ScriptusScribe | Scriptus Recensera

May 30, 2024 by ScriptusScribe

Demons of Change: Antagonism and Apotheosis in Jewish and Christian Apocalypticism – Andrei A. Orlov

Categories: luciferian, mesopotamian, Tags: SUNY Press,

Andrei Orlov is Professor of Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and has previously published several titles through SUNY Press. With his past considerations of heavenly doppelgangers, divine scapegoats, and the place of Azazel and Satanael in early Jewish demonology, Orlov often has a focus on the demonic and this is the case here as well. In this instance, it is the idea of an adept’s combat with demonic forces being a prerequisite for their apotheosis, a combative tempering within the forge of diabolical antagonism. Such combat does not simply represent a standard hero’s journey in which the protagonist defeats a monster on their way to maturity, be it Marduk and Tiamat, Sigurd and Fafnir, or Luke Skywalker and the Rancor. Rather, this process of deification is one in which the antagonist not only loses the battle but also their status, with the hero being apotheosised at their expense, taking their place (and in some instances, their clothes) and assuming their role.

Orlov has a somewhat verbose academic style, particularly in the introduction where he establishes the core thesis and maps out a general framework. It’s all perfectly legible, but it does feel almost poetic in its grandiloquence, with a noticeable preference for certain field-specific key words that get quite the workout. And wonderful words they are too, can’t fault him there as some of them are personal favourites as well, with a surfeit of ‘eschatologicals,’ ‘protologicals’ ‘metamorphoses,’ soteriological,’ ‘sacerdotal’ (five times in one paragraph), and the delightful double barrel of ‘psychodemonic anthropologies;’ a collocation that really should be slotted into more everyday conversations.

Demons of Change is divided into four chapters, each dedicated to a particular variation of these antagonistic interactions, beginning with, well, the beginning, in which the battle is betwixt God and Satan, with the primordial Adam as the protagonist who is destined to usurp the mantle of his antagonist. Key to this theme of angelic opposition is what Orlov describes as an induction ritual, in which the protagonist is presented before the angels as tselem or image of the divine, one whose arrival threatens their privileged existence, and is then either venerated or opposed by them. In apocryphal versions of the creation myth, such as those found in the Primary Adam Books, Satan’s refusal to venerate Adam is what leads to his fall from grace, abandoning the vestments of heaven to the protoplastic Adam and assuming a dark mantle. Orlov shows how this Adamic template was applied to other significant figures, beginning with the antediluvian patriarch Enoch who was caught up to heaven upon his death and, in an act of apotheosis, was presented as an Imago Dei to the angels (who, seemingly aware of the Satan-Adam precedent, knew not to make a fuss this time). Jacob’s wrestling with the angel at Bethel and the vision of the ladder stretching between heaven and earth also aligns with this theme, as does an excerpt from the Exag?g? of Ezekiel the Tragedian in which Moses describes a vision of being enthroned in heaven and having stars process in front of him in obeisance.

The full circle of this motif then occurs in the New Testament, where Jesus, the very literal iqonin or image of God, is tempted by Satan in the desert. Satan attempts to reverse his interaction in heaven with the prelapsarian Adam, compelling this New Adam to bow before him, offering him all the kingdoms of the world if he does so. When Christ refuses this genuflexion rematch, Satan departs and the gospels of both Matthew and Mark refer to angels then ministering to Jesus, drawing an inevitable parallel to the angelic attention paid in the climax of the induction rituals of other incarnations of the Imago Dei. Orlov studiously documents the evolution of these ideas and how such parallels have been drawn before in both Talmudic and Christian commentary.

In his second chapter, Orlov turns his attention to stories of fiery ordeals, in particular an apocryphal tale in which a tyrant (sometimes identified as Nimord) tried to burn a young Abraham for refusing to worship fire. The story is found in the midrashic Genesis Rabbah, but the focus here is on a version from the Slavonic recension of The Apocalypse of Abraham, a pseudepigrapha, that includes details not found elsewhere and is cited with some frequency across Orlov’s work. Thought to have been written sometime in the first or second century CE, the most obvious parallel to The Apocalypse of Abraham is the chronologically older but textually younger biblical tale of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace from the book of Daniel, with both including elements of oppressive leaders and angelic intervention. On the surface, this theme could feel somewhat divergent from the angelic and demonic antagonisms documented in the first chapter, but by drawing parallels with the fiery martyrdom of Christian saints, such as Pionius and Polycarp, Orlov shows how it relates to this book’s other theme of apotheosis. Orlov gets into the weeds here, drawing little details from various variations of the theme of fiery martyrdom to flesh out an interpretation of the apocalypse as one concerned with a ritualised apotheosis, including ideas of Abraham as a bound sacrifice whose igneous ordeal elevates him to heaven. Sometimes the recourse to chronologically and culturally diverse, but circumstantially similar, sources feels like a stretch, with the tiniest of minutiae being mentioned if it helps the speculative narrative.

This second chapter is significant because much of this book’s remainder flows from The Apocalypse of Abraham and its characters and antagonists. While there are human antagonists in the various accounts of fiery martyrdom, with the various tyrannical rulers (Nimord, Nebuchadnezzar, Marcus Aurelius) seemingly acting as avatars of demonic malice, the second section of the apocalypse features an actual demonic adversary, Azazel, who assumes the form of an unclean bird and attempts to interfere with a sacrifice Abraham performs on the summit of Mt. Horeb. The angel Yahoel assists Abraham by fighting off Azazel, and rewards the patriarch with celestial garments that had been originally set aside for the fallen angel. This allows Orlov to return to one of his favourite themes, the gifting of ritual clothing, and to use that most favoured of his phrases, sacerdotal garments. Matters sacerdotal and sartorial continue in the third chapter with a brief, and on the surface, diverting, discussion of the cosmological symbolism of the sash worn by the Hebrew high priest. The snake-like appearance of the sash’s material has long drawn comparisons with the primordial serpent Leviathan and Orlov details how the symbolism of the outer waters and its monstrous inhabitant in Jewish cosmogony had a liturgical application, particularly in the macrocosmic design of the temple in Jerusalem as a vision of the earth. As such, the High Priest could be interpreted as an eschatological Adam, an Adam Kadmon whose very form represents creation as a dynamic process of divine exile-rectification hitlabshut (‘enclothement’). Orlov affirms this interpretation by mentioning a tradition found in some Jewish traditions (as recorded in the Aramaic Targum Pseudo-Jonathan and the midrash Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer) that when Adam and Eve were clothed by God, he did so with garments made from the sloughed off skin of the Edenic serpent; repeating, once again, the motif of the clothing of a demoted antagonist being given to their replacement.

For here on out it is pretty much Everybody Loves Azazel for almost the rest of Demons of Change, with the scapegoat returning in the fourth and shortest chapter with a little comparison between the demons ritualised sacrifice (as documented in Leviticus and elaborated on by Mishnah Yoma as well as a variety of apocalypses), and the description of Great Beast’s descent from heaven and subsequent binding from the Book of Revelation. Orlov breaks down the motifs of the scapegoat ritual (banishment to the wilderness, a binding and descent from a cliff, being sealed away in an abyss, a temporary healing of the earth, and a momentary release before a final demise) and compares them to key points in the descent of the beast. They make for a neat, but by no means conclusive, simulacrum, although once again, the comparisons can feel a tiny bit circumstantial and finessed. Given the brevity of this chapter, there’s obviously not much more than can be pulled from this comparison, but it’s an attractive interpretation nonetheless.

In the penultimate chapter, Orlov broadly considers the will of Azazel and other demonic forces (such as Matema) but also uses this section as a demonological survey of how the nature of demons and spirits were understood in a variety of apocalypses and pseudepigrapha. Finally, and straying from Azazel, the concluding chapter deals with the use of fear as a component in divine encounters, with a particular focus on 2 Enoch, where this emotion often precedes their apotheosis.

