esotericism are always cropping up, but so many really useful and high-quality things have landed in my mailbox of late that I thought I should do a blog post about them. The first three are also added to the SHWEP Resources page, which, as ever, strives to be a good place to start searching for quality resources online in various sub-fields of the study of weso.

1. Digital ZODIAC Glossary

We have an updated resource for studying the history of ancient astrology from those industrious scholars at the ZODIAC project in Berlin (we were lucky enough to visit their cool establishment and interview principle investigator Mathieu Ossendrijver a few years back). This would be extremely useful for researchers working in Greek or Latin, whose standard lexica utterly let them down when they want to look at the technical terminology of ancient astrology, and I assume the same is also true for scholars working in others of the glorious range of languages encompassed by this glossary. They say:

“The project “ZODIAC – Ancient Astral Science in Transformation” (ERC, FU Berlin) is launching a new public web interface for its digital ZODIAC glossary,

https://zodiacglossary.github.io/

The lemmatized, cross-linked, cross-cultural glossary contains astronomical and astrological terminology from the ancient world (ca. 400 BCE – 300 CE) in Akkadian, Egyptian, Greek, and Latin, as well as some lemmata in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Sanskrit. The new interface, developed by Kierán Meinhardt, offers both basic and advanced search tools, including an option to generate a customized pdf glossary with selected lemmata.

The old website at https://zodiac.fly.dev remains operational and contains the same data.”

2. A New Online Library of Digitised Renaissance/Early-Modern Esoterica from the BPH

The Ritman Library of Amsterdam, a.k.a. Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, a.k.a. Embassy of the Free Mind, continues to spin off groovy and useful projects. Recent is a digitised collection of all manner of cool early-modern printed works and manuscripts. The whole thing is done to the nines, with facing-page translations into English for some texts, and all the bells and whistles.

They say:

“SourceLibrary.org translates the world’s wisdom traditions into modern languages. This is an open-source initiative of the Embassy of the Free Mind in Amsterdam, which hosts one of the world’s largest collections of Renaissance esoteric literature, the Biblioteca Philosophica Hermetica (UNESCO Memory of the World). Our initial focus is the Latin Renaissance; for, while translations of Greek wisdom into Latin helped spark the European Renaissance, 95% of the Renaissance itself remains untranslated. In addition to Latin, we host translations of original works in Greek, Arabic, Armenian, Sanskrit, Chinese and more. We additionally maintain a research blog at https://www.secondrenaissance.ai/.”

3. The Occult Library: A Slick Online Resource Pulling Together a Bunch of Interesting Stuff to a High Standard

They say:

“The Occult Library is a volunteer-run nonprofit hub for all things occult, from books and art, to movies, TV shows, podcasts and more. We maintain an ever-expanding catalogue of active and retired publishers, authors, artists, bookstores, artisans and more. The emphasis of our work is to serve as a central resource for discovering and researching occult materials.”

Then Occult Library https://www.occultlibrary.org/

A work in progress, this one, but I like what I’m seeing so far, and if they keep expanding as they say they will this could develop into a top-of-the-line hub for occultural matters.

4. Two Important New Editions in the History of Magic

We also have two important new primary-source editions for all you lovers of ancient magic. Specifically, they are up-to-date editions of ancient defixiones or ‘curse-tablets’.

Robert W. Daniel, Alexander Hollmann, Magica Levantina. Sonderreihe der Abhandlungen Papyrologica Coloniensia, 52. Leiden: Brill, 2025 [curse-tablets from Syria/Palestine].

Jaime Curbera, Inscriptiones Graecae II/III: Inscriptiones Atticae Euclidis anno posteriores. Part 8: Miscellanea. Fascicule 1: defixiones Atticae. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024 [curse-tablets from Attica].

Check out Christopher Faraone’s review of both volumes here.

Stay esoteric,

Earl