Alchemical Emblems, Occult Diagrams, and Memory Arts: 2011

Leo Catana on Giordano Bruno's "system" of philosophy and use of
"principle" in De Minimo+De Causa http://t.co/WnsxTpw3 @EPButler read this?

Giving mad people what they want (i.e. care, information,
transactions) is a mad business.

a more secure historical knowledge of
esoteric texts will help people apply them to their own eso. practices

the initiation of influence

All the texts of "Hermetic" occultism since the 19th century have
spoken to an audience embedded in a specifically post-industrial worldview

19th century style "Hermetic" magic doesn't offer an authentic
experience of ancient magic. Arguably it wasn't intended to: modern
concerns.

"Jung—who regarded himself as a scientist—is today remembered
more as a countercultural icon, proponent of spirituality outside
religion..."

C.Hakim:‘meritocratic capitalist values...invite us to admire
people who exploit their human capital for personal gain
http://t.co/AQArxYRB

@_shrine_ unity isn't always worth trimming off all the edges of
difference. we can get unity w/o ignoring the otherness @EPButler

RT @EPButler "...it is important to downgrade comparison
ontologically: a fuzzy image instead of the identity prior to difference."

@Jinx_Disruption My own focus is on texts that are all in some way
post-Pico: Reuchlin, Agrippa, John Dee, Giordano Bruno, but resist groupn

@Jinx_Disruption my "research focus" has shifted too many times as I
dig problem w/"genres" like "Christian Cabala" "Neoplatonism" "Gnostic"

@Jinx_Disruption Now, granted, implicit in this critique of "Western
Esotericism" is that there's a problem/funny emphasis on which texts...

@Jinx_Disruption The texts that are listed in the canon of "Western
Esotericism." See Faivre, Stuckrad, Hanegraaff for key secondary texts.

@EPButler "Western Esotericism" is doing a totalizing project,
haunted by an allergy to the other, but thinks it is "respecting
differences"

@EPButler Yes! A healthy respect for the irreducible otherness and
distance of this material is all I'm asking for. Is that so much?

RT @EPButler It was no accident: there's an ideology that grabs for
the same in the different, then drops the book.

@EPButler A big part of the problem is that many of these fuzzy
comparitivist+universalist notions snuck into the umbrella w/o
justification

If we can be more careful about closely reading the texts, with a
spiritual practice of confirming from evidence, we can take bigger risks!

The kind of methodological caution I'm advocating is not intended to
limit speculation, but rather a better assessment of hermeneutical risk

"Western Esotericism" needs to return to the texts. We need more
experts in the languages who can read them, critical editions, translations

RT @sgbrownlow: Therapy is two people sitting down and trying to find
out what the hell one of them wants. ~Milton Erickson

Rees:Pitfalls include a tendency to confuse our metaphors with the
act itself,difficulties attendant to discredited notions of introspection

The field of "Western Esotericism" has benefited greatly from the
myth of "Western Esotericism" but it needs to escape from problem methods.

The solution is as boring as ever. Work the methodology, but never
stop paying attention to the specifics of the texts. Difficulty is the ma

meta-historical projects studying how to apply Imaginative
Participation to historical problems must be careful not to get lost in
Theory...

@narada314 My personal take is we should respect what the Mayans
actually thought about time, which can teach us a lot. http://t.co/ha4DNTpY

@narada314 It's easy to use the evidence to demonstrate that there
was never any reason for claims of Arguelles, etc. http://t.co/zIwtCyMj

Versluis, Voss, et al. are absolutely correct to criticize limitation
of academic methods, but without grounding in texts get too far afield

Too much of the scholarship based on Versluis/Voss style criticism
about academic limits fails to preserve what is good about academic care.

Imaginative Participation in esoteric texts provides phemonological
evidence better applied to one's own life than dubious historical claims

Any such imaginative participation shouldn't be limited in terms of
what imaginative results are valued/but these aren't historical evidence

The Historiographical Concept 'System of Philosophy': It's Origin,
Nature, Influence, and Legitimacy http://t.co/lkPA82qO

It's all commedia dell'arte, a lazzi (sp?) of the ladder.