Demons of Change runs to 262 pages, but with its six chapters it is something of a short book with 100 of those pages being taken up by a bibliography, an index, and rather extensive endnotes. For those who have read any of Orlov’s previous works, there is a certain atmosphere of familiarity, given the outsize role the Apocalypse of Abraham plays here and in his entire oeuvre. With that said, it is a text that warrants Orlov’s repeat visits, as he brings a different focus in this investigation and clearly knows his source material. The first chapter remains the highlight and a supreme statement of thesis, but the resulting ones have much to offer in fleshing out some of these themes.

Published by SUNY Press

May 4, 2024 by ScriptusScribe

Philosophising the Occult: Avicennan Psychology and ‘The Hidden Secret’ of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi – Michael-Sebastian Noble

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Categories: esotericism, hermeticism, mesopotamian, Tags: De Gruyter

Presented as the 35^th volume in De Gruyter’s series Studies in the History and Culture of the Middle East, Michael-Sebastian Noble’s Philosophising the Occult is a development of his 2017 doctoral thesis, pursued over four years at the University of London’s Warburg Institute. His focus here is on Fakhr al-Din al-Razi. Known as the Sultan of the Theologians, al-Razi was one of the most influential Islamic scholars of the twelfth century, writing various works on astronomy, chemistry, cosmology, history, jurisprudence, literature, medicine, ontology, philosophy, physics and theology. But he also covered matters considerably more magical and in one of his earliest works, Al-Sirr Al-Maktum Fiasrar Al-Nujcm (‘The Hidden Secret in the Secrets of the Stars’), he presented a study of the ‘craft’ of astral magic which drew upon spiritual discipline and natural philosophy to establish noetic connection with celestial souls in order to work wonders on earth. In this, the first ever full-length study of al-Sirr al-Maktum, Noble seeks to understand al-Razi’s intent in writing the work, and argues that it represents a synthesis of two sources: the perfect nature doctrine conceived by the twelfth century philosopher Abu’l-Barakat al-Baghdad?, and the naturalistic account of prophethood constructed by the eleventh century Persian polymath Ibn Sina (commonly known in the West as Avicenna).

Avicenna believed that the human soul was composed of two parts: the rational soul (responsible for intellectual thought), and the animal soul (responsible for sensation and movement). Noble argues that al-Razi’’s theory of astral magic was based on his understanding of Avicenna’s concept of bifurcated souls, with the talismanic power of the celestial spheres being mediated by the human soul. Most notably, it was the rational soul that could be used to establish a noetic connection with the celestial spheres, and it was this connection that drew down their power into a talisman.

Noble frames his exploration within three primary themes: cognition, prophethood, and soteriology, and shows how these were developed and systemised in al-Razi’s work. While this may summarise the core argument of Philosophising the Occult, Noble is nothing if not thorough in his journey getting there, providing considered diversions into various relevant areas that establish vital context. As a result, this is a book whose value extends beyond the central premise, with much that is rewarding for those with a broad interested in Arabic mysticism and its intersection with pseudo-Aristotelian and Neoplatonic cosmologies.

Central to Al-Sirr Al-Maktum F?asrar Al-Nujcm is al-Razi’s representation of the Sabians, an enigmatic ‘people of the book’ mentioned three times in the Quaran whose identity has never been firmly established. Al-Razi was little concerned about the historicity of the Sabians, and used the term to broadly describe various forms of learned astrolatrous paganism, be it Egyptian, Indian, or that of any pre-Islamic Mesopotamian people, in particular the Chaldeans. As these types of non-Islamic sources could be condemned as heretical by pious Muslims, al-Razi took a hermeneutic approach, arguing that since God’s wisdom encompasses all things, no knowledge could be considered damnable, and nothing could be said to have been created in vain. Al-Razi’s conceptualisation of the Sabians was a syncretic one, drawing specifically on Hindu and Chaldean ideas, and then run through an Avicennan filter, with recourse in some instances to al-Baghdadi as well.

In his third chapter Noble analyses the eight Sabian doctrines, as understood by al-Razi, and gets to the meat of his hypothesis, breaking down al-Razi’s analysis of these cosmological concepts and seeking to show how he was influenced by arguments of Avicenna and Abu l-Barakat al-Baghdadi. No space is spared here, with each doctrine and its interpretations explained in sometimes excruciating detail, examining how al-Razi interpreted it, and how this aligned with the cosmovisions of Avicenna and Abu l-Barakat al-Baghdadi specifically, and with the worldview of Islam in general. It is the Sabian concept of the cosmos that facilitates the use of talismans, imagining a Neoplatonic scheme of emanations in which seven concentric celestial spheres encompassed the earth, each endowed with intelligences. These rational souls, it was argued, had perfect knowledge of the universal and were the causes of all sublunary change. As such, these intelligences could be petitioned through the sympathetic magic of talismans to affect change on earth. That’s the simplest explanation, but Nobel details all the justifications and science from al-Razi, Avicenna and Abu l-Barakat al-Baghdadi. And by science, we don’t really mean anything empirical or heuristic, just theoretical and often specious speculation and thought experiments, as was the style of the times. Ah, the wisdom of the ancients.

Noble’s fourth and fifth chapters turns to the talismans themselves, first explaining, as the chapter title puts it, the general physics or talismans, and then detailing their creation through a process called tamz?j (‘blending’), in which the active celestial influences were combined with receptive terrestrial forces. There endeth the consideration of talismanic magic, and in the remaining chapters, the discussion moves to matters augural and soteriological. Nobel concludes with an appendix, providing, as a valuable service, an English translation of the Ritual of Planetary Ascent (Al-Sirr al-maktum 4:2)

Philosophising the Occult runs to almost 300 total pages and is formatted in the standard De Gruyter house style of flat colour covers, headings both supra and sub in a bold sans serif and body text in the standard slightly slab-serif face that kinda scans as a sans-serif and feels, as a result, just a little unpropitious for reading. With the book’s overly-detailed accounting of all the Neoplatonic and Avicennan speculative theorising, it can be a little hard going in places, and it does feel like a reigning in of some of Nobel’s exhaustive treatment of his subject could have been beneficial. Nevertheless, Noble succeeds is showing that al-Sirr was not an aberrant minor composition in al-Razi’s oeuvre but rather an important text that embraced an original approach to matters philosophical and scientific in cosmology.

Published by De Gruyter

April 4, 2024 by ScriptusScribe

Literatures of Alchemy in Medieval and Early Modern England – Eoin Bentick

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Categories: alchemy, hermeticism, Tags: DS Brewer

Like Bruce Janacek’s recently reviewed Alchemical Belief: Occultism in the Religious Culture of Early Modern England, this book is concerned with how alchemy was perceived in Early Modern England, with the focus here being on literary works. Rather than simply providing a survey of specifically alchemical literature from alchemists and their advocates, Eoin Bentick casts a wider net to provide more fluid understandings of the art in that period, exploring how it was conceptualised by adept and sceptic alike, and how its obfuscated language was interpreted by those who didn’t know their alembic from their athanor. In so doing, Bentick endeavours to answer the question as to why the difficult writing and language of alchemy held appeal for so many.

Literatures of Alchemy in Medieval and Early Modern England has its content divided into two sections, the first considering how alchemical obtuseness was dealt with in medieval poetry and academia, as well as the wider culture. The second turns to the language of alchemy itself and narrows the view in particular to how it was read and understood by those novitiates beginning their alchemical journey. Bentick opens with an introduction, but this is no mere formality and instead gives a thorough history of alchemy, beginning in Egypt with Zosimos of Panopolis, marking its growth in the Arab world, and then its expansion into Europe where it was assimilated into the canon of Latin scientific literature and even incorporated into Christian cosmology. Concise yet detailed, this makes for a valuable primer, even for those who might be familiar with alchemical history, allowing the background of alchemy and its procedures to be covered off before getting to the grist of this book: writings about the thing, not the thing itself..

