Frances A. Yates

ZusammenfassungDie Wissenschaftssoziologie behandelte bislang hauptsächlich die Frage der Entstehung des „Neuen” in den sogenannten wissenschaftlichen Revolutionen. Hier beschäftigen wir uns mit der entgegengesetzten Frage des Fortlebens des „Alten” durch Prozesse wissenschaftlichen Wandels hindurch. Ein Beispiel ist der Übergang von Konzeptionen des hermetischen in solche des modernen, rational-mechanistischen Weltbildes seit dem 16. Jahrhundert. Die Untersuchung dieser Entwicklung zeigt, daß zusätzlich zu „neuen” „alte” Ideen reinterpretiert und dadurch substanziell bewahrt werden.

Inspired by Paul Ricoeur’s seminal discussions in De l’interprétation (1965), this article argues that the academic study of Eranos has suffered from a binary logic which falsely assumes that scholars must choose between either a hermeneutics of faith or a hermeneutics of suspicion. Hans Thomas Hakl’s Eranos exemplifies a neglected intermediary approach that may be referred to as the hermeneutics of generosity. Hakl’s insistence on the maxim audiatur et altera pars allowed him to transcend narrow ideological positions and apply the principle of charity to thinkers across the political spectrum from left to right. Furthermore, instead of approaching scholars such as Jung, Eliade, Corbin, or Scholem as unique and isolated figures, he contextualized them historically as parts of a scholarly tradition that had been neglected by the academy. Although his true agenda was to discuss Eranos in terms of an alternative Geistesgeschichte with special attention to its “esoteric” dimension, the sheer pressure of the dominant discourse may have actually caused him to overemphasize political issues. Updated future studies of Eranos should be able to follow in Hakl’s footsteps while expanding the scope of inquiry to dimensions that still remain neglected, including that of Eranos as a characteristic manifestation of high modernity. It is suggested here that the famous “spirit of Eranos” reflects a refusal of the linguistic turn in twentieth-century thought and an insistence that meaning comes to the self rather than from it. Its characteristic hope of being ergriffen or interpellé by “the impossible” is best understood in terms of the dark existentialist mood among intellectuals during the period dominated by two world wars.

A conversation between Peter Mark Adams and Christophe Poncet on the esoteric tarot, in relation to the elite and Saturnian Sola-Busca tarocchi and the popular and luminous Tarot de Marseille. The two leading researchers into the hidden legacy of the tarot discuss the significance of their discoveries, which overturn the prevailing academic orthodoxy, and in doing so transform our understanding of the role of tarot in Western esotericism.

Le propos de cet article est de montrer que cette approche de l’œuvre en Allégorie de la Prudence , en dépit de sa séduction, n’est plus pertinente pour plusieurs motifs majeurs, et qu’en reprenant l’analyse de l’œuvre à la base, à partir de son caractère inhabituel et frappant, il est possible de proposer une lecture parfaitement nouvelle, et très étroitement reliée à un contexte historique précis où l’on retrouve, le « théâtre » de Giulio Camillo, l’atelier de Titien, et le passage du jeune Henri III à Venise en 1574. Cette nouvelle approche donne à cette peinture une fonction très circonstanciée, et justifie sa qualité d’unicum dans l’œuvre de Titien.

Ted Hughes, ‘An Alchemy’ and Shakespeare: Hughes’ poem ‘An Alchemy’ (THCP 279) is constructed as an alchemical process which seeks to describe the Alchemical nature of Shakespeare’s works. This paper offers a description and analysis of the poem. A section of this paper was presentend at the British Library Symposium on ‘Ted Hughes and Expressionism’(Sept 2023).
Part 1 (not included) is published in Intellect Book 2.0 'online first'. (September. 2023).

Giordano Bruno vermischt in seiner Cena de le ceneri die Gattungen Dialog und Komödie miteinander, um sich darin mit satirischen Mitteln als philosophische Autorität zu inszenieren. Der Aufsatz zeichnet nach, wie Bruno dabei auf die Dialogformen Lukians von Samosata zurückgreift und die Gattungsmischung in Anlehnung an Erasmus poetologisch theoretisiert, um abschließend vorzuführen, wie Bruno die Figur des Pedanten in seinem Dialog handhabt.

