Search

Early Greek alchemy, Patronage and Innovation in Late Antiquity provides an example of the innovative power of ancient scholarly patronage by looking at a key moment in the creation of the Greek alchemical tradition.New evidence on scholarly patronage under the Roman empire can be garnered by analyzing the descriptions of learned magoi in several texts from the second to the fourth century CE. Since a common use of the term magos connoted flatterer-like figures (kolakes), it is likely that the figures of “learned sorcerers” found in texts such as Lucian’s Philopseudes and the apocryphal Acts of Peter captured the notion that some client scholars exerted undue influence over patrons.The first known author of alchemical commentaries, Zosimus of Panopolis (c. 300 CE), presented himself neither as a magos nor as an alchemist. In his treatises, he rather appears as a Christian scholar and the client of a rich woman named Theosebeia. In three polemical letters to his patroness, Zosimus attempted to discredit rival specialists of alchemy by describing them as magoi and demon-worshippers and by equating their techniques with Egyptian temple practice. In a subtler attempt to edge out his competitors, Zosimus pointed to their limited education and suggested that true alchemy could only be acquired by a meticulous interpretation of Greek alchemical texts.Extant evidence thus suggests that alchemical texts were first introduced among other Greek scholarly traditions when Zosimus annexed Egyptian temple rituals into the ambit of paideia thanks to the support and venue provided by his patroness.

Chapter 26 of the book "Science in Culture" is presented. It explores the concept of gnosticism. According to the author, gnosticism is a mysterious intellectual and religious movement which started during the second century A.D. Gnosticism contains many religious and mythological elements. It influenced art, psychology, politics and other aspects of philosophy.

the clock ticked on and on, happy about being apprenticed to eternity … Die Uhren stimmen nicht überein [The clocks are not in unison] Introduction Schoenberg's generation inherits its fascination with things uncanny from the Romantics. One need not look far to find examples in German literature from the nineteenth century: the poetry of Goethe, Hölderlin, and Heine, and the prose of E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Grimm brothers provide the most conspicuous and celebrated examples, as do August Schlegel's German translations of Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest all feed into Romantic visions of the uncanny). Within Schoenberg's generation, Freud becomes the supreme analyst of the uncanny, while Kafka invents its most profound examples, so much so that his name becomes synonymous with the uncanny. Schubert and Wagner must top the list of musical precursors to Schoenberg's depictions of things uncanny, but examples also can be found in Mozart, Don Giovanni in particular, Beethoven, and others. The principal focus of this chapter will be on one particular development of Schoenberg's rhythmic practice. It involves the use of a steady pulse-stream, set in contrast to its immediate musical environment, and expressing a sense of altered, “uncanny” time. The practice has antecedents in Schoenberg's tonal music, in Wagner before him, and even earlier, in the music of Schubert. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 1 of the book "Theological Aesthetics: A Reader," is presented. It contains extracts from the texts "Dialogue with Trypho," by Justin Martyr, "Against Heresies," by Iraneus the Bishop of Lyons and "The Trinity," by Hilary of Poitiers. It explains how the appearance of God in visions demonstrates His power over the universe and on man. It denounces the practices of the religious movement Gnosticism. It examines how the finite form of God may be revealed in His invisibility and infinity.

Chapter 11 of the book "The Satanic Epic," by Neil Forsyth is presented. It explores the symbolic significance of the serpent and the dove in the poem "Paradise Lost," by John Milton in allusion to God's creation in the Bible. It examines the relationship between the two animals in Christian narrative which was elaborated by the early priests. It probes the belief based from the Gnostic tradition that Christ is the serpent of Genesis.

