🝧 Meropisᚒcreaties

The dialogue is an intrinsic part of literary tradition in Europe, as a genre dating back to Antiquity, and there are good reasons for this long continuation. The genre has been utilised as a didactic means to convey and spread ideas in an attractive and comprehensible manner, ranging from scholastic disputations to downright polemics to moralising conversations for laymen. The variety of these dialogues and the motivation for their use is discussed hereafter. Furthermore, the dialogue in the form of individual revelation has been firmly placed within the hermetic tradition, where hermetic must be understood as the whole body of occult arts and disciplines current and practised since at least the Hellenic period, such as Hermetism , Gnosticism , natural magic , astrology and alchemy . Hellenic-Egyptian hermetic arts were studied extensively by A.J. Festugière, whose useful typology of hermetic dialogues will be used below. The alchemical dialogue stands in a tradition that is...

'These horribly artificial speech patterns, these pseudo-profundities on the meanings of random words, are what? Self-indulgent? Meandering? Pointless? What is all of the above?' Cosmopolis is, in my opinion, one of those hidden gems I am lucky to be acquainted with. For an introduction to the film, however, I refer to the Wikipedia article . In the next part, I want to present some thoughts on Cosmopolis . Several contrasts can be observed in the film.  Rich - poor  Order - chaos  No affection - affection  Reality - illusion or existence - non-existence "Rich" and "poor" are evident aspects. For example, the main character Eric Packer (what's in a name?) is a multi-billionaire who drives in a state-of-the-art limousine, white on the outside, dark on the inside. When Packer meets Richard Sheets in the final part of the film, the environment shows poverty. Packer has a career, Sheets does not, and it can be conjectured pretty much t...

Lawrence Principe, The Secrets of Alchemy , Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press 2013. 281 pp. ISBN-13 978-0-226-10379-2. Alchemy is a subject that is as diverse as it elusive when one tries to find definitive interpretations of its literature and gain a thorough understanding of its ideas. Without doubt, it is the lack of understanding and the inaccessibility of original sources that engendered the enormous corpus of non-academic writings on alchemy we have today, overshadowing sound scientific studies that are not occupied primarily with ‘occultism’ or magical practices (pp. 2-3). From Late Classical Hellenic Egypt and the Arabic world to alchemy’s apex in Early Modern Europe: the subject area is vast, with different and old languages involved. In all, alchemy travelled a long way before ending up in popular culture like Paul Coelho’s The Alchemist and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone , which immediately betray persistent clichés on ...