The first and primary thesis of this book is that religious studies have little-known and sometimes repressed origins which lie in the field of esotericism. The second thesis, which stems directly from this idea, holds that esotericism is an intrinsic part of hegemonic cultures and not a separate, small, “secret”, or “occult” field of minority groups. These two themes run through all the essays in this volume. By adopting this perspective, we aim to shed new light on the history of the academic discipline of religious studies and esotericism. In the historiographical narratives on the history of religious studies this dimension is usually completely absent, even if the connections to other disciplines emerging in the 19 century (e.g. ethnology, cultural anthropology, geography of religion) are addressed or if the connection with ideological patterns of interpretation, e.g. evolutionary doctrines, which also play a central role in occultism, is present. One can read a lot about acade...

Hans Magnus Enzensberger'in Mausoleum: Thirty-seven Ballads from the History of Progress (1975) başlıklı nazım biyografi derlemesinden Tommaso Campanella'yı konu alan, "T. C. (1568-1639)" şiirinin Türkçe çevirisini, Frances Yates'in "Giordano Bruno ve Hermetik Gelenek" yapıtının geçtiğimiz günlerde Say Yayınları tarafından basılan çevirisine nazire olarak sunuyorum.

Dieser Aufsatz beschäftigt sich mit der These von Frances Yates, dass Denker wie Giordano Bruno und Agrippa von Nettesheim angenommen haben, dass die Schriften des Hermes Trismegistos von dem Ägypter Thoth (Hermes) stammten. Es soll in diesem Aufsatz demonstriert werden, dass die Annahme von Yates sehr spekulativ war und zumindest nicht auf Agrippa zutrifft, da aus keiner seiner Schriften hervorgeht, dass er das Corpus Hermeticum für Texte des Ägypters Hermes selbst hielt. Er glaubte zwar an die Legende des Hermes, aber in dieser Abhandlung wird die Hypothese überprüft, dass Agrippa dem Neuplatoniker Jamblichus folgte, dass griechische Philosophen, die ungefähr in der Zeit von Jamblichus lebten, diese Schriften verfasst haben. Damit wäre die Hypothese von Frances Yates widerlegt, nach der Agrippa glaubte, das Corpus Hermeticum würde direkt vom Ägypter Thoth herrühren. Aus der "Occulta philosophia" geht hervor, dass Agrippa die Werke Jamblichus hervorragend kannte, doch Yates hielt es scheinbar für nicht relevant, dass Jamblichus darauf hingewiesen hatte, dass das Corpus Hermeticum von ägyptischen Priestern geschrieben wurden. Es war damit nicht Casaubon, der als Erster erkannt hat, dass das Corpus Hermeticum unmöglich auf eine ägyptische Legende mit dem Namen Hermes zurückgehen konnte. Casaubon dachte selbst nicht, dass er der Erste war, der den Irrtum aufdeckte, denn er berichtete ebenfalls von der Aussage von Jamblichus. Abstract This paper deals with the thesis of Frances Yates that philosophers as Giordano Bruno and Agrippa von Nettesheim thought that the Trismegistic books were directly written by the Egyptian Hermes (Thoth). This paper has the target to reveal that the speculative thesis of Yates was not correct at least for Agrippa von Nettesheim, because from nowhere in the publications of Agrippa follows that he thought that the Corpus Hermeticum came directly from Egyptian Hermes. Agrippa thought that the legend of Hermes is true, however, we want to review the hypothesis that it is more likely that Agrippa followed the neoplatonic philosopher Iamblichus that Greek philosophers who lived during life time of Jamblichus authored the books. From that perspective the hypothesis of Yates would be contradicted that Agrippa assumed that the Corpus Hermeticum came directly from the Egyptian Hermes. From the Occulta philosophia results that Agrippa knew the works of Iamblichus very well. However, Yates did not think it is relevant that Iamblichus already said that the Corpus Hermeticum was authored by Egyptian priests. Casaubon was not the first author who suggested that the Corpus Hermeticum did not originate from the Egyptian legend Hermes. Casaubon also did not think that he was the first who revealed the error, because he also mentioned the utterance of Iamblichus.

