noli me tangere

For the first time, as Hyperallergic reports, the eighteenth century Austrian grimoire Touch Me Not! is available as a full colour facsimile with translations of the German and Latin texts—which is rather a unique primer on the dark arts, focused nearly exclusively on the transgressive and with few pretensions to spare for the best intentions of the practicioner—especially one who has failed to take a sufficiently reverend approach for the esoteric arts.
Also being sufficiently girded with psychedelic substances whose potions are also laid out in the book can’t harm either. Warnings abound throughout the visceral compendium not to meddle in such matters and the Touch Me Not! is the final proscriptive in the work’s title “A most rare Summary of the entire magical Art by its most famous Masters of the Year 1057”—though this embellishment of ancient provenance is probably only meant to entice contemporary (circa 1775) even more. Still the command does also conjure what Jesus uttered to Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection—there is too much invested in every iconographic tradition for it just to be a coincidence and for it not to carry some echo of significance. Similar to the weight given in medical circles to the placebo effect (meaning I will please), classically trained surgeons were often instructed that most organs in all but the most dire of emergencies beseeched “noli me tangere” and that invasive measures were seldom advisable.