#

Cap.

PP.

1.

Phantasms at Work

3-27

2.

Empirical Psychology

28-52

3.

Dangerous Liaisons

53-84

5.

Pneumatic Magic

107-29

6.

Intersubjective Magic

130-143

p. 5

"Called phantasia or inner sense, the sidereal spirit transforms messages from the five senses in phantasms perceptible to the soul. For the soul cannot grasp anything that is not converted into a sequence of phantasms ... . ... The sensus interior, inner sense ..., ... is to keep its importance even for Descartes and to reappear ... at the beginning of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. ...

Whence two separate and distinct grammars ... : a grammar of the spoken language and a grammar of the phantasmic language. Stemming from the soul, itself phantasmic ... ,

p. 6

intellect alone enjoys the privilege of understanding the phantasmic grammar ... . ... The doctrine of the phantasmic pneuma is ... the horizon of hope toward which human existence stretched for ... our species."

he locates the psychic pneuma (psychikon) in the brain."

"Whereas, for Aristotle, the pneuma was just a thin casing around the soul,

{cf. the maya-kos`a-s (‘sheaths’) surrounding the atman (‘soul’)}

for the Stoics ... the pneuma is the soul itself, which penetrates the whole human body".

{cf. [in the Jaina system] the jiva co-extensive with the body}

In "Stoic theory ... a cardiac synthesizer, the hegemonic Principal (hegemonikon) receives all the pneumatic currents ... produced by the "comprehensible phantasms" (phantasia kataleptike) apprehended by the intellect. This has the only means to recognize "prints made upon the soul" ... produced by the Principal, which, like a spider in its web, from its seat in the heart ... is on the lookout for all information transmitted to it". [p. 226, n. 1:13 : "The comparison is in Calcidius, Commentary on the Timaeus, chap. 220". {according to Calcidius, "Chrysippus likens it to a spider in the midst of its web." (EGPhC, pp. 190-1)}]

[quoted from Andreas Capellanus : On Love (p. 228, n. 1:50 : written c. 1170 Chr.E.)] "When a man sees a woman deserving of erotic attentions, he at once ... explores [rimari, lit : splits] the private parts of her body."

"The Renaissance knew two Arts of memory : one, strictly utilitarian, was soon to degenerate into the alphabets of Romberch and Rosselli;

the other was a continuation of medieval mnemotechnics and the universal Art of Ramon Llull, who ... intended to construct a world of phantasms supposed to express approximately the realities of the intelligible order of which our world is but a distant and imperfect copy."

p. 35

"intelligential relationships can be represented in the form of theater, ... by ... the Friulian Giulio Camillo Delminio ... . A professor at Bologna, Giulio Camillo ... set forth his schema ... published in Florence in 1550, L’Idea del Teatro. His construction, which had the form of an amphitheater of seven sections, ... as the sets linking terrestrial phenomena to corresponding planets ... were constructed according to correlations between a planet and certain animals, plants and stones ... transmitted by tradition ... of Hellenistic astrology. ...

p. 36

The subject matter ... came from Florentine Platonism. For example, the idea of the incorporation of the soul was represented by the image of Pasiphae and the Bull on the door of the fifth level. Pasiphae symbolized the soul attracted by the body (the Bull)".

"The treatise, Hieroglyphica, attributed to Horapollon .... made ... the art of emblems that Giovanni Andrea Alciato (1492-1550), in his Emblematum Pater et Princeps, was to develop ..., not without debt to his precursor Pierio Valeriano (Giovan Pietro della Fosse, 1477-1558)". (cf. ME&H)

"These figurae, characters of an inner phantasmagoria staged by the soul itself, represent the modality by means of which the vision of the soul opens before the oculus spiritalis, the organ that has taught the inner consciousness about existence, through diligent meditation. This experience ... has to do with the formation of an "inner awareness," ... a phantasmal process ... to discover a means of communication between reason and intellect (the soul), and this means is provided by the spiritual eye, the mysterious organ that permits us to look upward toward the higher ontological levels." (ChO&Th, pp. 370 sq)

"The ludus globi is the supreme mystical game, the game the Titans made Dionysus play in order to seize him and put him to death. From the ashes of the Titans struck down by the lightning of Zeus, arose mankind, a race guilty without having sinned because of the deicide of its ancestors. But, since the Titans had incorporated part of the god, men also inherited a spark from the murdered child, ... the metaphor of the ages : "Aion is a child who plays checkers : sovereignty of a child!"" [p. 231, n. 2:37 : (Herakleitos, fragment 52) on the Orphic interpretation of this fragment, see ENSO]

p. 40

"from Treviso, Francesco Colonna ... in Padua ... is the author of ... the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which ... had been finished ... 1467, but was not published until 1499 ... . ...

p. 41

Taken literally, the title Hypnerotomachia means a "live fight during sleep." ... The tale ... is an enigma

p. 42

whose solution is given only at the end. ... The first part tells of the endless roaming of Poliphilus amid the ruins of antiquity, of triumphs, emblems and impresae, each with its own secret meaning. ... In the end, Poliphilus finds Polia, and the lovers plead their case before the heavenly tribunal of Venus."

p. 65

"Egyptian statues, "full of life, full of intelligence and spirit ... . Those statues foresee the future"" (Asc., IX; cf. Ficino, Op., II, p. 1865; Bruno, Op. it., II, p. 180).

p. 66

"the contents of De gl’heroici furori" : "The fifth dialogue in part 1 is a course in the Art of Memory applied to the intellectual processes, in fifteen chapters. The impresae symbolizing the stages of ... sophistry are explained in sonnets, which, in turn are the subject matter of the prose commentary. ... mnemonic image appearing on the escutcheon of the "heroic furor" ... . ... Other impresae, twelve in number, are commented on in the first dialogue of part 2."

p. 67

"grace ... of ... the heroic Eros establishes ... heat generated in the in the soul by the intelligential sun, and a divine impetus (impeto) that makes it grow wings" ([Bruno,] II, pp. 333-34) – an allusion to the myth of Phaedrus and to the wings of the soul, which, damaged by ... our entry into the world, could only be recovered by a few chosen people".

p. 68

" "The feat of the Heroic Furors is the changing of man into God, the homoiosis theo," E. Garin [CFRI, p. 703] tells us".

