By Christopher I. Lehrich
"Given the historic orientation of philosophy, is it unreasonable to recommend a much broader solid of the internet into the deep waters of magic? by means of encountering magical concept as conception, we come to a brand new figuring out of a suggestion that appears again at us from a funhouse mirror."--The Occult brain Divination, like many serious modes, consists of interpreting symptoms, and magic, extra commonly, will be visible as a type of feedback that takes the universe--seen and unseen, identified and unknowable--as its textual content. within the Occult brain, Christopher I. Lehrich explores the heritage of magic in Western idea, suggesting a daring new figuring out of the claims made concerning the continual of assorted trust platforms. In heavily interlinked essays on such disparate themes as ley traces, the Tarot, the Corpus Hermeticum, writing and formality in magical perform, and early makes an attempt to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics, Lehrich treats magic and its components as an highbrow item that calls for interpretive zeal at the a part of readers/observers. Drawing illuminating parallels among the perform of magic and more moderen interpretive systems--structuralism, deconstruction, semiotics--Lehrich deftly means that the threat of magic haunts all such makes an attempt to know the nature of data. delivering an intensive new method of the character and price of occult proposal, Lehrich's brilliantly conceived and accomplished booklet posits magic as a style of concept that's intrinsically subversive of normative conceptions of cause and fact. In elucidating the deep parallels among occult concept and educational discourse, Lehrich demonstrates that sixteenth-century occult philosophy usually touched on matters that experience develop into crucial to philosophical discourse purely some time past fifty years.
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Sample text
Tbis is structuraUy equivalent to old-fashioned "bad" comparison, annulling difference in the name of familiarity. On the other hand, the recently more popular radical defamiliarization, whidl insists on the uniqueness ofits objects, risks incomprehensibility. lfthe other is simply other, we have no way to understand. Setting aside obvious moral concerns about dehumanizing those we study, the practical difficulty is dlat this procedure destroys the possibility of interpretation. Furthernl0re, because it dislodges dle scholar from the analysis, such defamiliarization ends up denying everytlung we ought to have learned from the theoretical revolutions of the last few decades.
But if we are to avoid falling back into circularity, to evade the historian's overinsistence on difference, this familiarization must be cross-cultural, al-ustorical in tlle sense that the context must not arise from early modern historicaJ trends. Of course, the purpose of such comparison must be constrained: it is not that Dee's work is the sa'me as tlle object of the comparison, but ratller that it is similar in specific ways, which then illuminate Dec. We need a new perspective. l ... No is a Japanese dramatic form that developed in the Muromachi period (1111 1171) and by the lore Edo period (1603-1867) had achieved dle1fi"ed, { 61 crystallized form seen today.
Most commonly, they argue simply that historians cannot accept :1historical analyses. But apart from the fact that to define crosscult ural comparison as ahistorical entails :1 specific and narrow sense of "hislOry" ~s cndcavor, this :trgllmcllt prcsumes a nccessary contiguity of the 117 I historian's own position with that of the object sntdied. Taken seriously, this objection requires historians to study only their ancestral roots, such that all historians of China should be Chinese. Of course, anticomparativisr historians do not intend this racist conclusion.