RT @helacious: @t3dy You're related to academia and arcana in a way
that doesn't, apparently, reduce you to cataclysmic giggling.

Statue of Egyptian king Amenhotep III found http://t.co/jG1tuQ6O

"Put Out of Her Course": Images of the Monstrous in de Bry's
Illustrations of Atalanta fugiens http://t.co/skQRZCml

Hegel on Leibniz vs.Spinoza-existence for self, the monad, but the
monad regarded as the absolute Notion, though perhaps not yet as the "I."

The main endeavour of Bruno was thus to represent the All+One, after
the method of Lullus, as a system of classes of regular determinations.

...Hence in the manner of Proclus he specifies the three spheres."
Hegel on Giordano Bruno in The History of Philosophy http://t.co/wcE2fAie

@helacious everybody wants to build systems out of triangles. "After
the bicycle, it always comes the tricycle." Adam Weishaupt

Hegel: "Since Bruno sought to apprehend this connection more closely,
he considers thinking as a subjective art and activity of the soul."

Hegel on Johannes Reuchlin http://t.co/H4hgJPuL "the Cabalistic
philosophy found a defender."

Hegel on Reuchlin: He endeavoured to reconstruct the Pythagorean
philosophy proper; but he mingled with it much that is vague and mysterious

Hegel on Pico della Mirandola http://t.co/D1tPjYBn (finds it worth
emphasizing that Pico took 55 conclusions from Proclus)

"...this metaphysic was killed, and its parts in their lifelessness
were separated and parcelled out." -Hegel on the Scholastics

Hegel on Lull http://t.co/fRsNeqnr (with trippy illustrations I
added)

@17beowulf I hope to one day see annotated editions of Bruno's
magical+memory texts that explain WTF is going on...

I read in an Alchemy Dictionary that Michael Maier wrote of his
fugues that they were admittedly musically inexpert but reader could fix
'em

@17beowulf I thought I heard a few years ago that Ingrid Rowland was
doing a translation of The Shadows of Ideas into English. soon come?

@EPButler I tend to be wary of sticking gnosis to things, the
category itself already being so unstable @Sababarbathioth @17beowulf

"His learning was generally understood to consist largely of magic."
-Hegel on Albertus Magnus

@cole_tucker most memorable concept for me was the "state of the
stone" lecture, I loved the picture of alchemical social involvedness

"To call him an enthusiast signifies nothing at all." -Hegel on Jacob
Boehme http://t.co/QJDgU5yh cc @erik_davis

@TheRoyalArt here's a teaser of a Kassell article on astrological
tables that might be of interest http://t.co/SHdgyg6l

Hegel on Kabbalah and Gnosticism http://t.co/8WJXoki7

@cole_tucker What Greek/Roman scholarly stuff are you reading? I need
to go back to the PGM, Gregory Shaw and theurgy studies since.

@cole_tucker Kiekhefer is great, check out his "Specific Rationality
of Medieval Magic" http://t.co/4QJbeIMD he's good on Christian Kabbalah

@cole_tucker There's a lot of great stuff on Dee. My favorites are
Clulee+Clucas (whom I've partied with) Harkness, Szonyi, Hakansson,Leitch

@cole_tucker Walker's "Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to
Campanella" would def. be a good place to go, to follow roots of Couliano.

I agree with scholars like Versluis, who argue that we must
"imaginatively participate" in the texts to grok their magic. But only so
far...

@narada314 Not knowing what a people predicted is never a good
argument in favor of some implausible speculation. Except on History
channel.

Geometry and Rhetoric: Thinking about Thinking in Pictures
http://t.co/CrDlN8oO J.M. Rees

Arielle Saiber: Giordano Bruno indicated that mystical union is not
possible http://t.co/66oMpmOg

Nuccio Ordine on Giordano Bruno and the Philosophy of the Ass
http://t.co/NGS358AL (something like The Fool of the Tarot?)

