Call for Papers: The Substance of Sacred Place

From:   Urban, Tim <Urban@khi.fi.it>
Date:   October 29, 2012

Call for Papers

The Substance of Sacred Place:
An Interdisciplinary Workshop on Locative Materiality

organised by Laura Veneskey and Annette Hoffmann

20th/21st June 2013
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz - Max-Planck-Institut

The study of holy places has long been a central concern of not only the humanities, but also the social sciences. Much of this body of scholarship has focused on pilgrimage and sacred centers, either as theoretical constructions or as concrete places, such as Jerusalem, Mecca or Benares. These subjects have been explored, on the one hand, through the study of ritual and liturgy, and on the other, through various modes of representation, be they architectural, cartographic, iconic, or textual. Complementary to these lines of inquiry, we invite papers that explore the material and tactile dimensions of locative sacrality across religious traditions. How is a sense of place communicable through physical means? What can a consideration of matter tell us about the often fraught relationship between the tangible world and its representation?

We seek analyses of all materials evocative of a particular sacred milieu, not only earth, dust, stone, but also wood, metal, pigments, oil, or water. Presentations exploring either the substances and places themselves or textual and iconic depictions thereof are equally welcome. We invite papers from all disciplines on any locale conceived of as sacred, whether scriptural, pilgrim, monastic, ascetic, or cultic, between antiquity and the early modern period. The workshop is aimed at young researchers, and is intended to bring together graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and those in the early stages of their teaching or professional careers.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Sacred landscapes (deserts, mountains, caves, etc.)
- The material dimensions of topographic representation (iconic or textual)
- Earthen, geographic, and locative relics
- Transportable versus site-specific sanctity
- The physicality of built environments and places of worship

Interested applicants should send a current c.v. and an abstract of no more than 250 words (for presentations of twenty minutes) to hoffmann@khi.fi.it andlv2308@columbia.edu). Proposals must be received by date 30th November 2012.

For questions and further information please contact:
Laura Veneskey (lv2308@columbia.edu)
or Annette Hoffmann (hoffmann@khi.fi.it)

abstract of Blum's Introduction to Giordano Bruno

Giordano Bruno. An Introduction by Paul Richard Blum

 "Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was a philosopher in his own right. However, he was famous through the centuries due to his execution as a heretic. His pronouncements against teachings of the Catholic Church, his defence of the cosmology of Nicholas Copernicus, and his provocative personality, all this made him a paradigmatic figure of modernity. Bruno’s way of philosophizing is not looking for outright solutions but rather for the depth of the problems; he knows his predecessors and their strategies as well as their weaknesses, which he exposes satirically. This introduction helps to identify the original thought of Bruno who proudly said about himself: “Philosophy is my profession!” His major achievements concern the creativity of the human mind studied through the theory of memory, the infinity of the world, and the discovery of atomism for modernity. He never held a permanent office within or without the academic world. Therefore, the way of thinking of this “Knight Errant of Philosophy” will be presented along the stations of his journey through Western Europe.


Chapters
Pleasant Campania: Education Before and In the Convent
Fleeing into Exile—Northern Italy, Geneva, Toulouse: Astronomy as a Means of Earning a Living
Paris: The Power of Memory
Off to London: Satire, Metaphysics, and Ethics in Italian
God Is Not Idle: Infinite Possibilities and Infinite Reality
Religion and Ethics for the People and the Hero
Return to Paris: Challenging Mathematics and Aristotelianism
“Houses of Wisdom” in Germany: History, Magic, and Atomism
Off to Venice: The Trial of the Heretic
Afterlife: From Heretic to Hermeticist 

abstract for a talk on textual sources of magic, epistemological problems

Giving a talk tomorrow for an interdisciplinary seminar series on pre-modern era research (before 1800) in Tartu, Estonia.

