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Renaissance Magic - 27/Jan/2023
🕑 Added 2023-01-27 19:13:47 +0000 UTCRENAISSANCE NEOPLATONISTS
It is may 29th, 1453. You are Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, and you have just taken the city of Constantinople. You’ve been scaring the daylights out of the Christian world for a while now, but now you’ve really gone and done it. Your little jaunt through Asia Minor is causing a bunch of greek theologians to pull up and run further west into europe. The catholic church already has their hands full with a whole mess of internal conflicts. You wonder how they’re gonna handle this influx of new ideas. Sure would be a shame if you accidentally contributed to some sort of protestant reformation or something. You can’t think about that right now though, you’ve got to think of a better name for your cool new city.
Meanwhile, back in the Catholic Church, a sin is being committed. A sin so grievous and dangerous that it will eventually tear the Christian world as we know it in two: people are translating the Bible into dutch.
This may not seem like the biggest deal, but back then, the Bible wasn't something you just read. Books were expensive to make! You couldn't just let any shit-shoveling peasant pick up and read the Good Book. The Bible was printed in Latin. Masses were conducted in Latin. If you had a question, you asked your priest what the words meant.
"But doesn't that give the church fairly significant social and political control over a basic facet of life for medieval Europeans?" Why yes it does. Some people were quite upset about this. On the other hand, this isn't any ordinary book. This is the Good Book. Is the word of god something that can even be translated? Some in the church argued “sure, why not? If we translate the bible into other languages, it would probably help with conversion right?” Others argued “Not only will translating the bible into the common vernacular significantly erode our control, but it isn’t theologically possible. Latin is the oldest, most pure, most proper form of the word of god and that’s that.”
We are approaching the magic, I promise. This is a notoriously difficult era of magical history to summarize. Not only was it a period of significant and explosive change for the theological landscape of Europe, but the printing press was just invented. Writing, printing, selling, and translating books is now significantly cheaper, so everyone and their cousin wants to print one.
NOMINALISM VS REALISM
Here’s a question: What’s the relationship between a thing, and its name? For a while, medieval world was split on this question.
Common knowledge has changed. Nowadays, we are nominalists. When we say the word “dog” we know that the word “dog” is just a series of noises we use to represent the animal, the word has no real effect on the furry creature known as a dog. This was not always the case. The vast majority of medieval thinkers were realists. They believed that “dog” meant “the furry animal with four legs that barks” in the same sense that one plus one equals two.
For a moment, we must put ourselves in the jingly little shoes of a medieval person. For them, this debate had widespread consequences for the nature of reality. We know humans exist, but does the category “human” exist as a privileged part of the fabric of reality? If it does, how is it defined? What is it made of? If it doesn't, how can we be humans?
Practically, if everything in the universe has a True Name, that brings up the problem of how there are many languages on earth. If dogs have a True Name, how do we know which word is the true one? This becomes a real problem if you’re the Catholic Church and you need to translate the bible. If God wants to talk about a dog, what language does she speak?
AD FONTES!
If the renaissance had a war cry, it would be this: Ad Fontes! Back to the Sources! In many ways, the entire renaissance was built on the influx of classical texts slowly being translated into Latin at the library of Baghdad. By the 15th century, Europe found itself swimming in copies of Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and dozens of other sources of ancient knowledge.
Here’s another question: Where does knowledge come from?
If you asked most medieval scholars, you would get an answer along the lines of “Well, it comes from tradition, or legendary teachers.” This was a bit of a problem for the Church. Plato and Aristotle didn’t have much to say about Catholicism, and if you go back far enough in the tradition of Catholicism, you end up in Judaism.
Up until recently, the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) was controlled by the Ummayad Caliphate. Generally when Christians reconquer a place, they demand conversion from the populace. “Convert or we kill you” is a dreadful choice to make. For some Rabbis and Imams, conversion meant they would be able to stay with communities they had been leading for their entire lives. Rabbis who converted were known as Conversos. This gave the Christian world access to something rare for the time: Christians who spoke Hebrew.
THE RENAISSANCE NEOPLATONISTS
By the time of the renaissance, the Christian world was awash in new theological ideas. A synthesis of Neoplatonic, Orphic, Hermetic, and Kabbalistic works would form the basis of a new school of Christian esoterica. It would be assembled by Johannes Reuchlin, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno. Later it would be syncretized by Heirnich Cornelius Agrippa, and extrapolated by John Dee.
