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The occult Renaissance

a word of advice: you may want to read my article about “the philosophical renaissance in italy” first to put things in a wider perspective and for background information. In my article “The Philosophical Renaissance In Italy” I have written about the beginning of the Renaissance in Italy focussing on the philosophical side. In this article I will leave Italy and since especially in other countries there came a more esoteric side, I will speak some more about that. In the mentioned article I told about the humanist tradition as starting-point for Renaissance-thinking. Ironically enough, humanism outside Italy has brought forth two very opposital movements. One is the more occult movement, the other led to the reformation and the coming up of Protestantism. Initially the two weren’t too hostile towards each other, but later there came friction and when the Catholics started to win back territory (the so-called counter-reformation) occultism… Read More »The occult Renaissance

Steganographia vs Theurgia/Goetia

In my article about Angel Magic I very shortly compared the Steganographia of Trithemius with the second book of the Lemegeton: Theurgia/Goetia (T/G). In this article I will make a slightly closer investigation of the differences and the similarities of the two writings. For this purpose I used the Latin Steganographia and the English T/G from Esotericarchives.com and the translation of the T/G by S.L. MacGregor Mathers that can be found online on several pages. Later I also checked the English translation of the Steganographia by Adam McLean (it is still available, but very expensive, so I went to the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica to see it). Comparing the two writings it becomes very clear that Trithemius used the older writing as basis for his own work. Not only the names of the angels, dukes, etc. are almost always roughly the same, but even the order corresponds mostly. Both books speak… Read More »Steganographia vs Theurgia/Goetia

The Monas Hieroglyphica of John Dee (1527-1608)

However the best-known work of Dee, his Monas Hieroglypica is by far his most mysterious and difficult one. Other writings are accounts of his conversations with angels, the Monas was written through direct inspiration by God in a trance-like state. In a preface and 24 ‘theorems’ Dee wants to “revolutionize astronomy, alchemy, mathematics, linguistics, mechanics, music, optics, magic, and adeptship” to quote Joe Peterson in the short intro of his online version of the text. Dee starts to explain that the circle and the line are the first forms in creation and therefor come back in the hieroglyph. The point in the circle is the earth and the circle the sun (a circle with a point is also the Egyptian symbol for the sun), the crescent is of course the moon and adds to the idea of the sun. Together they are day and night, the first day of creation… Read More »The Monas Hieroglyphica of John Dee (1527-1608)

A history of Freemasonry

This article about the history of Freemasonry is based on the book De Kinderen Van Hiram (‘the children of Hiram’) by Andries van den Abeele. This book is not only out of print, but it seems to have never been available in English either. It was published in 1991, so probably written / finished in 1990. The writer claims to give the history of Freemasonry for the first time based on the latest scientific findings. “The result is stirring: myths fall, accepted history becomes legend, exorbitant stories are brought back to their actual proportions.” The book actually deals with the history of Freemasonry in Belgium, but because it isn’t an exclusive Belgian phenomenon, the history of Freemasonry in general is dealt with to give a wider picture. I will make a short summery of the findings. The official history of Freemasonry, says that ever since the time of Adam secret… Read More »A history of Freemasonry

“The stanzas of dzyan” and “the sifra di-tseniutha”

“There can be little doubt in my opinion that the famous stanzas of the mysterious Book Dzyan on which Mme. H.P. Blavatsky’s magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, is based owe something, both in title and content, to the pompous pages of the Zoharic writing called Sifra Di-Tseniutha. The first to advance this theory, without further proof, was L.A. Bosman, a Jewish Theosophist, in his booklet The Mysteries of the Qabalah (1916) p. 31. This seems to me, indeed, the true ‘etymology’ of the hitherto unexplained title. Mme Blavatsky has drawn heavily upon Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata (1677-1684), which contains (vol. II, pp. 347-385) a Latin translation of the Sifra Di-Tseniutha. The solemn and magniloquent style of these pages may well have impressed her susceptible mind. As a matter of fact, H.P.B. herself alludes to such a connection between the two ‘books’ in the very first lines of Isis Unveiled… Read More »“The stanzas of dzyan” and “the sifra di-tseniutha”

