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The Leaf of Immortality

Aaron Cheak, PhD

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN you study comparative religion, philosophy, and esotericism for fifteen years and then take heroic doses of entheogens? In many respects, this book is a long answer to that question. The short answer is: The floodgates open. The dried riverbeds of academic learning become inundated with raw, living, divine experience.

In this short but zesty volume, Dr Cheak explores the intersection of Nordic theurgy, Hermetic philosophy, and cunning linguistics to reveal a uniquely alchemical lesson: how to play with poison in order to find its hidden gift.

Through richly layered references to the sinister theologies of Loki, Hermes, and Seth-Typhon, Cheak shows how divine gnosis ultimately dissolves the duality between our inner and outer worlds. What we call “gods”, he remarks, “are living principles that continue to incarnate both in us and in the world around us in ways that elude rigidly theistic understandings”.

“Reminds me of some of Peter Lamborn Wilson’s best work—spiritual, scholarly, and creative. Both way out there and way in there”.

—Stephen CRIMI, Logosophia Books.

“The divine manias narrated in The Leaf of Immortality, fueled by the contemplation of language in itself, are the essential, translucent experiences of the hermetical, where words, symbols, and abstract powers can be seen to be manifesting as actual individual fleshy being”.

—Alejandro Martínez Gallardo, Cadena áurea.

About the Author

Aaron Cheak, PhD, is a scholar of comparative religion, philosophy, and esotericism. Former president of the International Jean Gebser Society (2013–2015), he received his doctorate in Religious Studies from the University of Queensland in 2011 for his work on the history of eastern and western alchemies. Outside the academy, Aaron has been trained in the preparation of spagyric elixirs (Paracelsus College; Spagyricus Institute), and is a practitioner within the Nyingma and Kagyu lineages of Vajrayana Buddhism. He presently lives in Auckland, New Zealand, where he maintains an active interest in tea, wine, poetry, typography, and alchemy. Dr Cheak has appeared in a number of academic and esoteric publications, including Alchemical Traditions (2013), Clavis (2014), Diaphany (2015), Heretic (2015), Octagon (2016), and Lux in Tenebris (2017).