TEXTUAL SOURCES FOR THE STUDY OF MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN MAGIC
Jason Cronbach Van Boom

This talk discusses the use of textual sources in the study of medieval and early modern magic (1100-1650). Like other historical disciplines, the history of magic relies heavily on texts. When studying medieval and early modern magic, however, the historian uses two kinds of texts: texts about magic, and texts that were intended as tools for magical practices. The former category is extremely diverse with respect to content and ideological perspective. This category includes academic, legal, polemical, and popular texts. Academic and polemical texts themselves fall into different categories, mostly juridical, theological, and philosophical. Their authors come form a spectrum of learned opinion about magic, ranging from complete opposition to ardent defense. Grimoires and other magical texts comprise a distinct category. They address a limited audience (practitioners of magic) and are intended to be experimental handbooks rather than speculative treatises. Consequently, they pose some special epistemological problems. The talk will discuss four texts as primary examples: the De Mineralibus of Albertus Magnus, the Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, the De Occulta Philosophia of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, and a 15th century German necromantic manual (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Clm 849) published by Prof. Richard Kieckhefer.

Call for Papers: Celestial Magic

University of Wales Trinity Saint David
The Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture,
School of Archaeology, History and Anthropology
http://www.trinitysaintdavid.ac.uk/en/sophia/

Eleventh Annual Sophia Centre Conference
Call for Papers

'CELESTIAL MAGIC'

22-23 June 2013
Venue: Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, Bath, England

Keynote speakers

Prof. Peter Forshaw, Universitair Docent (Senior Lecturer/Assistant
Professor) for History of Western Esotericism in the Early Modern Period at
the Center for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents,
University of Amsterdam.

Prof. Elliot R. Wolfson, Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic
Studies, New York University.


Conference Chairs
Dr Nicholas Campion, University of Wales Trinity Saint David,
n.campion@tsd.ac.uk
Dr Liz Greene, University of Wales Trinity Saint David and the University of
Bristol. l.greene@tsd.ac.uk

Conference Theme
Magic, loosely defined, is the attempt to engage with the world through the
imagination or psyche, in order to obtain some form of knowledge, benefit or
advantage. Celestial magic engages with the cosmos through stellar,
planetary or celestial symbolism, influences or intelligences. This academic
conference will explore the history, philosophy and practice of celestial
magic in past or present societies.

The conference organisers invite proposals for papers of 30 minutes which
may deal with text, imagery, practice or theory. We welcome proposals on any
time period or culture. The deadline for submissions is 31 December 2012.

Please include an abstract of c. 150 words and a biography of c 100 words,
in the same document.

Abstracts and biographies should be e mailed to Dr Liz Greene,
l.greene@tsd.ac.uk

The conference is held in collaboration with the Sophia Centre Press.
Publication: selected proceedings will be published through the Sophia
Centre Press.

Hebrew translation of Lull

Raimundus Lullus, Ha-Melacha ha-Ketzara. A Hebrew Translation of Ramon Llull's Ars Brevis, Turnhout, 2012.

 Éditeur : Brepols
Collection : Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis
ISBN : 978-2-503-54198-3 140 €

Ramon Llull completed the Ars breuis in 1308. This short but very popular work extant in over seventy manuscripts was a concise and much more easily digestible version of the much longer Ars generalis ultima, the final redaction of Llull's Art. In Senigallia in the March of Ancona in July or August 1474, the Ars breuis was translated into Hebrew and then copied twice over the next couple of years. The colophon of the extant copy shows that these Jewish students of the Ars breuis used the work to attain unio mystica. This seems to be a unique example of a Christian work, described as being ”short in quantity but great in quality”, knowingly being used by Jews for mystical purposes.

The translator and copyists seem to have read and understood Llull's work through the prism of Abulafian Kabbalah. Abraham Abulafia (d. ca. 1291), a contemporary of Llull's, wrote numerous works dealing with the divine names and the combination of letters. He believed that the whole Torah was the names of God, and by manipulating the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, one could have knowledge of the divine and created world. This Jewish circle seemed to have understood the letters of the Lullian alphabet and the various combinations and compartments of the Ars breuis as leading to true mystical cognition.

This volume presents the Hebrew edition together with the original Latin (based on a slightly revised edition of ROL 12 / CC CM 38) along with an English translation and detailed notes which show how the Jewish translator and copyists understood and used this work.

This edition was prepared under the auspices of the ERC project “Latin Philosophy into Hebrew: Intercultural Networks in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe”.