MARSILLIO FICINO
After yet another failed attempt to heal the schism between the eastern and western churches, fabulously wealthy Italian banker Cosimo de’ Medici decided to revive Plato’s Academy. He needed the most greek-obsessed scholar he could find, so he put Marsillio Ficino in charge and gave him a stack of greek manuscripts so large you could fit a trojan army inside. Notably, he was the first person to translate the works of Plato into Latin. But he was also the translator of a stack of works from Porphyry, Iamblicus, and Plotinus called Hermetica.
The trouble with this influx of new philosophies and ideas is that not all of them might’ve jived with the Catholic Church. If you were the guy translating a work from Plato or Aristotle, you had to have a good argument as to how it could further the cause of Christ, or that the text wasn’t heretical.
Ficino would come out the other end of the translating process as “A Catholic priest in 1492 with a deep and enthusiastic understanding of theologies that are almost definitely heretical.” He believed that Platonic philosophy was compatible with Christianity, a dubious proposition for the time, not impossible, but it would take some elbow grease. His masterwork was a book called Platonic Theology, which attempted to use Platonic ideas to logically prove the existence of the soul.
[get some about his mysticism. The divine mania and on the platonic theology]
PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was an odd duck. As a young scholar, he allegedly mastered Greek and Latin by the age of 13. In 1484 he met Marsillio Ficino and fabulously wealthy italian banker Lorenzo De Medici, and promptly charmed the both of them, roping tutelage from the former, and patronage from the latter. During his time in Florence he would write the 900 Theses, a text which claimed that not only were Plato and Aristotle reconcilable, but that they were compatible with Christianity. He was quite confident in the strength of his work. In fact, he was so confident that he ended the 900 Theses with the following announcement:
“THE CONCLUSIONS will not be disputed until after the Epiphany. In the meantime they will be published in all Italian universities. And if any philosopher or theologian, even from the ends of Italy, wishes to come to Rome for the sake of debating, his lord the disputer promises to pay the travel expenses from his own funds.”
His plan was to travel to Rome, have the theses published, hold a conference defending his work, defeat every challenger with Facts and Logic, and ride the wave of success to theological glory. On his way to Rome he stopped in the town of Arezzo, had an affair with the wife of one of Lorenzo de Medici’s cousins, attempted to run away with her, got beaten nearly to death, thrown in prison, and then released by order of Lorenzo himself. While recovering from his wounds, he became obsessed with magic.
When it comes to magic, calling Pico an eclectic is an understatement. While recovering from his injuries, he had time to read all the fresh manuscripts flowing into europe. Orphic, Chaldean, Hermetic, Kabbalistic, you name it. It all went into the pot of Pico’s brain, but how exactly he cooked it will take some explaining:
For Pico, and most Catholics of the time, Christianity was inevitable. All of history was leading up to Christianity being the one true religion. This was simply taken as a given, a fact of life. However, the Christianity of Pico’s day was fighting with itself, constantly in danger of fracturing. When pico dipped into all this ancient esoterica he made two big assumptions: One, that all these different forms of esoterica were actually just the same esoterica. And two, that the secret knowledge in this ancient magical tradition could be used to fix theological arguments tearing apart the catholic church. In mysticism, he saw religious unity, and in that unity he saw peace.
PERENNIALISM
Pico was what’s called a Perennialist. He believed that all the world’s religions share a single, metaphysical truth from which all doctrine grows, they are all branches of a single tree.
Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with this idea. Religions share truths all the time. It’s a lovely idea in theory, but it tends to be applied in troublesome ways. “All the world’s religious conflicts can be solved if we just understand that they are expressions of the same truth!” Sounds lovely, but Pico was a Catholic theologian in the 14th century. When he says “the same truth!” he meant “accepting Jesus Christ as lord.” Which did not go over well with Jews and Muslims.
The foundation of Pico’s radical synthesis is a theory called the Prisca Theologia. (literally “Ancient Theology”) In which he argues that God actually revealed himself to pagans several times in the form of the Divine Logos (Mind) to guide humanity to the point where it would be ready for Jesus. Specifically, he names six historical figures as the Six Sages who gave us pre-christian divine wisdom that was actually secretly Christian this whole time. They are:
- Hermes Trismegistus (legendary, occasionally divine founder of Hermeticism)
- Zoroaster (Ancient Iranian Prophet and founder of Zoroastrianism)
- Orpheus (Greek mythological figure, central figure of Orphic religion)
- Agleophemus (Proclus mentions this guy. Supposedly he is the Thracian Orphic Initiator who taught Orphic secrets to Pythagoras)
- Pythagoras (The triangle mystic)
- Plato (Plato)
PICO AND KABBALAH
(The Kabbalah chapter will be before this)
Pico getting his hands on some translated Kabbalistic texts will mark a sea change for occult history. Pico’s fascination, even admiration for Kabbalsitic theology would cement its place in occult history for better and for worse.
