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The Occult Mind: Magic in Theory and Practice by Christopher I. Lehrich

By Christopher I. Lehrich

"Given the ancient orientation of philosophy, is it unreasonable to recommend a much wider solid of the web into the deep waters of magic? via encountering magical proposal as concept, we come to a brand new figuring out of a concept that appears again at us from a funhouse mirror."--The Occult brain Divination, like many severe modes, consists of analyzing indicators, and magic, extra ordinarily, should be visible as one of those feedback that takes the universe--seen and unseen, recognized and unknowable--as its textual content. within the Occult brain, Christopher I. Lehrich explores the background of magic in Western idea, suggesting a daring new realizing of the claims made in regards to the chronic of assorted trust platforms. In heavily interlinked essays on such disparate themes as ley traces, the Tarot, the Corpus Hermeticum, writing and formality in magical perform, and early makes an attempt to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics, Lehrich treats magic and its elements as an highbrow item that calls for interpretive zeal at the a part of readers/observers. Drawing illuminating parallels among the perform of magic and newer interpretive systems--structuralism, deconstruction, semiotics--Lehrich deftly means that the threat of magic haunts all such makes an attempt to understand the nature of data. providing an intensive new method of the character and price of occult proposal, Lehrich's brilliantly conceived and accomplished ebook posits magic as a style of concept that's intrinsically subversive of normative conceptions of cause and fact. In elucidating the deep parallels among occult inspiration and educational discourse, Lehrich demonstrates that sixteenth-century occult philosophy usually touched on matters that experience turn into critical to philosophical discourse merely long ago fifty years.

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14 But this very human solution is also only half the answer. The other parallels a number of dichotomies of concern throughout dlis book: prophecy and nostalgia, synchrony and diachrony, history and structure, science and magic. I suggest that Dee understood cile Monas and the angelic actions as similar not only in purpose but in method l as activity. To make a long story short, the bookMonas Hieroglyphica does not construct a perfect character but explicates a vision vouchsafed by God. The book is an account of Dee's attempt, by ratiocination and application of a range of knmvledges, to interpret, as is also obviously true of the angelic conversations, in which Dee stnlggled desperately to make sense of peculiar and often contradictory messages.

Dee's library appears to have been organized quite haphazardly, with books shoved in more or less wherever they would fit, albeit under gen. eral headings. The marginalia of Dec, like those of his contemporaries Isaac Casaubon and Thomas Smith~ indicate important points and graceful passages in the text under review, and Sherman justly contends that these denote bits of rhe rcxts intended by rhe reader for later appropriation into his own writings. :1scinating, but surely rather familiar? I have organized my own modest collection under three nlbrics-fiction, occult, nonfiction-and then aJphabetically by author.

Smith) it becomes historical. To use some of Smith's terminology, the first step defnmilinrizcs the object, dislodging it from an obscuring background so that its distinctive features become apparent, while the second fatl'liliarizcs, making the object an instance of something known. 27 With the notion of }Egypt, I tried ro defamiliarize the magical nosralgia for Egypt, leading to a somewhat inside-out reacling of the Asclepiu,. The justification for the move is the seeming familiarity of Egypt: because we think we know about Egypt, we miss the peculiarities ofiEgypt.

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