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.

CASE STUDIES IN OCCULT ALPHABETS: CELESTIAL WRITING

On my desk today is the first work to depict ‘Celestial Writing’ in the skies– that is, the formation of the stars into characters reminiscent of the Hebrew alphabet, which until that time had only been described in the West in Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy (first published in 1533).  Why would you want to be able to read the skies in such a way? Some reasons include fortune telling, and trying to talk to angels. There is also a relationship to poetry, and most recently yet, the chart above factors into Jerome Rothenberg’s Ethnopoetics available on UbuWeb.

The work is by the expert Oriental scholar, Jacques Gaffarel (1601-1681)– his Curiositez inouyes sur la sculpture talismanique des Persans, horoscope des Patriarches et lecture des estoiles (“Unheard Curiosities concerning Talismanic Sculpture of the Persians, Horoscopes of the Patriarchs, and the Reading of the Stars”), was first printed in French in 1629– ours is later, 1637. Unlike Agrippa, Gaffarel was well qualified to write about the mysteries of the divine cabala, as well as Persian inscriptions, proficient as he was in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syrian and Persian.

This work in particular was printed well into the 18th century, its topic esoteric and complex as only a prodigy of Eastern languages could produce. The first part defends Oriental religion and philosophy, focusing on ancient Hebrew traditions especially, the second explores Persian talismans particularly as they relate to natural magic, and the third part returns to the Oriental religion, specifically astrology. Most radically, by tracing the origins of these belief systems Gaffarel argues that they are not diabolical or malicious, nor hostile to Christianity, but completely separate. By virtue of falling totally outside of (not to mention pre-dating) Western religious terms, they cannot be deemed idolatry– a wholly Western accusation. Nevertheless, he offers some helpful ways of translating these ancient methods of reading the stars to contemporary understanding. In other words, showing the reliance of Western star-gazing upon its more distant Judaic ancestry.

As above the planets are translated from Hebrew into French, so below the alchemical symbols form (Beginning at the top and going clockwise) Saturn, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter.

The work sparked immediate controversy and on 1 August 1629 was condemned by the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris as “entirely to be disapproved”– “false, erroneous, scandalous, opposed to Holy Writ, contumelious towards the Church Fathers, and superstitious besides”. Such accusations were serious: the University was an ancient institution with considerable sway over the Monarchy, and strong ties to Catholic Rome, not to mention control over what could be printed in Paris. Since this book had been, and would continue to be printed right under their noses, in order for Gaffarel to appease the faculty he had to make some public show of contrition. So, two months later he did indeed sign a retraction vaguely stating that he had not intended to put forward his book as truth, merely to collect various ancient authorities on the matter. So don’t shoot the starry messenger.

Gaffarel, for all the upbraiding he received for defending astrology, was still on the right side of history: Rene Descartes delighted in the work (although thought of it as fantasy), Pierre Gassendi defended it, Thomas Browne consulted it to compile his own encyclopedic Pseudodoxica Epidemica, and even Cardinal Richelieu appointed Gaffarel as his librarian. Gaffarel used his leverage in this position to acquire books about the cabala for Richelieu, to the extent that he published a catalogue of related manuscripts in 1651, most of which once belonged to the late great Pico della Mirandola. Gaffarel was also a fan of that great occultist/utopian/theologian Tommaso Campanella, seeing that the Italians works were circulated in France, and even editing a brief synopsis of Campanella’s writings and purchasing all medical works for Richelieu’s library. This was a great help to Campanella, who in fact moved to France in 1634 after a huge fall-out with the Pope over his belief in astrology.