The first chapter bears the intriguing title Ignotum Per Ignocius: Literatures of Alchemical Impotence, the choice of which becomes clear when the topic is depictions of alchemists as fools or dupes. Satirisation was the name of the game in the medieval and early modern periods, with alchemists represented in literature as either tricksters or the tricked. Bentick gives a variety of examples from Ben Johnson, Dante and Petrarch, but the largest analysis is of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in which the yeoman tells two stories, each about a different canon, both of whom are deceitful alchemists. The canon whom the yeoman is indentured to appears to be inept, despite his claims of great skill, while the second canon is a charlatan who tricks a priest into buying a recipe with the claim that it can turn things into silver. As S. Foster Damon argued 100 years ago in his article Chaucer and Alchemy, Chaucer may have attacked charlatan alchemists because they were becoming a public menace, but he appears to have also surreptitiously included information so that genuine alchemists would recognise him as one of their own; which they did. Indeed, Chaucer provides something of a through line within this book, being a friend of John Gower who is discussed in the second chapter, while a century later, the poet and alchemist Thomas Norton satirised the alchemical bona fides that Chaucer had been given.

Questions of morality and character arise again in the second chapter, Alchemical Theories of Social Reform, in which Bentick surveys the use of alchemy as a metaphor or analogy of the reinvigoration of a fallen present. The obvious exemplar of this is what Bentick refers to as the Holistic Alchemy of Roger Bacon, with the Doctor Mirabilis seeing alchemy as a force for social evolution, though perhaps not in the most altruistic of manners. Based on a unique misreading of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum Secretorum (a work that presents itself as messages given by Aristotle to Alexander during the conquest of Achaemenid Persia), Bacon believed that it was through the alchemical principles taught by Aristotle that Alexander was able to conquer the known world. For Bacon, people could be changed by the manipulation of the elements, making it possible for a skilled alchemist to transmute an entire population on the macrocosmic level just as they would the microcosmic elements in a laboratory. As unethical as this sounds, Bentick notes that this core idea would influence others who saw alchemy as capable of social improvement, such as the 14^th century poet John Gower and the 15^th century poet and alchemist, Thomas Norton. While Gower followed Bacon’s model of a moral universal improvement, Norton focussed on the idea of a redemptive Alchemical King whose changes would be more overtly political, one who would Antiquos mores mutabit in meliores (‘change old ways into better.’).

For his third chapter, British Library, MS Harley 2407, Bentick turns to the manuscript of the title and considers its compilation of alchemy-related poems. The MS consists of six booklets, mostly written by two fifteenth-century scribes, with over twenty people contributing to an accretion of notes in the margins and spaces from the fifteenth to eighteenth century; including the recognisable hands of John Dee and Elias Ashmole. There are nine Middle English poems in the manuscript, making it indicative of the veritable boom in English alchemical verse in the fifteenth century and onwards; contrasting with previous centuries in which Latin prose had dominated as the lingua alchemica, and with only a fraction of that being presented in verse. The clutch from this manuscript are categorised by Bentick as recipe poems, gnomic poems, theoretical poems, and conceit poems, and he provides an analysis of each one under those groupings.

Bentick’s fourth and final chapter, Alchemical Hermeneutics, opens with a discussion on how alchemists, with their reverence for the inerrancy of the past, reacted when coming across alchemical information that was contrary to either their training or experience. The assimilation of such potentially false knowledge required interpretation, rather than dismissal, using an Augustinian system of hermeneutics, in which everything, be it text or the physical universe, was to be interpreted in order to discovered the divine truth buried within it. This speaks to Bentick’s core theme here, that the literature of alchemy, be it by novices, sceptics or adepts, helped to perpetuate the allure of alchemy. Even when someone like Chaucer uses the Canon’s Yeoman Canon as a vehicle to depict alchemists as fools or mountebanks, such presentations encouraged readers to seek out the truths that must surely lie behind the façade. Furthermore, the rich symbolism of alchemy ensured its own perpetuity, with its lexicon gifting writers such as Shakespeare and Sidney with ready images of amelioration and mystery. These writers, then, maintained the allure of the arte, adding to its inherent sense of wonder with their alchemical use of language to create even more wonder.

Despite its four chapter length, Literatures of Alchemy in Medieval and Early Modern England feels like it crams a lot into its sub-200 pages. Bentick writes with an assured style, the general thesis being threaded throughout with no sense of wandering off into tangents or becoming mired in irrelevancies. The book is presented by D.S. Brewer as a hardback with a cover design by Hannah Gaskamp that incorporates an alchemical petegrue from MS Harley 2407. In at least this review copy, the pages are printed on an unpleasant acid-free paper by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, leaving a distracting film on one’s fingers with every page turn. In addition, the cover image is sloppily misaligned, drifting off centre so that the petegrue image touches the right edge of the book resulting in a vast empty space being left on the cover’s opposite edge; with the title and printer’s mark on the spine being similarly misaligned. It is not clear whether this slipshod production is true for all copies, or if we just got unlucky.

Published by D.S. Brewer

March 22, 2024 by ScriptusScribe

The Spiritual Power of Masks – Nigel Pennick

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Categories: folk, witchcraft, Tags: Destiny Books,

Bearing the rather poetic subtitle of Doorways to Realms Unseen, Nigel Pennick’s The Spiritual Power of Masks promises to provide a thorough exploration of the use of masks in folklore and magic, with a particular focus, as one would expect, on the British Isles. Given Pennick’s vast experience in writing on matters of folklore and magic, one would think that he has explored masks in some depth before, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. He has certainly touched on them previously as part of his broader considerations of Norse magic and folk traditions, such as chapters on masks and mumming in his 2015 Pagan Magic of the Northern Tradition: Customs, Rites, and Ceremonies, but as this book’s own Pennick-rich bibliography shows, this is the first standalone donning of such a ceremonial guise.

As the reader begins to make their way through this, a book ostensibly about the spiritual power of masks, they may notice that while there’s a lot of spiritual power here, it’s not necessarily just about masks. Instead, masks are but one accoutrement amongst many others in what can be seen as a broader consideration of all manner of guising and ritual regalia and their use across Europe in various festivities and rituals. With this broadness also comes the opportunity to investigate the folklore that lies behind or resembles such ritualised events. Thus, there are chapters about the Furious Host and Wild Hunt, as well as other types of spectral animals, all of which tend to focus just on folklore accounts, thereby effectively providing a cultural context, rather than how they might specifically relate to guising.

The area that receives the largest focus in The Spiritual Power of Masks are English folk customs, with Pennick offering individual but connected chapters on Straw Bears and Straw Men, Masquerades, Rural Ceremonies, Carnival Characters and Mumming; with a further chapter on the specific characters, disguises and costumes of Mummers’ Plays. Some of these entries do mention similarities with Scandinavian or Continental traditions (such as Germany in the connection to straw bears due to their greater popularity there), but by and large, the focus is on England and the wider British Isles.

Animal guises take up significant space in this book, with several chapters devoted to their various forms. Horses have such a prominent role in guising that they warrant their own chapter, as do dragons, with Pennick listing possibly every instance of a processional horse or dragon, including a personal anecdote about performing as the white horse at a folk festival in Cambridgeshire. The miscellaneous assortment of other animal guises, those not deserving the sixteen pages given to horses or the thirteen for dragons, receive a combined chapter, so let’s hear it for the rams, bulls, goats, camels, and a few sundry others. In addition to animal kind, Pennick devotes separate chapters to their more humanoid cousins such as straw bears/men, and the civic giants that were processed through towns and cities.

The remaining chapters, constituting about half of the book, largely turn from the players to the plays, considering the various events at which guising might occur, including Christmas revels, masquerades, puppet shows, mummer’s plays, and rural festivals. Pennick tracks the history and evolution of such events, showing the influence that Commedia dell’arte in particular had throughout Europe, immortalising such figures as Harlequin, Pulcinella, Pantalone and Pierrot. By far the largest topic covered in this grouping is mumming and mummers’ plays, as well as similar rural ceremonies. Pennick is thorough here, documenting various examples from across the British Isles, all copiously illustrated.

