The Hidden Fire: Mystics, Heretics, and the Technology of Belief (The Fires Series)

Newton wrote a million words on alchemy — more than he wrote on physics. His heirs hid the papers for 250 years because they were embarrassed. When John Maynard Keynes finally read them in 1936, he concluded that Newton was “not the first of the age of reason” but “the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians.”The Hidden Fire traces the underground current connecting the mystery schools of ancient Greece, the Gnostic gospels buried at Nag Hammadi, the Kabbalists who encoded God in mathematics, the Sufi mystics who trolled Islam from inside, the alchemists who built the foundations of modern chemistry while searching for the Philosopher’s Stone, and the chaos magicians who figured out that belief itself is the technology.Along the way: the Templars were framed (probably). The Rosicrucians may never have existed. The Illuminati lasted eleven years and accomplished almost nothing. Aleister Crowley was a better mountaineer than magician. The Satanic Temple doesn’t believe in Satan. And the entire Western esoteric tradition turns out to be one long, elaborate troll of institutional religion.Book 2 of The Fires Series, a four-volume work examining how deliberate provocation has shaped civilization from ancient Athens to the age of artificial intelligence. Read more