For Pico, Kabbalah was theological scrap that could be melted down into weapons of conversion against the Jews. In his work the Heptaplus, he literally states: “Oh, Christian brothers, I pray that you consider a little more diligently how true and sound is my exposition, when to you there will be furnished, against the stony hearts of the Hebrews, very powerful darts taken from their armaments.”
All of this begs the question: “Hey, isn’t kabbalah pretty complicated? How well did Pico actually understand this stuff?” To answer this question, let us meet Pico’s Jewish teachers.
First was Elia del Medigo, called The “Last Jewish Averroist” by his students, but considered himself a staunch follower of Maimonides. He was a sober, down-to-earth sort with a notable distaste for kabbalah. In fact, he became disillusioned with radical syncretism after a certain prominent student of his got beaten up and thrown in jail for sleeping with the wife of a Medici. Even going so far as to write the Sefer Bechinat Ha-dath, a philosophical treatise against said student’s perennial philosophy.
Next up, Flavius Mithridates. A converso with a skill for oration, referred to by his colleagues as a “clever charlatan” who preached anti-jewish ideas from the Pugio Fidei before the papal court. Known for the Bibliotheca Cabbalistica, a translation of over 70 kabbalistic works into Latin. Modern scholarly revisions of his works have found them to be “erratic” and it is likely that he added entirely fabricated christian elements to his translations to make his patrons happy. This is where Pico gets the majority of his Kabbalistic knowledge from.
https://www.ibiblio.org/expo/vatican.exhibit/exhibit/h-orient_to_rome/Orient_to_rome.html
And finally, Yohannan Alemanno. A full-blown astral magician, mystical syncretic, and the only actual kabbalist on this list. His works include everything from a kabbalistic commentary on the Torah, to a treatise on magically achieving eternal life, to a book of fun anecdotes about King Solomon.
So to recap, Pico’s Jewish teachers were: An anti-kabbalist who hated him, a known charlatan, and an astral magician. It is safe to say that his understanding of this fairly niche and complex corner of Jewish theology was incomplete.
Big Influence on Heptaplus
Apparently there was a bit of a cottage industry of conversoes translating kabbalistic texts into latin and just kinda adding trinitarian shit for the paycheck
JOHANN REUCHLIN
GIORDANO BRUNO
Mostly plagiarized Ficino, but hes where you got all the fun woodcuts and figura.
NOTES
Ad Fontes - Back to the source
Where does knowledge come from? Well, it comes from Hermes trismegistus.
Last quarter of the 15th century = Platonic + Orphic + Hermetic + Kabbalistic work
Assembled by Ficicno, Pico, and Bruno
Syncretized by Agrippa, and extrapolated by Dee
Hermes trismegistus
1433 - 1499 Marsilio Ficino
- Published the The Corpus Hermeticum though corrupted in translation. It hit the presses in 1471
- Started to translate Plato in the 15th century
- Tried to re-establish the platonic academy
- Expanded upon and systematized Platos theory of The Mania
- “On the Divine Frenzies”
- The Abstracteo, the process by which plato’s four frenzies liberate the soul, acting as stages
- Poetic: Liberates the soul through sacred language
- Telestic: Ceremonies of ritual purification allow the soul to begin traveling
- Prophetic:
- Love: soul is re-united with god
- He further explores this in On the Platonic Theologies
- He actually cites the corpus hermeticum as an example of what he means. This is truly a Christian/Hermetic theology of salvation
- “On the Heroic Frenzy”
- Plato and Aristotle underwent the bacchic rituals
1463 - 1494 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
1447 - 1500 Lodovico Lazzarelli
- First guy to identify as a Hermeticist
- Crater Hermetis - First true work of european Hermetic Philosophy
1548 - 1600 Giordano Bruno
1455 - 1522 Reuchlin
- Ad Fontes, back to the source
- De Verbo Merofico - The Wonder-working word
- On the Art of Kabbalah
- Ficino and Pico were weirdly contemptuous of “modern” magic like solomonic or astral magic. Binding demons, ritual furniture, robes, binding sigils, etc
- Shit like the munich manual
- They seemed to view these things as an extension of the debased and backwards medieval era
- Pico was the first guy to introduce Kabbalah to western society, as part of a renovation of religion
- “No science more truly assures us of the divinity of christ than magic and kabbalah”
- “No magic is efficacious unless supported by Kabbalah”
- Pico’s works were some of the first ever put on the index prohibitorum, the catholic list of banned books
- Pico was assassinated at 31 probably
- Reuchlin studied hebrew and actually valiantly argued against the destruction of hebrew texts in an effort for mass conversion, dude was an OG
