Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition
2012 Conference
July 14-15, Milwaukee, WI USA
Call for Abstracts
Since 2001, the Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition (JWMT) has worked to publish diverse perspectives on the occultisms, magical practices, mysticisms and esotericisms commonly known as the “Western Mystery Tradition.” The JWMT is expanding the work of the web journal through its first conference.
The JWMT conference is a two-day event open to scholars, students, practitioners, and the public. The keynote speaker is the Journal’s founder and publisher, Dr. Jeffrey S. Kupperman.
The study of western esoteric practices has risen greatly over the last decade, focusing on Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Modern magical practices and beliefs, outside of the realm of modern Paganisms and the New Age, have received little attention. Further, practitioners have had little opportunity to present their work, either as papers or in the form of ritual practice, outside of the internet or small groups. The focus of this conference is the movement of contemporary western esotericisms, loosely construed as the “western mysteries,” and their transition from the 20th to the 21st century. The Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition Conference 2012 is seeking abstracts for presentations, panels and practices centered on this broad subject.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
Esoteric traditions such as Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, Martinism and chivalric organizations,
Ritual magical practices from organizations such as the Golden Dawn and the Aurum Solis and modern initiatory Paganisms,
Esotericisms from earlier periods, such as alchemy, Gnosticism and Neoplatonism, the magical work of John Dee or the medieval grimoire traditions, and their re-emergence and relevancy to modern praxes,
Theoretical, paedogogical, and methodological approaches to the study of the western mysteries,
The relation of the esotericisms to orthodox and mainstream practices and society at large.
We welcome presentations, panels and practices focusing on methodological and theoretical issues in relation to the contemporary study and practice of the various western esoteric currents. The conference encourages an interdisciplinary approach and welcomes perspectives from the disciplines of religious studies, theology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, history, political science, as well as active practitioners. Papers should last 20 minutes, with time for questions and answers. Panels and practices will be scheduled for up to an hour, with time for questions and answers afterwards as necessary.
Please submit abstracts (approx. 200 words), proposals for a themed panel (with three presenters, moderator as necessary, and short description) or proposals for a ritual practice and discussion to conference@jwmt.org. Deadline for submissions is April 15, 2012.
No attachments please; copy and paste your abstract or proposal in plain text into the body of the e-mail. Submissions are not limited to academics or professional scholars. Include a brief (no more than one page) CV listing any qualifications, academic or otherwise, relevant to your proposal.
The conference will be held at the Best Western Plus Milwaukee Airport Hotel and Conference Center. More information on the conference, registration, fees, accommodation, etc. is available at http://www.jwmt.org/jwmt12.
Friday, January 27, 2012
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Call For Papers - Medieval Space and Place
Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies
Special Call For Papers for Issue on Medieval Space and Place
SUBMISSION DEADLINE FOR VOLUME 7, Issue 1: 1 March 2012
Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies is a refereed
journal devoted to the literature, history, and culture of the medieval
world. Published electronically twice a year, its mission is to present a
forum in which graduate students from around the globe may share their
ideas. Article submissions on the selected theme are welcome in any
discipline and period of Medieval Studies. We are also interested in book
reviews on recent works of interest to a broad audience of Medieval
Studies scholars.
Recently, place and space theories have manifested themselves in Medieval
Studies in a number of ways, from analysis of specific spaces and places,
such as gardens, forests, cities, and the court, to spatially theorized
topics such as travel narratives, nationalism, and the open- or closedness
of specific medieval cultural areas. Over an array of subjects, the
spatial turn challenges scholars to re-think how humans create the world
around them, through both physical and mental processes. Articles should
explore the meaning of space/place in the past by situating it in its
precise historical context.
