Everything in the Archive

Human life across the long stretch before writing — surviving the Ice Age, the shift to farming, the mines and monuments of Stone Age Europe. It stays with what the archaeology can support, including a plague that may have emptied Neolithic Europe, and is direct about where the evidence stops.

The civilisations that traded across the Mediterranean three thousand years ago and collapsed within a generation of each other — Nuragic Sardinia, Argaric Iberia, Mycenaean Greece. Covers the Sea Peoples and the collapse itself, including Rameses III's own account of the invasion.

Who built the Great Pyramid, when, and by what method. Sets the mainstream Egyptological case beside the fringe claims — the Sphinx water-erosion hypothesis, the power-plant theory, the Khafre radar scans — and works through what the evidence actually supports in each case.

Ordinary Roman life rather than emperors and battles: wealth, crime, religion, and the far edges of the empire. Several chapters work directly from primary sources, including a Roman writing about the first Christians and Chinese and Roman historians describing each other's empires.

Maya, Aztec and Inca civilisation on its own terms — the decipherment of Maya script, the Mesoamerican calendar and ballgame, Inca stonework, and the Maya collapse. The later chapters are indigenous accounts of first contact and conquest, read from the Florentine Codex and Titu Cusi.

Begins with what Plato actually wrote and why, then follows the search through the Minoan hypothesis and into modern claims. It is explicit about the difference between a real candidate civilisation and a bad argument, and spends time on the lies told by Atlantis proponents.

Sumer, Assyria and Persia — the first cities, kings and written records. Covers the disputed origins of the Sumerians, the King List, Assyrian star maps, and a letter from Alexander to Darius, with attention to how much these cultures genuinely knew about the sky.

The documented history of UFO reporting, from mid-century cases through the Pentagon disclosure era. Gives equal weight to how governments have manufactured and managed belief, and separates the cases that remain genuinely unexplained from those that do not.

Disappearance cases where the investigative record ran out — the Yuba County Five, the missing-children era, and a set of modern vanishings that began online. Looks at claimed patterns in the data and at how much of a pattern is real when you assemble cases after the fact.

Kryptos, the Voynich Manuscript, Cicada 3301 and the numbers stations. Each is taken in turn: where the text came from, who has attacked it, and what cryptanalysis has and has not recovered — including where the answer may be that there is nothing encoded at all.

Sixty years of investigation into the Kennedy assassination. Works through the physical evidence and the reconstruction of the shooting, then the layers of conspiracy claim built on top, and is clear about which questions are open and which have been settled.

Bigfoot, Mothman, Skinwalker Ranch and the deep-water and Southern Hemisphere cryptids. Treats each as a reporting phenomenon — what people describe, how consistently, and what the environmental and electromagnetic explanations account for.

How coercive groups form, hold members, and end. Covers Rajneeshpuram, Waco, the Ant Hill Kids and the newer online movements that behave like cults without meeting for worship, with attention to the mechanics of recruitment rather than the spectacle of collapse.

The folklore the internet is currently producing — analog horror, the Backrooms, altered-memory archives — alongside the dead internet theory itself. Covers why so much online content is now automated or fabricated, and how that changes what the medium feels like.

Claims that sit at the boundary of physics and belief: time-travel accounts, the Kozyrev mirrors, parallel-universe testimony, the Mandela Effect. Explains the real physics each claim borrows from and where the borrowing stops being legitimate.

Comparative reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European religion — Dyeus the sky father, the creation myth, the war among the gods. Shows the method by which linguists recover a mythology no one wrote down, and traces its descendants as far as Genesis.

Pre-Christian Norse religion as scholars reconstruct it: Yggdrasil, Odin's many names, the seidr tradition, and Loki. Includes the argument that Tyr, not Odin, originally led the pantheon, and distinguishes the sources from later literary retellings.

The oldest surviving accounts of how the world began, centred on the Near East and the Enuma Elish. A substantial part is given to flood mythology — where the story originates, and how recent evidence has rewritten the relationship between Mesopotamian and biblical versions.

One narrative pattern — a hero kills a serpent — traced from the Rig Veda and the Enuma Elish through to the Indo-European warrior Trito. Comparative throughout, asking why this particular story recurs and how far back the ritual behind it may go.

How different traditions mapped the land of the dead and the rules for entering it. Covers the Indo-European otherworld, the dogs that guide souls, the many hells of Buddhism, and Greek and early Christian conceptions with a historian of early Christianity.

Alchemy as its practitioners understood it — the Philosopher's Stone, the Summa Perfectionis, the wordless Mutus Liber. Covers both the laboratory practice and the spiritual reading, plus Daoist internal alchemy and one recreated seventeenth-century preparation.

Jewish mysticism from Israelite prophecy through the Zohar to ecstatic Kabbalah. Concentrates on the tradition's account of evil — the Qliphoth and the Sitra Achra — and on how a Jewish system was absorbed into Christian and occult Qabalah.

The Corpus Hermeticum and the Emerald Tablet, and the figure of Hermes Trismegistus behind them. Follows Hermetic philosophy from the Egyptian god Thoth through late antiquity to medieval Spain and Isaac Newton, and explains why it mattered so much to European thought.

The continuous Western magical tradition — the Testament of Solomon, Renaissance demonology, the Picatrix, Crowley. Covers where its rituals actually come from, including the ancient invocation Crowley reworked, and the Islamicate sciences usually left out of the story.

Gnostic Christianity from its own texts: the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Mary, Pistis Sophia. Explains the Demiurge and the Archons, the fall of Sophia, and how a system in which the creator god is the villain arose within early Christianity.

The mystical tradition within Islam, through Attar's Conference of the Birds, Rumi, and the Shadhili and Ni'matullahi orders. Includes the Jewish-Sufi mystics of medieval Egypt and Sufism's metaphysics of love, drawing on recent scholarship rather than popular anthology.

What witchcraft meant to the people who prosecuted it. Works from the sources — Nider's Formicarius, the Lesser Key of Solomon, the Loudun possessions — through the theology of the demonic pact, and shows how scepticism about witches produced modern demonology and psychiatry.

Jung's concept of the shadow and the practical work of integrating it. Covers projection, arrested development, and the claim that the disowned parts of a personality are unrealised capability rather than simply damage. The shortest journey in the Archive.

Stoic practice as the Stoics described it — Marcus Aurelius on pain, Seneca on wasted time, Epictetus on what is and is not in your control. Applied throughout to ordinary difficulty: discipline, loss, worry, and dealing with other people.

Kierkegaard, Camus and the problem of living without inherent meaning. Covers angst as a response rather than a symptom, Camus on why feeling lost is the expected condition, and how the same argument reappears in contemporary anxiety.

Nietzsche's actual arguments in context — Beyond Good and Evil, master and herd morality, the will to power, the last man and the Übermensch. Includes his quarrels with Socrates and Plato, and corrects the misreadings that have attached to each idea.

Schopenhauer at length: the world as will and representation, his antinatalism, his views on reading, sociability and the reduction of suffering. A sustained engagement with the pessimist tradition that takes its conclusions seriously rather than explaining them away.

Jung's depth psychology as a programme of work — active imagination, the anima and animus, the collective unconscious, and individuation. Covers his symbol theory and inferiority complexes, and closes on what he and Nietzsche each made of myth.

Taoism, Buddhism and Zen approached as practical philosophy: acceptance, letting go, flow, and the limits of control. Covers Lao Tzu and the Buddha directly, the koan tradition, and Alan Watts as the figure who carried these ideas west.

Nihilism taken as a serious philosophical position rather than a mood — Cioran, Kierkegaard on despair, and existential psychotherapy's four concerns of death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness. Ends on the arguments for getting past it.

Mortality as a subject to think about deliberately: memento mori, the fear of dying, the death drive, and how to hold the fact of your own end. Includes a guided experience of dying, and draws on psychology as much as philosophy.

The difference between solitude and loneliness, and what deliberate time alone is actually for. Covers the psychology of solitude and its link to creative work, alongside the Buddhist and Taoist traditions of silence.

Two novelists read as psychologists. Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground on guilt, spite and self-defeat; Kafka on institutional absurdity and what the word Kafkaesque properly means. Sets both against Camus and Kierkegaard.

Why a universe this large and old shows no sign of anyone else. Works through the proposed answers one at a time — Dark Forest, the Great Filter, fallen empires, grabby aliens — and revisits the Drake equation sixty years on.

What black holes are and what the current arguments about them are. Covers the information paradox and its possible wormhole resolution, the fuzzball proposal, primordial black holes as a dark matter candidate, and why falling in is harder than films suggest.

Why subjective experience exists at all, and why neuroscience has not answered it. Presents the competing positions — Penrose on quantum effects in the brain, Kastrup's idealism, consciousness-as-field — alongside the experimental work being done on each.

The far future of the universe: heat death, the Big Rip, and the physics of a cosmos running down. Also covers what an advanced civilisation might do about it, and the proposals for postponing or surviving the end.

The engineering of hypothetical advanced civilisations — Dyson spheres, Kardashev scale transitions, and what building at that scale would require. Unusually practical: it spends real time on maintenance, failure modes, and the barriers that may prevent any of it.

Exoplanet science as it stands after JWST. Covers how many genuinely Earth-like planets there are, what atmospheric analysis at interstellar distance can establish, and why the habitable-zone concept is being narrowed and challenged.

Quantum mechanics at its current edges — tunnelling and the speed of light, quantum jumps, the uncertainty principle, and whether gravity is quantum at all. Built around recent experimental results rather than the standard introductory tour.

Dark matter and dark energy account for most of the universe and neither has been identified. Sets out the observations that force astronomers to posit them, the candidates under test, and the serious recent arguments that dark energy may not exist.

Bostrom's simulation argument set out properly, along with the strongest objections to it. Covers what an ancestor simulation would involve, whether a simulation could be detected from inside, and why the argument's conclusion is narrower than it is usually reported to be.

How life might begin and how we would detect it elsewhere. Covers panspermia and whether bacteria survive impacts, biosignature detection and its false positives, Mars astrobiology, and the mathematical case that we may be alone.