[quoted from Heroic Furors] "one [the subject] is not dead, because one lives in the object; one is not live, because one is dead within oneself" (II, p. 327).

{"For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." (Epistle to the Colossians 3:3)}

p. 80

"in La Cabala del cavallo Pegaseo (1585) ... "All spirits come from Amphitrite, who is spirit, and all return there.""

{cf. "spirits from the vasty deep." (Henry the 4^th, Pt. I, Act 3, Scene 1, Line 52 – "VD")}

"Onorio, the donkey, came from the environs of Thebes. ...

{cf. the god Tuphon, whose "brutish ass-head touched the stars" (GM 36.a) is related to "Cadmeians" (GM 36.4).}

p. 81

When his body was buried, the soul of Onorio, the equal of all other souls, flew to the zenith.

Reaching the river Lethe, it pretended to quench its thirst but actually kept intact the memory of its ecstatic adventures."

{As owner of a braying ass (Eurip. Cycl. – "S"), Silenos told of a stream which is able to age persons "backwards" (GM 83.b).}

p. 112

"For the Stoics, the cosmos was conceived as a living organism, endowed with the faculty of reason, able to engender rational microcosms". (vide "MS", n. 85)

In "doctrine ... formulated by Zeno of Citium and developed by Cleanthes of Assos and his successor, Chrysippus ..., the macrocosm is also equipped with a hegemonikon, located in the sun, the heart of the world." (EDPS, p. 53)

According to Cicero (De divinatione I.30.63), "the Stoic philosophers practiced the prediction of future events through dreams. During sleep, Cicero informs us, the soul is detached "from contact with the body," ... to move about in time, learning things past or to come."

p. 113

Later, Epictetus is to state that phantasms are influenced by the state of the pneuma ... : "... external objects reflected in our psychic pneuma, ... are influenced by the present state of the pneuma."" (EDPS, p. 76)

p. 113

"Credit for ... the theoretical basis for Renaissance magic is due to Synesius of Cyrene, ... the disciple of the Neoplatonist martyr, Hypatia of Alexandria (d. 415) ... . ...

p. 114

Synesius holds the pneumatic synthesizer responsible for soothsaying and magic. ... According to Platonic dogma, ... the synthesizer ... plays the role of a mirror, but a double-faced mirror that reflects both what is above ... and what is below ... . The synthesizer ... is formed by the "phantasmal spirit [phantastikon pneuma] which is the primary body of the soul in which visions and images are formed. ..."" (Synesius : De somniis 135d)

p. 128

"With respect to Tommaso Campanella, a dissident Calabrian monk at the beginning of the seventeenth century, whose political utopia seems to have exerted a decisive influence on the group of German friends who produced the "farce" (ludibrium) of the Rosicrucians [vide JT], he too cultivated a pneumatic magic deriving from

p. 129

Ficino, with ... rituals that were greatly appreciated by Pope Urban." (S&DM, pp. 203 sq)

p.

spirit of the world

131

Third, it must be treated in such a way as to make it more subtle and harder."

132

[quoted from Ficino : Vita coel., XI] "When our spirit has been carefully prepared ..., it is able to receive many gifts through stellar rays, from the spirit of cosmic life. ... . ... it is possible to gain a great deal from the spirit of the world."

"During sleep, the energies, or pranas, withdraw into the manas, or inner sense (a phenomenon known as "telescoping of pranas"); in the waking state, they circulate in the subtle body."

[(concerning akas`a hr.daya) quoted from the Chan.d.ogya Upanis.ad 8:1] "The little space in the heart is as big as this great universe. The heavens and the earth are there, the sun, the moon, and the stars ...; and all that exists now and all that exists no longer".

"the Hesychastic mystic ... is using a technique called "cardioscopy," which consists in visualizing the space in the heart ... and trying to restore it all of its ... transparency."

"the word thymos is itself related to ... Latin fumus, Sanscrit dhumah" {both meaning ‘smoke’}

{possibly, however, it may be related to [<ibri^] /dumah/ ‘silence’]

"As to the psyche, ... it derives from the verb psychein ("to breathe")".

{some /psukh-/ words mean ‘cold, cool; refrigerate’, however}

[quoted from Ficino : Vita coel., I] "For it is the universal soul itself that makes the bait [escas] that suits the soul and with which it can be bewitched {into remaining in the material body during life}, and it stay there { in the material body during life } willingly."

planet

its sense-organ

Sun

right eye

Moon

left [eye]

Saturn

ears

Jupiter

brain

Mars

blood

Venus

smelling

Mercury

tongue & gullet

planet

activity

Saturn

"occultism"

Jupiter

"natural philosophy"

Mars

"virile certamina"

Sun & Mercury

"eloquence, music"

Venus

"festivities"

Moon

"nourishment"