Leaving no stone unturned, Pennick concludes with a sequence of chapters that feel slightly odds and ends, but which consider other less discussed roles of masks and guising. Of particular interest are two chapters that deal with guising as a tool for misrule, rioting and other rebellious acts, with a focus on fiery Guy Fawkes celebrations and the somewhat related creation of brigades that allowed the disguised population to fight various injustices or attempts at political or religious control. The most delightful of these were the Skeleton Army, factions of which were established across southern England, created as a reaction and opposing force to the Salvation Army’s proselytising and calls for temperance. When the Salvation Army arrived in a town, bothering the locals with excessive hymnody and objections to alcohol, the Skeletons would mobilise, meeting them with violence and vulgarity, throwing flour, rotten eggs, and dead rats. Fun times.

The strangest of these latter chapters begins with a brief description of the English festival tradition of Pantomime before veering widely across the English Channel for an only slightly longer discussion of guises and masks in modern Avant-Garde European art movements. Bauhaus, Dada, Futurism and Surrealism get brief mentions, though these receive considerably more attention than the artists mentioned in the chapter’s final paragraph where Pennick concludes by listing the names of some mask-rearing contemporary musicians you’d never expect to see receive a mention in one of his books: the Knife, Slipknot, Pussy Riot, and the veritable kings of these unexpected and aberrant appearances, the Insane Clown Posse. Just the thought of Pennick sitting there typing ICP’s name into his manuscript creates, in one, a bubble of concentrated joy.

At 267 pages of body copy alone, this is a thorough book, one that is perhaps ill-served by the limiting title, as what Pennick presents here is a valuable resource concerning guising and related folk traditions. There is so much material here, with Pennick comprehensively drawing from a variety of sources, bringing a wealth of information together in an easily accessible reference. The abundance of information can make the reader feel overwhelmed by encyclopaedic info-dumps (a previously-aired complaint in some of Pennick’s other titles), in which the facts and information are presented abruptly, with little literary or analytical cartilage to string them together. Given how frequently this critique continues to come up in these reviews, one can assume it’s not going to change any time soon. This is a shame, especially given that Pennick is a skilled writer, and just adding a bit more analysis and continuity would raise the value of these books. With that said, and while we wait in vain for anything to change. Pennick’s exhaustive data collection is for the most part fastidiously referenced, with citations appearing in-body and pointing to a lengthy reference list at the back.

The Spiritual Power of Masks features text design and layout by Priscilla Haris Baker, using Garamond for body copy, with Belwe and Gill Sans as interior display faces, and with the decorative Amber Taste giving a vintage vibe for the cover. Like many of Pennick’s books, this one is profusely illustrated with a wide selection of photographs and other illustrations; so much so that, in some places, two-page spreads of just text can be hard to come by. This surfeit of pictures is not limited to the text body, as there is an additional 16-page section of full colour plates, doing justice to the costumes and festivities with a wonderful and welcomed burst of colour.

Published by Destiny Books

January 11, 2024 by ScriptusScribe

Magic in the Modern World: Strategies of Repression and Legitimization – Edited by Edward Bever and Randall Styers

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Categories: magick, shamanism, thelema, witchcraft, Tags: Penn State University Press

Magic in the Modern World is another entry in Penn State Press’ ever reliable Magic in History series and brings together eight essays with contributions from Egil Asprem, Erik Davis, Megan Goodwin, Dan Harms, Adam Jortner, and Benedek Láng, as well as editors Edward Bever and Randall Styers. Beyers and Styers divide the contents into two sections, beginning with Magic and the Making of Modernity, which could be broadly said to reflect a foundational theoretical approach with broad strokes outlying the interactions between magic and modernity. This leaves the second half, Magic in Modernity, to explore some fun case studies with more of a focus on the idea of legitimisation in magical practice.

One of the two core themes of this collection is how modernity has been defined in explicit opposition to magic and superstition, but with a counterargument that sometimes the role of disenchantment in the modern world has been greatly overstated, and as a result, much like the perennial punk battle cry, magic’s not dead. Styers set the stage to this in the opening Bad Habits, or, How Superstition Disappeared in the Modern World, documenting how superstition was increasingly framed in psychological terms through the various stages of modernity until it attained the status of a delusion that was an inherent threat to the order of society.

As in another reviewed title from Penn State Press, Frank Klaassen’s Making Magic in Elizabethan England, Max Weber’s concept of Entzauberung and its assumed totality is swiftly undone. In Descartes’ Dreams, the Neuropsychology of Disbelief, and the Making of the Modern Self, Bever discusses the three pivotal dreams that René Descartes experienced on a November night in 1619, and thereafter believed that a divine spirit had revealed to him a new philosophy. That Cartesian thought, that most rational of philosophies, emerged from an irrational, spiritual event, underscores how the rational cannot be so easily separated from the mystical.

For his contribution Benedek Láng explains, in the words of the title, Why Magic Cannot Be Falsified by Experiments, beginning with a question as to why scribes and collectors of grimoire did not see that some of the more ridiculous spells and operations couldn’t possibly work, whether it’s becoming invisible with certain herbs, or expelling all scorpions from Baghdad. Ultimately, Láng’s essay is a questioning of the whole idea of crucial experiments, be they in matters magical or the science laboratory.

The final essay categorised as Magic and the Making of Modernity is Adam Jortner’s Witches as Liars, which looks at the relationship between witchcraft and civilization in the Early American Republic. He argues that the rationalist response to concepts of magic and witchcraft was fundamental in the development of the political and social structures of the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian United States, with the irrationality of magic being seen not only as antithetical but as a direct threat to the nascent order of social democracy.

The four entries gathered under the heading of Magic in Modernity are a diverse bunch, covering off Enochian magic, Jack Parsons and rocketry, Seidr in contemporary Norse paganism, and Simon’s Necronomicon. That’s truly something for everyone, and Egil Asprem starts things off with Loagaeth, Q Consibra A Caosg, which navigates what he defines as the contested arena of modern Enochian angel magic. He provides a potted history of Dee and Kelley’s Enochian revelations, showing how the magical system broadly fits within Dee’s version of natural philosophy, before breaking down how these foundations have been built upon and interpreted by subsequent practitioners, ultimately taking the material far from its roots. This is familiar territory for Asprem, having written the previously reviewed Arguing With Angels, which pursued similar concerns, but with a considerably higher page count. For this outing, Enochian magic makes a suitable area for considerations of legitimisation, not just because of the inherently suspect origin of the system (transmitted by angels to a known forger in Edward Kelley) but because of the way in which subsequent adoption of its elements (or a veneer thereof) have required mental gymnastics to justify their diversions from the source.

In Babalon Launching: Jack Parsons, Rocketry, and the ‘Method of Science,’ Erik Davis considers the intersection between Parsons’s magical work and his career in rocketry, two worlds he largely kept separate. This an enjoyable read, with Davis effectively giving a brief overview of Parson’s life, focussing on particular moments and showing how the scientific model interacted with the magical one. Parsons becomes an example of how romance and rationalism are not compartmentalised or balanced in occultism, with Davis arguing that modern occultism, specifically its Thelemic strands, does not simply seek to re-enchant the world but is instead an aggressive performance of pluralism with a structural ambiguity founded on deconstructed notions of belief.

Megan Goodwin enters the world of contemporary Norse paganism with Manning the High Seat, exploring how the magical technique of Seidr is used and how its implicit associations with gender and sexuality are navigated by male practitioners. Goodwin presents a brief historical overview of Seidr before exploring the perspectives of two people, Jenny Blain and Raven Kaldera. Blain’s significant role in the promotion of Seidr in Norse Neopaganism ensures her presence here, with Goodwin crediting her with making an important contribution to the scholarship or gender and magic, and providing a thorough review of her understanding of Seidr, particularly its relation to sexuality. As Goodwin notes, though, Blain’s perspective never moves beyond the binary, employing rather basic dichotomies of straight and gay, male and female, and with none of the queer ambiguity and multiplicity that is implicit in the definition of Seidr as ergi. The ergi is plentiful in Kaldera’s definition of Seidr, though, and Goodwin appears to have a lot of sympathy for him in the presentation of his approach.