Possible article topics include, but are not limited to:
Medieval representations of spatial order
The sense of place in the construction of social identities
Mapping and spatial imagination
Topographies of meaningful places
Beyond the binary of center/periphery
Spatial policies of separation: ethnicity, religion, or gender
Travel and the sense of place
Creating landscape
The idea of place in medieval religious culture
Pilgrimage
Workplaces
Intimate space, public place
Liminality and proximity as social categories
The 2011 issue of Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval
Studies will be published in May of 2012. All graduate students are
welcome to submit their articles and book reviews, or to send their
queries, via email to submit@hortulus.net by March 1, 2012. For further
information please visit our website at www.hortulus.net
Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies, www.hortulus.net
Special Call For Papers for Issue on Medieval Space and Place
SUBMISSION DEADLINE FOR VOLUME 7, Issue 1: 1 March 2012
Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies is a refereed
journal devoted to the literature, history, and culture of the medieval
world. Published electronically twice a year, its mission is to present a
forum in which graduate students from around the globe may share their
ideas. Article submissions on the selected theme are welcome in any
discipline and period of Medieval Studies. We are also interested in book
reviews on recent works of interest to a broad audience of Medieval
Studies scholars.
Recently, place and space theories have manifested themselves in Medieval
Studies in a number of ways, from analysis of specific spaces and places,
such as gardens, forests, cities, and the court, to spatially theorized
topics such as travel narratives, nationalism, and the open- or closedness
of specific medieval cultural areas. Over an array of subjects, the
spatial turn challenges scholars to re-think how humans create the world
around them, through both physical and mental processes. Articles should
explore the meaning of space/place in the past by situating it in its
precise historical context.
Possible article topics include, but are not limited to:
Medieval representations of spatial order
The sense of place in the construction of social identities
Mapping and spatial imagination
Topographies of meaningful places
Beyond the binary of center/periphery
Spatial policies of separation: ethnicity, religion, or gender
Travel and the sense of place
Creating landscape
The idea of place in medieval religious culture
Pilgrimage
Workplaces
Intimate space, public place
Liminality and proximity as social categories
The 2011 issue of Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval
Studies will be published in May of 2012. All graduate students are
welcome to submit their articles and book reviews, or to send their
queries, via email to submit@hortulus.net by March 1, 2012. For further
information please visit our website at www.hortulus.net
Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies, www.hortulus.net
Friday, January 20, 2012
Campanella Cutup
On the World and Its Parts
The world is a great and perfect animal,
statue of God, which praises and resembles God:
Immortal Soul
Within a fist of the brain I dwell and I devour
so much that all the books that the world contains
could not satiate my profound appetite.
...
and the more I understand, the more I do not know.
So I am the image of the immense Father
...
only he who becomes Him and is born in Him is certain and blessed.
The Way to Philosophize
The world is the book in which the eternal Intellect
wrote His concepts, and a living temple
where, painting the exploits and His own example,
He adorned with living statues the depths and the heights;
so every spirit here should read and contemplate
art and government, so as not to become impious
and be able to say: “I fulfill the universe,
and by contemplating God internalize all things.”
City of the Sun
excerpts from
Selected Philosophical Poems of Tommaso Campanella: A Bilingual Edition
Tommaso Campanella; Edited, Translated, and Annotated by Sherry Roush
images from Google Image
see also Campanella article at SEP
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Renaissance Mathematicus on the contributions of Fludd
"Historians of medicine and alchemy have long ago demonstrated that Paracelsian medicine, although in terms of healing craft no improvement, helped to pave the way away from the humoral medicine of antiquity to modern scientific medicine and that the Paracelsian chemists laid the foundations for both chemical pharmacology and chemistry. Fludd was the leading Paracelsian physician in Britain in the first half of the seventeenth century. Fludd was also an independent co-inventor of the thermoscope the predecessor of the thermometer. Lastly Fludd was a close friend and colleague of William Harvey and was the first to accept and publicly support Harvey theory of the blood circulation. He even helped Harvey to get his De mortu cordis published by his printers in Germany."
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Dee utilized the analogy between kabbalah and alchemy
Winslade paraphrases and quotes Forshaw in "Thinning the Veils."
Dee recognized and utilized the analogy between kabbalah, in which the Hebrew language in the Torah is broken down and recombined to generate new meanings, and alchemy, "in which substances were reduced to their primal matter, and then recombined and transmuted to create and reveal new products"
Dee recognized and utilized the analogy between kabbalah, in which the Hebrew language in the Torah is broken down and recombined to generate new meanings, and alchemy, "in which substances were reduced to their primal matter, and then recombined and transmuted to create and reveal new products"
Gift ideas for students interested in authentic Jewish Kabbalah
Introductory collection of quotations by the current translator of the Zohar. Best starting point.