The time is right, apparently, for a rebirth of trinitarian theology in the West. From the Enlightenment until the mid-twentieth century, the doctrine had been largely left for dead; those who continued to affirm it often did so in merely formulaic ways, which did little to help anyone understand its significance. Nevertheless, while the doctrine has all too rarely been explicated in adequate ways, its claims have remained present – in ordinary Christian practice, in the European intellectual milieu, and even in the very air that was breathed in the (ostensibly antitrinitarian) Enlightenment. Hans-Georg Gadamer has argued that ‘the Doctrine of the Trinity <…> has constantly stimulated the course of thought in the West as a challenge and invitation to try and think that which continually transcends the limits of human understanding’. So the soil was already fertile as the seeds of trinitarian theology were resown in the early twentieth century, by theologians such as Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar. These seeds are now producing a bumper-crop of thoughtful reflection on the Christian doctrine of God – much of it very good fruit (though not without the occasional weed). The renaissance of trinitarian theology also owes a great deal to the East: to the early Greek fathers, to the ongoing Orthodox tradition, and – in general – to a region of theological discourse within which the doctrine did not fade from view (as it had in the West). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From arcane learning to public knowledge Bacon's project was to harness firmly to the yoke of the state a new attitude to knowledge, and in the course of attempting to do this, he was led to think through and transform this new attitude to knowledge. At the most elementary level, his aim was to reform natural philosophy, but what exactly he was reforming, and how he envisaged its reform, are not straightforward questions. The object of this reform was both the practice and the practitioners of natural philosophy. He was concerned to reform a tradition of natural philosophy in which the central ingredients were areas such as natural history and alchemy: empirical, labour-intensive disciplines. In a pioneering essay, Kuhn attempted to distinguish between what he referred to as the mathematical and the experimental or ‘Baconian’ traditions. This is a useful first approximation, and it indicates a divergence of research in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (although Newton, for example, was considered to have produced models in both traditions, in his Principia and his Opticks, respectively). It is only to be expected that this characterisation is of less help in understanding the way in which fields of research were structured at the time Bacon was writing – and of course it is this that we need to understand if we are to comprehend what Bacon's reforms were directed towards – but there is a similar divergence between two broad kinds of discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PESSIMISM Now this, monks, is the noble truth about Ill: Birth is Ill, decay is Ill, sickness is Ill, death is Ill: likewise sorrow and grief, woe, lamentation and despair. To be conjoined with things which we dislike: to be separated from things which we like, – that also is Ill. Not to get what one wants, – that also is Ill. In a word, this body, this fivefold mass which is based on grasping, – that is Ill. Now this, monks, is the noble truth about the arising of Ill: It is that craving that leads to birth, along with the love and the lust that lingers longingly now here, now there: namely the craving for sensual pleasure, the craving to be born again, the craving for existence to end. Such, monks, is the noble truth about the arising of Ill. And this, monks, is the noble truth about the ceasing of Ill: Verily it is the utter passionless cessation of, the giving up, the forsaking, the release from, the absence of longing for this craving. Now this, monks, is the noble truth about the practice that leads to the ceasing of Ill: Verily it is this noble eightfold way, to wit: right view, right aim, right speech, right action, right living, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. It was the experience of suffering that supplied the motive for Buddhist thought. The analysis of suffering and the way to release from it constitute its contents. In the four noble truths that the Buddha delivered in the Deer Park of Isipatana near Benares, the nature of suffering and the way to liberation from it form the central theme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