In the final essay, Dan Harms is well ensconced in his Lovecraftian wheelhouse with a consideration of the strategies of legitimisation used in the presentation of the trade paperback version of the Necronomicon by the mononymic Simon. There’s probably no other work in occult publishing that has a greater need for legitimisation than Simon’s Necronomicon, not just because it purports to be the non-fiction version of a fictional book, but because it always had an air of inauthenticity about it, right down to the cliché origin story with the mysterious monk revealing the manuscript before disappearing into unverifiable oblivion. It also seemed to be such a product of the occult scene of the 1970s New York, especially with how Herman Slater’s Warlock Shoppe was so central to its mythos, along with all those familiar scene names. Despite the transparency of the deception, Harms doesn’t descend into invective or scorn (as he is sometimes wont to do when discussing such matter on his more informal blog), but rather presents a considered analysis of each of the strategies used by Simon within the book and in marketing. There are a couple of classic strats here, as one would expect, with the most obvious being appeals to authority through comparisons to a bricolage of religious and mystical traditions, employing reduction to simplify these and enable pattern recognition to an uninformed audience.

In all, Magic in the Modern World is an interesting read, particularly in the second half where the four entries all offer something different. Body copy is devoid of any illustrations with the text set in Minion Pro by Coghill Composition Company, and presented in the consistent Magic in History style.

Published by the Pennsylvania State University Press

December 19, 2023 by ScriptusScribe

Fortuna: The Sacred and Profane Faces of Luck – Nigel Pennick

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Categories: folk, Tags: Destiny Books,

This is a brisk little read from Destiny Books’ ever-growing collection of titles by Nigel Pennick, clocking in at a total of 134 pages, which does include an index, references and appendices. The subject here is one which Pennick has some familiarity with, having considered various forms of divination throughout his written career. Rather than runes or other script-based based systems, though, this time the focus is on the core mechanics of randomness and chance that lies behind so many divinatory systems, but largely reduced to the pure mathematics of dice.

As a complete work, this is something of a strange beast, given its focussed and specific nature. In many ways, it feels like a section from another book that become unwieldy and was separated off to become its own thing. With its description of examples of gambling and dice from modern folklore, one could imagine this coming from one of Pennick’s other books where he plucks at thematic threads and goes off on little folkloric tangents with reckless abandon.

Pennick divides this brief work into equally brief chapters, ten in all, fair powering through his subject matter. The first is something of a theory dump, in regard to ideas of predestination and randomness, predominantly in conceptual terms accompanied by only a handful of references to historical examples. The second chapter is titled Lady Luck and the Goddess Fortuna, and despite the title of the book and the image of Dame Fortuna on the cover, this is really the only mention of her here, and it only runs to seven pages of body text. There’s a couple of page overview of Fortuna, but this is brief and limited to only the classical period, with no exploration of her later periods of greater prominence, the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Indeed the second half of this chapter ignores its title and abandons any discussion of Fortuna in order to discuss the historic use of dice.

And if you like dice and gambling, there’s plenty more of that here, with chapters on techniques for cheating when throwing dice, the history of wagered walks, and the pre-nineteenth century prohibitions on gambling and gaming. These are topics that might be of interest to some people, and presumably are to Pennick, but there’s no escaping the fact that, for this reviewer at least, it’s really boring, just devastating in its dullness. That these chapters feel longer than the other more interesting ones doesn’t help either, nor does their complete separation from the magical themes one might expect to find in here.

There are some valuable early chapters on geomantic divination and another on the late antique dice-based divination described in the Sortes Sanctorum text, with Pennick providing a full history of the system, including later examples of similar dice oracles. Things also refocus on matters mystical towards the end of the book with chapters on illegal gambling’s intersection with divination and magic, and on superstition in gambling, but as just discussed, these feel relatively brief and the connections tenuous. In the end, it feels like there was only so much that could be written about luck and dice systems of divination, so the rest of the word count had to be massaged with more general discussions about more mundane gambling.

Fortuna: The Sacred and Profane Faces of Luck ends with two appendices and an extensive nine page bibliography, and it certainly is a bibliography rather than a reference list, as very few of the titles are cited in the text. Only direct quotes receive in-body citing, with extended quotes getting a lot of mileage out of some titles, in particular John Ashton’s 1898 The History of Gambling in England.

Text design and layout comes from the capable hands of Virginia Scott Bowman, with type set in Garamond and Gill Sans, with the flared-serif Ribelano and a smattering of Optima as display faces. As is di rigueur for titles by Pennick, there’s a surfeit of illustrations dotted throughout the book, a combination of old etching or posters, as well as contemporary photographs of various apropos artefacts, varying in quality as is typical of this type of visual curation.

Published by Destiny Books

November 6, 2023 by ScriptusScribe

Tales & Legends of the Devil – Claude & Corinne Lecouteux

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Categories: folk, satanism, Tags: Inner Traditions,

Subtitled The Many Guises of the Primal Shapeshifter, this is an English edition of Contes et légendes du diablele, first published in French, sans the subtitle, in 2021 by Éditions Imago. As with two previously reviewed titles from Claude and Corinne Lecouteux, Mysteries of the Werewolf and Tales of Witchcraft and Wonder, Inner Traditions have put a bit of extra effort into the presentation, with a red cloth-bound hardback wrapped in a fetching dustjacket.

Les Lecouteux draw on folk traditions from all over Europe, some twenty countries including Transylvanian Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Switzerland, Italy, France, Scandinavia, Moravia, Bohemia, Lapland, and the Baltic countries. These tales are grouped together into seven categorical chapters considering the Devil as a suitor, the family of the Devil, tricking or outsmarting the Devil, the relationship between the Devil and the Church, visits to Hell, and finally, singular tales that eschew these broad classifications. Although there is a substantial bibliography at the rear of this book, the front matter includes a list of credited source that is rather humble, running to only nine works, though some of these are quite substantial, such as Walter Scherf’s 1600 page Das Märchen Lexikon, as well as the folklorist’s essential double-feature bill of Antti Aarne’s The Types of the Folktale. A Classification and Bibliography, and Stith Thompson’s seminal six-volume Motif-Index of Folk-Literature.

Following a foreword by translator Jon E. Graham, the authors give a brief introduction, introducing the folk concept of the Devil and providing a quick summary of how he appears within the tales they have collated. Leaning heavily on Aarne and Thompson’s pioneering work in folklore, each entry includes endnotes that indicate a particular folk motif when it appears in the story. These are enhanced at the end of the book with two appendices, one which lists the included tale types based on Aarne and Thompson’s international classification system, and an index of motifs associated with the devil based on Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk Literature.

The type of stories included here will be familiar to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the tropes of folklore, with the Devil appearing as an often whimsical, sometimes inept, buffoonish figure, a stark divergence from his grimdark ecclesiastical role. He gets tricked by knaves and deserters, is shot in the face by his son after mistaking a rifle for a flute, and is trapped inside a walnut. Not quite the primal shapeshifter of the subtitle, more like the primal doofus, but that probably wouldn’t look so good on the cover.

In the Scriptus Recensera review of Mysteries of the Werewolf it was noted that the entries in that book lacked references and footnotes, while later, we were happy to find, in a significant improvement, that Tales of Witchcraft and Wonder refreshingly had both. But Tales & Legends of the Devil takes a step backwards, and although the references are there at the end of every tale, only a tiny handful of them have any notes or analysis. There’s also no introduction or summary at the beginning or end of each chapter, meaning that you are just given the stories themselves and that’s about it. This wouldn’t be such a problem if it weren’t for how the book is presented as if it offers something more. This begins with the subtitle The Many Guises of the Primal Shapeshifter, which suggests some sort of editorial direction in which the idea of the Devil as a “Primal Shapeshifter” will be unpacked through canny exegesis by Les Lecouteux. This is then affirmed by a reviewer’s blurb on the back cover, hyperbolically talking of Les Lecouteux ‘unearthing’ “a truth that our culture translates into myth: we as a human community remain deeply affectionate to our old gods.” and of having created “a forbidden feast.” But nah, they didn’t do that, they just republished some old folktales.