The aspiring hermetic mage would have built everything off Iamblichus’s De Mysteriis
Proclus: On Sacrifices in Magic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMREGOVqxZ4&ab_channel=ESOTERICA
Reuchlin and the Wonder-Working Word
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmhmzERU84g&ab_channel=ESOTERICA
Hermetic Philosophy, Earlies European Hermeticism - Crater Hermetis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG7U_3OA868&ab_channel=ESOTERICA
Resistance is Futile: Perennialism, Platonism, and Hegemony - 1 of 2
- Dr Dan Atrell
- Most Polemics are In Group Singaling, intended to demonstrate faith
- Not all Evangelization is colonialism
- What SHOULD be criticized is this process of Appropriation and Weaponization
- 15th Century
- Christianity is in trouble
- Eastern Christianity is being encroached upon by the Ottoman Empire
- 1453, Constantinople falls of Mehmed the 2nd and this scares the FUCK out of the christian world
- Mass exile of greek scholars fleeing to italy, beginning all their texts with em
- Tehre is no Christian Kabbalah, only a Christian Interpretation of Kabbalah
- Joseph L. Blau, The Christian Interpretation of the Kabbalah in the renaissance
- Christian Perenial thought is this idea that pre-christian religion foreshadowed christianity
- The goal being to create an irrefutable system of religion that could be used to convert the world
- Perennialism: The belief that there is one metaphysical truth underlying all world religions. (or all “true” religions)
- Perennialists hold what is Universal to be significant, and what is particular to be insignificant
- Perniallism emerged as a polemical strategy to locate common denominators ebtween two similar but incomensurate belief systems
- Perennialism functions via the distinction between Exoteric and Esoteric
- Ficino Prisca Theologia
- Argues that God revealed himself as the Logos to pagans
- He gets this directly from Proclus
- The forefront of these guys was Hermes Trismegistus
- 1:26:11
- Marsillio Fincino On the Christian Religion trans. Dr. Dan Attrell
- Ficino considered jews to be valueable and worth studying, but he also considered them to not have a natural end point
- On the Spiritual Understanding:
- “In [the words fo Jeremiah,] God promises that someday He will set up a new agreement and testament, and that He will hand down a new law, different from the one which he had given to moses after he had delivered the Jews from Egypt, and that he will no longer write it on tablets, but in the minds of men, as if to say that the first one could be destroyed, not the second, and the old ceremonies ought to be maintained according to the spiritual understanding (intelligentia spiritalis) once the New Testamant is introduces. Certainly, as paul the Apostle says, when the prophet speaks of a “new agreement and testament, ” je ,eams tjat the other cam grow old and falter.”
- -
- …The divine depth of the prophetic and Christian mysteries: because it is divine, it is therefore impenetrable to human understanding. Conversely, the character of the venal and wretched Jews is entirely uncultivated and obstinate: and insatiable greed not only to preserve what is theirs, but also to earn interest; a natural love of their own people and an innate hatred for Christians.
Marsillo Ficino has a deep reverence and appreciation for Judaism as a religion, but he describes actual Jewish people as "uncultivated" and "venal." In his mind, Judaism has a sort of natural theological endpoint, as if its a seed that will inevitably sprout into Christianity. He interprets Kabbalah as "proof" that Judaism will become obsolete. His interpretation of Kabbalah is notably supersessionist and anti-Jewish, but also aggressively antisemitic. De Christiana Religione trades in some pretty awful stereotypes.
Pico de Mirandola seems to interpret Judaism as a sort of necessary root structure for Christianity. He interprets Kabbalah as evidence of some deeper truth underlying both religions, heavily implying that he thinks both Jews and Christians are doing religion wrong. Rather than supersesionism, his interpretation of Kabbalah leans into a sort of proto-theosophical stance, as if both Christianity and Judaism hold fragments of some deeper truth that must be reconstructed.
- Ficino didn’t study under jewish teachers
- Pico did
- Reuchlin did
Part 2
Prisca Theologia, the Six Sages
- Hermes Trismegistus
- Zoroaster
- Orpheus
- Agleophemus
- Pythagoras
- Plato
If the hebrews agree with us anywhere, we shall order them to stand by the ancient traditions of their fathers; if anywhere they disagree, then drawn up in Catholic legions we shall make an attack upon them. In short, whatever we detect foreign to the truth of the Gospels we shall refute to the extent of our power, while whatever we find holy and true we shall bear off from the synagogue as from a wrongful possessor to ourselves, the legitimate Israelites.
