Essays from the Scriptorium
A collection of original essays by Alex Vizcroft on divination, AI, archaeoacoustics, ancient knowledge systems, and the strange overlap between ancient wisdom and modern technology. Each essay is grounded in specific data, named sources, and real historical context. Written in the voice of a scholar who has also lived.
Available Essays
- Wheel, Letter, and Verse: A History of the Zairja — The medieval Islamic answer-machine that computed its replies in poetry, and the thousand-year road it walked to a London fortune-teller's manual, through hands that never knew what they were holding.
- The Two-Way River: A History of the Roads That Carried Divination — The watershed map: how the knowledge streams of divination flowed between civilisations, out of the Islamic world by the roads of al-Andalus and Venice, and what each bank kept.
- Two Temples, One Statute: Whare Ra, Hīona, and the Unequal History of the Unseen in Aotearoa — Two temples, one statute: how the 1907 Tohunga Act fell on Māori and settler occultism alike, and why the histories were written as if it had not.
- What the Law Could Not Kill: The Two Temples of 1907 — The two temples of 1907, and what the law could not kill.
- Fire, Shell, and Stalk: A History of Chinese Divination — A history of Chinese divination told through its own instruments: the fire, the shell, and the stalks.
- The Algorithm as Magic System — Divination, diffusion models, and the For You Page run on the same engine. The oracle does not predict the future; it reflects the present back at you. So does TikTok.
- The Fifth Contract — Four contracts have broken in our lifetime: religion, media, education, government. Each offered a map, a community, a set of answers. What comes next?
- Did the Ancients Understand Frequencies Better Than Us? — The Oracle Room at Hal Saflieni aligns to 110 Hz. Chamber C3 at Karahan Tepe amplifies 8.13 Hz by 34 decibels. They did not know it as Hertz. They knew it as effect.
- Archaeoacoustics: The Evidence — A comprehensive review of empirical evidence for acoustic engineering in megalithic structures. Data from Barabar, Karahan Tepe, Hal Saflieni, and ALBA acoustic erosion simulations.
- The Old Knowledge Was Right About the Thing — The Wheel of the Year is not a Celtic calendar. It is a biological map. The old knowledge was right about the thing. The mechanism was different from what anyone guessed.
- The Forgetting of Sundaland — Why the world's most spiritually layered civilisation is almost entirely absent from Western occultism, and what the Javanese shadow puppets remember about the world before the flood.
Explore
- Divination tools — Fal-e Hafez, Tarot, I Ching, Runes, Geomancy
- Cosmic Library — 27 civilisations and 11 method deep-dives
- Daily Cosmic Briefing — your personalised daily reading
By Alex Vizcroft, author of Fal-e Hafez: The Oracle of Shiraz (Vizcroft Publishing). Books available on Amazon.