The Viatorium Press, after two years of toil and tumult, emerges from the hermetic isolation of the forge with the flagship volume (Zero) of its projected seven volume florilegium of the Arcane Sciences, Occlith: Labyrinthus Archidoxae. Entitled Omniform, it encapsulates the golden lore of the Renaissance Magus, helmed by key texts of the great Theophrastus von Hohenheim, known across the ages as Paracelsus the Great, and his brilliant disciple, a venerated alchemist and healer in his own right, Oswald Croll.
At 272 pages, offset printed on 80# cream paper, sewn and bound in blind stamped gun-metal grey cloth, Occlith 0: Omniform is a microcosmic gothic cathedral, a place of exploration, designed so that the reader is impelled to make a kind of pilgrimage through its pages. Like the pan-mythic unicursal labyrinth itself, Omniform possesses the strange dual nature of challenge and revelation. Typographically, it shuns modern convention, instead reaching back to the ur-texts of the Incunabula era (1450-1500) to wrest primal insight into the contemporary age. Designer Joseph Uccello did not make his decisions lightly: after years of deep study into typography, both in an academic setting and solo, and an intimate grasp of the sentience of type itself gained from countless hours of letterpress printing on a Vandercook 4, he came armed with a vision of what the Occult book could be in this era of lukewarm received wisdom filtered through decades of mediocrity masking as the status quo.
Incepted with a weird brand of Gnosticism, the presence of the Omniform, (Divine Craftsman, or Demiourgos) can be detected in the involuting and wondrously complex language of the Early Modern English writing. Protected behind multiple gates of gloriously strident, Orthodox piety, the pearl of knowledge is revealed to the patient and passionate reader. Paracelsus' hermetic account of the creation of the universe in Philosphy to the Athenians is one of the richest and most daemonically visionary in any language or era.
Pervasive throughout the Paracelsus and Croll texts is woven the lore of multifarious spirits, strange beings, and elementals, whose presence, both as entities that share this world with mankind, and as vehicles to carry the symbolism of deeper alchemical principles. Many of the illustrations in the book were directly inspired by this survival of ancient folk tradition that found its apotheosis and sadly, perhaps its final serious and esoteric consideration before the European mind was swept through by conflicting currents of thought in the coming centuries.
Appended to the body of the work is a separate book containing a lexicon addressing the alchemical terms and mystical lore in Paracelsus' alchemical universe.
Occlith 0: Omniform can be purchased from our collaborating publisher, www.threehandspress.com