Literature
For centuries literature has been the place where magic could speak freely. Magicians, witches, alchemists and forbidden books cross the pages of the great authors, from Apuleius's Golden Ass, with its initiation into the mysteries of Isis, to the philosophical labyrinths of Borges and the satires of Umberto Eco. This section gathers twenty journeys devoted to works in which esotericism becomes narrative material: Faust's pact in Marlowe and Goethe, Dante's numerical symbolism, Shakespeare's Prospero and Weird Sisters, the Gothic novel from Lewis to Stoker, Meyrink's Golem, Yeats's Golden Dawn, the Rosicrucian Chymical Wedding and Lovecraft's Necronomicon. Each article reconstructs dates, sources and historical context, separates facts from legends and explains how writers of different eras used Kabbalah, alchemy and demonology as a symbolic language for telling of the human desire to know.
Goethe's Faust: the wager with Mephistopheles and the thirst for knowledge
From the historical Faust of the sixteenth century to Goethe's drama: alchemy, the Homunculus and the symbolic meaning of the wager with Mephistopheles.
3 min readIII.02Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: the blood pact and the twenty-four years
Christopher Marlowe's Elizabethan tragedy: the pact signed in blood, Mephistopheles, Helen of Troy and the damnation of the doctor of Wittenberg.
3 min readIII.03Dante and symbolism: numbers, allegories and esoteric readings of the poem
The number three, the four senses of scripture, the Greyhound and the «five hundred, ten and five»: the Divine Comedy read through its symbols.
3 min readIII.04Shakespeare's The Tempest: Prospero, the magician who renounces magic
Prospero, Ariel and Caliban: Renaissance magic in Shakespeare's The Tempest, between the John Dee hypothesis and the magician's farewell to power.
3 min readIII.05Macbeth and the witches: the Weird Sisters between prophecy and demonology
The witches of Macbeth, James I and the Daemonologie, the North Berwick trials and the Hecate scenes: witchcraft in Shakespeare's darkest tragedy.
3 min readIII.06The Master and Margarita: Woland, Bulgakov's devil in Moscow
Woland, Behemoth the cat and Satan's great ball: Mikhail Bulgakov's novel between Faust, Pontius Pilate and a satire of Soviet Moscow.
2 min readIII.07Meyrink's The Golem: Prague, the ghetto and the soul's double
Gustav Meyrink's 1915 novel: the legend of Rabbi Loew, the Prague ghetto, Athanasius Pernath and the symbols of Kabbalah and Theosophy.
3 min readIII.08Yeats and the Golden Dawn: the Irish poet in the Hermetic order
William Butler Yeats, Theosophy, the Golden Dawn and A Vision: how ceremonial magic entered the work of the Irish poet who won the 1923 Nobel Prize.
3 min readIII.09Borges, the Aleph and Tlön: Kabbalah and invented worlds
The Aleph, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and the Library of Babel: how Jorge Luis Borges turned Kabbalah, idealism and gnosis into philosophical tales.
3 min readIII.10Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum: the Plan and the conspiracy fever
Templars, Rosicrucians and the mysterious Plan: Umberto Eco's 1988 novel as a satire of obsessive interpretation and vanity occult publishing.
3 min readIII.11Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies: storytelling with tarot cards
The Visconti tarot and the Tarot of Marseilles in Italo Calvino's book: how the figures on the cards become tales of Orlando, Faust, Hamlet and Macbeth.
3 min readIII.12Lewis's The Monk and the origins of the Gothic novel
From The Castle of Otranto to Matthew Lewis's The Monk: devil's pacts, bleeding nuns and the Inquisition in the English Gothic novel of the 1700s.
3 min readIII.13Frankenstein and the alchemists: Mary Shelley and the modern Prometheus
Agrippa, Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus in Victor Frankenstein's reading: Mary Shelley's novel between alchemy, galvanism and the Prometheus myth.
3 min readIII.14Bram Stoker's Dracula: the vampire between folklore and Victorian occultism
Count Dracula, the Scholomance, Van Helsing and Transylvanian superstitions: the historical and folk sources of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel.
3 min readIII.15Apuleius and The Metamorphoses: the Golden Ass and the mysteries of Isis
Lucius turned into an ass, the tale of Cupid and Psyche and Book XI devoted to Isis: Apuleius's novel as a story of fall and initiation.
3 min readIII.16The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz: the alchemical tale of 1616
Seven days, a castle and a royal couple who die and rise again: the Chymical Wedding attributed to Johann Valentin Andreae and the Rosicrucian myth.
3 min readIII.17Lovecraft and the Necronomicon: the story of a book that never existed
Abdul Alhazred, Olaus Wormius and Miskatonic University: how H.P. Lovecraft invented the Necronomicon and why so many readers believed it was real.
3 min readIII.18E.T.A. Hoffmann and the fantastic: The Sandman and The Golden Pot
Coppelius, the automaton Olimpia and the salamander Lindhorst: E.T.A. Hoffmann's tales between alchemy, elemental spirits, doubles and Freud's uncanny.
3 min readIII.19The Picture of Dorian Gray: Oscar Wilde and the pact with the image
A portrait that ages in place of its sitter: Oscar Wilde's novel of 1890-1891 between aestheticism, the Faustian myth and the poisonous book.
3 min readIII.20Huysmans and Là-bas: Gilles de Rais and Satanism in fin-de-siècle Paris
Joris-Karl Huysmans's 1891 novel: the writer Durtal, his research into Gilles de Rais and the occultist world of late nineteenth-century Paris.
3 min read