Concise and helpful historical introduction by one of the top Jewish Kabbalah scholars.
Magisterial lectures from the first great scholar of Kabbalah. Highly influential.
Critical response to Scholem's Major Trends by one of the greatest living Kabbalah scholars.
Dense but rewarding, theory-heavy study situates Kabbalah in contemporary thought.
Useful collection of Kabbalistic sources and earlier Jewish visionary/mystical texts.
Introductory edition of selections from the Zohar, most important text of Kabbalah.
The most current scholarly translation of the Zohar, laden with footnotes.
Concise and helpful historical introduction by one of the top Jewish Kabbalah scholars.
Magisterial lectures from the first great scholar of Kabbalah. Highly influential.
Critical response to Scholem's Major Trends by one of the greatest living Kabbalah scholars.
Dense but rewarding, theory-heavy study situates Kabbalah in contemporary thought.
Useful collection of Kabbalistic sources and earlier Jewish visionary/mystical texts.
Introductory edition of selections from the Zohar, most important text of Kabbalah.
The most current scholarly translation of the Zohar, laden with footnotes.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Fanger vs. Harkness on neglect of John Dee's medieval magical influences
She does not recognize that in Dee's arguments for a divine and Christian rationale behind his operations lies a rhetoric (and a set of biblical topoi) already much worn by use. Although she cites Stephen Clucas' recent work on the precedents for Dee's practices in medieval Solomonic magic, she largely ignores its implications; at any rate she does not pursue his leads and does not seem to have looked closely at most of the texts he cites.
The assumption that Dee's practices are original with him, or at the very least must harbor early modern principles (as opposed to medieval principles or precedents) sometimes leads her to misread the evidence. So, for example, Harkness writes:
In Dee's time ... Reformation theologians placed a new emphasis on the ways in which prayer could foster an "unmediated relationship between the individual and God." Dee showed himself, in this respect at least, very much a Protestant, for he did not direct his prayers to intercessory agents .... He communicated with God directly, and asked the Deity to send angels, who would then function as intermediaries in the transmission of divine knowledge. (125)
However addressing God in order to request the presence of angels to deliver information is a standard procedure of such operations, having little to do with the Reformation or Protestant theology. In medieval texts like the Ars notoria and its avatars, and in fact in those crystallomantic experiments intended to bring down angels (whose prayers differed in no fundamental aspect from orthodox Christian prayers, or for that matter, from Dee's), God is typically addressed directly and is similarly requested to send angels as intermediaries in the transmission of knowledge. (See for example the crystallomantic experiments numbered 24 and 25 edited by Kieckhefer in Forbidden Rites [Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1997], 244-245). Harkness' unfamiliarity with the medieval traditions of theurgy leads her to overstate as well the distinction between "magical invocation" and "prayer." She writes: "In prayer, the practitioner subjects himself to the will of God. In magical invocation, on the other hand, the practitioner subverts the hierarchical arrangement of the cosmos by asserting his or her will over a spirit and, through a subsequent binding spell, controlling a spirit's actions."(120)
Yet in practice few texts show more consciousness of the hierarchical arrangement of the cosmos than those devoted to conjuring spirits. All use prayer; even necromantic rituals often show a fine sensitivity to the order in which lower spirits must be bound by loftier ones, and it is generally recognized in one way or another that the whole machine moves at the will of God. While is not clear in all cases whether the spirits involved in necromantic experiments are good, bad, or simply neutral, in those experiments and texts explicitly devoted to the invocation of angels, the angels are typically not "bound" or coerced in the way that demons are -- as Dee clearly knew himself, their presence was requested through humble petition to God.