@kimcascone @hrmtc Lachmann's very useful too. His "The Dark Muse" is
like a sequel to Joscelyn Godwin's "Theosophical Enlightenment"

@hrmtc also very readable introductions: Secret History of Hermes
Trismegistus by Florian Eberling, and The Eternal Hermes by Antoine Faivre

@hrmtc I would refer people to Brian Copenhaver's translation of The
Hermetica (aka Hermetic Corpus) and Garth Fowden's Egyptian Hermes

"The angle is a symbol and a likeness, we say, of the coherence that
obtains in the realm of divine things.: -Proclus on Euclid IX.129

Methodological texts related to intellectual history
http://t.co/liqSYiJI

Bruno leads us through an excursus on Cusan negative theology
http://t.co/k3znkMpK Ash Wednesday Supper Introduction

RT @SheBlacksmith: Photo: The Harmony of the Spheres.
http://t.co/7y8gBpDP

RT @ArtsBooks: Refiguring the Face of God: The Daphni Pantokrator
(Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle A... - Anthony Cutler ht ...

Frances Yates on Hermes Trismegistus http://t.co/6hGC6JD2

Giordano Bruno on God as First Principle http://t.co/Z2FTkAYJ in
Cause, Principle, and Unity

Philosophy of History of Philosophy & Historiography of Philosophy:
Selected Bibliography http://t.co/8wDgrnGf

Giordano Bruno: Theosophy's Apostle in the Sixteenth Century (1913)
By Annie Wood Besant http://t.co/55qQVhtD

"Despite or perhaps because of his insistence on the impossibility of
evocation, on the incommensurable otherness of things..."

Giordano Bruno's "Degll Eroici Furori"+Elizabethan poets in the
context of 16th-century Italian Petrarch-commentaries. Clucas, Stephen,
Ph.D

Giordano Bruno and the New Atomism http://t.co/UbX7iD5T

Anima Mundi http://t.co/bWzouJNt in Pathways to the Jungian World:
Phenomenology and Analytic Psychology

2011-12-03 08:46:55
t3dy: Boehme's Speculative Theology http://t.co/Ye0GDnXM in Anima Mundi:
the rise of the world soul theory in modern German philosophy

Philosophy of Chemistry http://t.co/QCUjGucy

The Medicinal Use of Plants by Chimpanzees in the Wild
http://t.co/qoeEke9i

some people can hallucinate colors at will http://t.co/tiaGwIoh

A Response to Robert Pasnau on Studying the History of Ph
ilosophy
http://t.co/OjSzGQ1D historical study is valuable in itself

Voynich Manuscript online http://t.co/MmCQpgOD via @avisolo

Robert Pasnau: "Aquinas explains human freedom without any recourse
to an uncaused, undetermined act of will or intellect... [1/2]
...as if only an uncaused decision could count as a free decision."
[2/2]

The Latin Aristotle http://t.co/cV9TpPsP

Robert Pasnau on Philosophy of Mind and Human Nature
http://t.co/5eo8cTy0 (contrast with Pinker)

Robert Pasnau, “Metaphysical Themes: 1274-1671″
http://t.co/E0aoXKNm

"...and the resultant proliferation of wild metaphysics was the price
they paid."

Mind and Hylomorphism http://t.co/km7BZ3sn

"Divisions of Epistemic Labor: Some Remarks on the History of Fideism
and Esotericism" http://t.co/YzxMau4d

Pasnau: “Aquinas usually refers to the soul as subsistent, and only
occasionally speaks of it as a substance.”

review of Pasnau on Human Nature in Aquinas http://t.co/TysKZrxy

"The discipline of philosophy benefits from a serious, sustained
engagement with its history." -Robert Pasnau http://t.co/iB6DyKzb

Robert Pasnau - A Letter to a Graduate Student interested in studying
the History of Philosophy http://t.co/iB6DyKzb

"Philosophers today have largely given up on the project of
categorizing being." -Robert Pasnau @_shrine_