-Pico della Mirandola
Pico thought that Neoplatonists were appropriating the ideas of Christians, and not the other way around 17:46
Pico is trying to reconcile Aristotle and Plato, but his solution is very aristotelian. Ficino was a platonist. Ficino said that The One is above and outside of being. For Pico, The One IS being.
Pico is all about Averroes and merging with the Active intellect. Pico wants to annihilate himself in The One, become one with the Good. The soul merges with god.
Ficino, the soul is immortal, but goes to be with god in eternal beatitude but never fully merges.
Pico got this from Averroists like aliah del Medico
Dr. Sledge emphasizes the importance of Averroes
- Oh, Christian brothers, I pray that you consider a little more diligently how true and sound is my exposition, when to you there will be furnished, against the stony hearts of the Hbrewes, very powerful darts taken from their armaments.
- Heptaplus, 1489
- They conceived of themselves as engaging in spiritual warfare
Pico’s Jewish Teachers
Elia del Medigo
- Jewish schoolman at padua
- The Last Jewish Averroist
- Pro-Aristotle, Anti-plato, anti-Kabbalah, anti-syncretism
Flavius Mithridates
- Converso
- Preached ideas from the pugio fidei before the papal court
- (Mis)translator of 70 works of Kabbalah (This is where Pico gets his Kabbalah from)
- Pro-Platonic, Pro-Pisca Theologia, Pro-syncretism
Yohannan Alemanno
- Jewish Kabbalist and Astral Magician, Pro-syncretism
- Big Influence on Heptaplus
- Apparently there was a bit of a cottage industry of conversoes translating kabbalistic texts into latin and just kinda adding trinitarian shit for the paycheck
Wonder working word was probably the big influence on John Dee
Agrippa is getting his Kabbala from Francesco giorgi, a fransiscan, and Giorgi is getting his shit from Pico
The Last Gasp of Platonic Realism. By the time that all this was going on, the late 15th century, Nominalism had already won the day
Pico believed in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. He conceptualized magic as playing the strings between objects, and he did so with hebrew. He believed that Hebrew was the fundamentally primordial language, the language that god taught to Moses
Figura: Diagram to explain things. Very common medieval thing to try and summarize everything in a single diagram.
Joacim of Fiore, John dee calls him Joachim the prophicizer
The thing that unites the three realms is number
42:17
From the wikipedia for the problem of universals
Nominalism arose in reaction to the problem of universals, specifically accounting for the fact that some things are of the same type. For example, Fluffy and Kitzler are both cats, or, the fact that certain properties are repeatable, such as: the grass, the shirt, and Kermit the Frog are green. One wants to know by virtue of what are Fluffy and Kitzler both cats, and what makes the grass, the shirt, and Kermit green.
The Platonist answer is that all the green things are green in virtue of the existence of a universal: a single abstract thing that, in this case, is a part of all the green things. With respect to the color of the grass, the shirt and Kermit, one of their parts is identical. In this respect, the three parts are literally one. Greenness is repeatable because there is one thing that manifests itself wherever there are green things.
Nominalism denies the existence of universals. The motivation for this flows from several concerns, the first one being where they might exist. Plato famously held, on one interpretation, that there is a realm of abstract forms or universals apart from the physical world (see theory of the forms). Particular physical objects merely exemplify or instantiate the universal. But this raises the question: Where is this universal realm? One possibility is that it is outside space and time. A view sympathetic with this possibility holds that, precisely because some form is immanent in several physical objects, it must also transcend each of those physical objects; in this way, the forms are "transcendent" only insofar as they are "immanent" in many physical objects. In other words, immanence implies transcendence; they are not opposed to one another. (Nor, in this view, would there be a separate "world" or "realm" of forms that is distinct from the physical world, thus shirking much of the worry about where to locate a "universal realm".) However, naturalists assert that nothing is outside of space and time. Some Neoplatonists, such as the pagan philosopher Plotinus and the Christian philosopher Augustine, imply (anticipating conceptualism) that universals are contained within the mind of God. To complicate things, what is the nature of the instantiation or exemplification relation?
Comments
Knives
Just want to reiterate that the work you're doing here? Frankly invaluable, and to share it with patrons as you're writing it?? Incredibly generous. Thank you for all your work, it's been a delight to read through your passages and notes and translations of text I can only BEGIN to grasp and connect to each other right now.
