Esoteric Coffeehouse

Happy New Year to all. Since it is the beginning of the year, I thought I’d experiment a little and write from time to time some commentaries on esoteric ideas related to popular culture. And what better way to start than with a review of the movie Avatar.

While I was watching Avatar, the concept of mundus imaginalis coined by historian and philosopher Henri Corbin kept crossing my mind in regards to the world of Pandora. Mundus imaginalis  is, simply put, the world of imagination – a world we project out of our mind. To us today this may be a poetic expression, but to traditional esoteric thought, this world was as real as we are, an intermediary place between this world and the divine one. It was a place we could access in our dreams and visions by the aid of a so-called ‘third eye’.

It is a phenomenon of our contemporary imagination to present this spiritual world as more accessible. What could make us transcend the barrier between our mundane universe and this magical one? The answer often is: technology. In Avatar, we see that technology (of a very expensive and sci-fi kind) can turn Jake Sully into an avatar capable of interacting with the world of imagination, symbolized by Pandora’s Navi people. We can see technology facilitating the forbidden interaction between the elusive Navi and the human beings.

But how does this apology for avatar technology reconcile with the explicit denial of technology amongst the idealistic Navis? After all, the Navis reject all complex machines and prefer hunting with spears and arrows. The movie’s answer is, by differentiating between ‘good’ technology and ‘bad’ technology. The good technology is the ‘soft’ kind: the one of computers and complex systems. It is this technology that allows one to ascend to the forbidden world of the Navis. Remarkably this world, we learn, is built on the same principles as soft technology. Grace the scientist puts it plainly: the Home Tree is a neural network connecting all trees on the planet. And if that wasn’t clear enough, we have the very explicit image of the Navi ‘jacking in’ the planetary system with their hair (Naughty as I am, I briefly wondered why would Jack and the Navi girl need to have sex the usual human way when they seemed to make love through their hair just fine).

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Today I want to talk about Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), the most famous (or infamous) Renaissance magician. He is the author of one of the well-known compendium of Renaissance esotericism, On the Occult Philosophy (or De Occulta Philosophia), which is still admired by people interested in magic today.

Agrippa was a German wanderer, much like his contemporary, Paracelsus. He traveled almost all his life between Germany, France and Italy, and switched professions just as easily as he switched countries. He was a theologian, a lawyer, a physician and a hired soldier. He claimed to have acquired both a law and medicine degree In the meantime, he wrote revolutionary treatises on Renaissance magic, the vanity of knowledge, the status of women in society and Virgin Mary. Most of these he refrained to publish until late in his life.

Agrippa was an unconventional scholar; for instance, in an era when women were seen as inferior and even instruments of the devil, he affirmed that they were in fact superior to men and more spiritual than them. His defense of the female sex caused quite a sensation in the period. In his De Vanitate Scientiarium, On the Vanity of all Sciences, he rejected all forms of knowledge as empty and purposeless. Even today scholars of Agrippa’s works are baffled by his universal rejection of knowledge. He was certainly an unusual iconoclast, an unique character that built and destroyed all at once.

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There is hardly a more controversional figure in the history of ideas than Paracelsus, by his real name Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim (1493-1541). He was many things to many people: a hero to some, a quack to other, a devil’s doctor, a German nationalist or a drunkard. Perhaps he was all these things, because, by comparison to most other historical figures, he was impossible to frame. In fact, Paracelsus created a world of his own and a mythology that has never ceased to fascinate since his premature death at 47.

Inevitably, any scholarly analysis of Paracelsus is bound to reduce something from his larger-than-life self. Scholars simply do not have the tools to tackle his complexity. The same is the situation of his works. He wrote a wondrous amount, and another wondrous amount was added unto him by his faithful followers. Like a religious figure, he created a veritable ‘tradition’ of writings that were attributed to him. This huge compendium is still awaiting a contemporary analysis, despite efforts in this direction (notably Kurt Goldammer).

Paracelsus was a religious figure of sorts; many people called him ‘Lutherus Medicorum’, the Luther of physicians. He didn’t like it; even though he lived during the turmoil of Luther’s Reform, he remained a faithful, if unorthodox Catholic. Instead, he proposed his own version of the world, a peculiar mixture of natural philosophy, alchemy, magic and Christianity. He was in fact the quintessential representative of the Renaissance; a man convinced of his mission of reforming people’s views of the world and of Christianity. He believed there was no inherent contradiction between the analysis of the natural world (we now call this ‘science’) and religion; in fact, Christianity was the very basis of this analysis.

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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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I have written sometime ago an article on the Egyptian myth of the Tarot (you can find it here if you missed it). I mentioned there that the ‘creators’ of the Tarot as we know it were basically 18th century esoteric writers Antoine Court de Gebelin and his friend the Count of Mallet. Yet Tarot would not be the esoteric phenomenon it is today (a search on the internet on ‘tarot’ would pull a staggering amount of 28 million entries) if it weren’t for another Frenchman, Alphonse Louis Constant, known as Eliphas Levi (1810 -1875).

Levi was a shoemaker’s son, just like another famous esotericist, Jacob Boehme. He was due to become a priest, but he gave up and got involved in the whirlwind of the 1848 revolution (1). When his political ambitions became frustrated, Levi turned to a serious study of Western esoteric traditions. In the process, he became acquainted with two key traditions: the Jewish Kabbalah and the Tarot.

The Kabbalah is a set of esoteric teachings developed by medieval Jews, and based upon a hidden understanding of the Hebrew Bible. At the core of the Kabbalah stays the Tree of Life, a complex system representing the 10 emanations of God into His Creation and the relationships amongst them. Kabbalah had been enthusiastically taken up by the Hermetic thinkers of Renaissance Europe, particularly Pico della Mirandola, Johann Reuchlin, Cornelius Agrippa and others. Christian Cabala, or Qabalah, as it became known, may have altered the original Jewish thought, but it had a tremendous influence on modern esoteric traditions. Levi enthusiastically subscribed to the Kabbalah and included it in his works.

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