-106-
Other bald generalisations about practices commonly characterised as "magical" obscure their possible relevance to Dee's enterprise. Harkness writes: "In late medieval and early modern Europe stones were used in divination typically to locate stolen property, a practice decried by the church." (117) While it is true that the immediate point of many kinds of divination is the location of stolen property (or hidden treasure), it is also true that medieval texts which actually describe the prayers and rituals accompanying the use of crystal stones show a somewhat broader and more interesting array of spiritual concerns and sensitivities than such a characterization might suggest. In fact, even in respect of using the crystal to locate hidden treasure, Dee's work is hardly unusual, for Dee himself was wont to use the crystal to ask questions about hidden treasure whenever his financial fortune was at a low ebb (as Harkness notes in another location). Doubtless Dee had other concerns as well; but so too, sometimes, did medieval conjurers of angels, whose aims and motivations were sufficiently close to Dee's to warrant further and more detailed comparison of their prayers and practices to Dee's. While it is probably true that Dee's concerns in his angelic conversations differed in certain ways from those of the medieval predecessors, Harkness is not really sufficiently aware of the medieval practices to make authoritative statements about what these differences are.
Review of John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature
The assumption that Dee's practices are original with him, or at the very least must harbor early modern principles (as opposed to medieval principles or precedents) sometimes leads her to misread the evidence. So, for example, Harkness writes:
In Dee's time ... Reformation theologians placed a new emphasis on the ways in which prayer could foster an "unmediated relationship between the individual and God." Dee showed himself, in this respect at least, very much a Protestant, for he did not direct his prayers to intercessory agents .... He communicated with God directly, and asked the Deity to send angels, who would then function as intermediaries in the transmission of divine knowledge. (125)
However addressing God in order to request the presence of angels to deliver information is a standard procedure of such operations, having little to do with the Reformation or Protestant theology. In medieval texts like the Ars notoria and its avatars, and in fact in those crystallomantic experiments intended to bring down angels (whose prayers differed in no fundamental aspect from orthodox Christian prayers, or for that matter, from Dee's), God is typically addressed directly and is similarly requested to send angels as intermediaries in the transmission of knowledge. (See for example the crystallomantic experiments numbered 24 and 25 edited by Kieckhefer in Forbidden Rites [Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1997], 244-245). Harkness' unfamiliarity with the medieval traditions of theurgy leads her to overstate as well the distinction between "magical invocation" and "prayer." She writes: "In prayer, the practitioner subjects himself to the will of God. In magical invocation, on the other hand, the practitioner subverts the hierarchical arrangement of the cosmos by asserting his or her will over a spirit and, through a subsequent binding spell, controlling a spirit's actions."(120)
Yet in practice few texts show more consciousness of the hierarchical arrangement of the cosmos than those devoted to conjuring spirits. All use prayer; even necromantic rituals often show a fine sensitivity to the order in which lower spirits must be bound by loftier ones, and it is generally recognized in one way or another that the whole machine moves at the will of God. While is not clear in all cases whether the spirits involved in necromantic experiments are good, bad, or simply neutral, in those experiments and texts explicitly devoted to the invocation of angels, the angels are typically not "bound" or coerced in the way that demons are -- as Dee clearly knew himself, their presence was requested through humble petition to God.
-106-
Other bald generalisations about practices commonly characterised as "magical" obscure their possible relevance to Dee's enterprise. Harkness writes: "In late medieval and early modern Europe stones were used in divination typically to locate stolen property, a practice decried by the church." (117) While it is true that the immediate point of many kinds of divination is the location of stolen property (or hidden treasure), it is also true that medieval texts which actually describe the prayers and rituals accompanying the use of crystal stones show a somewhat broader and more interesting array of spiritual concerns and sensitivities than such a characterization might suggest. In fact, even in respect of using the crystal to locate hidden treasure, Dee's work is hardly unusual, for Dee himself was wont to use the crystal to ask questions about hidden treasure whenever his financial fortune was at a low ebb (as Harkness notes in another location). Doubtless Dee had other concerns as well; but so too, sometimes, did medieval conjurers of angels, whose aims and motivations were sufficiently close to Dee's to warrant further and more detailed comparison of their prayers and practices to Dee's. While it is probably true that Dee's concerns in his angelic conversations differed in certain ways from those of the medieval predecessors, Harkness is not really sufficiently aware of the medieval practices to make authoritative statements about what these differences are.
Review of John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)