Esoteric Coffeehouse

It’s autumn, the leaves are yellowing and I am back. I’m happy to say that my MA dissertation in Western Esotericism is off and I will be starting my PhD in Western Esotericism. Yup, I can’t get enough of it.

In case you’re wondering (and even if you are not), my thesis was called “The Impact of Jan Baptista Van Helmont’s Theory of Love, Desire and Universal Sympathy on his ‘Christian Philosophy’”. I hope it sounds heavy enough. I will try to write an article on Van Helmont some time soon; he was a physician and an alchemist in the tradition of Paracelsus who lived at the beginning of the 17th century.

For now, I would like to write a bit on the Renaissance love philosophy and its relationship with magic. The story begins with the first Renaissance philosopher, Marsilio Ficino (end of the 15th century). Today he is remembered mainly as the translator of Plato’s treatises from Greek into Latin. History has not been very kind to him, even as he was in many ways the reason the Renaissance ever existed. Ficino re-introduced Plato, the Neoplatonists and Hermetic thinking in the discourse of his contemporary age and hence ignited a revolution of consequences.

I will not go into the depths of Ficinian philosophy now except in so far as he was the creator of a pervasive love philosophy in his era. Of course, if you asked Ficino, he would never recognize that he created it (back then originality was not well regarded). Perhaps he really didn’t. He simply tried to restore the courtly love tradition of the Middle Ages, whose chief representatives were Francesco Petrarch, Dante Alighieri and Guido Cavalcanti. He also looked farther back to Plato himself for inspiration.

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Until recently, the field of Western Esotericism, like other academic fields, has had an “Iron Curtain” of its own, staying away from Eastern Europe or Russia. In many ways, this omission was not intentional, but resulted from the lack of access to documents trapped on the other side of the Wall. It was then salutary that at this ESSWE conference in Strasbourg (of which you can read more in my previous post) there were presentations on the esotericism of Russia, the Czech Republic and Romania. In many ways, Eastern European countries are an unearthed treasure-trove that demands recovery.

My presentation focused on the town of Sibiu (also called Hermannstadt or Nagyszeben) in Transylvania, a historical province of Romania. Sibiu was named in 2007 as one of the two European capitals of culture, and Sibians are still very proud of this honour, the first one bestowed to an Eastern European city. Sibiu is by many standards a peculiar place, as it was for almost a millennium inhabited mainly by ethnic Germans, locally called “Saxons”, in a province dominated by a Romanian majority and a Hungarian minority. The Germans came here around 1100s, invited by the Hungarian kings to protect the border of Transylvania from Tartar and later Turkish raiders. The Germans occupied a land they called “Siebenburgen” (the seven cities) out of which Sibiu was the most important and best fortified. It was so well fortified that the Pope once praised it for being one of the foremost bastions of Christianity, successfully withstanding Moslem attacks. In 1526, however, Hungary fell to the Turks, and Transylvania (together with Sibiu) became a vassal of the Turks. This was not as bad as it sounded, because the principality was virtually independent, paying a formal tribute to the Ottoman Empire. Hence, when the Austrian Empire tried to take over Transylvania in the 1600s, there was strong local resistance. Eventually, the Austrians did occupy the principality, which became part of the Empire until 1918. Since then, Transylvania (and Sibiu) was part of Romania. However, after 1945, most Germans began to leave the country, with the result that now there are only 3% of them left in Sibiu (albeit the mayor of the town is a German).

From my investigations, Sibiu appears to have a rich esoteric background, focused particularly on alchemy and freemasonry. The key alchemist figure here was Melchior Cibinensis, a mysterious author which composed a famous alchemical work in the 1500s called “the Alchemical Process in the form of a Mass”. This was an audacious piece that made an analogy between alchemy and the Catholic Mass. In the 20th century, Carl Jung used this work to describe his theory of the correspondence between the lapis philosophorum and Christ.

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I have just returned from the 2nd ESSWE European Western Esotericism conference in Strasbourg, France. It was organized between 2nd and 4th of July by the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE) in partnership with MISHA (Maison Interuniversitaire des Sciences de l’Homme d’Alsace) at the University of Strasbourg. The conference included plenary presentations by major esoteric scholars, including: Carlos Gilly, Andreas Kilcher, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Kocku von Stuckrad, Mark Sedgwick, Christine Maillard, and Joscelyn Godwin. Other major participants included Wouter Hanegraaff, president of ESSWE, Antoine Faivre, former chair at the Sorbonne, and Jean-Pierre Brach, current History of esotericism chair at Sorbonne. Outside of these sonorous names, MA, PhD students, lecturers and independent scholars have contributed their papers to this event.