Robert Pasnau - “Form, Substance, and Mechanism,” Philosophical
Review 113 (2004) 31-88. http://t.co/lj7fPae7

the latest on stonehenge http://t.co/eeBPfZv1 recognized as a sacred
site earlier than previously thought

Sasha Chaitow reviews the AAR Western Esotericism meeting
http://t.co/9HZkfZFP

Language is not just a window into human nature but a fistula: an
open wound through which our innards are exposed to an infectious world.SP

did religion evolve to help us develop self-control cognition?
http://t.co/D9KSmfPI via @ken_homer

Robert Pasnau on Averroes, "The Islamic Scholar Who Gave Us Modern
Philosophy" http://t.co/dNmKfZF2

John Donne, "Love's Alchemy" http://t.co/1bChxUIb via @ColorsTease

RT @EPButler "Strangest to me is circle: how to distinguish from
hexagon? Hexagon obviously just assemblage of triangles for #Bruno."

RT @EPButler "A triangle, e.g., is the communion of three minima;
could be three monads of any kind whatsoever."

RT @EPButler "figure has an utterly new meaning for #Bruno, the
strictly geometrical no more privileged over "metaphorical" usages."

Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica opens again! http://t.co/bBS0k7bD
perhaps the world's greatest collection of Alchemical texts

Athanasius Kircher's Planetary Music Theory http://t.co/AVweu22I

Joscelyn Godwin on Rejected Knowledge http://t.co/etGXsOk9

Kepler and Kircher on the Harmony of the Spheres http://t.co/InWryl4z
Joscelyn Godwin

"Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and
making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness." -Aleister Crowley RT @hrmtc

RT @hrmtc: Photo: › Athanasius Kircher, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae
http://t.co/qTZn2rNt

RT @walters_museum: Art of the Day: Magic Wand Depicting a Procession
of Deities http://t.co/crH28fyk

"The newly empirical tendencies of the seventeenth century owe a
strong and surprising debt to the alchemical literature." William R. Newman

Newman: [b/c of demon connection] legitimacy of alchemical claims
acquired an importance that it would otherwise probably not have had.

Newman: Scholastic theologians+philosophers...appropriated alchemy as
a point of reference for determining the power of human art in general

The Birthmark, by Nathaniel Hawthorne http://t.co/O7jId7OT Alchemy in
an 1843 American Romantic short story

The Magic and Myth of Alchemy - The Alchemists http://t.co/Muark0TM
at the Lloyd Library

@eglinski excerpt from Newman--From Alchemical Gold to Synthetic
Humans: The Problem of the Artificial and the Natural http://t.co/7gnt4eOL

@eglinski [on the homonculus] start with this article by William R. Newman
http://t.co/IYfdMfKR and see also his book Promethean Ambitions
http://t.co/jDz9GGKm

interesting alchemy/art/psychedelia blog in Italian
http://t.co/apmgxcyP

Theosophy and Gnosticism: Jung and Franz von Baader
http://t.co/E2xLPlMm

@17beowulf depends on what you mean by gnostic. I'm not a big fan of
"gnostic" as a universal category across traditions.

MONSTROPHY: THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF MONSTERS: PRETERNATURE call for
papers http://t.co/JpeJ5KbU

Fludd interprets kabbalistic "two appearances of Aleph" as alchemical
transmutation of dark prima materia into luminous Philosophers' Stone.

