A History of Speculation

John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus, by Peter French.

“John Dee was Renaissance England's first Hermetic Magus, a philosopher-magician. He was also a respected practical scientist, an immensely learned man who investigated all areas of knowledge. In this fine biography, Peter French shows that not only magic and science, but geography, antiquarianism, theology, and the fine arts, were fields in which Dee was deeply involved. Through his teaching, writing, and friendships with many of the most important figures of the age, Dee was at the center of great affairs and had a profound influence on major developments in sixteenth-century England. Peter French places this extraordinary individual within his proper historical context, describing the whole world of Renaissance science, Platonism, and Hermetic magic.” – Goodreads. I’ve been interested in Dr. Dee since middle school. For years he was seen as a sort of gullible chump at best, falling for Edward Kelly’s grift, or at worst as an actual black magician, the image he had in the popular imagination until the so-called Enlightenment. But he was known in his time as the most educated man in Europe. My interest deepened when John Crowley used him as a major figure in his AEgypt Cycle. Illustrated.

Ranking: Keeper.

File Code: Biography. Social History. Hardback. 

John Dee: Essential Readings, Selected and Introduced by Gerald Suster.

“Although revered in his own time, John Dee (1527-1608) was until recently regarded as an isolated crank on the margins of Tudor history. This anthology of Dee's writings illustrates his diverse interests and his central position in the history of Renaissance thought and the development of Western Magic. Dee's celebrated Preface to Euclid is included along with selections from his Spiritual Diaries and letters to other mystics and royals. In addition to Hermetic and Cabalistic philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, and navigation are also covered.” – Amazon.

Ranking: Keeper.

File Code: History. Reader. Diary. Softcover.

The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, by Sir James George Frazer.

The classic work of anthropology, the one volume abridged edition of a multi-volume study. “Frazer attempted to define the shared elements of religious belief and scientific thought, discussing fertility rites, human sacrifice, the dying god, the scapegoat, and many other symbols and practices whose influences had extended into 20th-century culture. His thesis is that old religions were fertility cults that revolved around the worship and periodic sacrifice of a sacred king. Frazer proposed that mankind progresses from magic through religious belief to scientific thought … The king was the incarnation of a dying and reviving god, a solar deity who underwent a mystic marriage to a goddess of the Earth. He died at the harvest and was reincarnated in the spring. Frazer claims that this legend of rebirth is central to almost all of the world's mythologies … The Golden Bough scandalized the British public when first published, as it included the Christian story of the resurrection of Jesus in its comparative study. Critics thought this treatment invited an agnostic reading of the Lamb of God as a relic of a pagan religion … Frazer himself accepted that his theories were speculative and that the associations he made were circumstantial and usually based only on resemblance … Robert Ackerman writes that, for British social anthropologists, Frazer is still "an embarrassment" for being "the most famous of them all" while they now dissociate themselves "from much that he wrote." While The Golden Bough achieved wide "popular appeal" and exerted a "disproportionate" influence "on so many [20th century] creative writers", Frazer's ideas played "a much smaller part" in the history of academic social anthropology … Despite the controversy generated by the work, and its critical reception amongst other scholars, The Golden Bough inspired much of the creative literature of the period. The poet Robert Graves adapted Frazer's concept of the dying king sacrificed for the good of the kingdom to the romantic idea of the poet's suffering for the sake of his Muse-Goddess, as reflected in his book on poetry, rituals, and myths, The White Goddess (1948). William Butler Yeats refers to Frazer's thesis in his poem "Sailing to Byzantium". The horror writer H. P. Lovecraft's understanding of religion was influenced by The Golden Bough, and Lovecraft mentions the book in his short story "The Call of Cthulhu". T. S. Eliot acknowledged indebtedness to Frazer in his first note to his poem The Waste Land. William Carlos Williams refers to The Golden Bough in Book Two, part two, of his extended poem in five books Paterson. The Golden Bough influenced Sigmund Freud's work Totem and Taboo (1913). Frazer's work also influenced the psychiatrist Carl Jung and the novelists James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and D. H. Lawrence. The mythologist Joseph Campbell drew on The Golden Bough in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), in which he accepted Frazer's view that mythology is a primitive attempt to explain the world of nature, though considering it only one among a number of valid explanations of mythology … The critic Camille Paglia has identified The Golden Bough as one of the most important influences on her book Sexual Personae (1990)… Paglia has also commented, however, that the one-volume abridgement of The Golden Bough is "bland" and should be "avoided like the plague." – Wikipedia. Well, this is that bland abridgement; still a marker of cultural significance, I’d say. Spine a little ragged. [Lacks this Jacket.]

