The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician
Tag: renaissance
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/
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…
Reinventing the Renaissance Occult
Review of the ‘Reinventing the Renaissance Occult in Modern and Postmodern Culture’ conference accepted by the Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition (JWMT) for the forthcoming edition, vol. 2, no. 20. Will post link when the journal is published.
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…
Reinventing the Renaissance Occult
The aim of the day was to explore the different ways in which modern culture has returned to Renaissance esotericism. Some have been drawn to the intriguing remoteness of such teachings from our own more scientific and sceptical age. Others, by contrast, have sought to discover unexpected points of contact between the mysteries of the…
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…