#evola spotted | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

ejbarnes · 6 years ago

Text

Book review: _The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structures of Alchemy_ by Mircea Eliade, translated from the French by Stephen Corrin, Harper Torchbooks 1971

Prolific Romanian-born writer Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) wrote Forgerons et Alchimistes (Smiths and Alchemists) in the 1950s, and Flammarion published it in 1956. It’s a good thing that, by the time I read the 1962 translation by Stephen Corrin, I’d done a great deal of reading on the theory and history of Western alchemy and the occult, not to mention both popular and scholarly history in general – or I’d have been much more easily impressed by Eliade’s ostentatious displays of erudition.

These displays consist of piling on examples meant to demonstrate his theses, all too rarely bothering to step through the logic (even the emotional logic). This pattern is especially marked in the early chapters, where he illustrates various cultural concepts associated with metallurgy by listing various peoples who hold them; but it crops up in other chapters as well, most stultifyingly in the chapter on Chinese alchemy, in which he quotes a range of Chinese sources vouching for the exact same idea or practice. This is a very old-fashioned – as in pre-Enlightenment – way of framing an argument (as noted by Wayne Shumaker in his book The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance). Many peoples are mentioned without mentioning where they are, what their general technological state is (other than the implication that they are “primitive”), or how much contact they have with neighboring cultures; many ancient, mediaeval, and early-modern writers on alchemy are cited without noting the threads of influence between them. In an ostensibly historical cultural study such as this, it is not enough to note that a person or culture embraces an idea; the why is a critical part.

In a few places, Eliade complains that he doesn’t have the space to go into depth on certain matters that would help him construct his argument more clearly and logically. This beggars belief, coming from someone who had previously written a 500-page book on shamanism – and cites himself in the current work (Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l’extase, 1951). Who set the terms under which the new book was to be written?

Where metallurgy fits into the history of material culture in general is only waved at; Eliade declares at the outset that there is less known about the spiritual significance of other crafts. Considering that material culture, as a subject of historical study, was in its infancy at the time he was writing, it’s hard to tell whether the blind spot here was his, or that of the entire field. Eventually, Eliade admits there’s not much known about the cultural history of metallurgy, either.

As he was writing in the 1950s, Eliade can be somewhat forgiven for using the word “primitive” (only sometimes in quotes) to describe cultures and communities that have not (yet) been overtaken by industrial methods of production. However, after chapter upon chapter of describing the metallurgy-related cultural practices of pre-industrial peoples – within historical times – belatedly, he admits that looking at modern “primitives” is not necessarily a reliable way to determine the by-definition-unwritten prehistory of cultural practices surrounding ancient technologies. Unfortunately, even if this is the best we can do, it really isn’t good enough for the purposes he wishes to serve.

It is easier to forgive Eliade for using ethnic terminology that has fallen out of fashion since the book was written, such as applying the term “Hamitic” to the Ma[a]sai. Alas, the translator, Stephen Corrin, stumbles in rendering the French versions of various ethnonyms into English, such as not realizing that the Achanti are the Ashanti, or that “Tziganes” are the French exonym for what English speakers would have called Gypsies (who call themselves, as Eliade points out, “Rom” or variations of the same).

Eliade makes interesting points about mythological significance of smelting and smithing, including the smith as both a heroic and a threatening figure. However, he implies that these themes are universal, when almost all of his examples are positive rather than negative; no effort seems to be made to explain why some metal-using cultures might not share in these themes. Critics over the years have accused Eliade of cherry-picking his data when writing cultural history, and Forgerons et Alchimistes may have been one example. In addition, almost all of the cultures he cites are Old World. “Metallurgy as such,” he writes, “in Central and South America, is probably Asiatic in origin.” The evidence he gives for this is grossly anachronistic, at least by modern research – although the source he cites, a German article from 1954, is the likely source of the problem. Other than this, he has little to say about indigenous/traditional New World cultures except in reference to their shamanic, rather than metallurgic, practices.

More importantly, the only universal that could apply to his argument about the history of metallurgy is the pre-industrial enchantment of the world, and with it both nature and all of material culture. The best parts, early in the book, address how ideas of organic growth, as well as sex and sexual reproduction, are applied to what we moderns would consider non-living matter, either natural or human-made. The disenchantment of the modern world encourages drawing a sharp line between living and non-living matter, whereas in the pre-modern view that line is often either nonexistent or highly permeable.

Smiths (and alchemists) are “Masters of Fire”, as one chapter puts it; but there are other members of any human culture who are. At the very least, they stand at the hearth instead of the forge – but who cared, in the 1950s, about how women use fire in traditional cultures?

The significance of gold in early Chinese culture, where it was too rare to use for coinage, is fluffed off in one of the appendices. (Interestingly, China is ranked, as of 2016, as the world’s top producer of gold.) Eliade never mentions that the Chinese knew, even in ancient times, that cinnabar was toxic, so the significance of tales of adepts ingesting it for “immortality” is not put in proper socio-mythic context. Is this a result of his stated decision to completely avoid discussing practical aspects of chemistry/alchemy because his focus is on the mystical aspects? The physical properties of materials drive their spiritual significance, not the other way around. For example, gold would not be “noble” if it corroded as easily as iron.

Illustrations from Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens (reprinted under the title Scrutinium chymicum, the version Eliade references) are strewn through the book, but the only reference to Maier in the text quotes an entirely different work, Symbola aureae mensae duodecim nationem. In addition, none of the illustrations (including from another work, Rosarium philosophorum) have captions giving anything more than author, title of work, date and place of publication, and a brief translation of the text from the source. Thus, while many of the illustrations definitely reference ideas described in the book, there is no direct connection, and thus the reader is left to wonder why this illustration was selected until the text mentions the idea -- without referencing the illustration – a circle that badly needed to be completed.

I do not know enough about the history of history of science to say whether it was known, at the time Eliade wrote, that all attributions of alchemical texts to Arnaud de Villeneuve and Ramon Llull were spurious. Certainly the “Geber problem” was well known by then, but he manages to skirt around it by only specifically referencing works definitely known to be by Geber (Jābir ibn Hayyān).

Once he gets to Western alchemy, Eliade in several places cites Baron Julius Evola, who wrote the influential but historically questionable The Hermetic Tradition. I’ve read too little anthropology from the 1950s to know if Evola was generally radioactive in European scholarship during this period, but his political leanings would not have been much of a secret. Unlike Eliade, Evola never distanced himself from his fascist past; he criticized the Fascist party from the right, and, after the war, continued to produce polemics for the Italian radical right, including calls for political violence. Evola’s scholarly interest in Hindusim was to no small degree colored by its karmic justification of caste society, a stratification he hoped would be re-embraced by the decadent, democratic West; there’s no reason for me to believe that Evola’s study of hermeticism was untainted by his personal politics, prescriptive for all civilization as they were. Can we trust what a misogynist such as Evola, who openly advocated the forcible subjection of women, would have made of the alchemical Hermaphrodite, or the female alchemical assistant depicted in Mutus Liber?

Ultimately, I came away from The Forge and the Crucible feeling snookered by false advertising. The book groups together smiths and alchemists as major topics in one ~200-page volume – and the English subtitle implies that the origins of alchemy are the main topic of the book. I was thus led to believe that a case would be made that the cultural practices surrounding early metallurgy evolved directly into alchemy as both a technical and mystical practice. Yet, when the time came, the process of tracing from one to the other was fudged with “probablys” and “must-have-beens.” This is the book’s single greatest weakness.

Toward the end of the book, Eliade can’t resist lamenting the sorry state of modernity and what was lost with the disenchantment of the world. Treating this topic with anything more rigorous than sentimentality would require acknowledging that our experience of the numinous is necessarily filtered through our subjective mindset, whether our cultural background or our personal psychology. Such a treatment would require a book of its own, one which would be incomplete without positing a non-sectarian methodology by which the external reality of our spiritual experiences could be judged. As I’m not a professional theologian, I am unaware of whether any such methodology is possible, let alone whether anyone has proposed one.

The standard format of historical or anthropological bibliographies may have changed since this book was published, or it may be (or have been) different in the Francophone circles for which it was originally written. As it stands, the bibliographical information is concentrated in several appendices rather than a single bibliography arranged in a format familiar to me – i.e. a list or group of topic-based lists alphabetized by surname of author or editor. In these appendices, works on related topics are clustered in paragraphs, making scanning for authors or titles a huge pain. The best appendix of the lot is the last, his essay on Jung.

An online blurb for the 1978 edition claims an updated appendix including more recent works on Chinese alchemy, as well as “the importance of alchemy in Newton’s scientific revolution.” I should probably have a look at this, as Newton’s alchemical work was little acknowledged until the 1970s.

The index is sparse, to the point of being nearly useless. Despite Eliade’s name-dropping numerous ethnic groups, only some ethnonyms make it into the index. Geber/Jābir (written by Eliade as Jâbîr) appears at least twice (at least once in the main text as well as in one of the appendices), yet, despite being a major figure in the history of alchemy, he does not appear in the index at all under either G or J. Other alchemists, such as Zosimos and Michael Maier, though mentioned in the text, are similarly omitted from the index. Whether the shameful carelessness of composing the index is a function of the original Francophone publisher or the Anglophone publisher is not something I am in a position to pinpoint.

Overall, I would not recommend this ~60-year-old book for anyone who is just starting out in the study of alchemy, as understanding it correctly requires a background in history of science, and perhaps more background than I have in the history of material culture. I would prefer to direct such readers to Lawrence M. Principe’s 2013 book The Secrets of Alchemy, in which he demonstrates that first and foremost, alchemy was (and, according to its modern adherents, apparently still is) a physical discipline which was capable of yielding observable results, regardless of whether the “gold” produced was real.

#alchemy #Mircea Eliade #The Forge and the Crucible #Forgerons et Alchimistes #Geber #Llull #Arnaud de Villeneuve #Michael Maier #Lawrence Principe #Lawrence M. Principe

3 notes · View notes

principleofplenitude · 6 years ago

Quote

The anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor came to his idea of animism as the original form of religion in part by reflecting on the presence of spiritualism in his own society—practices in which he, like so many other learned Victorians, occasionally participated.14 Friedrich Max Müller, the philologist best known for his thesis that mythologies originate as a disease of language, promoted the esoteric view that real religion recognizes the unity of the soul and the divine.15 He labelled this superior form of religion Theosophy. The logical positivists Rudolf Carnap and Hans Hahn chased ghosts in Vienna.16 Weber was himself deeply attracted to the German poet, mystic, and prophet Stefan George. He had a personal soft spot for Christian mysticism.17 The most important of these vignettes comes in a chapter entitled “Dialectic of Darkness: The Magical Foundations of Critical Theory.” It is here that Josephson-Storm shows how large parts of the Frankfurt School’s critique of modernity appear lifted from the eccentric occultist Ludwig Klages.18 A figure in the Munich-based group of poets and neo-pagans calling themselves the Kosmikerkreis (Cosmic Circle), Klages castigated the myth of progress, the techno-scientific exploitation of Mother Earth, and the logocentrism of Western civilization. He called for the return to a pristine, spontaneous connection with nature that he called “the Cosmogonic Eros.”19 These ideas are important because, as it turns out, there is a direct link between Klages’s diagnosis of what went wrong with modernity and Critical Theory. The link runs through Walter Benjamin, who not only knew and corresponded with Klages, but even went to Munich to study with him.20 Klages’s work is explicitly cited in the footnotes of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung. An intellectual movement that is usually seen as anti-occult shared its critique of modernity with a neo-pagan occultist. The myth of disenchantment has as much potency on the right as it does on the left. Klages was an anti-Semite, which Benjamin somehow tolerated, and was co-opted by the Nazis. Joseph Pryce, who has translated some of Klages into English, is an influential American white supremacist, his translations distributed by the far-right publisher Arktos.22 When neo-fascists and white power groups have been reinventing themselves in recent years as identitarians, ethno-nationalists, or the alt-right, they have done so by co-opting criticisms of modernity associated both with the left, and with esoteric authors like René Guénon, Julius Evola, or, indeed, Klages.23 The myth of disenchantment retains its potency.

