Hermes Explains

Few fields of academic research are surrounded by so many misunderstandings and misconceptions as the study of Western esotericism. For twenty years now, the Centre for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents (University of Amsterdam) has been at the forefront of international scholarship in this domain. This anniversary volume seeks to make the modern study of Western esotericism more widely known beyond specialist circles, while addressing a range of misconceptions, biases, and prejudices that still tend to surround it. Thirty major scholars in the field respond to questions about a wide range of unfamiliar ideas, traditions, practices, problems, and personalities that are central to the field. By challenging many taken-for-granted assumptions about religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, this volume demonstrates why the modern study of esotericism leads us to reconsider much that we thought we knew about the story of Western culture.

This volume seeks to make the modern study of Western esotericism more widely known beyond specialist circles, while addressing a range of misconceptions, biases, and prejudices that still tend to surround it.

Papers presented at the Fourteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 2003 (see also Studia Patristica 39, 40, 41 and 42). The successive sets of Studia Patristica contain papers delivered at the International Conferences on Patristic Studies, which meet for a week once every four years in Oxford; they are held under the aegis of the Theology Faculty of the University. Members of these conferences come from all over the world and most offer papers. These range over the whole field, both East and West, from the second century to a section on the Nachleben of the Fathers. The majority are short papers dealing with some small and manageable point; they raise and sometimes resolve questions about the authenticity of documents, dates of events, and such like, and some unveil new texts. The smaller number of longer papers put such matters into context and indicate wider trends. The whole reflects the state of Patristic scholarship and demonstrates the vigour and popularity of the subject.

In The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus , Christian H. Bull argues that the actual authors behind the treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus were Hellenized Egyptian priests in charge of small groups practicing spiritual exercises, initiatory rituals, and devotional hymns.

This book is an attempt to assess the creative potential of alchemy as a master trope in Coleridge’s conception of authorship and imagination. It begins with a challenge to the idea that an autonomous author is at the centre of a literary work. This idea is crucial to the reception of literature and to the way in which concepts of “originality” and “authorship” are typically understood. Against this marking out of an author as a singular, autonomous, and uniquely privileged “self,” it is posited that, for Coleridge, authorship occurs in a transformative or alchemical interspace between the desire for self-expression and the necessarily other-determined nature of creativity. Offering an alternative trajectory for the author, Coleridge elaborates an imaginative strategy in which the dislocation of the self from itself is the truest path to self-expression, and the author must become other in order to become more fully himself. Demonstrating a unique link between plagiarism and creativity, this book suggests that alchemy, better than any other system, accounts for Coleridge’s propensity for plagiarism and for an aesthetic of artifice. In an attempt to trace Coleridge’s familiarity with Hermetic and alchemical discourses throughout his life, it has been necessary to review works as varied as those of Plato, Marsilio Ficino, Ralph Cudworth, Jacob Boehme, Herman Boerhaave, and F. W. J. Schelling. It is then suggested how Coleridge appropriates alchemical terminology to his own aesthetic and imaginative ends. Unable to resolve the desire for aesthetic autonomy with the impossibility of asserting the self in one’s own voice, Coleridge “plays” in the hermeneutic interspace between selfhood and otherness, creativity and counterfeit, authority and artifice in order to arrive at an entirely unique strategy of alchemical self-exposition. Arriving at authorial selfhood through the odyssey of alterity, Coleridge’s “play”giarisms, in this view, do not violate the principles of originality, but redefine them. The book ends with a consideration of the necessarily negotiated fiction of all acts of imagination and authorship.

Provides a comprehensive and systematic treatment of the life and work of Aristophanes A Companion to Aristophanes provides an invaluable set of foundational resources for undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars alike. More than a basic reference text, this innovative volume situates each of Aristophanes' surviving plays within discussion of key themes relevant to the study of the Aristophanic corpus. Throughout the Companion, an international panel of contributors incorporates material culture and performance context, offers methodological and theoretical insights into the study of Aristophanes, demonstrates the relevance of Aristophanes to modern life, and more. Each chapter focused on a particular play is paired with a theme that is exemplified by that play, such as gender, sexuality, religion, ritual, and satire. With an emphasis on understanding Greek comedy and its ancient Athenian context, the text includes approaches to Aristophanes through criticism, performance, translation, and teaching to encourage and inform future work on Greek comedy. Illustrating the vitality of contemporary engagement with one of the world's great literary figures, this comprehensive volume: Helps new readers and teachers of Aristophanes appreciate the broader importance of each play within the study of antiquity Offers sophisticated analyses of the Aristophanic corpus and its place in literary and cultural history Includes chapters focused on teaching Aristophanes, including one emphasizing performance Provides detailed syllabi and lesson plans for integrating the material into high school and college curricula A Companion to Aristophanes is an essential resource for advanced students and instructors in Classics, Ancient Literature, Comparative Literature, and Ancient Drama and Theater. It is also a must-have reference for academic scholars, university libraries, non-specialist Classicists and other literary critics researching ancient drama, and sophisticated general readers interested in Aristophanes, Greek drama, classical Athens, or the ancient Mediterranean world.

This is the first major study devoted to the early Arabic reception and adaption of the figure of Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary Egyptian sage to whom were ascribed numerous works on astrology, alchemy, talismans, medicine, and philosophy. Before the more famous Renaissance European reception of the ancient Greek Hermetica, the Arabic tradition about Hermes and the works under his name had been developing and flourishing for seven hundred years. The legendary Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus was renowned in Roman antiquity as an ancient sage whose teachings were represented in books of philosophy and occult science. The works in his name, written in Greek by Egyptians living under Roman rule, subsequently circulated in many languages and regions of the Roman and Sasanian Persian empires. After the rise of Arabic as a prestigious language of scholarship in the eighth century, accounts of Hermes identity and Hermetic texts were translated into Arabic along with the hundreds of other works translated from Greek, Middle Persian, and other literary languages of antiquity. Hermetica were in fact among the earliest translations into Arabic, appearing already in the eighth century. This book explains the origins of the Arabic myth of Hermes Trismegistus, its sources, the reasons for its peculiar character, and its varied significance for the traditions of Hermetica in Asia and northern Africa as well as Europe. It shows who pre-modern Arabic scholars thought Hermes was and how they came to that view.

Six months after Itra and Danae were ejected from the Castle of Teskom, an alarming phone call sends them back and not by choice. They’re not alone aided by the support of the new alliance of descendants from the bloodlines of Zeus and Mui and the Protectors of Time. They arrive just-in-time to defend the castle from Ember’s scorned ex-lover Chronos. But the list of opponents evolve as they uncover an ancient prophecy of a new beginning of time between the four dimensions. To begin again or tip the end. They must decide.