From: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org (stillpt-digest) To: stillpt-digest@smoe.org Subject: stillpt-digest V2 #27 Reply-To: stillpt@smoe.org Sender: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk stillpt-digest Friday, February 4 2000 Volume 02 : Number 027 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: stillpt-digest V2 #26 ["Jennifer Stevenson" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2000 11:31:51 -0600 From: "Jennifer Stevenson" Subject: Re: stillpt-digest V2 #26 David: Can't address that one. Don, you write, By the way, can you explain the differences, if any, between Hermeticism, Alchemy, and Rosicrucianism? They seem to be intersecting disciplines, at least (throw in Art of Memory, too, as I know that's a specialty of yours). I do have, to my surprise (found it in a box with John Crowley books, semi-logically), Frances Yates' Bruno/Hermeticism book, but her others are hard to come by. Hermeticism came first by about two hundred and fifty years. It's the "ism" that arose out of the publication of a set of texts purporting to date from Egyptian dynastic times, narrated and "authored" by Hermes Trismegistis (hell I've misspelled that), but actually dating from about the fourth century and written (scholars think) by a Greek. 12th/13thC publication thereof. Alchemy kind of grew, like Topsy. Its roots are in neoplatonic cosmology (and before; there are magic scholars who like to trace the Greek magic to Indian sources). Hermeticism provided a lot of good stuff for it. The Emerald Tablets of Hermes T. was kind of a syncretic document (something parallel to the work of the Society of the Golden Dawn in Victorian England) that pulled together a whole lot of ideas about "scientia" from a variety of ill-documented sources and presented them as a unified field theory emitting from an unimpeachable source (the god of knowledge) dating from an era of recognized magical chops (ancient Egypt). (Remember, the Tablets are guesstimated to date from the fourth century, though they were discovered much later.) As such they didn't quite work, but they set off a craze for unified-field-theorizing that continues to this day. So you get to the very beginning of the 17th C, with the political upheavals that began the Thirty Years War, and a situation in Heidelberg where a young, idealistic, liberal Protestant prince has married the daughter of a right wing nut (James I of England). Everybody thinks James is going to back the prince & his daughter when the prince (egged on by other European Protestants) gets in a fight with the conservative Catholic princes of (mostly) Germany. James I lets his daughter down, but before that happens, before the fighting starts, while it's all in the shouting and Kremlin-watching stage, the Rosicrucian hoax is perpetrated in Paris by a couple of guys who own a printing press. They invent this ancient society of secret magical dudes who go around healing people and working miracles and, dang, you know what? they're behind the Heidelberg prince, in some sense or other of the word "behind". The magical dudes practice magic of a Hermetical nature, but so did everybody by then, including Jewish magicians in Spain & elsewhere and Islamic magicians in Arab countries. The trouble is, the hoax & the stuff of scandal is all pretty well documented. It's the stuff that got taken seriously over centuries that has hidden roots. For good reason, too. Off and on again, it was a hanging offense to read it. Don, if you want a copy of Yates' THE ROSICRUCIAN ENLIGHTENMENT, try the web page for The Seminary Coop in Chicago. They got me a copy, overnight, from England no less, at trade paper plus shipping prices. If you want to learn about Art of Memory, however, don't read Yates, or not alone anyway. She was the best source there was for a long time (and before her, Beryl Smalley, whose work has all but disappeared) but now we have Mary Carruthers THE BOOK OF MEMORY. Her next one, called THE CRAFT OF THOUGHT, is still in a very expensive hardcover from Cambridge U. Press, so I'd wait for that in TP if I were you. Both should be available at the library, or you can get your library to order 'em. Yates never understood the Art, and focused on its rather sensational use by 16thC magicians; Carruthers understands it thoroughly and covers its entire history, from Greek times up through 1000 years of scholastic monastic use. Sorry about the long post. I'm supposed to be writing, so instead I'm blathering to the list. ------------------------------ End of stillpt-digest V2 #27 ****************************