Marked by Stars – Agrippa's Occult Philosophy
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Just curious if anyone is into this kind of stuffs. I got into this in late teen, believing that Lovecraftian is a really thing. It quickly turned out to be made up by the great writer, but nevertheless Occult drew me in. I was never deep into it due to lack of time and my belief in science (or we can say modern science especially Physics and Mathematics are the modern Occult).
Maybe I'll dig deeper and learn a few foreign languages after 50.
Science doesn't negate an interest in the arcane, esoteric, or occult. You can still find this stuff fascinating, and in fact there are practitioners who are actively involved in scientific circles simultaneously. It is not always mutually exclusive.
Pythagoras was what we might call an occultist. Newton was an alchemist (which isn’t about lead to gold, it’s about the transmutation of the Self), Jack Parsons was a Thelemite. Ramanujan credited his genius to visions.
Science and math can’t (yet) answer the big questions. There are things it doesn’t even try and touch. In my experience, curious minds are often interested in trying to attain a broader understanding of the universe and our place in it.
Well, maybe not so much. That's kind of a 19th-20th century interpretation. We didn't want to believe that all these smart people really were into stupidity like turning lead into gold. Surely it must be much deeper than that! It must have been metaphors! But maybe not. Maybe they literally were into what they said they were into. It's not unlike how people want to claim that various religious stories weren't "really" about what they claim to be.
“There are two sciences and two wisdoms, that of the Egyptians and that of the Hebrews, which latter is confirmed by divine justice. The science and wisdom of the most excellent dominate the one and the other. Both originate in olden times. Their origin is without a king, autonomous and immaterial; it is not concerned with material and corruptible bodies, it operates, without submitting to strange influences, supported by prayer and divine grace.
The symbol of chemistry is drawn from the creation by its adepts, who cleanse and save the divine soul bound in the elements, and who free the divine spirit from its mixture with the flesh.“
Psychology and psychiatry are two other fields that traveled the path of spirituality and occultism before becoming what we now term modern.
Alchemy was not stupid in the 17th century. You have the benefit of three centuries of subsequent scientific advances, to which geniuses like Isaac Newton, and those other smart people, contributed significantly.
Besides alchemy, Newton was deeply immersed in various occult studies. He was also a heretic, being a Unitarian, keeping his religious beliefs secret. Scientific research occupied only a part of his time. The seventeenth century was a time of religious and political turmoil, millenarianism and apocalyptic prophecy abounded. Newton was a man of his time.
For traditional ritual/ceremonial magic The Heptameron is possibly the easiest of the old grimoires to read, and whilst he has his detractors Joseph Lisiewski's Ceremonial Magic & The Power of Evocation is pretty readable as a modern take.
(None of this is to comment on the truth or practicality of the belief systems and practices, it's just a pointer to possibly interesting early stage sources.)
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