The Magical World of the Heroes

Cesare della Riviera addresses not the ceremonial magician but the “Heroe,” a term he means literally: someone undertaking a long, inward path of self-transformation through natural, rather than invoked, forces. Della Riviera is explicit that his subject is not the summoning of spirits, but a discipline of elevation carried out on the self.

First published in 1605 and rediscovered in the twentieth century, it stands among the clearest statements in the hermeticDrawing on Hermeticism, a current of Western esoteric thought that reads the material and spiritual worlds as mirrors of one another, so that transforming one's own inner nature is treated as a real, not merely symbolic, act. tradition of alchemy read as an inner discipline rather than a chemical one — the furnace and the vessel as figures for the reader's own transformation.

Of the three Series C translations, it is the most direct on the subject of the will toward the good, understood not as a belief a person holds but as a labor a person undertakes.

It will be published on October 25, 2026, at all major booksellers, as a 6 by 9 inch hardcover of 300 to 350 pages at $79.99, with an ebook at $19.99 on Kindle and an audiobook to follow.

The translation is complete, and its front matter is finished as well. Its back matter is roughly halfway compiled, with final formatting and editing still ahead before publication.