WICCAPEDIA

Have you ever noticed that the internet is really good at providing translations and editions of books pertaining to magic, witchcraft, alchemy, divination, and really all else related to the occult? And we’re talking the height of old, esoterica here– Trithemius, Ficino, and onward, not to mention spanning Eastward. Off of the top of my head I can think of at least four sources with an exhaustive library spanning the ages that were founded within a few years of one another, and all have very similar fin de siècle website interface reminiscent of geocities, and a similarly benevolent mission to make provide accurate texts for free.

1. The Alchemy Web Site (c. 1995)
2. Esoterica Archive (c. 1997)
3. Sacred-Texts.com (c. 1999)
4. Renaissance Astrology (c. 2000)

Given the chronology, The Craft (1996) maybe plays a very important inspirational role in this constellation of 90s occultists keeping websites actively to this day. They’re all maintained by secular experts– I mean secular, in the sense that they manage to do this without academic appointments to keep them going– in their spare time, as independent scholars and freelance teachers, or alongside their legal practice among other things. But are they all friends? Do they know each other beyond the strength of weak ties i.e. linking to one another? It’s almost as if a subculture has been revived distinctly with the internet as its HQ, and it’s large enough and invested enough in digital archiving to have been around in the very beginning:

Many of the texts included here were originally posted in ftp archives or on bulletin boards before the growth of the World Wide Web and have been lost. In some cases, the texts were posted in such a form as to make them unusable by non-technically oriented users. Some of these texts were on the web at some point but have completely disappeared because the site they were posted on has closed. Thus the need for an archive which organizes this material in a persistent location. (Sacred-Texts.com)

I’d love to know what William Eamon thinks about this. It’s not only a subculture of belief systems dating back centuries, but a subculture of archival practices. It’s strange that something so committed, longstanding, and successful (via massive amounts of traffic), and also so outside the academy, should also remain fairly ignored by the digital humanities. There’s such a mindfulness in the ‘About’ section of each that they serve a purpose that is unique, and it goes beyond the website even, to the core of collecting (super relevant, given what’s happened to the Bibliotheca Hermetica Philosophica lately):

BW: Thank you for agreeing to another interview. I am surprised at the changes in your workplace, it is not quite as I remember things.
McLean: Yes, the hall is now a ‘Hall of Tarot’! Not quite that which the esotericists believe still lies hidden under the pyramids.
BW: You certainly now have a large collection of tarot cards.
McLean: Don’t worry. I am not about to tell your fortune! I recently became very engaged by the multiplicity of tarot card designs that had come into being in the past 50 years. These reflected all sorts of different ways of envisaging tarot imagery, in different art styles and interpretations, but which at the same time still held to the tarot structure. It reminded me of the 16th and 17th century emblems books, and I decided to investigate this aspect of tarot. I was immediately frustrated because there is no library that holds a collection of tarot cards. They seem to have been entirely ignored by libraries and archives and also by the art world. So in order to study them I knew I had to buy copies of the decks themselves. It has been quite a struggle but I have now amassed a collection of over 1000 actual decks with a hundred or more scans of decks on my computer.  (Link)

Hint hint, booksellers!

I’d love to do my part, although unfortunately it won’t go so far as an entire digital edition (yet) as much as a mere show-and-tell of solidarity. Here’s something that’s missing from these websites (as well as from Google Books) one of the books we’ve just got in is Hieronymus Cardanus/Girolamo Cardano’s Libelli Duo/Two Books (Nuremberg, 1543).  Cardano was generally a weird and prolific dude (even wikapedia will tell you, but Anthony Grafton’s Cardano’s Cosmosis much better). He thought he had magic powers including (1) to enter into a trance at will, (2) advanced imagination, allowing him to have any vision he wanted to and (3) foresight of his own future through examination of his dreams, or his fingernails.

He was a bestseller in his day, but his complete works were not printed until 1663, in twelve massive volumes collecting the various subjects he had written about during his lifetime: astrology, astronomy, medicine, educating the hearing impaired, gambling and probability, algebra, and even hereditary transmission in animals. [For instance in his De rerum varietate he argues that  his puppy learned to carry stones in only eight days because its parents had done so, whereas for others it would take months. Another oddity in this book is the argument that all Dolphins prefer to be called Simon because their forebears were called as much (De rerum varietate, VIII 40, Thorndike 577)]

This work includes an Almanack Supplement, a short treatise on the movement of the heavens, and most importantly a collection of astrological genitures of famous people, from Emperor Nero and Francesco Petrarch to celebrities and royals of his day, such as Erasmus and Henry VIII of England. A decade after the publication of this book (1554), Cardano published the horoscope of Jesus Christ which earned him several months in prison for heresy in 1570, under Pope Pius V — to give you a sense of the kind of trouble you can get into as an occult practitioner.  (Lest we forget, Hugh Trevor Roper has few compelling asides about this in Europe’s Physician: personal astrologer/alchemists were a must-have in many a civilized court, but for nobles like the Duke of Württemberg a misspoken horoscope or falsified ability to transmute metal into gold could land you in the gallows, as happened to Georg Honauer & later,  Muhlenfels.)

Starting later this week, I’ll be posting some of the best/juiciest parts of the book, maybe it will eventually grow toward something else, but who knows? But in the very least it might get us thinking about the history of digital archives and their habits– a fairly recent history but one with a lot of little corners of the internet that often don’t get the attention they deserve.

TREND ALERT: TREPANATION

Here’s the deal: the International Trepanation Advocacy Group thinks that trepanning, i.e. drilling into the skull and leaving the brain open-air like “favorably alters movement of blood through the brain and improves brain functions which are more important than ever before in history to adapt to an ever more rapidly changing world”.  According to this interview with a self-treppaner, John Lennon was interested in it. He even seriously asked the infamous ‘Dr’ Bart Hughes about what it could do for him.

And why not? Trepanation goes back to the B.C.s, and was even provided for in Hammurabi’s code ca. 18th century B.C.. A surgeon who successfully made a hole in his patient’s skull was entitled to payment– an unsuccessful surgeon had his hand cut off. The famous ancient Indian physician Sushruta included in his writings a number of ways in which budding surgeons could practice their technique: incising on a cucumber, lancing a leather bag full of slime, extracting seeds out of fruit with forceps, etc.

With this in mind, today on my desk for cataloguing is Peter Paaw’s (sometimes Pauw, sometimes Pavius) Succenturiatus anatomicus…de capitis vulneribus (Lyon: Colster, 1616). It’s the definitive 17th century commentary that expands & illustrates Hippocrates’ treatise on head wounds, by a leading anatomist in the tradition of Vesalius, and trepanation features prominently. (You can download the complete first edition in .PDF form on google books here!)

Paaw (1564 – 1617) was a famous anatomist and bontanist who opened the first Anatomical Theatre in the city of Leiden (and really in all of the Netherlands) in 1597. His dissections (usually of deceased criminals’ bodies) were popular far beyond the students at the university where he was Professor of Medicine– members of the public even bought tickets to attend. Outside of dissection-time, Paaw used the vaulted, well-lit theatre as a medical museum of curiosities, a kind of modern-day Mütter. Somehow, he managed to get ahold of the bladder of Isaac Casaubon for display (the malformation of which caused his death)! There are several engravings of the theatre that exist, including this fold-out image by Andrew Stock featured in the Succenturiatus anatomicus: