Month: January 2020
"Beyond the real"
The dimension of the fantastic has always existed. In ancient times, through the use of myths, sagas, legends and cosmogonies, human beings shaped their beliefs and motivated their actions. Today the fantastic continues to permeate life and the collective unconscious of man, expressing itself with certainly different means but always capable of magnetizing our inner compasses. Lovecraft, Machen, Meyrink, Smith and Tolkien are five paradigmatic authors of this genre, finally presented in all their literary and philosophical dignity in the new essay published by GOG edizioni.
RenΓ© GuΓ©non: "The symbolism of the theater"
It can be said that the theater is a symbol of the manifestation, of which it expresses in the most perfect way possible the illusory character; and this symbolism can be considered either from the point of view of the actor, or from that of the theater itself. The actor is a symbol of the "Self", or rather of the personality, which manifests itself through an indefinite series of states and modalities, which can be regarded as so many different parts; and it should be noted the importance that the ancient use of the mask had for the perfect accuracy of this symbolism.
Greetings to Emanuele Severino: the eternals and the will to power
Our homage to Emanuele Severino, the "philosopher of eternal being" who left us in these days: a brief reflection on nihilism starting from the great teaching of the Master.
Hieronymus Bosch and the drΓ΄leries
A stranger to the idealizing representation of nature, Bosch established himself in the collective imagination as a painter of dream visions, and so he has in fact been defined over the centuries up to the present day: as a painter of the fantastic and of the dream, or even of the nightmare, painter of the demonic and hell par excellence. Yet his works always refer to another reality, in which the traditional categories of Beauty, Eternity and Sense are (still) present, albeit in a renewed form.
The kidnappings of the Fairies and the mystery of the "Missing 411"
Every year dozens of people suddenly disappear in US National Parks, in unexplained situations and without leaving any trace; Detective David Paulides, who for decades has been studying these mysterious cases he defined as "Missing 411", has identified some recurring patterns which, analyzed with an eye to ancient traditions (both European and Native American), bring us back to the folklore beliefs concerning the "water-babies" and other feral entities residing in the "invisible world", to which it is sometimes believed that the human being, willy-nilly, is able to access, sometimes never to return to our world.
The Iranian rite of Ashura, between religion and politics
During the ashura ceremony, the Shiites mythically refer to the exemplary self-sacrifice of the third Imam Husayn by inserting him in the cosmological context of the cosmic war, of Madzeist derivation, among the principles of good against evil; then a continuous union between the political and religious spheres, the boundaries between the two are becoming more and more confused, and the religious dimension justifies the political sentiment, while the local sentiment leads to a global drama.
Germanic Isis
On the identity of the "naval" Isis mentioned by Tacitus in "Germany" a real quarrel has opened up between those who consider it a Roman import -- which would have its reflection in the practice of βNavigium Isidisβ - e who, like Georges DumΓ©zil, considers it connected to an original Germanic goddess, Freyja or Nerthus. But, beyond the denominations, the category to which the goddess can be ascribed is the broadest one of the Great Goddesses of the archaic period, including Rhea and Cybele.
