Melvyn Bragg In Conversation With Peter Forshaw, Valery Rees & Jonathan Sawday discussing Renaissance obsession with Magic. First broadcast: Thursday 17 June 2004
This is on the 'In Our Time' channel, but theirs is the shortened version (from the evening repeat) and is only 27 minutes long. The one here will have a lot of material cut from the evening broadcast.
Interesting, but talk about missing the point. These scholars are a great example of how you can't really understand a subject unless you have participated in it. They try to reason that the motivation for doing magic was for non magical purposes (e.g. getting power, getting money, etc) rather than doing it for the sake of gnosis, or to cause magical effects to happen. The basic assumption of these scholars is the materialist view that magic is not real. Ha. They are very much poorer for their materialist viewpoint. They got part of the skeleton and a maybe some of the flesh of the subject, but they did not capture the whole organism, or the spirit of the thing. This illustrates the problem of not taking the past at face value. They project there assumption that magic is rubbish and for charlatans onto what was happening in the past and therefore can't make sense of it. Guess what people, in the renaissance Dee, Ficino, Fludd, etc. actually thought that magic did something. It wasn't just a way for them to manipulate the courts, or have justification to do science. They believed in the reality of magic.
+Erich Hunter Ph.D. Didn't they acknowledge that by explicating on the point that Ficino et al thought of themselves as magi, and that the knowledge they were acquiring was not theoretical but active? I thought they touched on pretty much every possible motivation for doing magic, including gnosis, theosophy, alchemy and restoration, as well as the more cynical reasons. Of course they added to this their own biographical and historical scepticism, but that doesn't detract from the analysis and is quite welcome as it broadens out the discourse. I thought they were pretty thorough, especially considering the time constraints. What more could they have done?
Hi Jonathan, Thanks for the comment. Cool that you actually read what I wrote. Thank you. I guess I may have been overly critical. I am glad they presented this info. and I guess they did the best they could under the limits of what they could accept viz a vi their world view. They just seemed lost trying to impose their modern materialist viewpoint on the topic. The idea that these guys were frauds doing it for their advantage was too cynical and far fetched. A lot of good it did them, lol. The more I have researched this, the more I have learned that the primary motivation was most likely religious for Ficino and Agrippa at least. Trying to show a way to understand God's laws etc. They ended up on the losing side of the argument. The church didn't want them doing it because it undermined there authority and scientists didn't like it because they were trying to get freedom to do science by divorcing themselves from the church (hence the Cartesian materialist spiritualist duality that plagues modern thinking. As an aside, calling what they were doing as magic in the Renaissance is sort of a stretch. Some sort of Gnosis yes, but certainly not magic in the way it is historically conceived, which would be healing, fortune telling, various spells, herbalism and for the educated astrology and alchemy.
+Erich Hunter Ph.D. What about Ioan Culianu's perspective on the neo-platonic nature of Renaissance magic (?) Have you got an opinion on that (?) Its psychological and sexual sophistication is pretty compelling in its way . . .
No I don't but thanks for bringing this up. Not sure if this is related, but people practicing magic at that time did not have great ways of achieving higher states of consciousness, e.g. mescaline, DMT, etc. were not really available, so sex and magic ceremonies may have been a driving force for Renn. magic in a quest to achieve altered states that can be obtained during rituals.
Hermes was High when he wrote the Bible in Phonecian, it was so trippin, they had to create a knew language to cover it up. It goes with a couple other binds you'll see in Gen 1:1 AT H'SMIM VAT H'ARTz Book the spirits to call on and book the ARTz knowledge of holy plants. Both writings of Solomon (Sun and moon). This dude so bad he got Christians Praying to him and Hating him all at once. That's God.
Very interesting topic, but a disappointing and unstructured discussionn. Feels like jumping from one thing to another without a clear feeling of what you actually want to discuss and what you are getting at.
@@MrTeenStyle Love can be tied down to certain chemical reactions occuring in the brain as a result of certain factors/criteria being met. I don't think magic can be tied down to anything other than chance and luck, chance and luck being something woven into the fabric of the universe itself owing from the nature of matter at the quantum level itself. Magic is just a lazy explanation of a phenomenon without taking an actual look into why that phenomenon occurs.
These idiots lost me at Plato being a "Christian" philosopher. Plato was a Pagan philosopher and one of the wisest men of his time. Christians are the opposite of wise. Also Paganism is not ireligious. Paganism is simply ancient religion that Christians tried to wipe out.
Original retroductive thought by Pythagoras & Plato too was an acknowledgement of the 1 : phi present in the as above, so below of nature. It was never about the negation of soul/divine intelligence ... only a debate over the solar mythos present in dogma/the Christ (plus all of the interplay w Horus & Osiris & Vishnu & Noah etc) vs. the other ideologies.
@悲哀G.o7 All people value those things regardless of religion, atheists as well. Those aren't exclusively Christian ideals; Christian ideals are built off those.
Eeeeeh but Platonism dovetails with christianity very well and therefore lent itself to be picked up by christian thinkers and used to deepen christian beliefs, notably by for example Augustine. Greek (platonic) philosophy is arguably there at the foundation of christian texts, take for example the gospel of John. These "idiots" are, I presume, much more learned and well-read on these subjects than you are (were: it's been four years since your comment). Don't be so quick to dismiss them.