Harvey J. Hames is Professor of Medieval History at Ben Gurion University of the Negev (Israel).

 from http://www.compitum.fr/publications/4102-raimundus-lullus-ha-melacha-ha-ketzara-a-hebrew-translation-of-ramon-llulls-ars-brevis

Embryology+Astrology After Pico

3. “Renaissance Embryology and Astrology after Pico”
Hiro Hirai (Radboud University Nijmegen)
The traditional relationship between medicine and astrology was transformed during the Renaissance.A major factor of this change was the criticism formulated by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494). In his posthumous work Disputations against Judicial Astrology (Bologna, 1496), he rejected the divinatory aspects of astrology while accepting its physical dimensions, which can be qualified as “natural astrology.” According to him, celestial bodies produce their effects only by physical means such as motion, light and heat. The field of embryology received a direct impact from Pico’s new theory. This paper will take up the case of a lesser-known philosophical embryology published in Italy during the 1560s by Sebastiano Paparella who taught theoretical medicine at Pisa and Perugia. Under the strong influence of Pico, he tried to restore cosmic bonds, which could bridge the gap between heaven and seeds in animal and human generation.

Giordano Bruno's Definition of Magic

On Magic

First, the term ‘magician’ means a wise man; for example, the Trismegistes
among the Egyptians, the druids among the Gauls, the gymnosophists
among the Indians, the cabalists among the Hebrews, the magi among the
Persians (who were followers of Zoroaster), the sophists among the Greeks
and the wise men among the Latins.

Second, ‘magician’ refers to someone who does wondrous things merely
by manipulating active and passive powers, as occurs in chemistry, medicine
and such fields; this is commonly called ‘natural magic’.

Third, magic involves circumstances such that the actions of nature or
of a higher intelligence occur in such a way as to excite wonderment by
their appearances; this type of magic is called ‘prestidigitation’.

Fourth, magic refers to what happens as a result of the powers of attraction
and repulsion between things, for example, the pushes, motions and
attractions due to magnets and such things, when all these actions are due
not to active and passive qualities but rather to the spirit or soul existing in
things. This is called ‘natural magic’ in the proper sense.

The fifth meaning includes, in addition to these powers, the use of
words, chants, calculations of numbers and times, images, figures, symbols,
characters, or letters. This is a form of magic which is intermediate between
the natural and the preternatural or the supernatural, and is properly called
‘mathematical magic’, or even more accurately ‘occult philosophy’.

The sixth sense adds to this the exhortation or invocation of the intelligences
and external or higher forces by means of prayers, dedications,
incensings, sacrifices, resolutions and ceremonies directed to the gods,
demons and heroes. Sometimes, this is done for the purpose of contacting
a spirit itself to become its vessel and instrument in order to appear wise,
although this wisdom can be easily removed, together with the spirit, by
means of a drug. This is the magic of the hopeless, who become the vessels
of evil demons, which they seek through their notorious art. On the other
hand, this is sometimes done to command and control lower demons with
the authority of higher demonic spirits, by honouring and entreating the
latter while restricting the former with oaths and petitions. This is
transnatural or metaphysical magic and is properly called ‘theurgy’.

Seventh, magic is the petition or invocation, not of the demons and
heroes themselves, but through them, to call upon the souls of dead
humans, in order to predict and know absent and future events, by taking
their cadavers or parts thereof to some oracle. This type of magic, both in
its subject matter and in its purpose, is called ‘necromancy’. If the body is
not present, but the oracle is beseeched by invoking the spirit residing in
its viscera with very active incantations, then this type of magic is properly
called ‘Pythian’, for, if I may say so, this was the usual meaning of ‘inspired’
at the temple of the Pythian Apollo.

Eighth, sometimes incantations are associated with a person’s physical
parts in any sense; garments, excrement, remnants, footprints and anything
which is believed to have made some contact with the person. In that case,
and if they are used to untie, fasten, or weaken, then this constitutes the
type of magic called ‘wicked’, if it leads to evil. If it leads to good, it is to be
counted among the medicines belonging to a certain method and type of
medical practice. If it leads to final destruction and death, then it is called
‘poisonous magic’.

Ninth, all those who are able, for any reason, to predict distant and
future events are said to be magicians. These are generally called ‘diviners’
because of their purpose. The primary groups of such magicians use either
the four material principles, fire, air, water and earth, and they are thus
called ‘pyromancers’, ‘hydromancers’, and ‘geomancers’, or they use the
three objects of knowledge, the natural, mathematical and divine. There
are also various other types of prophecy. For augerers, soothsayers and
other such people make predictions from an inspection of natural or physical
things. Geomancers make predictions in their own way by inspecting
mathematical objects like numbers, letters and certain lines and figures,
and also from the appearance, light and location of the planets and similar
objects. Still others make predictions by using divine things, like sacred
names, coincidental locations, brief calculations and persevering circumstances.
In our day, these latter people are not called magicians, since, for
us, the word ‘magic’ sounds bad and has an unworthy connotation. So this
is not called magic but ‘prophecy’.

