Wicked Angels and the Good Demon: The Origins of Alchemy According to the Physica of Hermes

Christian H. Bull, University of Oslo and Princeton University

"The alchemist Zosimus of Panopolis, writing around 300 CE, is our only source for a series of treatises by Hermes called the Physica, which reportedly spoke about angels  who had intercourse with women, as in 1 Enoch, and which credited the revelation of alchemy to an enigmatic figure called Chemeu."

https://www.academia.edu/36394399/Wicked..._of_Hermes

"Bennet anchors his work in Northumbrian history, providing scholarly endnotes to sketch the lives and deeds he reimagines, e.g., those of the 17th-century Quaker evangelist James Nayler, and of the 15th-century alchemist George Ripley, whose writings propel Bennet’s “Folly Wood” sequence. He quotes from the archival record throughout his historical sequences, with dialogue and commentary by participants forming found poetry and meta-text. The notes include glosses on the many citations in Latin and from the Bible, and discuss the intertextuality of Bennet’s work; for instance, his “Landscape with Psyche” begins with an epigraph from Pierre Corneille (which Paul Valery also used), refers to a Claude Lorraine painting, and includes phrases from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass as retold by Thomas Bulfinch and Walter Pater."

Review:
https://oceanstatereview.org/2023/08/05/...ted-poems/

Peter reading some of his poems:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7erEpL-jF8

Author of the All Souls Trilogy:

"A Discovery of Witches is a 2011 historical-fantasy novel and the debut novel by American scholar Deborah Harkness. It follows Diana Bishop, a history of science professor at Yale University, as she embraces her magical blood after finding a long-thought-lost manuscript and engages in a forbidden romance with a charming vampire, Matthew Clairmont."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Discovery_of_Witches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Harkness

This interesting website, by an art historian, explores the material culture of the Trilogy:

https://thearthistoryofallsouls.com/

By Hiro Hirai

" Paracelsus’s concept of seeds is an important contribution to
Renaissance theories of matter. Unlike the alchemists’ notion of metal
seeds, it has a strong Christian orientation, based on a particular inter-
pretation of the biblical Creation story. It is in this cosmogonical aspect
that Paracelsian seeds are more akin to the seminal reasons of Augustine
than to the logoi spermatikoi of the Stoics or Plotinus. The present study
examines the Augustinian background of this Paracelsian concept and
Marsilio Ficino’s intermediary role in its origination."


https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-revue...ge-245.htm

By Margaret Healy.

Full text.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/fu...086/673351

"The library formed by the late Michael Innes just before the 1939-45 war and mainly in the fifties and sixties is the collection of a scholar with a philosophical and historical mind; at the same time Mr Innes was a bibliophile, as is shown by the fact that the early books - with a few exceptions - are complete and in good condition. It contains approximately 4,000 works. This includes 23 MSS and about 420 books of the 16th and 17th centuries, many of which contain a number of titles. The largest part of the library is of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries and much of it is in French. The early books are in Latin, English, French, Italian and German, the last being in the minority as Mr Innes was not a German scholar, French together with English being his natural language. There are also a small number of books in Hebrew and in Arabic."


https://warburg.libguides.com/c.php?g=660284&p=4751036

Yuri Rednev.

"The article aims to rethink the several stereotypes of Romantic tradition, which are still reproduced in regard to Benvenuto Cellini and his Vita. Using the approaches of intellectual history and iconographical studies, the present study pays attention to the coherent system of lay, scientific and 'secret' knowledge of the epoch lurking under the surface of the simplicity and even naivety of the author's language. I argue that this autobiographical writing embodies a certain type of culture of the self deeply rooted in contemporary medical, alchemical and magical contexts. Organized around the concept of " getting pleasure, " Cellini's practices of the self are built into the Neo-Platonic picture of the world. Analyzing the two passages of Vita, I demonstrate the author's spiritual ascent from the corporeal suffering to union with 'the One' by means of individual and collective magic rituals, transforming his Life into a work of art."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication...i%27s_Vita

"The historiographical construal of the relations between science and religion in terms of
conflict has long undermined the legitimacy of the study of spiritual alchemy. Recent studies
have illustrated the compatibility of natural philosophy and theology during the early modern
period. This project will follow the recent trend in reassessing this conflict by examining the
work of an illustrious renaissance alchemist, Gerhard Dorn (c. 1530/5 – after 1584). I will
approach Dorn as a ‘secular theologian,’ a natural philosopher who attempted to restore
harmony and unity in the world by means of a scientific-philosophical discourse."


ILLUSTRIOUS PROVIDENCE AND THE SUPERNATURAL ART.
A RENAISSANCE ALCHEMIST AND HIS PURSUIT OF SALVATION
Zoë Van Cauwenberg


https://libstore.ugent.be/fulltxt/RUG01/...001_AC.pdf

The Alchemical Order: Reason, Passions, Alchemy and the Social World in the Philosophy and Cosmology of Jean d’Espagnet

by Alexander Scott Dessens.


"Jean d’Espagnet (c. 1564–1637?) was a magistrate and presiding judge at the parlement of  Bordeaux  in  the  late  sixteenth  and  early  seventeenth  centuries.    He  served  on  the  court  from 1590 until retiring in 1615, from 1600 as a président, a venal office of significant power and social standing. After retirement he wrote three books which comprise his literary and intellectual legacy.Together they speak to the fertile philosophical ground of the late Renaissance and present a vision of order and God’s cosmos deeply influenced by Neoplatonism,  Hermetism,  Paracelsianism, Neostoicism,  and  medieval  alchemy,  as  well  as  d’Espagnet’s  judicial  education  and  social experience as a magistrate.  This dissertation explores the foundations of d’Espagnet’s philosophy of nature, tracing the development of certain philosophical ideas from ancient sources such as the Platonic and Hermetic traditions through medieval and Renaissance philosophers like Ramon Lull, Pseudo-Geber, and Marsilio Ficino to d’Espagnet and his contemporaries."

https://hammer.purdue.edu/articles/thesi...t/19666323

Interesting online collection of texts on various Hermetic subjects:

https://via-hygeia.art/bibliotherapy/