Series: Texts and Translations of Transcendence and Transformation

The Pearlsong is an ancient poem that recounts the story of a Parthian prince sent by his parents on a mission to Egypt to retrieve a pearl from the clutches of a giant serpent. Along the way, the prince falls asleep and forgets his identity and mission. A letter from his parents awakens him, gives him a spell to put...

From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, a number of historians, jurists, poets, and others writing in Arabic turned their attention to a newly arrived plant, Cannabis indica, noting its psychoactive powers and how it first spread among Sufis. They discuss cannabis’s origins, who uses it and how, and whether or not it should be used. These works range from...

In a text known as the Letter to Melania, or the Great Letter, Christian monastic philosopher Evagrius of Pontus (345-399) delivers a moving meditation on the power of language (spoken and written), the composition of humanity in light of the three persons of God, and the final restoration or apokatastasis when all creatures will be reunited with their creator. Evagrius...

Porphyry of Tyre (c. 234-305) was not only the biographer of his teacher Plotinus and the editor of his Enneads, but also an important Platonist philosopher in his own right. On Theology and Theurgy presents two of Porphyry's texts, preserved in fragments, in which he endeavours to apply philosophy to religion, ultimately seeking to align the two. In Letter to...