Spiritus Mundi

This collection of a dozen major essays written in recent year is vintage Frye—the fine distillation of a lifetime of originative thinking about literature and its context. The essays in Spiritus Mundi—the title comes from one of Yeat's best known poems, "The Second Coming," and refers to the book that was supposedly the source of Yeat's apocalyptic vision of a "great beast, slouching toward Bethlehem"—are arranges in three groups of four essays each. The first four are about the "contexts of literature," the second are about the "mythological universe," and the last are studies of four of the great visionary or myth-making poets who have been enduring sources of interest for Frye: Milton, Blake, Yeats, and Wallace Stevens. The volume is full of agreeable surprises: a delightful piece on charms and riddles is followed by an illuminating essay on Shakespearean romance. Like most of the other essays in the book, these two are compressed and elegant expositions of ideas that in the hands of a lesser writer would have required a book. In another selection Frye rescues Spengler from neglect and argues for the inclusion of The Decline of the West among the major imaginative books produced by the Western world. Elsewhere he advances the case for placing Copernicus in a pantheon composed primarily of literary figures. OF particular interest are several essays in which Frye comments personally and reflectively on the influence he has had on the study of literature and the reactions elicited by his work. In "The Renaissance of Books" he dissents from the opinion of the McLuhanites that the written word is showing signs of obsolescence and argues that books are "the technological instrument that makes democracy possible." As the dozen essays collected here amply attest, Northrop Frye continues to be the most perceptive and most persuasive exponent of the power of mythological imagination—or as he himself calls it, "the mythological habit of mind"—written in English.

In this major re-evaluation of Isaac Newton's intellectual life, Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs shows how his pioneering work in mathematics, physics, and cosmology was intertwined with his study of alchemy. Directing attention to the religious ambience of the alchemical enterprise of early modern Europe, Dobbs argues that Newton understood alchemy - and the divine activity in micromatter to which it spoke - to be a much needed corrective to the overly mechanized system of Descartes. The same religious basis underlay the rest of his work. To Newton it seemed possible to obtain partial truths from many different approaches to knowledge, be it textual work aimed at the interpretation of prophecy, the study of ancient theology and philosophy, creative mathematics, or experiments with prisms, pendulums, vegetating minerals, light, or electricity. Newton's work was a constant attempt to bring these partial truths together, with the larger goal of restoring true natural philosophy and true religion.

This major work offers a new interpretation of the witchcraft beliefs of European intellectuals between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, showing how these beliefs fitted rationally with other beliefs of the period and how far the nature of rationality is dependent on its historical context.

This volume consists of 21 essays on Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus-priest who was the architect of Renaissance Platonism. They cast fascinating new light on his theology, philosophy, and psychology as well as on his influence and sources.

This book investigates the intersections between education, social justice, gendered violence and human rights in South African schools and universities. The rich and multifarious tapestry of scholarship and literature emanating from South African classrooms provides a fascinating lens through which we can understand the complex consequences of the economies of education, social justice imperatives, gendered violence in the lives of women and children, and marginalised communities. The scholarship in the book challenges readers to imagine alternative futures predicated on the transformational capacity of a democratic South Africa. Contributors to this volume examine the many ways in which social justice and gendered violence mirror, express, project, and articulate the larger phenomenon of human rights violations in Africa and how, in turn, the discourse of human rights informs the ways in which we articulate, interrogate, conceptualise, enact and interpret quality education. The book also wrestles with the linguistic contradictions and ambiguities in the articulation of quality education in public and private spaces. This book is essential reading for scholars seeking a solid grounding in exploring quality education, the instances of epistemic disobedience, the political implications of place and power, and human rights in theory and practice.

Have you ever lost an important object? Are you taking on a new job? Looking for buried treasure? The Art and Practice of Geomancy teaches readers how to divine the answers to life's everyday questions about health, luck, new jobs, and love, as well as those less mundane tasks such as finding buried treasure, predicting the weather, being released from prison, and identifying secret enemies. Greer delivers to readers an ancient system of divination in an easy-to-use form requiring little more than a pen and a piece of paper. Using a system of counting odd and even numbers--from a deck of cards, a roll of the dice, or even by hitting sand or dirt with a stick to generate patterns--readers learn how to cast their own geomantic chart. And for those who wish to delve further, he offers exercises for geomantic meditation and ritual magic. The Art and Practice of Geomancy will appeal to pagans, followers of the Western Mystery tradition, scholars of folk magic and divination, and anyone who wants to take their past, present, and future into their own hands.

This is the first dictionary to identify, chart, and explain in context the many proper names and place names that so famously enrich the poetry of William Butler Yeats and, just as famously, anchor that poetry to Ireland. In compiling this work, Lester I. Conner has relied upon Yeats's own prose, the principal Yeats criticism, and the writings of Yeats's friends and critics. The result is a work that warmly ushers us into the poems, where we find we are not strangers after all.