Source books
Books
Start by searching for a title or author. Open Filters to narrow the list by tradition, the role a book played, whether a free edition is available, or how much public attention it receives. Last, choose date or name order. Every choice stays in the address, so you can bookmark the result or send the same list to someone else.
22 books of 370 · oldest first
Greek and Roman mysteries 22
-
c. 430 BCE
Histories
Nine books of enquiry into the Persian wars and the peoples around them. Book II is given almost entirely to Egypt, and is the oldest sustained account of Egyptian religion by...
-
fifth century BCE
On Nature
A cosmological poem explaining the four roots, cosmic cycles, perception and natural phenomena.
-
fifth century BCE
Purifications
Traditionally treated as a separate religious poem on reincarnation, pollution, divine exile and purification. Scholars debate whether it and On Nature originally belonged to...
-
2nd century
The Golden Ass
Ancient Roman novel by Apuleius
-
c. 175–180 CE
The True Doctrine
Celsus's anti-Christian treatise survives through Origen's third-century refutation. Book VI preserves a report of a seven-gated Mithraic ladder whose gates are assigned both...
-
copied II BCE - IV CE
The Greek Magical Papyri
Working handbooks rather than a book: invocations, hymns, recipes, divination and dream procedures, curses, love spells and rites of divine encounter, copied and added to by...
-
c. 211–229 CE
Roman History
Cassius Dio's history includes an early explanation of the seven-day planetary week and the planetary-hour order used to derive it.
-
late third century
Life of Pythagoras
A religious-philosophical biography that helped turn Pythagoras into an archetypal sacred philosopher.
-
early fourth century
On the Pythagorean Life
Transforms Pythagoras into an exemplary initiatory philosopher, and preserves a great deal of Pythagorean tradition.
-
1890
The Golden Bough
1890 non-fiction work by James George Frazer
-
1891
-
1903
-
1911
-
1912
-
2014
Divination and Theurgy in Neoplatonism: Oracles of the Gods
A study of oracles, divination and theurgy in Porphyry and Iamblichus, set within the religious and philosophical debates of late antiquity.
-
undated
-
undated
-
undated
The Golden Verses
literary work
-
undated
The Life of Apollonius of Tyana
work by Philostratus
-
undated
-
undated
The Orphic Hymns
collection of 87 short religious poems composed in either the late Hellenistic or early Roman era
-
undated
The Sibylline Oracles
collection of oracular utterances in Greek hexameter, containing Hellenistic/Roman mythology with Jewish, Gnostic and Christian stories