The theme of the conference was “Capitals of European Esotericism and Transcultural Dialogue”. Thus, we learned about the impact of the legendary count of St Germain’s visit in the Hague (Caroline de Westenholz); the freemasonic lodges of Halle, Germany (Renko Geffarth & Markus Meumann); the reasons of Nuremberg’s prohibition of alchemy in the Renaissance (Hereward Tilton); the esoteric scene of the 1960’s – 1980s London (Christopher McIntosh); the image of Prague in Meyrink, Kafka and Kubin (Cecile Wolff and Amanda Boyd); the Jerusalem Kabbalists reaction to Christian Kabbalists (Judith Weiss); New York state spiritualities (Joscelyn Godwin); Giordano Bruno’s influence in Germany (Joyce Pijnenburg); Corfu esotericism (Sasha Chaitow); esoteric traditions of Glastonbury (Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke); cyberspace esotericism (John Crow); the topography of Russian esotericism (Konstantin Burmistrov) or the alchemical and freemasonic traditions of Sibiu, Romania (yours truly). In addition to these presentations, a secondary theme referred to imaginary spaces and landscapes: Stuckrad talked about escapism in Hermann Hesse and Mircea Eliade, Clare Goodrick-Clarke about the mundus imaginalis of Wessex, Maillard about Jung’s initiatory journeys, Aurelie Chone about Shambala and Agarthi in Tibet, Sara Thejls on Atlantis and the community of Damanhur. There were a lot more presentations that should deserve mention, including an intriguing discussion about the “West” in Western esotericism.

I should end this short report by mentioning briefly the wonderful times the participants had at the conference. We had the opportunity of meeting old friends and discovering new ones. We sat down, drank esoteric beer and shared inciting debates on Kabbala, alchemy and Second Life. We shared contacts and established new meeting points at future conferences. When we finally departed, we did so enriched and inspired by this unique Strasbourg experience, ready to explore newly discovered themes and subjects of esotericism.

Homeopathy is the brainchild of Samuel Hahnemann, a German doctor practicing at the beginning of the 19th century. As a young physician, Hahnemann became discontented with the mainstream medicine practiced during his era, which often employed harsh and doubtful measures such as bloodletting, purging, blistering and excessive doses (1). His own experience and observation led him to propose a radically new medicine, homeopathy, which could be translated as “the cure is like to the disease”. Homeopathy is based on a few pillar principles developed by Hahnemann, which I will attempt to summarise below:

1. The law of “similars”. This law, which is rightfully considered as the basic tenet of homeopathy, had been the mainstay of several ‘dissident’ physicians such as Hippocrates, Paracelsus or Stahl. The law maintains that cure should be similar, rather than opposed to disease. In other words, patients should take medicine that is apparently ‘stimulating’ the illness. This may sound rather absurd in our day-and-age, when it is ‘self-understood’ that the medicine should be contradictory to the disease: thus, when we have an infection we take antibiotics to ‘reduce’ or ‘eliminate’ it. Who would even consider taking something that would increase the infection? Yet some famous physicians, including Hahnemann, thought that a contrary medicine only quashes the symptoms, without addressing the real problem. The infection may be reduced or eliminated, but the body’s disease would only find some other outlet to express itself. That is because, in Hahnemann’s views, disease goes deeper than what we normally think as illness. Disease is a spiritual entity, rather than a physical one (2).

2. Theory of the vital force (“vitalism”). Homeopathy belongs to a long lineage of scientists or philosophers that believed that, behind the apparent materiality of the universe lay a spiritual force that organized matter (3). Proponents of this theory include Aristotle, Hippocrates, Paracelsus, Van Helmont, Stahl, Bergson, Driesch and others (4, 5). Hahnemann subscribed to this view, maintaining that the body was animated by a spiritual force he called “dynamis”, which was responsible for maintaining and regulating the body (6). Far before the ideas of homeostasis and immunity were introduced into medicine, he believed that the body had the capacity of self-regulating itself. However, he also considered that, when disease takes over, the body is no longer able to protect itself and the physician must then intervene.

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The history of the Knights Templar may be fascinating, but it does not compare with the history of their legend. It is hence regrettable that insufficient research has been done in Knights Templar mythology. Whether the Templars were truly in possession of some wondrous knowledge, the Grail, or they were devil worshippers, we will probably never know. What we can record is what the people believed, and some continue to believe, about the Templars.

From what I have been able to fathom, the Templar-mania is no coincidence. Even during the existence of the knighthood, they were the object of an intense medieval propaganda. At the beginning, the propaganda was positive, even idealistic, initiated by high church figures and popular troubadours. Then, as Philip IV and Pope Clement began to defame the order, the publicity became very negative. The story they told about the Templars resembled a modern ‘conspiracy theory’. In any case, in the 13-14th centuries, the Templars were, as it were, “big news”. Today, books like those of Dan Brown or Michael Baigent only perpetuate a medieval news story.

The positive propaganda was initiated by an influential monk, St. Bernard of Clairvaux. St Bernard was an amazing figure: he single-handedly organized the reformist Cistercian order in Europe, preached the Second Crusade and even arbitrated the choice of the Pope (for more on him, see 1). In addition, St Bernard was a staunch supporter of the Templar order. In fact, much of Templar ideology came from St Bernard’s vision. In 1128, at the Council of Troyes, he penned down the outline of the Templar Rules, which became a standard of chivalry in the epoch (2). Later on, he wrote “In the Praise of the New Knighthood”, which portrayed the Templars as an ideal knightly order that combined military chivalry and monk dedication (3). In his view, the Templars were probably meant to be more than an order – but an archetype of the ‘new knighthood’. In this spirit, he urged the entire European knightly class to join the Templars (4).

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