The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician
Tag: occultism
Black Magic Code
“It began with a letter to a dead man…” My article ‘The Black Magic Code’ on Trithemius, cryptography and nigromancy published in Abraxas Journal. For more details see http://fulgur.co.uk/shop/abraxas/abraxas-journal-issue-6/
Spiritualism and the Golden Dawn
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the most important magical society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was established on the basis of spirit communication with supernatural entities. Known as the ‘Secret Chiefs’, these entities provided the source of authority for the leaders of the Order as well as later becoming the…
Reinventing the Renaissance Occult
Review of ‘Reinventing the Renaissance Occult in Modern and Postmodern Culture’ now available at http://jwmt.org/v2n20/reinventing.html Five hundred years ago the occult – what we think of as ‘the occult’ – was taught in university and practised by many of the foremost personalities of the age. Still it was persecuted. Dangerous. Between the Church and the…
Remember The Exorcist?
The priest approaches the bed, a smile on his face. His words are kindly as he addresses the girl bound to the bed frame… Leo Ruickbie, ‘Talk of the Devil’, Paranormal, 51, September 2010.
Renaissance Occult – Conference Update
Prof. Sarah Annes Brown has posted a summary of my talk ‘Dealing with the Devil: The Faustian Pact in Magical Culture’: Leo Ruickbie gave a very engaging account of the Faustian pact in magical culture, moving from the responses of Faust’s near contemporaries, to an account of an eighteenth-century man apparently saved at the last…
Dealing with the Devil
This paper given at Reinventing the Renaissance Occult, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, 14 November 2009, explored the development of the Faustian Pact, looking at how the Renaissance magician Faustus came to be condemned as having made a pact with the Devil, and how this condemnation itself came to be a pattern for magical practice. Pacts…
On the Shelf Review – Ruickbie’s Faustus: The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician
I don’t know what I pay you guys for, because nobody mentioned to me that the most thorough treatment of the Renaissance magus Faust, Leo Ruickbie’s Faustus, had just appeared. Nevertheless, you’re all forgiven, and I’ll review it for you. Writing a biography of Jorg Faust is an extremely daunting task. […] This is the…