Promotional copy from Inner Traditions also leans into this perception, crediting an agency that, save for the introduction, just isn’t in the book, with talk of the authors explaining this, or peeling back the Christian veneer here, and even tracing the devil’s shapeshifting powers back to their Vedic origins in ancient India. Um, what? That weird, aberrant little claim is a marketer’s injudicious extrapolation of a strange start to a discussion of the Devil as shapeshifter in which Les Lecouteux make the eyebrow-raising declaration that the Vedic names for the devil are kamarupa or vicvarupa, and saying that these names mean “he who changes shape at will.” This may be indicative of some loss in translation, if we’re generous, because that’s quite the claim to make and there is no further explanation as to how the Devil would even have a name in Bronze Age India, As it is, K?mar?pa is simply the name of an early semi-mythical state from India’s Classical period (with an etymology, developed six centuries later, explaining it as the place where the god of love K?madeva regained his rupa or form). Similarly, Vicvarupa is presumably Vi?var?pa, the name of a theophany of Vishnu which is also used as an epithet for Soma and Rudra, amongst others deva, and as a name of Tvastr who is, at least, classified as an asura. But I digress.

The value, then, of Tales & Legends of the Devil is more humble than the marketing might have us believe, and yet, perhaps more worthy. For it is found in its concatenation of tales, making it a handing resource for getting an exclusively diabolical, albeit often comical, slice of the far larger pie that is folktales and legends.

As is tradition, Inner Tradition have turned to Debbie Glogover for the text and design layout here, with the body of Tales & Legends of the Devil set in Garamond, paired with Nocturne Serif and Gill Sans as display faces, and with the battered serif of Zamora taking the lead for chapter headings and as the cover star. The title text, along with the cover hero image (using the image of The Trinity of Absolute Evil based on a miniature from the 15th century Histoire du Saint-Graal), are both spot varnished on the ruddy dust jacket for that extra bit of class.

Published by Inner Traditions

October 11, 2023 by ScriptusScribe

Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy – Marla Segol

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Categories: qabalah, Tags: Penn State University Press

With its provocative title, Kabbalah and Sex Magic makes for an intriguing entry in Penn State University Press’ Magic in History series. Marla Segol shows how the cosmology that underpins much of Kabbalah is inherently sexual and corporeal, being based on the interaction between human and divine bodies. Drawing on a diverse wealth of texts spanning the fifth to the twelfth centuries from Byzantium, Persia, Iberia, and southern France, she argues that in its fully developed medieval form, Kabbalah represented a ritualised mythos of divine creation through sexual reproduction. In Jewish mysticism, to study through reading was an intimate and embodied undertaking, with the act of seeing being perceived as a form of touching in which sexuality was the paradigmatic form of interembodiment.

Segol is the Director of Undergraduate Studies at Buffalo University and an Associate Professor in its Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies, with a particular interest in sexuality and the body in Jewish mysticism and contemporary New Age religion. This is very much evident in the chapter divisions employed here, and in Segol’s other published work; as parts of this book have been previously published, most notably her 2012 Word and Image in Medieval Kabbalah: the Texts, Commentaries and Diagrams of the Sefer Yetsirah.

Despite what the title might suggest, Segol’s focus is limited to only certain areas of Kabbalah and is by no means comprehensive. Indeed, it is worth reiterating that many of the texts here can be classified as proto-Kabbalistic, predating the modern emergence of Kabbalah in the twelfth century; fulfilling the promise of the subtitle that describes this as a mythical-ritual genealogy. As a result, her discussion of Kabbalah’s foundational text, the thirteenth century Zohar, is somewhat cursory, as is any consideration of the Lurianic Kabbalah of the sixteenth century. Although both of these fare better than the Kabbalistic interpretations of the Frankist, Sabbatean and Hasidic movements, which are not mentioned at all.

In her first chapter, Segol focuses on the oldest text considered here, Shi’ur Qomah (‘The Measure of the Body’), a midrash which dates from between the fifth and seventh century CE and which combines a visionary experience with an exegesis on the Song of Songs (5:11-16). Segol describes it as “the most important Jewish esoteric text for the study of divine embodiment and thus for the study of kabbalistic sex magic today,” and indeed, much of what she considers later in this title has a grounding here. It is a remarkable work in which the angel Metatron reveals to the tanna Rabbi Ishmael a vision of the cosmic body of God, intimately naming and measuring each divine body part and describing the Hebrew letters that are inscribed on them. Segol shows how the text’s midrashic intersection with the Song of Songs highlights the fundamentally erotic nature of this visionary encounter; somewhat justifying Maimonides’ belief that it was a work so heretical that it warranted burning. Segol argues that this text and its encounter with an inscribed and bejewelled divine corporeality serves a theurgic function via the conventions of amulets and magic seals, protecting and transforming the operator, and imagining the relationship as an aestheticized and sexualized one.

Although she doesn’t give a textual analysis of the entire Shi’ur Qomah (and by the end of chapter resorts to mere summaries of some of its sections, sans any direct quotes), Segol does a thorough job showing the eroticism inherent in the text. Although, it must be said that, given the veiled, circumspect and ambiguous quality of the language used in this midrash, it can sometimes feel as if almost anything is ripe for a sexual interpretation, one quite a odds with conventional ideas about Judaism and Christianity. This use of erotic metaphor can lead to some bizarre imagery, like divine testicles filled with wax and fire.

In the following chapter, Segol builds upon the themes found within Shi’ur Qomah by considering two thematically and functionally diverse texts, both of which date from around the same period: the medical handbook Sefer Refuot and the cosmological and mathematical Sefer Yetzirah. The Sefer Refuot is once again concerned with corporeality, adopting a microcosmic model to imagine the human body as a mirror of the divine body, allowing the former to harness the power of the later in order to heal. The Sefer Yetzirah, meanwhile, gives an account of creation in which both the microcosm and the macrocosm are products of the mystic combination of 32 characters, including the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the Ten Numbers, meaning the Sefirot. The language of the Sefer Yetzirah genders and sexualizes these components, with the sefirot being gendered as either male or female, depending on the verse, and the primary Hebrew letters being celebrated as “mothers, from which all else is born.”

In her third chapter, Segol continues her focus on the concept of the microcosm and shows how it was developed in the tenth and eleventh century through three texts that adapted what had been established by scripture, Shi’ur Qomah, the Sefer Refuot and the Sefer Yetzirah. One of these works, Shabbetai Donnolo’s Sefer Hakhmoni (Book of Wisdom), comes from the tenth century, while Gabirol’s Tikun Midot HaNefesh (Improvement of the Moral Qualities) and Bahya ibn Paquda’s Torat Chovot HaLevavot (Duties of the Heart) are from the eleventh. As with some of the other previously considered texts, these works combine Judaic metaphysics with concepts from Greek myth and cosmology, providing a method for practitioners to emulate God and access divine power, thereby impacting the cosmos itself.

Segol devotes her final section of textual analysis to the Sefer HaBahir, a composite work dating variously from the tenth and twelfth centuries; although apocryphally credited to the first century rabbinic sage Nehunya ben HaKanah. The Sefer HaBahir contains several literary layers, denoting different authors and periods of composition. This is a style that is emblematic of a work that defies the kind of order that scholars inevitably seek to impose on it, often by ignoring the “instability of its imagery, nonbinary genderings” and its “good-natured confounding of cognitive categories,” as Segol wonderfully terms them.

In her concluding chapter, Segol moves through the medieval period and into the modern, comparing the precedents she has covered with what contemporary practitioners are doing. However, from the offset, this is a strained comparison, as medieval kabbalists share little with modern wellness and New Age self-help gurus who are covered here. Space is given to the so-called America’s Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, to Kelle Sparta (a “spiritual coach and transformational shaman” who calls herself The Spirit Doctor™), and to self-described “international love and intimacy expert” Robyn Vogel. Most egregious of all is the inclusion of the Kabbalah Centre and its former co-director, Yehuda Berg, who was removed from the position for sexual assault. In a quote referenced here, Berg claims to regard selfish sexuality as the original sin which caused a separation between the human and the divine, but his actions stand in stark contrast to such lofty and disingenuous White-Knighting.