Ranking: Keeper.

File Code: Mythology. Anthropology. Hardback.

Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay on Myth and The Frame of Time, by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend.

“A nonfiction work of history and comparative mythology, particularly the subfield of archaeoastronomy. It is mostly about the claim of a Megalithic era discovery of axial precession, and the encoding of this knowledge in mythology. The book was severely criticized by academics upon its publication … The main argument of the book may be summarized as the claim of an early (Neolithic) discovery of the precession of the equinoxes (usually attributed to Hipparchus, 2nd century BCE), and an associated very long-lived Megalithic civilization of "unsuspected sophistication" that was particularly preoccupied with astronomical observation. The knowledge of this civilization about precession, and the associated astrological ages, would have been encoded in mythology, typically in the form of a story relating to a millstone and a young protagonist—the "Hamlet's Mill" of the book's title, a reference to the kenning Amlóða kvren recorded in the Old Icelandic Skáldskaparmál. The authors indeed claim that mythology is primarily to be interpreted as in terms of archaeoastronomy ("mythological language has exclusive reference to celestial phenomena"), and they mock alternative interpretations in terms of fertility or agriculture. The book's project is an examination of the "relics, fragments and allusions that have survived the steep attrition of the ages". In particular, the book reconstructs a myth of a heavenly mill which rotates around the celestial pole and grinds out the world's salt and soil, and is associated with the maelstrom. The millstone falling off its frame represents the passing of one age's pole star (symbolized by a ruler or king of some sort), and its restoration and the overthrow of the old king of authority and the empowering of the new one the establishment of a new order of the age (a new star moving into the position of pole star) … H. R. Ellis Davidson referred to Hamlet’s Mill as: [...] amateurish in the worst sense, jumping to wild conclusions without any knowledge of the historical value of the sources or of previous work done. On the Scandinavian side there is heavy dependence on the fantasies of Rydberg, writing in the last [19th] century, and apparent ignorance of progress made since his time.” – Wikipedia. I believe this work of ‘popular speculative anthropology’ has had some influence on John Crowley, perhaps, just a tad.

Ranking: Keeper.

File Code: Speculative Anthropology. Mythology. Hardback.

The History of Magic, by Kurt Seligmann.

Ex-library book, bought at Yesterday’s Warehouse. An overview of the subject from Mesopotamia to the Masons. 250 illustrations. “A Catalogue of Sorcery, Witchcraft, and the Occult. Book is magnificently illustrated, recounting the whole fascinating story of magical ideas and manifestations in the Western world and reveals the aesthetic value and influence of magic on man's creative imagination. This book crystallizes the most significant and interesting aspects of the subject since antiquity. Delving into the works of hundreds of scholars and specialists who have written on the inexhaustible subject, Seligmann presents a vivid picture of the most typical religio-magical beliefs of ancient, medieval, and modern times. The illustrations, selected by Seligmann with a true artist's eye, came from his own library of old books on magic and witchcraft, and from the archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and other authoritative sources. Embodied in the text as an integral part of the narrative, they mirror the magical world view throughout the ages as no other presentation has ever done before.” – Amazon. [Library rebind; lacks this jacket.]

Ranking: Keeper.

File Code: Magic. Reference. Hardback.