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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Alternative belief systems > Occult studies > Magic, alchemy & hermetic thought
This book explores a series of powerful artifacts associated with
King Solomon via legendary or extracanonical textual sources.
Tracing their cultural resonance throughout history, art historian
Allegra Iafrate delivers exciting insights into these objects and
interrogates the ways in which magic manifests itself at a material
level. Each chapter focuses on a different Solomonic object: a ring
used to control demons; a mysterious set of bottles that constrain
evil forces; an endless knot or seal with similar properties; the
shamir, known for its supernatural ability to cut through stone;
and a flying carpet that can bring the sitter anywhere he desires.
Taken together, these chapters constitute a study on the reception
of the figure of Solomon, but they are also cultural biographies of
these magical objects and their inherent aesthetic, morphological,
and technical qualities. Thought-provoking and engaging, Iafrate's
study shows how ancient magic artifacts live on in our imagination,
in items such as Sauron's ring of power, Aladdin's lamp, and the
magic carpet. It will appeal to historians of art, religion,
folklore, and literature.
When Harry Potter first boards the Hogwarts Express, he journeys to
a world which Rowling says has alchemy as its "internal logic." The
Philosopher's Stone, known for its power to transform base metals
into gold and to give immortality to its maker, is the subject of
the conflict between Harry and Voldemort in the first book of the
series. But alchemy is not about money or eternal life, it is much
more about the transformations of desire, of power and of
people-through love. Harry's equally remarkable and ordinary power
to love leads to his desire to find but not use the Philosopher's
Stone at the start of the series and his wish to end the
destructive power of the Elder Wand at the end. This collection of
essays on alchemical symbolism and transformations in Rowling's
series demonstrates how Harry's work with magical objects, people,
and creatures transfigure desire, power, and identity. As Harry's
leaden existence on Privet Drive is transformed in the company of
his friends and teachers, the Harry Potter novels have transformed
millions of readers, inspiring us to find the gold in our ordinary
lives.
This collection of essays considers the place of magic in the
modern world, first by exploring the ways in which modernity has
been defined in explicit opposition to magic and superstition, and
then by illuminating how modern proponents of magic have worked to
legitimize their practices through an overt embrace of evolving
forms such as esotericism and supernaturalism. Taking a two-track
approach, this book explores the complex dynamics of the
construction of the modern self and its relation to the modern
preoccupation with magic. Essays examine how modern “rational”
consciousness is generated and maintained and how proponents of
both magical and scientific traditions rationalize evidence to fit
accepted orthodoxy. This book also describes how people unsatisfied
with the norms of modern subjectivity embrace various forms of
magic—and the methods these modern practitioners use to
legitimate magic in the modern world. A compelling assessment of
magic from the early modern period to today, Magic in the Modern
World shows how, despite the dominant culture’s emphatic denial
of their validity, older forms of magic persist and develop while
new forms of magic continue to emerge. In addition to the editors,
contributors include Egil Asprem, Erik Davis, Megan Goodwin, Dan
Harms, Adam Jortner, and Benedek Láng.
The story of the beliefs and practices called 'magic' starts in
ancient Iran, Greece, and Rome, before entering its crucial
Christian phase in the Middle Ages. Centering on the Renaissance
and Marsilio Ficino - whose work on magic was the most influential
account written in premodern times - this groundbreaking book
treats magic as a classical tradition with foundations that were
distinctly philosophical. Besides Ficino, the premodern story of
magic also features Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus, Aquinas,
Agrippa, Pomponazzi, Porta, Bruno, Campanella, Descartes, Boyle,
Leibniz, and Newton, to name only a few of the prominent thinkers
discussed in this book. Because pictures play a key role in the
story of magic, this book is richly illustrated.
This book presents the story of a unique collection of 140
manuscripts of 'learned magic' that was sold for a fantastic sum
within the clandestine channels of the German book trade in the
early eighteenth century. The book will interpret this collection
from two angles - as an artefact of the early modern book market as
well as the longue-duree tradition of Western learned magic -, thus
taking a new stance towards scribal texts that are often regarded
as eccentric, peripheral, or marginal. The study is structured by
the apparent exceptionality, scarcity, and illegality of the
collection, and provides chapters on clandestine activities in
European book markets, questions of censorship regimes and
efficiency, the use of manuscripts in an age of print, and the
history of learned magic in early modern Europe. As the collection
has survived till this day in Leipzig University Library, the book
provides a critical edition of the 1710 selling catalogue, which
includes a brief content analysis of all extant manuscripts. The
study will be of interest to scholars and students from a variety
of fields, such as early modern book history, the history of magic,
cultural history, the sociology of religion, or the study of
Western esotericism.