Another matter of distinction between such modern practitioners and their predecessors, and one which Segol could have interrogated further, is that there is a distinct queerness in the eroticism of the source texts, one that destabilises heteronormativity and its attendant hierarchies, embracing, instead, an atmosphere of divine gender fluidity. In contrast, Berg and his modern ilk conceive of sex within a deeply conventional and frankly boring framework, one that is dull in both its heteronormativity and its adherence to the binary, and whose bland inevitable fruits can be seen harvested in the criminal charges against Berg. In a similar manner, Rabbi Boteach centres the male experience (with the female as mere sexual muse), while Vogel expresses an enervative and reactionary trad-wife gender essentialism that seems indicative of the inherently conservative spine that underlies so much of the entrepreneurial wellness movement. Rather than focus on the likes of Berg and Vogel, it would perhaps have been considerably more interesting to consider the inheritance of the Shi’ur Qomah in earlier Frankist and Sabbatean thought, given the core notion in those movements that intercourse in the human realm could stimulate intercourse in the cosmic realm. Further, the antinomian corporeality so thoroughly covered throughout this book has obvious mirrors in the Sabbatean and Frankish belief that rituals of transgressive sex, which they viewed as imitations of unrestrained relations in the divine world, could lead to cosmic redemption. Similarly, it would have been interesting to draw comparisons with Hasidism, and its idea of transforming mundane human impulses into elevated spiritual ones, such as the Ba‘al Shem Tov encouraging the use of sexual desire as an instrument to achieve a closer union with God, or the likening of swaying during prayer to the act of intercourse with the shekhinah.

Kabbalah and Sex Magic runs to 166 pages, with an additional 43 for notes, references and an index, but given its dense, textual subject matter, it does not feel short. Despite the slight sense of a misleading title, and gaps in what could have been covered, this is a valuable work that brings the eroticism inherent in the Shi’ur Qomahi and other proto-Kabbalistic texts to prominence. It is presented as a hardback with a glossy dustjacket.

Published by the Pennsylvania State University Press

August 28, 2023 by ScriptusScribe

The Light of Hermes Trismegistus – Charles Stein

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Categories: alchemy, classical, hellenic, hermeticism, Tags: Inner Traditions,

Charles Stein’s The Light of Hermes Trismegistus is one of those releases from Inner Traditions that feels a little different from their usual fare, appearing as something for shelving in the reference section, rather than the personal growth or practical magic ones. Stein has a Ph.D. in literature and a bachelor’s degree in ancient Greek, and in the past he has principally published works of poetry, as well as a Persephone-focussed study of the Eleusian Mysteries. With this new book he provides translations of what are categorised here as seven essential Hermetic texts, each drawn from the earliest written source, and with context and further insights provided by Stein’s preamble and voluminous commentaries.

Despite a subtitle promising “seven Hermetic texts,” the works included here come from a period that spans several centuries, beginning in the seventh century BCE and ending in the fourth century CE, with only one of them, Poimandres, having provenance within that great canon of Hermetic thought, the Corpus Hermeticum. Thus, instead of being texts that could be specifically defined, in a purely technical sense, as Hermetica, these are works that pull on threads various, drawing from Greek myth, the Homeric Hymns, Neoplatonism, archaic alchemy, and (in the case of Apuleius’ The Metamorphoses) picaresque novels from ancient Rome. The one occasional through-line amongst these temporally and culturally diverse texts is Hermes, whether he appears as the divine messenger of Greek myth, as seen in Hesiod’s Theogony, or as the later Hellenistic syncretic form of the fabled Hermes Trismegistus; with Stein regarding the mythic and the legendary incarnations as largely one and the same.

Stein opens with a substantial introduction, outlining his focus on Hermes in a rather personal and devotional manner, describing him as the very principle of the mind in all its possibilities. Here, Stein makes clear his intent, defining this work as an exercise in what he calls configurative theology, with an attendant configurative theophany, emphasising the concept of hermeneutics, in which the translation and interpretations of a text perpetuate it in new, ever evolving ways.

Hesiod’s Theogony is the first work featured here, with Stein translating from the original Greek as recorded in Hugh G. Evelyn-White’s 1977 collection of the Homeric Hymns and works by Hesiod. As a poem dated to the eighth or seventh century BCE, this is the piece furthest from the traditional corpus of Hermetica, retelling the creation of the world. In his commentary, Stein ties this act of cosmic creation to Hesiod’s text itself, saying that Theogony does not simply describe the act but rather, through the reading thereof, initiates it. This is emblematic of Stein’s hermeneutic approach to this material, using etymology, historical precedent and philosophy to present it as not only profound, but inherently magical.

Rather than providing a line-by-line analysis of each text, Stein’s commentary is often focussed little on the specific textual content itself, and instead uses the works as starting off points for broader discussions of each core theme. Sometimes this extends far beyond the source texts, such as in the translation of a text by Zosimos of Panopolis, which is followed by an extensive overview of alchemy that stretches centuries, even millennia beyond the fourth century origins of the source; embracing everything from the Greek Magical Papyri to seventeen and eighteenth century alchemists, but without too much reference to the text itself.

This book’s Hermes-focussed brief finds a good fit in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, for which Stein provides a nimble translation followed by commentary focussed on the themes of magical voice and conscious listening. This is the abruptly book ended by an assemblage of somewhat contextless and usually brief additional comments on various matters from within the hymn, some as little as a sentence long, each divided by a short row of bullet points as if they were research notes that have been formatted into the chapter by mistake (not that they were).

In the next section, The Poem of Parmenides, Stein translates the fragments of Parmenides’ sole surviving work, usually retroactively referred to, though not here, as On Nature. Here the following commentary is less an exegesis on matters metaphysical and is, for the most part, purely textual in its focus, with a selection of notes about the translation.

Stein’s translations are often functional with a literal approach that predicates economy over poeticism. His translation of The Poimandres, for example is almost staccato in its brevity, with none of the free verse flourish and beauty of G.R.S. Mead’s version. The same is true of the Chaldean Oracles, though this is largely due to the fragmentary nature of the very source material. For the version here, Stein has used only 87 of the 260 extant fragments, and, diverging from the ordering template established in 1894 by Wilhelm Kroll, has rearranged them as if they make up a single poem.

After a free verse reinterpretation of the vision of Isis sequence from Apuleius’ prose The Metamorphoses, Stein concludes with a translation of a foundational but innominate alchemical text by Zosimos of Panopolis, in which the 4^th century Greco-Egyptian alchemist related a series of visionary dream journeys. This translation dates from 1964, using a text found in the Columbia University Library (though Stein notes that the exact source document is unknown as he no longer has the reference), and it was first published the same in his own single issue journal of the occult and the phenomenology, Aion: A Journal of Traditionary Science. For his translation, Stein uses the title On Divine Virtue and follows it with a commentary that is significantly longer than the mere five pages of entries from Zosimos’ dream journal.

Priscilla Harris Baker provides the text design and layout for The Light of Hermes Trismegistus, using Garamond for body copy and Trajan, Optima and Gill Sans as display faces. The translations themselves are formatted in Friz Quadrata, a pleasant enough modern serif, but one that feels a little incongruous for content from the Hellenistic and Roman eras. With its heavier than usual typographic weight, it is a face that seems more suited for display purposes, and at this point size, the tiny serifs almost disappear, giving the impression of a bulky san serif whose readability is not ideal for often poetically-formatted text. Like another Hermetic-themed work recently published by Inner Traditions, Marlene Seven Bremner’s Hermetic Philosophy and Creative Alchemy, this book has been granted a little more finesse than their usual trade paperbacks. It is presented as a sturdy hardback wrapped in a fetching blue-hued dustjacket, with foiled gold text on both jacket and spine; though it must be said that the gold of the title makes it hard to read against the blue background of the dustjacket.

