Magic in Everyday Renaissance Europe
Laura Miller at Slate
Topic
History
A collection of 254 issues
Black Magic and Scientism
Magic has fascinated me since I learned that the high watermark of magic was the Renaissance. The cutting-edge Renaissance thinkers were magicians. Magic and science were intertwined, its practitioners flitting between the two practices (arts) in their attempt to understand and, ultimately, control/manipulate the world, unaware that they
Misshapen Creatures that Live in the Earth Can Give Us Sage Advice?
Well, no. But: Don't Fear the Gnome
The first philosophical event in the Greek world, the selection of their seven sages, gives the first distinctive and unforgettable characteristic of Greek civilization. Other people have saints, while the Greeks have philosophers. They are right when some state that a
How Not to Sacrifice if You're a Father
Hint: Don't be Rousseau
I’ve been reading some Nock. Albert Jay Nock, one of the premier American essayists of the early twentieth century and one of the founders of modern conservative/libertarian thought.
A weighty man, that Nock.
But also a disturbing man. In a 1964 biography,
The Beatniks Were a Bunch of Consumerists
Well, kinda
William Burroughs liked opium, a lot. He liked its derivatives, morphine, and heroin. He liked other types of dope. He liked women. He liked men and boys. He wrote recklessly. He lived recklessly. He loved his common-law wife. He shot her dead in a drunken game of
Pragmatism and the Saints
"Pragmatism" and "practicality" aren't the same things. When a person says, "I'm just being practical," he's probably being highly impractical.
It normally means he's just thinking rationally: with the certitude of his left hemisphere, which excludes
The Fact Is, Saints Have Levitated
Daniel K. Williams at Mere Orthodoxy
Russia’s Freaky History with the Cult of Mother Earth
The Russian digs Mother Earth.
This has been the case from Russia’s earliest years when dark and brutal paganism soaked her culture in blood.[1]
The Russian venerates Mother Earth for her black depths, for the crops of life she provides, and for the resting home she gives at
Listening to Podcasts at Oxford in 1374 and Kansas in 1974
Why do we love those conversational podcasts?
If you were a student at a medieval university, you listened to lectures.
And listened and listened and listened to lectures, often more than ten hours a day.
But they weren’t like lectures at today’s universities, where hundreds of students sit
Parliament Created the 18th-Century’s Great Gin Craze
“[N]oe sort of Brandy Aqua vite or other Spirits or distilled Waters of any Kingdome Country or place whatsoever shall after the said foure and twentyeth day of August be imported into the Kingdoms of England or Ireland . . .”.
If you read the Wikipedia entries about England’s Great Gin