… the traditional beliefs and customs of the medieval and modern peasant are in nine cases out often but the detritus of heathen mythology and heathen worship … village festivals … are but fragments of naive cults addressed by a primitive folk to the beneficent deities of field, wood and river. Les fêtes, les jeux, la danse, la musique, le théâtre, les repas de noces ou de funerailles et surtout l'activité rituelle des groupes de la jeunesse locale et des défunts du village ont pour fonction … de redéfinir fréquemment pour chacun le sens d'appartenance au groupe. In chapter 8 brief mention was made of the games and rituals with which people in a local community enlivened their dull lives and induced a sense, if not of well-being, at least of camaraderie. It is appropriate to examine the assumptions and beliefs, the mentalité of ordinary people, which subsumed these activities, and, in so far as this is possible, to trace their origins as far back as practicable. The world-view of traditional peoples was underpinned by the tacit assumption that there were forces external to mankind which could in some way shape human destiny. Both the regularities of nature, the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, the movements of the planets and the procession of the seasons, no less than its irregularities, like the apparent randomness of weather and the incidence of epidemic disease, called for explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The civilization of Roman Britain was neither merely provincial nor merely cosmopolitan, neither Celtic nor Roman simply, but a fusion of the two, though an imperfect and unstable fusion, whose elements were mixed in varying proportions in different social strata and in different parts of the country. The Roman invasion of ad 43 had been presaged, not only by Julius Caesar's forays a century earlier, but also by the growing commercial and cultural ties between Britain and the nearby continent. It was, indeed, the closeness of these ties and the fear that an independent Britain might stimulate rebellion in Gaul that led to the Claudian invasion. The course of the conquest of much of Britain which followed gave further emphasis to that threefold division of the island that has already been mentioned (p. 6). By ad 47–8 the Romans had overrun south-eastern Britain and had established a military base near the present town of Colchester as well as forts elsewhere to hold the conquered territory. Their advance was halted, if only momentarily, along the line of the Jurassic escarpment. From its edge they could, metaphorically at least, look down on to the clay-floored and forested Midlands. Along this line they built a series of segments of roads, later linked to form the Fosse Way. It became a military road from Lindum (Lincoln) to its original south-western termination on Lyme Bay, later moved to Isca Dumnoniorum (Exeter). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joseph Campbell has argued for a recognition that ‘the interplay and mutual spiritual fertilization of the sexes’ are a profoundly formative influence on the ‘metamorphosis of myth’: ‘So that even where the woman may seem to have disappeared from the scene – as, for example, in the patriarchal Aranda and Hebrew images of the first days of creation – we must realize that she is there, even so, and watch for the ripple of her presence behind the curtain.’ The divine feminine has, in fact, rarely remained behind the curtain in Western culture. If Diana and Isis were to leave the stage with the growth of Christianity, the Virgin Mary was also to make her entrance. The Protestant rejection of Mariology created a divine realm that was overwhelmingly masculine in tone, but this was compensated in some circles by the introduction of another manifestation of the divine feminine, Sophia. As Barbara Newman has observed, ‘In the Protestant world, where the divine Father and Son were no longer counterbalanced by the figure of Mary the Mother and Ecclesia the Bride, sapiential theology took on more esoteric and heterodox forms, becoming bolder in its statements of divine androgyny.’ At the most general level, Behmenist thought on gender can thus be regarded as a response to a need to conceive the divine in both male and female terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alongside the masculinist tradition in Judaeo-Christian theology there has always existed a counter-tradition, traces of which can be found as far back as the Old Testament writings. The triumph of Yahweh was accomplished by the assimilation of other deities, rather than their elimination. It seems likely that the divine name El Shaddai represents the incorporation of Canaanite fertility goddesses, endowing the god of the pre-Deuteronomic Jews with certain female characteristics. Although this particular tradition was suppressed by the Deuteronomic reforms, there are several passages in the Old Testament in which feminine images are applied to God, most notably in the Wisdom literature. New Testament writers tended to avoid such images, but traces of the feminisation of the deity persisted in Christian thought, especially among the Greek Fathers. Clement of Alexandria spoke of ‘the Father's loving breasts’ supplying milk to those who ‘seek the Word’. Amongst the Latin Fathers, Tertullian referred to the Holy Spirit as the Mother in the Trinity. While the use of such terms seems to have declined in the early Middle Ages, the twelfth century saw a marked revival of maternal imagery applied to God, as in the works of Bernard of Clairvaux. Apart from this use of feminine images with regard to God, the myth of the androgyne (divine and human) has recurred throughout Judaeo-Christian thought. The duality of divine gender and the original androgyny of humanity are ancient and widespread conceptions, symbolising ‘the perfection of a primordial, non-conditioned state’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