Across the years, scholars have found in Dante’s "Inferno" a nearly endless wellspring for study, its breadth of vision and scope make it an object of intense curiosity and fascination, and a window into the medieval worldview. The subjects which I have chosen to investigate here, while somewhat radical, are not altogether without precedent having piqued the interest of a number of scholars over the years, whose work I provide a survey of here. My central aim is to consider the function of memory in "Inferno", both in it’s allegorical aspects and its practical historical function as a possible mnemonic tool, while simultaneously calling on Dante to guide us through a more modern Inferno. What does the Inferno mean to a modern audience, especially one that has become increasingly more secular, rational and scientific since it was originally conceived? It is my contention that not only is "Inferno" still very much relevant to the modern(and postmodern) psyche, but that it is as instructive as it is applicable today as it was in Dante’s time. This is due not only to the "Inferno" being a profoundly humanist text, but a text that exhorts the reader to a prudent pursuit of knowledge and remembrance of his or her own profoundly human circumstances, a process which the text itself models through the allegory of Dante the character’s pilgrimage through Hell. The variations of theme and subject in the "Inferno" are as far flung as they are all encompassing, spanning vast historical periods and drawing upon the nascent resurgence of classical learning beginning to percolate through the cultural and scholastic exchange during Dante's own historical moment at the cusp of the renaissance.

Having learned many useful lessons from the movement of
deconstruction over the previous decades, it is high time for our
discipline to move forward and begin reconstructing the study of
religion as a whole on new and better foundations. If we want to
have our voices heard and have an impact on the wider public
debate instead of being marginalized and defunded as irrelevant,
we need a positive and convincing, even inspiring new narrative
about religion that demonstrates its great importance not just to
societal but to general human concerns. The article outlines one
possible direction for such a new narrative, focusing on the key
terms ‘experience,’ ‘consciousness,’ ‘imagination,’ and ‘spirituality.’
Far from implying a new kind of religionism along the lines of the
Eranos or Eliade schools, this means that we should move such
topics out of the taboo sphere for secular scholars and reclaim
them for critical non-religionist methods and approaches.

Having completed this course, students will have acquired a solid overview of
(1) the main general currents of Western intellectual and cultural history from
late antiquity to the present, (2) their relation to those currents, ideas, practices,
and organizations that have tended to be suppressed, marginalized, or
discredited in traditional academic scholarship, and (3) the polemical and
apologetic discourses that have produced and regulated the relation between
these two.

This article analyzes new evidence from the marginalia to Ficino’s Plotinus manuscripts and offers a novel reading of Ficino’s “De Vita” 3. It settles scholarly disagreements concerning Paul O. Kristeller’s manuscript research and Frances Yates’s Hermetic thesis about “De Vita” 3, and reconsiders accepted conclusions regarding the centrality of Hermetic magic in Ficino’s philosophy. It demonstrates the origins and sources for “De Vita” 3 in Ficino’s reading of Plotinus’s explanations of prayer, and also reveals Iamblichus’s overlooked influence on Ficino: on the performative nature of philosophy in “De Vita” 3, and even on Ficino’s acknowledgment of the pseudonymity of the Hermetica.

In 1794, following his participation in a duel, Xavier de Maistre was placed under a period of house arrest which spanned forty-two days.  During this time he composed the work Voyage Around My Room, a model for undertaking introspected journeys within one’s own home.  This work associatively counterpoised the interior confines of the home with both imagination and memory. The ‘mental traveller’ was encouraged to conceive of journeys that drew from the remembrance of other journeys (whether those be experienced personally or vicariously through literature or travel narratives), the imaginative possibilities of experiences beyond the realm of one’s own experience, and preconceived notions of the nature of travel and place.

Maistre’s prescriptive narrative, and its subsequent sequel, engaged with a number of historic precedents. Firstly, in terms of the associative values of objects and places (and the imagined traversal of these), it resembled and exploited what Frances Yates was to later dub the art of memory, being a techne for extending the natural memory advocated by practitioners of classical rhetoric.  Secondly, the work responded to the growing eighteenth century fascination with travel narratives and the vicarious experience of adventure and place they facilitated.  This paper will discuss memory in relation to the imagined voyage, with particular reference to Xavier de Maistre, places and narratives designed for vicarious travel, and the classical art of memory.

