Music Banter - View Single Post - The Occult Bach
Thread: The Occult Bach
View Single Post
Old 06-01-2021, 06:03 PM   #14 (permalink)
Indrid Cold
Groupie
 
Indrid Cold's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2021
Posts: 27
Default

So, if the Renaissance magic was not the same type of magic found in the medieval period, then what type of magic was it? Renaissance magic was the highest realization of all philosophy or what Agrippa termed "occult philosophy" as per his three books published from 1531-33 (De occulta philosophia libri tres). By 1650, The Divine Pymander of Hermes Trismegistus was translated from the Arabic.

The occult philosophy was woven together of three primary strands:

1. Neoplatonism.
2. Jewish-Christian qaballah.
3. Hermeticism.

We've touched on all three of these already but it is Hermeticism that we are most interested in. the discipline of Hermeticism is named for Hermes Trismegistus or "Thrice-Great Hermes." He was said to be an Egyptian of great wisdom and an actual descendant of the god Hermes or, perhaps, in Egyptian, Thoth. His written works disappeared altogether from Europe and survived on in handwritten texts among the Ottomans who had taken over Byzantium--the last vestige of the Roman empire. There were supposedly originally 42 works but only 18 survived and these became known as the Corpus Hermeticum.

Another bit of Hermeticum that was highly important to the Renaissance was known as the Emerald Tablet which contained 13 alchemical maxims originally carved on a tablet of emerald and hence the name. This entered Europe through the Arabs and served as the very foundation of European alchemy. The alchemists regarded Hermes as a god-man.

Another Hermetic work that was complete but found only in a Latin translation from its original Greek was called Asclepius (aka The Perfect Word). Asclepius is the Greek god of healing and he reveals that while there is a God, humans can perfect themselves to godhood or, in Buddhistic terms, achieve enlightenment.

While the Hermetic view is monotheistic, the Hermetic God is very different from the Christian one. Instead of God that created a world sullied by mankind, the Hermetic God IS the world, the deepest part of it, and everything is a part of this God and partakes of its nature. The cosmos is alive, quickened by an anima mundi or World-Soul. It is a great thought or idea or mind or dream of God striving to know Himself. Because of this, the Hermeticist knows why God created the universe as opposed to the Christian who can only guess why his God would create a universe He then wanted no part of and even attempted to destroy it and yet somehow failed.

So great were the Hermetic ideas that Copernicus attributed his idea of the heliocentric universe to "Trismegistus." Copernicus learned of the idea through the works of Aristarchus of Samos from the 3rd century BCE. But the idea of an earth moving through space while rotating on its axis and while moving around a sun came from the Hermetic ideas. In Asclepius Copernicus found:

"The class persists, begetting copies of itself as often, as man and as diverse as the rotation of the world has moments. As it rotates the world changes. but the class neither changes nor rotates."

In Treatise XVI of the same work, Copernicus read:

"For the sun is situated at the center of the cosmos, wearing it like a crown."

And also:

"Around the sun are the eight spheres that depend from it: the sphere of the fixed stars, the six planets, and the one that surrounds the earth."
,
This is nothing like the Ptolemaic universe that the Church subscribed to. That scheme placed the earth at the center of the universe. Here, the sun is clearly described as the center.

Even more striking is that Hermes is referred to as "Thrice-Great" which is taken as an honorific. However, if we use isopsephia where each letter of the Greek alphabet is assigned a numerical value, we find that the name HERMES = 353 and if we multiply that by 3, we obtain 1059. The value of a half-step in a 12-tone equal temperament (or TET) scale is the 12th root of 2 or 1.0595! Even more amazing is that the TET scale was not yet invented or even calculated! In Greek mythology, Hermes was the younger brother of Apollo who was the god of music. Hermes made the first lyre and gave it to Apollo.

Last edited by Indrid Cold; 06-02-2021 at 07:46 AM.
Indrid Cold is offline   Reply With Quote