3.1.1 The subject of woman as seen by physiologists, anatomists and physicians is complex and multifaceted, because of its contiguity (and coincidence) with spermatology, hysterology, the science of the humours and theories of physical change. It is also very closely related to embryology, which exercises a deep influence on medical discussions about woman, and even determines to some degree the series of problems considered by medieval and Renaissance writers. In the excellent accounts of ancient embryology by Erna Lesky and H. B. Adelmann, this fact is pointed out, and the principal questions are listed: what is the origin of semen? do both sexes produce it? which part of the body develops first in the foetus? what determines sex and resemblance of children to parents? These questions give rise to a set of loci classici which are discussed by Renaissance doctors. 3.1.2 Renaissance medicine is distinct from the medieval discipline not only because of the work of humanists who produce the great editions, indices and commentaries of Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen in the first half of the sixteenth century, but also because of the growth of experimental anatomy. The work of Andreas Vesalius, Gabriele Falloppio and Realdo Colombo is paralleled in the clinical sphere by the producers of consilia (case histories) and great writers on physiology, among them Jean Fernel. Although most doctors refer to ancient sects (the ‘practici’ who follow Averroes, the ‘peripatetici’, the ‘Galenici’, the ‘methodici’, the ‘empirici’), the vast majority of them are, according to Adelmann, ‘thoroughgoing Galenists at heart’, but influenced to different degrees by Aristotle, Avicenna and Hippocrates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2.1.1 It is convenient to examine Renaissance attitudes to woman in theology and mystical writing principally in the light of scholasticism. There are several reasons for doing this: the problems considered and the methods of biblical analysis remain essentially the same for scholastics and Renaissance theologians alike; the influence of the Fathers is strong in both Catholic and reformed writing; furthermore, the scholastics' practice of drawing comparisons with Roman Law, Aristotelian medicine and ethics is continued in the Renaissance. There is no need for the purposes of this study to distinguish between systematic theology (strongly influenced, even in the case of Lutherans, by Aquinas) and biblical commentary, practised widely by theologians of all persuasions. It might be said that post-Tridentine Catholic commentators were more traditional in approach, whereas reformers were more insistent on the ‘claritas Scripturae’, and more concerned with achieving commonsense explanations of obscurities and plain exegesis for the widest possible public, but this is true only in the most general terms. A small difference between Catholic and reformed writers may be discerned by the latters' exclusion from the canon of apocryphal (deuterocanonical) books, especially Ecclesiasticus, which contains much material about women; but this difference is not sufficient to create a deep division of approach. For both Catholic and reformed theologians, the habit of total recuperation of the text (that is, the desire to make every statement fit into a coherent scheme) remains the same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. I think that He who made all things in wisdom so created all the species of visible things upon the earth, that He placed in some of them some teaching and knowledge of things invisible and heavenly, whereby the human mind might mount to spiritual understanding and seek the grounds of things in heaven. … after many generations and many conflicts there is strained out at last, I should say, one system of really true philosophy. For that philosophy is not of this world – such a philosophy our sacred mysteries most justly detest – but of the other, intelligible world. The Wisdom Of The World Visitors to modern Athens, if they were to approach the ancient monuments of the Acropolis from the Pláka area, might notice before the final ascent to the ruins of the temple of Athene Nike a set of steps cut into the side of a large granite outcrop which lies below and to the West of the Acropolis. The site is the Areopagus – literally ‘Mars Hill’ – where for the first time in their own city Athenians encountered the new faith of the Christians. To the right of the worn steps is a large brass plaque which bears in Greek the words of the seventeenth chapter of the book of Acts, which recount the events which took place there, probably in the autumn of the year AD 50. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter II of the book "Aylwin," by Theodore Watts-Dunton is presented. It explores Henry Aylwin's perceptions in life after school, with a promise that he will do a certain thing in relation to Winifred. It also highlights Henry's intimacy with his father after eighteen years when he realized that he is no longer a child. It occurred when he asked about the Gnostic amulet that represents the Gorgon's head which was possessed by his father.

A section from chapter 1 of the book "The Columbia History of Western Philosophy," edited by Richard H. Popkin is presented. It focuses on the origins of a religious movement called gnosticism. Central to the movement is the concept of gnosis, a privileged religious knowledge or insight that refers to the salvation of the elect. It notes the existence of a challenging logic behind gnostic assumptions that must have been viewed as a threat by other philosophies and religions of redemption.

A definition of the term "CATHARS" is presented. It refers to the heretical cult or millenarian tradition in the middle of the tenth century. The tradition is derived from the Gnosticism, a reinterpretation of Christianity which considers Satan and God as two sides of the same coin. Catharism is considered a unique among the dissident religious movements because of its gentleness and its promise of universal redemption.