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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Everyone remembers the witch hunts of the 1500 and 1600s as an ugly chapter of Western history. Thousands of so-called witches were burned, drowned, or tortured in an attempt to get rid of what the Inquisitors called ‘devil worship’. Today, we rarely believe that the witches were in league with the devil. In fact, during the early 20th century, scholars thought that witchcraft itself was a complete invention of the witch hunters (1). Even when some reality to the phenomenon was admitted, witch beliefs were dismissed as the matter of ‘female hysteria’ or peasant superstition (2).

Beginning with the 1960s and 70s, scholars began to consider witchcraft as more than a fiction of the Inquisition, and concentrated on analyzing its meaning for the peasant society (3), (4). Yet even this attempt was marred by a tendency of dismissing witchcraft as pure imagination.

If most scholarship believed witchcraft had no reality to it, there was one early dissenting voice: Margaret Murray, who maintained in 1926 that witchcraft was real, and that it actually represented a European-wide pagan religion dedicated to a horned god identifiable as Janus or Cernunnos (5). The medieval civilization was thus divided into the true Christians and the pagan “secret society” that adopted Christianity only as a facade. In an era of rationalism, numerous scholars rejected Murray’s work as pure fantasy (6).

Murray may have used her imagination to embellish the facts, but this does not necessarily mean that the whole phenomenon of witchcraft was imaginary. However, it was not until Carlo Ginzburg’s landmark studies that scholars began to really consider this possibility.

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