Viridarium Umbris: The Pleasure Garden of Shadow

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.

The work was initially issued in Three Editions:

Standard Edition: limited to 576 numbered copies, casebound in gilt-stamped luminescent green bookcloth.

Deluxe Edition: limited 72 numbered copies casebound in full brown goat, gold-stamped with slipcase and accompanied by the mystery-text The Epistle of the Tree, 526 pages.

Arbor Infernis Edition: This special edition edition was limited to 77 copies, casebound in Moss-green cloth with Mandrake Death’s Head blocked in gold on the front cover. Each copy is accompanied by an orginal hand-drawn talisman of coloured ink on papyrus, bearing one of 77 Emanants of the Arbor Infernis — the liminal genii of Midnight’s Eden.