Month: January 2018
Ioan P. Culianu: "game" and Magic in the Renaissance
Review of the recent Lindau issue containing notes on the Romanian philosopher and historian of religions on the Renaissance ars magica (Serious Iocari. Science and art in the thought of the Renaissance, Lindau, Turin, 2017).
Edgar Allan Poe and the criticism of the real in humorous farces
The anniversary of the birth of the Master of Terror gives us the opportunity to analyze his mocking vision of the "real", of the world and of the past in an almost unknown branch of his work
Parmenides, priest of Apollo: the "incubatio" and sacred healing
In an extract previously published on the site [cf. Ioan P. Culianu: the hyperborean shamanism of ancient Greece] we illustrated the retrospective of the Romanian religious historian Culianu on the existence of a Hyperborean shamanism in the ancient Mediterranean area: a "technique of ecstasy" attributable to the divine figure of Apollo Hyperborean of which the major interpreters, called "iatromanti", were the ancient scholars and philosophers. We focus here on one of these "enlightened": Parmenides of Elea (IV - V century BC), born in Elea / Velia (today Ascea, in the province of Salerno), where he founded the Eleatic School together with Zeno.
The archaeological findings of Velia allow us to reconstruct the "Apollonian Way" of Parmenides, pre-Socratic philosopher, Apollo's iatromancer and healer
The solar monotheism of the Emperor Flavius ββClaudius Julian
The swan song of Mediterranean "paganism" and ancient sacred thought in the last attempt of the last emperor of Rome, who paid his personal resistance by being branded as "Apostate"