Khunrath's understanding of the Kabbalah... was largely derived from
Pistorius' compendium Artis cabalisticae. http://t.co/Mja38vEY

RT @mocost: Ralph Steadman’s illustrations for a 1967 edition of
Alice in Wonderland http://t.co/dZc1Xwu7

Habermas on Myth and Ritual (video lecture) http://t.co/zxU626Ah

Kripal's Introduction to Adi Da, The Knee of Listening
http://t.co/lwYwxwwT

"Yahweh is presented in the Jewish Bible as stateless and nationless.
He can’t be used as a totem or fetish in that way." -Terry Eagleton

"The scandal of the NT—it backs what America calls the losers...has
been replaced, particularly in the States ,by an idolatrous version" -TE

Eagleton: the whole movement to see religion as literature is a way
of diffusing its radical content http://t.co/i4EwAcQi

Kripal talks about his Esalen book http://t.co/qzOqbJkj

Francis Ford Coppola has made Eliade whole again.
http://t.co/fCQ2XumS Kripal reviews "Youth without Youth"

"interpreting across cultural, religious+historical distances is
always vexed, requiring great sensitivity+openness..."

Interpreting Ramakrishna: Kali's Child Revisited http://t.co/UV8qGBMG

Dr. Jeff Kripal Offers a Fresh Perspective on the Nature of
Consciousness http://t.co/CoN79gzA "it always, always, always expresses
itself"

Jeffrey Kripal on Coast to Coast http://t.co/WiJpVEId

For me, "depressing" is not a mark of truth. http://t.co/6cBlweMg
Jeffrey Kripal introduces himself and his work in an essay

Umberto Eco on the Advantages of Fiction for Life and Death - podcast
http://t.co/opdV2Kfb

Review - The Cambridge Companion to Plato's Republic
http://t.co/K9yGBbtf by @epbutler

Review - Ancient Philosophy of the Self http://t.co/Mb6ssRmK by
@epbutler

"There's little in Jacques Derrida's self-satisfied antiessentialist
metaphysic that Fort didn't do first...with a lot less fuss+pretension"

...when Derrida philosophizes, he is not in his body.
http://t.co/s2aqatS1

RITE AID - DEMON YOGA http://t.co/OMpKNiQZ via @_Shrine_

on bibliography dumping http://t.co/NQ7Ua93v via @kerim @zunguzungu

Keynes concluded that much of our business cycle is driven by
fluctuations in “animal spirits” http://t.co/GTQLmCGD (neuroecon
cheerleading)

"there must be something which makes a voice within us ready to
recognize the compelling force of destiny in the Oedipus." Merkur/Freud

Merkur:Freud suggested that mythology consists of projections onto
the environment of what are actually divisions w/in the psychic apparatus

quote below is Freud, quoted on page one of Merkur's Psychoanalysis
and Myth.

Can you imagine what "endopsychic myths" are? The latest product of
my mental labor. The dim inner perception of one's own psychic apparatus

RT @fritzbogott: @t3dy Notes from Hollow Earth

@fritzbogott Notes from GrokLow

notes from undergrok

RT @DeenOverDunia: “How can it (the heart) travel to Allah when it
is chained by its desires?”
— Ibn Arabi

William Burroughs, Thanksgiving Prayer http://t.co/lUtmeUI7

The New Alchemy: To Turn You On http://t.co/Ehfi8jDI by Osho/Rajneesh

"...like historians, alchemists were continually concerned about
funding." -Jenny Rampling, Alchemy and Patronage in Tudor England

Jenny Rampling on Alchemical Patronage http://t.co/WPw8KyN5

"practitioners from a range of backgrounds were nevertheless
concerned to
present themselves as heirs to a single unified+ancient
tradition"

Jenny Rampling: "for all their personal diversity individual
alchemists often adopted similar styles of self-presentation"

"Alchemy was not a monolithic entity." -Jenny Rampling

is Fama Fraternitatis anti-alchemical-immortality? "their souls could
not trespass CERTAIN points of dissolution." http://t.co/cIHH5vn3

History and Iconography of the Occult http://t.co/4c6se5Lz

December 25th is associated with the birth of many pagan gods...and
that's what Christmas is about, Charlie Brown http://t.co/3Xy1FrYE

RT @fadesingh: Raphael Bousso on the universe as hologram:
http://t.co/sCNXWTvV

"When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is
constantly amalgamating experience..." T.S. Eliot

Alchemical Metaphors have much to offer music theory (slightly
expanded) http://t.co/wFakX0VN

Mary McCarthy: On a level usually thought to be “harmless,”
addiction to platitudes and commonplaces is global.... [1/2]
...To Burroughs’ ear, the Bore, lurking in the hotel lobby, is
literally deadly. [2/2] http://t.co/1TjsKAlm

William Burroughs literary criticism http://t.co/IiRbrnn7

INT: Do you think [a science of association blocks] will destroy the
magic? WSB: Not at all. I would say it would enhance it.