Published by Inner Traditions

June 11, 2023 by ScriptusScribe

Alchemical Belief: Occultism in the Religious Culture of Early Modern England – Bruce Janacek

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Categories: alchemy, Tags: Penn State University Press

In this unique title, Bruce Janacek explores alchemy in early modern England, but not from a scientific or even necessarily occult perspective. Instead, this is a consideration of how the art was contextualised within the lives, beliefs and philosophies of otherwise religious men for whom an interest in esoteric matters might seem incongruous. In so doing, Janacek shows how the aspirational and hopeful principles that underlie alchemy provided a language and methodology for restoring order, in either a political or religious context, to what was perceived as a disordered world. Janacek divides his books into five chapters, each focusing on one of the major examples of this intersection betwixt religion and alchemy: Thomas Tymme, Robert Fludd, Francis Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby, and Elias Ashmole.

The first of these men, Thomas Tymme, was a sixteenth-century minister, making him perhaps the most unlikely of advocates for an occult science such as alchemy. Janacek shows how Tymme’s primary concerns was the schisms within Christendom, specifically in post-Reformation England which had seen the emergence of Protestant dissenter groups who separated themselves from the Church of England, including Brownists, Puritans, Familists and Presbyterians and others. For Tymme, such factions were leading England to ruin, and constituted an enemy within that was far more dangerous than any foreign power. Such ecumenical concerns dominated Tymme’s initial run of publications, which Janacek documents fully, but following a largely silent decade between 1592 and 1602, Tymme turned somewhat unexpectedly to alchemy, publishing three treatises over the course of the following decade. He began with A Light in Darkness, a commentary on John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica, in which he traced the origin of esoteric tradition to the Postlapsarian world and gave Tubalcain a prominent role as an antediluvian alchemical figure, referring to him as “that Vulcanical Abram Tubalcain the astrologian and great arithmetitian.” As with this retelling of biblical history, the two periods of Tymme’s writing have a through line in the theme of spiritual harmony, with Tymme seeing the unity that he sought within Christendom as an emulation of divine oneness, a state that was, for him, illustrated by alchemical processes. Essentially, the universe was a divinely-ordered place and alchemy revealed its order.

Robert Fludd seems a more obvious alchemical fit given his proximity to similar subjects as a Paracelsian physician and defender of Rosicrucianism. Like Tymme, Fludd’s promotion of alchemy was tied to a natural theology that saw nature in all its forms, including alchemy, music and mathematics, as a revelation of God’s presence: nature was essentially a testament to God’s hand that could be read as easily as inerrant scripture. Fludd also shared Tymme’s concerns with unity, though rather than the ecclesiastical irenicism that would have brought Christendom together, he sought one that removed the boundaries between philosophical systems, integrating religious, philosophical and occult traditions. It is Frudd’s natural theology and its relationship to alchemy that Janacek focuses on here, particularly in contrast to the tutor and author, Patrick Scot, who, though accepting of alchemy as allegory, found it anathema to see it and any efficacy as a sign of God’s hand. Janacek illustrates this divide by analysing Scot’s refutation of alchemy, The Tillage of Light, and Fludd’s unpublished response to it, Truth’s Golden Harrow, showing how the difference of opinion between the two men reflected wider philosophical divides, in particular the orthodox distrust of the emerging spirit of Pyrrhonic scepticism. This highlights one of the joys of Janacek’s writing here, how he effortlessly contextualises everything within the mores and shifting beliefs of the time, whether it is alchemy’s relationship to scepticism, or in another instance, how Fludd’s coadunative motivations embraced and aligned with Cabalism’s search for divine union.

Interestingly, of the five figures discussed in this work it is Francis Bacon who emerges as the most unlikely of alchemists, more so than even the Reverend Tymme, with Janacek focussing for most of his chapter on the father of empiricism’s published distain for the art. Bacon was withering in his treatment of alchemists, diagnosing them as being infected by their imagination, and calling Paracelsus, in the sickest of burns, the ‘adopted son of the family of asses’ and someone whose writings were the mere braying of a person possessed of a conspicuously braggart air. But Janacek attributes much of this invective to Bacon’s practiced dissimulation, an essential skill as a courtier for both Elizabeth I and James I, where one’s longevity could be assured through the judicious allegiances and the circumspect giving and withholding of advice or opinions. Drawing on Paolo Rossi’s ground-breaking 1957 rehabilitation of Bacon’s association with magic, Janacek shows how Bacon’s core ideas, as expressed in his Novum Organum, such as the spiritual quality of matter and its potential for mutability, were shared with alchemists.

Amongst the esteemed Protestants considered by Janacek is a lone Catholic, the courtier, diplomat and natural philosopher Sir Kenelm Digby. Like his contemporaries, Digby shared a concern with religious harmony, although for him, this was to be found in Catholicism, which, as embodied in the miracle of transubstantiation, stood for unity, inclusiveness and perfection; unlike the division and discord of Protestantism. For Digby, the miraculous process of transubstantiation was mirrored in alchemy and Janacek shows how this facilitated a vision of alchemy that tacked closely to Catholicism, with, in one instance, a particular emphasis on the theme of resurrection as an analogue of alchemical process. Digby’s last alchemical text, the posthumously-published Chymical Secrets, stands as a testament to this amalgam of religion and occult science, with a preface that acts as an apologetic for both alchemy and Catholicism, arguing that the Catholic doctrine of free will was a crucial element in the alchemical process. In this process Digby found a manifestation of the Trinity, with the stages and materials in the act of transmutation marking out the Creator (“Soul”), the Incarnation (“Body”) and the Holy Spirit (“Spirit”).

Janacek’s concluding chapter concerns the antiquary and politician Elias Ashmole who is justifiably immortalised in the University of Oxford museum that bears his name, a site that is the fullest realisation of his life-long collecting of naturalia, artificialia, as well as heraldic, astrological and alchemical manuscripts. Janacek shows how Ashmole’s dedicated pursuit and publication of alchemical manuscripts aligned with the hopes for unity that underscored the philosophies and goals of his predecessors Tymme, Fludd, Bacon, and Digby. Ashmole identified himself as a priestly figure and envisioned his collecting and publishing of knowledge as sacred work, something which Janacek shows was not an uncommon practice at the time, with similar acts of agglomeration being visualised as vehicles for Edenic renewal. Ashmole’s publication of Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum is exemplary of this motivation and his belief that alchemy was key to acquiring prelapsarian wisdom and freeing humanity from the corruption wrought by the Fall of man. By compiling, as it did, alchemical texts by Thomas Norton, George Ripley, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, John Lydgate, John Dastin, Abraham Andrews, William Backhouse and various anonymous authors, this British chemical theatre could essentially be seen as a devotional work, a testament to alchemy’s transformative potential.

Alchemical Belief runs to a mere 164 pages, followed by a significant wad of endnotes and references, but it by no means feels short, with the small point size cramming a significant word count into each page, and illustrations being kept to a minimum. In addition, Janacek has a writing style that if not dense could be considered comprehensive, often straying from the respective main subject into broader but relevant areas. This never feels egregious, and indeed it is always in the service of providing valuable context. For example, a discussion of Ashmole’s interest in botany and gardening (simultaneous with his exploration of alchemy) evolves into a larger discussion of how the use of collecting as an aide to Edenic renewal extended to formal gardens. A garden that incorporated numerology, cabalism or biblical symbolism into its design extended such a locus from its purely botanical function to one that created a new vision of the relationship between humanity and nature. As a result, the reader expecting a book simply about alchemy may find themselves knowing significantly more about the broader concerns of early modern England, both mundane and esoteric. Janacek ultimately succeeds in his brief, showing how alchemy was not, as one could superficially view it, a mere occult science (or pseudoscience), but was instead something that intelligent men could integrate into their religious world view, often with little effort or regret.

Published by the Pennsylvania State University Press