“Dialectics of Darkness“ from Inference Review

#reading list #inference review #myth of disenchantment #frankfurt school #critical theory #ludwig kluges #politics #modernity

0 notes

nofomoartworld · 7 years ago

Text

Hyperallergic: Required Reading

The renderings of the new Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences designed by Renzo Piano and Gensler are here. See more at Curbed. (photos courtesy of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences via Curbed)

Some adjunct professors are turning to sex work and sleeping in their cars to make ends meet. Welcome to the USA in 2017:

Sex work is one of the more unusual ways that adjuncts have avoided living in poverty, and perhaps even homelessness. A quarter of part-time college academics (many of whom are adjuncts, though it’s not uncommon for adjuncts to work 40 hours a week or more) are said to be enrolled in public assistance programs such as Medicaid.

They resort to food banks and Goodwill, and there is even an adjuncts’ cookbook that shows how to turn items like beef scraps, chicken bones and orange peel into meals. And then there are those who are either on the streets or teetering on the edge of losing stable housing. The Guardian has spoken to several such academics, including an adjunct living in a “shack” north of Miami, and another sleeping in her car in Silicon Valley.

The adjunct who turned to sex work makes several thousand dollars per course, and teaches about six per semester. She estimates that she puts in 60 hours a week. But she struggles to make ends meet after paying $1,500 in monthly rent and with student loans that, including interest, amount to a few hundred thousand dollars. Her income from teaching comes to $40,000 a year. That’s significantly more than most adjuncts: a 2014 survey found that the median income for adjuncts is only $22,041 a year, whereas for full-time faculty it is $47,500.

Barâa Arar writes about the portrayal of Algerian women in 19th-century Western art:

In the French Algerian context, the French colonial agenda purposefully and forcibly removed the experience of the collective attachment of the physical space. The unifying aspects of Algerian communities were removed such as expressions of culture, the Arabic language, and visual and musical vocabulary. Those born into a colonial context are born into a milieu void of attachment to Algerian land, culture, and people. The removal of cultural authenticity is in itself a violent colonial act.

A discussion about Cornell University’s architectural plans for Roosevelt Island in New York City:

On a macro scale, Bloomberg’s vision was to have this be a catalyst for change, spawning companies in an applied research kind of way. It has its limits of growth, physically speaking. The catalyst will happen in a silo at first but then it will spread into Manhattan and Queens and spread out like Silicon Valley.

Mashable shows us some beautiful “foldable” homes:

The Stranger points out that Neo-Nazi artist Charles Krafft is back in the news again, and they spotted him in that big undercover report by a Swedish grad student that infiltrated alt-right circles in the US:

The day before the forum I’m invited to an exclusive barbecue in a suburb of Seattle at the house of Charles Krafft, the infamous Nazi ceramicist. His home is a temple to National Socialism. Swastikas cover the walls and Mein Kampf sits on the bookshelf, alongside works by Mussolini, Evola and WW2 paraphernalia.

Most of the people there are men between 17 and 25 and most carry guns. “We’re all about the 14 words” a guy called Kato tells me when I ask about Cascadia, referencing the infamous white supremacist slogan (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”). “Whites are going to be a minority in this country by 2040,” he adds before telling me about the impending “race war.”

Writer, curator, and founder of ARTS.BLACK Taylor Renee Aldridge reflects on “success“:

Between sessions, I found myself in a brief conversation with artist Beverly McIver. I shared with her my hesitation in celebrating my recent achievements because I struggle with imposter syndrome. I also shared that receiving large unrestricted sums of money for my creative talents has left me some anxiety—simply because I’m not used to having money.