My essay contribution to a special edition of Cultural Encounters journal, edited by Paul Louis Metzger of Multnomah Biblical Seminary and New Wine, New Wineskins.

Stephen Webb presents an interesting thesis in his volume "Mormon Christianity", suggesting that Christendom should adopt the metaphysical materialism of Mormonism instead of the matter-spirit dualism, including divine immaterialism, of classical theism. In Webb’s view, Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith’s claims about a visionary experience with the divine
are the major shaping influence on Mormon metaphysics. In this essay, I will argue that Smith drew upon aspects of the Western esoteric tradition, in particular Hermeticism and what Catherine Albanese has called “American metaphysical religion,” and that it was these influences that shaped Smith’s
hermeneutic related to his visionary experience and his reading of the Bible, as well as his overall views on spirit and matter.

Gravira “Melanholija I” smatra se jednim od najznačajnijih dela renesansog majstora Albrehta Direra, ali o njenoj zagonetnoj ikonografiji i dalje ne postoji stručni konsenzus. Većina istraživača uverena je da se u osnovi vizuelne predstave nalazi učenje o četiri telesna fluida kao uzročnika četiri temperamenta (koleričnog, sangviničnog, flegmatičnog i melanholičnog), zbog čega predstojeći rad započinje istorijatom i kulturološkim implikacijama ove medicinske zablude. Zatim su prikazane četiri različite interpretacije “Melanholije I”. Prema prvoj, Direrova gravira portretiše frustriranog renesansnog genija koji se u traganju za savršenom lepotom suočava sa ograničenjima ljudske prirode. Prema drugoj, radi se o prikazu vizionarskog transa, pri čemu je glavna figura sjedinjena sa dobrim duhovima Saturna. Treća posmatra graviru kao direktnu ilustraciju Platonovog dijaloga “Hipija veći”. Četvrta, u stručnim krugovima još uvek apokrifna interpretacija tumači „Melanholiju I“ kao prikaz prve faze alhemijskog Magnum Opus-a.

Abstract: In Italy the topic of realism has finally returned to prominence in
current literary debate, after the long postmodern phase in which both narrative
production and discussions in literary criticism were polarised by slogans
like ‘the self-referentiality of the literary text’ or ‘literature as play’. We can
now take renewed interest in the question of whether references to reality are
present even in works, like Le città invisibili (that have traditionally been interpreted
under the sign of literary self-referentiality and literature as play), and
we can ask what role these play in the text. The first part of the paper will
examine the critical function of the novel’s references to the tradition of literary
utopias, in which a classic study by Frances Yates is taken to be a – hitherto
unnoticed – source of textual and visual inspiration for Calvino. The second
part will analyse a number of passages to show how, in the combinatory play,
divergences from the literary utopian tradition function as a dialectical process
through which the reader is provoked to take a critical look at contemporary
urban reality and its unsolved social problems.

Del (detenido) desaparecido se espera que aparezca, no que venga revestido de su desaparición. Todo lo que las técnicas (y las tecnologías) de reconstrucción de identidad puedan alcanzar en perfección y en exactitud, no acallarán la inquietud de un reencuentro que jamás podría tener lugar. No es irrelevante el hecho que para los familiares de los llamados “detenidos desaparecidos” el encuentro con un cadáver sea menos decisivo que el encuentro con tal o cual objeto que lo acompaña.  Todavía menos irrelevante es si el objeto que lo acompaña contribuye a ensanchar la fosa entre él y el cadáver que debía poder nombrar. En la misma medida en que el objeto es capaz de nombrar al que acompaña, pliega sobre sí el abismo de una fractura. Luego, si las técnicas y las tecnologías de identificación tienen alguna importancia, para que puedan aportar algo a la causa del desaparecido es necesario que se pongan al servicio de las condiciones del reconocimiento, las que nunca podrán dejar de incluir la confianza o el crédito dado a dichas tecnologías