Portrait of the Author as a Young Mystic
Esotericism in One Piece: Navigating Magic, Symbolism and Spirituality
Introduction Idea Presentation
The Hero with a thousand faces
The first popular work to combine the spiritual and psy…
Godly — Design Inspiration
Godly is a curated gallery of the best and most interesting web, app, ui, and visual design work published on the internet.
Realization experiences: a convergent account of insight and mystical experiences
We argue that the powerful transformative effects of mystical-type experiences can be understood using the same machinery that underlies insight problem solving, and that both mystical experiences ...
Entangled Magic in the Medieval Latin West
This article focusses on the history of learned magic in late medieval Europe, breaking a period of about 500 years into chronological stages to explore how medieval supporters and critics of magic represented the art and responded to each other’s arguments, then reframed their own in a continuous dynamic entanglement. In this period learned magic texts from diverse religious and cosmological traditions (primarily Christian, Jewish, Arabic and Greco-Roman) circulated among people familiar with, and emotionally invested in, a great variety of institutional and informal rituals. Sources reveal a vibrant culture of exchanges of texts between members of religious orders, physicians and lay men, clerics and lay women – a culture of entanglement: discussion, borrowing, critique and adaptation alongside practitioner-client relationships and necessary secrecy and concealment.
Analyzing Divine Machinery as an "”Art Movement"”
Face of a Bird, Legs of an Eagle: The Hybrid Venus in Medieval Texts of Image Magic and the So-Called Talisman of Catherine de’ Medici
This article examines the imagery of the goddess Venus in medieval sources of astrological magic, focusing on a zoomorphic hybrid Venus characterized by avian features. Furthermore, the article examines the transmission of this motif into early modern printed sources and talismans. The most renowned among surviving items related to the hybrid Venus is the 18th-century medallion known as Catherine de Medici’s talisman, depicting on one side a classical Venus figure, and on the other, a seated Jupiter alongside a hybrid with the head and feet of a bird. In previous scholarship it has been argued that the hybrid figure, interpreted as Venus, derives from Cornelius Agrippa and the medieval magical compendium Picatrix. The study demonstrates that the same hybrid Venus appears in several other medieval sources predating Agrippa and independent of the Picatrix. These sources, explored in this article in detail, offer a new insight into the evolution of the zoomorphic Venus, providing a deeper understanding of the ways in which non-Christian and non-classical astrological iconography was transformed and found pathways within medieval literature. Based on the findings of this research, De sigillis attributed to Arnoldus Saxo, seems to provide the most direct model for depicting two distinct Venus figures within the same talisman. The article further argues that the avian hybrid Venus was a dynamic figure among non-classical hybrids, appearing in a relatively wide range of sources, including contexts where astrological hybrids were a rarity.
19.09.12 Attrell/Porreca (eds.), Picatrix: A Medieval Treatise on Astral Magic
Attrell, Dan, and David Porreca, trans. Picatrix: A Medieval Treatise on Astral Magic, Magic in History. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. pp. xii, 372. $39.95 (hardback). ISBN: 978-0-271-08212-7 (hardback).
The Final Christian Generation? - Mockingbird
What we can learn from the century that saw the sun set on the “final” pagan generation
Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy
The Animator and the Glazer by Ju Chu, translated by S. Qiouyi Lu
Pierre d'Alancaisez: The Crisis in Contemporary Art