In The Chain of Things, Eric Downing shows how the connection
between divinatory magic and reading shaped the experience of
reading and aesthetics among nineteenth-century realists and
modernist thinkers. He explores how writers, artists, and critics
such as Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, and Walter Benjamin drew
on the ancient practice of divination, connecting the Greek idea of
sympathetic magic to the German aesthetic concept of the attunement
of mood and atmosphere. Downing deftly traces the genealogical
connection between reading and art in classical antiquity,
nineteenth-century realism, and modernism, attending to the ways in
which the modern re-enchantment of the world-both in nature and
human society-consciously engaged ancient practices that aimed at
preternatural prediction. Of particular significance to the
argument presented in The Chain of Things is how the future figured
into the reading of texts during this period, a time when the
future as a narrative determinant or article of historical faith
was losing its force. Elaborating a new theory of magic as a
critical tool, Downing secures crucial links between the governing
notions of time, world, the "real," and art.
In Rewriting Magic, Claire Fanger explores a fourteenth-century
text called The Flowers of Heavenly Teaching. Written by a
Benedictine monk named John of Morigny, the work all but
disappeared from the historical record, and it is only now coming
to light again in multiple versions and copies. While John's book
largely comprises an extended set of prayers for gaining knowledge,
The Flowers of Heavenly Teaching is unusual among prayer books of
its time because it includes a visionary autobiography with
intimate information about the book's inspiration and composition.
Through the window of this record, we witness how John reconstructs
and reconsecrates a condemned liturgy for knowledge acquisition:
the ars notoria of Solomon. John's work was the subject of intense
criticism and public scandal, and his book was burned as heretical
in 1323. The trauma of these experiences left its imprint on the
book, but in unexpected and sometimes baffling ways. Fanger decodes
this imprint even as she relays the narrative of how she learned to
understand it. In engaging prose, she explores the twin processes
of knowledge acquisition in John's visionary autobiography and her
own work of discovery as she reconstructed the background to his
extraordinary book. Fanger's approach to her subject exemplifies
innovative historical inquiry, research, and methodology. Part
theology, part historical anthropology, part biblio-memoir,
Rewriting Magic relates a story that will have deep implications
for the study of medieval life, monasticism, prayer, magic, and
religion.
What did it mean to believe in alchemy in early modern England?
In this book, Bruce Janacek considers alchemical beliefs in the
context of the writings of Thomas Tymme, Robert Fludd, Francis
Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby, and Elias Ashmole. Rather than examine
alchemy from a scientific or medical perspective, Janacek presents
it as integrated into the broader political, philosophical, and
religious upheavals of the first half of the seventeenth century,
arguing that the interest of these elite figures in alchemy was
part of an understanding that supported their national--and in some
cases royalist--loyalty and theological orthodoxy. Janacek
investigates how and why individuals who supported or were actually
placed at the traditional center of power in England's church and
state believed in the relevance of alchemy at a time when their
society, their government, their careers, and, in some cases, their
very lives were at stake.
Daughters of Hecate unites for the first time research on the
problem of gender and magic in three ancient Mediterranean
societies: early Judaism, Christianity, and Graeco-Roman culture.
The book illuminates the gendering of ancient magic by approaching
the topic from three distinct disciplinary perspectives: literary
stereotyping, the social application of magic discourse, and
material culture.
The volume challenges presumed associations of women and magic by
probing the foundations of, processes, and motivations behind
gendered stereotypes, beginning with Western culture's earliest
associations of women and magic in the Bible and Homer's Odyssey.
Daughters of Hecate provides a nuanced exploration of the topic
while avoiding reductive approaches. In fact, the essays in this
volume uncover complexities and counter-discourses that challenge,
rather than reaffirm, many gendered stereotypes taken for granted
and reified by most modern scholarship.
By combining critical theoretical methods with research into
literary and material evidence, Daughters of Hecate interrogates
gendered stereotypes that are as relevant now as for understanding
antiquity or the early modern witch hunts.
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