To download all files in the collection at once, please click this link to access the shared folder with the zip file and inventory.
Author: Forest Wizard
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EAR Cataloging Standards
Because this project is about cataloging processes as well as esotericism (one might say they’re two sides of the same coin), I want to share the current standards I’m using. These are all subject to change, but future changes will be posted on this blog.
Digital File Naming Standards
The entire digital collection conforms to a single file naming standard, ensuring that the collection can be easily shared, sorted, and read by humans or machines.
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The Fox Sisters in Rochester, NY
Earlier this year I shared a printable map of eight locations in downtown Rochester, NY that are notable in the history of the religion of Modern Spiritualism. While that map includes a lot of information, I want to walk all of that out a bit more in this blog post. [Download that map here]
Background
Spiritualists celebrate the founding of their religion on March 31, 1848. It was on this day that the two youngest Fox sisters, Maggie (Margaretta) and Katie (Catherine/Catie/Kate/Kathie/Cathie), first communicated with a disembodied spirit in their small family home in Hydesville (an area since incorporated into the city of Newark), NY.
The Fox Sisters did not invent the concept of Spiritualism, but they did popularize it in a way others had not. And, the reason for that dates to more than 20 years before those events would unfold in their humble home.
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Charm to Suppress Liars
A favorite book of mine in the Guerrilla Library is The Power of the Psalms by Anna Riva. It’s a 1980s classic that looks at the Book of Psalms as a powerful grimoire. Each psalm has suggested ways to use the poem in part or in whole for a variety of different purposes.
I’ve shared a few of these charms on social media. Verse 6 of Psalm 58 is used to suppress liars and is accompanied by a short spell.
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The Esoteric Archive of Rochester is leaving Instagram
Our Instagram account will be deleted on Friday January 24, 2025.
In protest of the sweeping policy changes that Meta announced on January 7, 2025, allowing for the widespread use of hate speech against queer people, the EAR will permanently move away from this platform.
Mark Zuckerberg claims that this change is intended to promote and protect “free speech.” To the contrary, allowing hate speech to freely proliferate on your platform will only hinder the use of social media apps as the de facto town square.
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A New Home for the EAR
The Esoteric Archive of Rochester came to be in 2022. Its mission was twofold:
- Create a graphical interface to deal with my massive collection of occult-themed PDFs, and,
- To further investigate the esoteric roots of Rochester, NY and the so-called Burned Over District of New York state.
Like many seekers, I had accumulated hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of PDFs, mostly scans of books published in the late 1800s and very early 1900s (all in the public domain now). These files, with typically useless file names, were all stored in my Google Drive, and it was impossible to find anything I might be looking for.
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