Edda & Hermetica

For a long time I have wanted to read the myths of the North, but it was only until recently that I got so far. As you may have noticed in the book reviews section, I have gotten myself the poetic Edda and some other famous sagas. Also do I have one of these cheap-bookshop-books about Viking mythology. When I read the short version of the Viking tale of creation, I was struck by the likeness it has with some of the Hermetic creation-myths that I gave in my “Hermetic concepts” article. I couldn’t place the information of John Grant’s little book in my own library though. A quick investigation proved that most of the Northern mythology that we know comes from the so-called prose-Edda, also younger Edda (and the poetic Edda the older Edda) or Snorre/Snorra-Edda. This prose-Edda is the famous work of the Icelander Snorri Sturluson (1178-1241) with… Read More »Edda & Hermetica

The Northern tradition in the Renaissance

As you probably know, the so called “Renaissance” started in Italy around 1400 and the Renaissance in Northern Europe followed a few decades later. The Renaissance is characterised by a renewed interest in forgotten beliefs and cultures, a rapid development in the current beliefs and cultures and a disengaging from the scholastic Middle Ages. “A rebirth of paganism” or similar expressions you will run into frequently. Indeed, for the Southern Renaissance this is very clear. The libraries in the South of Europe were stuffed with ‘pagan texts’, classical mythology and ancient philosophers. These were rediscovered and however Christianity was stronger than ever, art, architecture, literature and philosophy used the pre-Christian imaginary like never before. So what happened when the Renaissance found its way to the more Northern parts of Europe ? Well, we usually hear that not only the styles of art, but also the imaginary of the Southern Renaissance… Read More »The Northern tradition in the Renaissance

Johannes Bureus, the Renaissance rune magician

When I read about Johannes Thomae Agrivillensis Bureus (latinisation of Johan Bure, 1568-1652), for the first time I realised that in Northern Europe during the Renaissance there actually hàs been a mix between pre-Christian religion/mythology and typical Renaissance magic (such as Hermetic, Kabbalah, Medieval magic, etc.). I started to look for information about this interesting character and his ideas and took up the idea to find out if there were more people in which these two interesting elements came together. I noticed that not only information about Bureus is quite scarse, but that the subject as a whole is very under lighted. The writer of the article The First Northern Renaissance (in the second volume of the Tyr magazine) Stephen Edred Flowers has released on his own Rûna Raven Press a small booklet about Bureus’ most famous work Adalruna Rediviva (first version 1605), which I of course got. It is… Read More »Johannes Bureus, the Renaissance rune magician

The rune-cross of Johannes Bureus

Earlier I reviewed a book about Bureus’ booklet Adalruna Rediviva and wrote an article about the man himself. If you haven’t read that article, I suggest you do before you start with this one. This time I want to say a bit more about Bureus’ wonderful runic hieroglyph. Bureus’ furthark consists of 15 runes. More about that in my other article. The rune-cross consists of all 15 runes, thus representing All or Totality. Bureus saw his runic system as the mediator between the divine and human worlds. The creative word of God is the mediator between Him and His creation. Consequentally Bureus saw the runes as the divine or original language. Bureus’ runes are of course letters, but also numbers, like with the Hebrew alphabet, but not entirely. Bureus has only 15 runes, so no rune for every number. He left out the even numbers which highly cuts the ‘Notaricon’… Read More »The rune-cross of Johannes Bureus

Papyri Graecae Magicae

It is strange how things can go. Several months ago I was writing an article about the different Corpus Hermeticums and the Hermetic scriptures. Just having finished that article I buy a brandnew book appears and the writer also has a list of Hermetic texts. Jacob Slavenburg found Hermetic texts among the so called Greek magical papyri; are the texts in the papyri in which Hermes is named. Only weeks later I was in my usual second-hand bookshop (that I visit every week) looking through the ‘theology’ section that I didn’t visit often before and my eye fell on the backs of two books saying “Abrasax”. Already figuring that these books were a bit misplaced in the section, I hoped for something Gnostic. Yet, the covers say: “Ausgewählte papyri religiösen und magischen Inhalts”, or in English: “selected papyri with religious and magical content”. You can imagine that I had to… Read More »Papyri Graecae Magicae