dr_mabeuse
seduce the mind
- Joined
- Oct 10, 2002
- Posts
- 11,528
A fascinating book by the late Ioan Culianu, Professor of Theology at the University of Chicago looks at the theoretical basis for renaissance magic.
Instead of being a bunch of hocus pocus, renaissance magic for a hard-core few was a technology based on their best understanding of how things worked at the time. They understood humans to have a physical body and a non-physical soul, and the big philosophical problem at the time (a problem we till wrestle with using 21st century concepts) is how do the physical and non-physical interact? How does the non-material soul get the material body to do things, and through what medium does the material world affect the noon-material soul?
The answer was the phantasm. A mental construct, the interface between physical and non-physical or the result of a perception upon the soul. Not quite physical, not quite non-physical. It was by applying certain techniques to the phantasmal juncture where thought meets reality that they sought to bring about the effects of will upon the world. Because we're such erotic creatures, eroticism was always a good source of energy for these experiments.
There's a ton of fascinating angles to this story it's hard to know where to begin. For one thing, these magicians were laying the foundations for modern science, breaking the Church's monopoly on knowledge and taking as their texts the recently discovered Arab translations of Plato and Aristotle left when the Moors were driven from Spain. These weren't quacks and charlatans but the very Humanists who kicked off the entire Ranaissance, and it was wild, speculative research and half-dream thinking like this that did it.
Another angle is the erotic link with nature, a pagan idea resurrected by these neo-Platonist magicians who had to wrestle with the question of whether love was a function of the body or the spirit. Both, they decided. There was a divine love and a physical love and one could maintain a physical love for objects such as nature - an erotic love for the world. This doesn't mean you want to fuck trees, it means an a relationship of an erotic intensity. This is an idea that was lost in the Judeo-Christian idea of Man's fall and the inherent wickedness of the world, but an idea they resurrected and used for the power it contained.
I haven't gotten to that part yet, but supposedly some of the techniques they came up with were similar to techniques used today in advertising and crowd control. Apparently what he uncovered was interesting enough that it attracted the attention of Nikolai Ceauşescu, the crazy former ruler of Romania, who wanted Culianu to advise him on methods for keeping the citizenry of that unhappy country under control. Culianu, who was born in Romania, was living in the Netherlands at the time and refused.
Other techniques were more bizarre, including occult mnemonics or elaborate feats of memory in which the magician would create a mental mansion or garden and then stock it with the items to be memorized or phantasms to be summoned forth: virtual phantasm museums.
What Culianu does that's so fascinating is to give us a glimpse of a world unlike our own in its basic operating premises, and that in turn allows us to see the basic assumptions that govern our world that we normally never even notice. The people of the renaissance didn't know how spirit spoke to matter but knew it could be done, just like we don't know how mind speaks to body but know it can be done. We assume the answer will be found and when it is, it will be in our terms, just as they assumed it would be in their terms, in terms of spirit and body and phantasm.
The bizarre capper to this whole story is that Culianu was murdered in a bathroom on the University of Chicago campus in 1991 by an unknown assassin, killed by a single bullet behind the ear in a toilet stall in broad daylight. The assassin was never caught but was thought to be working for the Romanian State Police. The assassination was said to be classic KGB style, and the KGB had close ties to the Romanian Securitate, the state police who took over Romania de facto after Ceauşescu's fall. Culianu was, by that time, one of the world's leading experts in the history of religions and an expert in the occult.
The combination of religion, occult, sex, politics, reality, murder... it's all pretty compelling
Instead of being a bunch of hocus pocus, renaissance magic for a hard-core few was a technology based on their best understanding of how things worked at the time. They understood humans to have a physical body and a non-physical soul, and the big philosophical problem at the time (a problem we till wrestle with using 21st century concepts) is how do the physical and non-physical interact? How does the non-material soul get the material body to do things, and through what medium does the material world affect the noon-material soul?
The answer was the phantasm. A mental construct, the interface between physical and non-physical or the result of a perception upon the soul. Not quite physical, not quite non-physical. It was by applying certain techniques to the phantasmal juncture where thought meets reality that they sought to bring about the effects of will upon the world. Because we're such erotic creatures, eroticism was always a good source of energy for these experiments.
There's a ton of fascinating angles to this story it's hard to know where to begin. For one thing, these magicians were laying the foundations for modern science, breaking the Church's monopoly on knowledge and taking as their texts the recently discovered Arab translations of Plato and Aristotle left when the Moors were driven from Spain. These weren't quacks and charlatans but the very Humanists who kicked off the entire Ranaissance, and it was wild, speculative research and half-dream thinking like this that did it.
Another angle is the erotic link with nature, a pagan idea resurrected by these neo-Platonist magicians who had to wrestle with the question of whether love was a function of the body or the spirit. Both, they decided. There was a divine love and a physical love and one could maintain a physical love for objects such as nature - an erotic love for the world. This doesn't mean you want to fuck trees, it means an a relationship of an erotic intensity. This is an idea that was lost in the Judeo-Christian idea of Man's fall and the inherent wickedness of the world, but an idea they resurrected and used for the power it contained.
I haven't gotten to that part yet, but supposedly some of the techniques they came up with were similar to techniques used today in advertising and crowd control. Apparently what he uncovered was interesting enough that it attracted the attention of Nikolai Ceauşescu, the crazy former ruler of Romania, who wanted Culianu to advise him on methods for keeping the citizenry of that unhappy country under control. Culianu, who was born in Romania, was living in the Netherlands at the time and refused.
Other techniques were more bizarre, including occult mnemonics or elaborate feats of memory in which the magician would create a mental mansion or garden and then stock it with the items to be memorized or phantasms to be summoned forth: virtual phantasm museums.
What Culianu does that's so fascinating is to give us a glimpse of a world unlike our own in its basic operating premises, and that in turn allows us to see the basic assumptions that govern our world that we normally never even notice. The people of the renaissance didn't know how spirit spoke to matter but knew it could be done, just like we don't know how mind speaks to body but know it can be done. We assume the answer will be found and when it is, it will be in our terms, just as they assumed it would be in their terms, in terms of spirit and body and phantasm.
The bizarre capper to this whole story is that Culianu was murdered in a bathroom on the University of Chicago campus in 1991 by an unknown assassin, killed by a single bullet behind the ear in a toilet stall in broad daylight. The assassin was never caught but was thought to be working for the Romanian State Police. The assassination was said to be classic KGB style, and the KGB had close ties to the Romanian Securitate, the state police who took over Romania de facto after Ceauşescu's fall. Culianu was, by that time, one of the world's leading experts in the history of religions and an expert in the occult.
The combination of religion, occult, sex, politics, reality, murder... it's all pretty compelling
)