"Beckett wants to go inward. First he was in a bottle and now he is
in the mud. I am aimed in the other direction—outward." -Burroughs

"In one sense a special use of words and pictures can conduce
silence." -William S. Burroughs

"what has been damaged in pain is, of course, the image" -WSB

"I've had all the interesting effects I need, and I don't want any
repetition of those extremely unpleasant physical reactions." -Burroughs

"more a hallucinated viewpoint than any actual hallucination"

Burroughs interview--"altering what we call reality, which I would
define as a more or less constant scanning pattern." http://t.co/cM6uNUY3

"I didn't feel compelled. I had nothing else to do. Writing gave me
something to do every day. I don't feel the results were...spectacular."

McLuhan letter about Burroughs from 1964 http://t.co/PAHxqtKQ

Marshall McLuhan: Notes on Burroughs http://t.co/vnHwRF56

crowdsourcing the multiplication of the philosopher's stone
http://t.co/K5QWkLjW

Is anybody using alchemical metaphors (other than the co-opted
homonculus) to describe problems in philosophy of Mind? Such strange
changes.

Alchemy has much to offer music theory--theorizing by means of colors
and subtle changes, attention to time, geometry, measurement generally

Alchemical metaphors can be used more or less effectively. I find
them most useful in concrete, hands-dirty grokking of science and/or art.

We need alchemy as a metaphor to understand the bizarre and terrible
magic of chemistry. Science is a monstrous, transformative power.

I worry that alchemical metaphors have lost their power in being
diluted in support of all these vague, weak occultisms.

RT @etominusipi: @t3dy we should do more to celebrate Giordano Bruno.
his cosmic vision was superb. his treatment particularly shabby.

RT @SSRC_org: RT @immanentframe: “Where religion comes from and
leads us” – Steven Tipton on Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution:
http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/11/18/where-religion-comes-from-and-leads-us/

RT @irarchaeology: BBC News - 'Earliest' evidence of human violence
http://t.co/x27hum1x

Brill (publisher of Dictionary of Gnosis+Western Esotericism) teams
up with Credo Reference to provide online research http://t.co/dWfULcHh

AAR Western Esotericism panel http://t.co/w8TsWkFq

RT @PhilosophyQuotz: Let parents bequeath to their children not
riches, but the spirit of reverence. Plato

rt @EPButler "in Stoicism the I becomes object, dissolution of
subjectivity."

RT @17beowulf: @t3dy Downloadable PDFs of C. G. Jung's alchemy &
related books: http://t.co/mGDyhKJw They're in order by title.

Collection of Tweets on Alchemy, Renaissance Magic, Esotericism
http://t.co/35E6IoR7

Collected Tweets on Neoplatonic Theurgy--Iamblichus, Proclus,
Chaldean Oracles, philosophy, religious study/scholarship
http://t.co/MkXuy8KR

RT @EPButler Speaking of Roman Stoics, my review of a book on same:
http://t.co/eiVizFTz

Seneca's Turn to Self http://t.co/OVtRdCuY

Veyne:“Stoicism has become, for our use, a philosophy of the active
turning in on itself of the I…It was nothing of the kind in its own day"

Seneca: Only virtuous action is free in the sense of being fully
reasonable,while other actions spring from irrational movements of the mind

"Seneca envisages us as judges, passing judgment over what we should
be doing, and issuing commands to ourselves" http://t.co/LDTcrKmc

ancient atomism http://t.co/p4NfpdNj

RT @tedfriedman: Zizek: "Jung is the skeleton in Deleuze's closet."
#aartransmediareligion