Finally, ‘magic’ and ‘magician’ have a pejorative connotation which has
not been included or examined in the above meanings. In this sense, a
magician is any foolish evil-doer who is endowed with the power of helping
or harming someone by means of a communication with, or even a pact
with, a foul devil. This meaning does not apply to wise men, or indeed to
authors, although some of them have adopted the name ‘hooded magicians’,
for example, the authors of the book De malleo maleficarum (The
Witches’ Hammer). As a result, the name is used today by all writers of this
type, as can be seen in the comments and beliefs of ignorant and foolish
priests.

Therefore, when the word ‘magic’ is used, it should either be taken in
one of the senses distinguished above, or, if it is used without qualifications,
it should be taken in its strongest and most worthy sense as dictated by the
logicians, and especially by Aristotle in Book v of the Topics. So as it is used
by and among philosophers, ‘magician’ then means a wise man who has the
power to act. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the word, when unqualified,
means whatever is signified by common usage. Another common
meaning is found among various groups of priests who frequently speculate
about that foul demon called the devil. Still other meanings are to be
found in the common usages of different peoples and believers.
Given these distinctions, we will deal generally with three types of
magic: the divine, the physical and the mathematical. The first two of these
types of magic necessarily relate to what is good and best. But the third type
includes both good and evil, since the magician may direct it towards either.
Although all three types agree on many principles and actions, in the third
type, wickedness, idolatry, lawlessness and charges of idolatry are found
when error and deception are used to turn things which are intrinsically
good into evil. Here, the mathematical type of magic is not defined by the
usually mentioned fields of mathematics, i. e., geometry, arithmetic, astronomy,
optics, music, etc., but rather by its likeness and relationship to these
disciplines. It is similar to geometry in that it uses figures and symbols, to
music in its chants, to arithmetic in its numbers and manipulations, to
astronomy in its concerns for times and motions, and to optics in making
observations. In general, it is similar to mathematics as a whole, either
because it mediates between divine and natural actions, or because it shares
or lacks something of both. For some things are intermediates because they
participate in both extremes, others because they are excluded from both
extremes, in which case they should not be called intermediates but a third
species which is not between the other two but outside of them. From what
has been said, it is clear how divine and physical magic differ from the third
type.

To turn now to the particulars, magicians take it as axiomatic that, in all
the panorama before our eyes, God acts on the gods; the gods act on the
celestial or astral bodies, which are divine bodies; these act on the spirits
who reside in and control the stars, one of which is the earth; the spirits act
on the elements, the elements on the compounds, the compounds on the
senses; the senses on the soul, and the soul on the whole animal. This is the
descending scale.

By contrast, the ascending scale is from the animal through the soul to
the senses, through the senses to compounds, through compounds to the
elements, through these to spirits, through the spirits in the elements to
those in the stars, through these to the incorporeal gods who have an ethereal
substance or body, through them to the soul of the world or the spirit of the
universe; and through that to the contemplation of the one, most simple,
best, greatest, incorporeal, absolute and self-sufficient being.
Thus, there is a descent from God through the world to animals, and an
ascent from animals through the world to God. He is the highest point of
the scale, pure act and active power, the purest light. At the bottom of the
scale is matter, darkness and pure passive potency, which can become all
things from the bottom, just as He can make all things from the top.
Between the highest and lowest levels, there are intermediaries, the higher
of which have a greater share of light and action and active power, while the
lower levels have a greater share of darkness, potency and passive power.
As a result, all light in lower things, which comes to them from above, is
more powerful in higher things. And also, all darkness in higher things is
stronger in lower things. But the nature and power of light and darkness
are not equal. For light diffuses and penetrates through the lowest and
deepest darkness, but darkness does not touch the purest sphere of light.
Thus, light penetrates and conquers darkness and overflows to infinity,
while darkness does not penetrate or overwhelm or equal the light, but
rather is very weak compared to light.

text lifted from this excellent Philosophy of Magic Course Website