St. Jerome Bible tips:
1. Psalter, your recreation.
2. Proverbs, your way of life.
3. Ecclesiastes, how to trample the world.
4. Job, learn patient virtue.
5. Gospels, always in hand.
6. Acts+Epistles, be steeped in them.
7. Prophets, commit to memory.
8. Canticles, have no fear.
After WWII, writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini founded the Academy for the Friulian Language. Though born and educated in Bologna, he wrote poetry in Friulian, used Roman dialect in fiction, and later condemned television for eroding Italy’s rich dialect traditions.
Even in 1861, at the time of unification, some Sicilians thought L’Italia – or rather la Talia – was their new queen. A full century later, the social reformer Danilo Dolci encountered Sicilians who had never heard of Italy and asked him what it was.
In Renaissance Europe Italian merchants living abroad were often envied and despised by northerners, particularly Poles, who regarded them as feeble and effeminate, weedy lute-players who preferred wine and salads to beer and roast meat.
A landscape which encourages cultural diversity is almost bound to promote political disunity. In the case of Italy it has done so since before Romulus founded Rome.
Outside of researching the many manifestations of the so-called "occult" tradition, I have been learning more about Italian history and in my mind they somewhat relate. I do not think that either are unifiable, and it is a mistake to think otherwise. Both are patchworks.
As we all witness the consolidation of of white British sectarianism, in the aftermath of (among many other things) Henry Nowak's murder, it continues to amaze me how prescient Marshall McLuhan was, and how wildly the twentieth-century utopians misunderstood his concept of the "global village"
"Symbolism is the art of the missing link, as the word implies” sym-ballein, to throw together. It is the art of syncopation. It is the basis of electricity and quantum mechanics […] The Chemical bond, as understood by Heisenberg and Linus Pauling, is RESONANCE. Echoland. The world of acoustic space" - MM&BN 70'
Victorian magic is heavily reliant upon the idea of invented tradition . . . late nineteenth-century occultism w[as] very much influenced by this process and Golden Dawn magic itself was the result of its creators engaging in the practice of inventing tradition.
OK, new!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I wound up cutting like 3k words from this one and heavily revised it, but I think it's pretty good.
[The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn] not only revived the Renaissance process of esoteric synthesis which was so essential to the occult tradition, but it also stepped back further into the history of magic in its incorporation of older magical texts and rituals.
While many such [contemporary] studies seek to rescue magic and occultism from the label of irrationality, by merely arguing for its rationality within a given time and place, they once again provide an excuse for an occult worldview – ‘it made sense at that time.’
This ignores the prevalence and proliferation of occult practices and beliefs throughout the Western world, both past and present. It is time to stop apologizing for magic.