In so many words, she assured me that I am worthy and that I deserve even more. She waxed on about the relationship between artists and money, and the anxieties that come along with receiving large sums of money for work you enjoy doing or plan to do. We exchanged ideas on how to learn how to have money when you’re not used to having it. Knowing that her upbringing was also modest, and also a Black woman artist like myself, her seemingly simple advice created a deep sense of relief, and I felt heard in ways that I had not felt before. I realized the feeling of unworthiness could be a big hindrance in the success of an artist.

The story of Christian monks who saved Jewish history:

Some of the most popular Jewish documents that were highly circulated among Jews in the ancient world were preserved in monasteries that thrive to this day: St. Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai Desert, and the twenty monasteries on the Greek peninsula of Mount Athos. Both St. Catherine’s and Mount Athos were settled by Orthodox Christians in the early medieval period, and both are geographically isolated: St. Catherine’s is surrounded by desert, and Mount Athos’s rugged mountainous terrain, with its sharp cliffs that give way to the sea, is difficult to access.

… Two of the oldest surviving copies of the Bible were discovered at St. Catherine’s monastery in the 1800s. One is the Codex Sinaiticus, a fourth century CE codex comprising the books of the Old Testament, the books of the Apocrypha, the New Testament, and some other Christian documents called the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas, all written in Greek. This codex was first discovered in 1844 by the German scholar Constantin Tischendorf, but it was only in 1859, upon one of his return visits to St. Catherine’s, that Tischendorf discovered the bulk of the manuscripts. Tischendorf would later claim that he discovered the codex as it was about the be consigned to be burned for fuel, but this claim is dubious.

Enjoy these gorgeous images:

This is a fascinating interview about how Nazism almost found fertile soil in LA:

And so they called together the secret meeting of 40 of the most powerful figures in Hollywood at the Hillcrest Country Club. They walk into a private dining room not knowing why the hell they’d been called. And in front of every seat were copies of the “Silver Legion,” which is the American fascist magazine, with articles about the Jews in Hollywood and how they’re seducing women and perverting America.

Then he proceeds to tell them two things: that in fact Nazis have penetrated your studios, none of you are paying attention to your below-the-line employees, and that [Nazis] have been firing Jews for the last nine months. And in some studios, including yours, [MGM’s] Louis B. Mayer, there are almost no Jews at all working in craftsman positions.

Then he tells them about German consul Georg Gyssling, who had been sent by [Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph] Goebbels to stop Hollywood from making any film attacking or mocking Hitler.

Originally, Gyssling comes over in June 1933 and immediately goes to both Columbia Pictures and to Warner Bros.thers and demands changes. And the reason the moguls agree — Columbia is the first one to agree — is because the studios have more theaters in Germany than anywhere else on the Continent. And they didn’t want to lose that market. They thought Hitler would be out of office in a short time, so they played along.

No comment:

Justice Department Demands Names of Thousands Who Liked Anti-Trump Facebook Page

The Department of Justice (DOJ) served Facebook the warrants in February, along with a gag order that prevented the company from telling the activists they were being targeted for searches. But the department dropped the order earlier this month.

One of the warrants was issued for the disruptj20 Facebook page, which was used as a forum for planning Inauguration Day protests. If Facebook complies with the DOJ, then the company would likely have to give lawyers the names of the thousands of people who “simply liked, followed, reacted to, commented on, or otherwise engaged with the content on the Facebook page,” according to the ACLU. The news was first reported by Law Newz and confirmed by CNN, which obtained court documents.

Wow:

A man kneels with a folded U.S. flag as the POTUS motorcade passes him in Indianapolis. (Photo: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst) http://pic.twitter.com/KrBlzhauai

— Colin Campbell (@colincampbell) September 28, 2017

Some people are mourning the passing of Hugh Hefner and this thread is good:

RIP Hugh Hefner, a figure of liberation and enslavement, patron of the arts and mainstreamer of smut. Problematic for 60+ years.

— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) September 28, 2017

Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.

The post Required Reading appeared first on Hyperallergic.

from Hyperallergic http://ift.tt/2x6Z5m4 via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Hyperallergic

0 notes