Occult & Esoterica
[SCHULKE, Daniel A.] Viridarium Umbris: The Pleasure Garden of Shadow (Which Treats of the Secret Knowledge of Trees and Herbs, Deliver'd by the Fallen Angels unto Man)
[SCHULKE, Daniel A.] Viridarium Umbris: The Pleasure Garden of Shadow (Which Treats of the Secret Knowledge of Trees and Herbs, Deliver'd by the Fallen Angels unto Man)
[UK]: Xoanon Publishing, 2005. First Edition. Hardcover. Large octavo. 526pp. Limited to 576 hand-numbered copies. This copy is unnumbered. Bound in full iridescent sage green cloth, from boards blocked in bronze foil with emblem of Tree, Serpent, and Kerubim of Midnight's Eden. With black endsheets. Black and white illustrations and sigilae throughout. Book design by Daniel A. Schulke and Andrew D. Chumbley. Very faint horizontal line to cloth on back cover, one small (also faint) mark to cloth on back cover. Very mild corner wear. Otherwise, a near fine copy. Exceedingly Scarce.
An extensive grimorium of Wortcunning, or herb-magic, the Pleasure-Garden treats of the secret knowledge of trees and herbs as delivered by the Fallen Angels unto mankind. The book’s principal concerns are the sorcery and gnosis of the Greenwood, as arising from the varied luminaries of the Eternal Gardens of the Arte Magical. As a grimoire of Spiritual Botany, the Book is a Hortus Conclusus of text and image intended for the indwelling of these plant-spirits. The work encompasses magical practices, formulae, and mystical exegesis, all treating the respective arcana of Nature-Spirits and the powers of individual plants. Magical foci are on devotion, purity, humility, silence, solitude, and the hieros-gamos of wortcunner and plant as a tutelary relationship, in conjunction with the Mysteries of Cain, first tiller of the soil. The whole is intended as a textual reification of occult herbalism within the context of the Sabbatic Craft Tradition.