Drive north out of Baton Rouge along the river road, past the cane and the live oaks with their beards of Spanish moss, and you come eventually to St. Francisville, and just outside it there is a long low white house with a wrought-iron veranda running the whole length of its front. It is genuinely lovely. It was built in 1796. It is also, according to roughly every list ever compiled on the subject, one of the most haunted houses in America, and unlike most contenders for that title, it will rent you a room.

A beautiful young man leans over a quiet spring and sees a face that takes his breath away. He speaks to it, reaches for it, and cannot understand why it will not answer. Slowly he realizes that the face is his own. "I am he," he says. And that knowledge, in the tale as the Roman poet Ovid tells it, kills him. This is the myth of Narcissus, so familiar that its name has entered the language as a word for vanity. The story itself is stranger, sadder and more careful than the word suggests. Ovid's Telling The fullest ancient account is in Book III of Ovid's Metamorphoses , written around the year 8 CE. Narcissus is the son of the river god Cephissus and a nymph called Liriope. When he is born, his mother asks the blind prophet Tiresias if the child will live long. The seer gives a puzzling answer: yes, if he does not come to know himself. Narcissus grows into a youth so lovely that many fall in love with him, both women and men. He turns every one of them away, wi...

In Rome, around 1650, a Jesuit priest stood before a broken obelisk and told the pope that he could read it. Nobody alive could read the Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the writing on the stone looked like a puzzle of birds, eyes, snakes and reeds. The priest, Athanasius Kircher, said that those pictures were not simply words. They were sacred symbols in which the oldest wisdom of mankind had been locked, and he had the key. He was wrong about the key. But the story of how he got it wrong is one of the most revealing in the history of learning. A Jesuit of Many Talents Kircher was born in 1602 in Geisa, in the German lands, and joined the Jesuits as a youth. The Thirty Years' War drove him from place to place, and in 1633 he settled in Rome, where he taught at the Jesuit Roman College. He stayed there for the rest of his life and died in 1680. His curiosity was enormous. He wrote on magnetism, on music, on volcanoes, on China, on languages, on the sun and moon, and on the Ark of No...

Of all the parts of the body, the eye has the strangest reputation. It takes in light, it shows feeling before a word is spoken, and it seems to reach out and touch things at a distance. No wonder that nearly every culture has given the eye a place in its myths, amulets and prayers. It is a window, a weapon, a lamp and a god. A tour through the history of the eye is a tour through the human attempt to explain what it means to see. The Eye of Horus In ancient Egypt, one of the most common amulets was the wedjat , the eye of the falcon god Horus. Its myth tells that Horus lost his eye in a struggle with his uncle Set, who had killed Horus' father, Osiris. The eye was healed and restored, either by Thoth or by Hathor, according to different versions, and its name, wedjat , means "the sound one" or "the whole one." The symbol thus stood for healing, protection and restoration. It was painted on coffins, carved on jewelry and placed on boats. Egyptians also us...

"That which is below is like that which is above, and that which is above is like that which is below, to do the miracles of one only thing." The line is a few words long, and it has been repeated for a thousand years. It comes from the Emerald Tablet , a short text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, which became the creed of the alchemists. The sentence is often shortened today to "as above, so below," and people use it for everything from astrology to gardening. But what did it say in the beginning, and where did it come from? A Text With a Legend The Emerald Tablet , in Latin Tabula Smaragdina , is a small text of about a dozen lines. No emerald tablet has ever been found. According to a medieval legend, a plate of green stone with these words was discovered in the tomb of Hermes, in a cave, held in the hands of his body. In another version it was found by Apollonius of Tyana, or by Sarah, the wife of Abraham, who is said to have taken it from the tomb. Th...

"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries." So begins "The Library of Babel," a story of only a few pages by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. It appeared in 1941 and is among the most commented stories of the twentieth century. It has been read as science, as theology and as a joke. Borges was an agnostic, and in one story even calls metaphysics a branch of fantastic literature. Yet few modern writers has used the symbols of the esoteric traditions, the mirror, the labyrinth, the book of everything, with such mastery. The Man Who Went Blind Among Books Borges was born in Buenos Aires on August 24, 1899. His father's library, which held many English books, was his first world. As a teenager he lived in Switzerland and Spain, learned several languages, and returned to Argentina in 1921. In the 1950s he lost his sight, as his father had, from an inherited disease. In 1955 ...