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Eros and Magic in the Renaissance

It is a widespread prejudice of modern, scientific society that "magic" is merely a ludicrous amalgam of recipes and methods derived from primitive and erroneous notions about nature. Eros and Magic in the Renaissance challenges this view, providing an in-depth scholarly explanation of the workings of magic and showing that magic continues to exist in an altered form even today.

Renaissance magic, according to Ioan Couliano, was a scientifically plausible attempt to manipulate individuals and groups based on a knowledge of motivations, particularly erotic motivations. Its key principle was that everyone (and in a sense everything) could be influenced by appeal to sexual desire. In addition, the magician relied on a profound knowledge of the art of memory to manipulate the imaginations of his subjects. In these respects, Couliano suggests, magic is the precursor of the modern psychological and sociological sciences, and the magician is the distant ancestor of the psychoanalyst and the advertising and publicity agent.

In the course of his study, Couliano examines in detail the ideas of such writers as Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola and illuminates many aspects of Renaissance culture, including heresy, medicine, astrology, alchemy, courtly love, the influence of classical mythology, and even the role of fashion in clothing.

Just as science gives the present age its ruling myth, so magic gave a ruling myth to the Renaissance. Because magic relied upon the use of images, and images were repressed and banned in the Reformation and subsequent history, magic was replaced by exact science and modern technology and eventually forgotten. Couliano's remarkable scholarship helps us to recover much of its original significance and will interest a wide audience in the humanities and social sciences.

Genres HistoryPhilosophyNonfictionReligionMagicMythologyOccult

271 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Ioan Petru Culianu

Ioan Petru Culianu was a Romanian historian of religion, culture, and ideas, a philosopher and political essayist, and a short story writer. He served as professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago from 1988 to his death, and had previously taught the history of Romanian culture at the University of Groningen.

An expert in gnosticism and Renaissance magic, he was encouraged and befriended by Mircea Eliade, though he gradually distanced himself from his mentor. Culianu published seminal work on the interrelation of the occult, Eros, magic, physics, and history.

Culianu was murdered in 1991. It has been much speculated his murder was in consequence of his critical view of Romanian national politics. Some factions of the Romanian political right openly celebrated his murder. The Romanian Securitate, which he once lambasted as a force "of epochal stupidity", has also been suspected of involvement and of using puppet fronts on the right as cover.

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This is one of my favourite books from my university days. Not for the faint of intellect -- it took me three tries to really understand it -- but once you do a door opens into a whole new understanding of Renaissance philosophy. And it's also fun to learn the origin of myths like why vampires don't reflect in glass, or to see the origins of quantum physics in the writings of a ninth-century Arab philosopher. The title is spot-on: I loved it. It's magic.

I can hardly do justice to this brilliant history of the development of magic during the Renaissance. This is not superstitious hocus-pocus, but rather a serious theological and philosophical study of the rise of Hermetic thought which presages modern psychology and science of the brain. Professor Couliano was the world authority, and it is a bitter tragedy that he was lost to us so young. This book should be of interest to those interested in the history of science, since early scientific thinking grew out of the philosophical study of magic.

Imi pare rau sa o spun, dar prezentarea lui Sorin Antohi ma lasa rece si imi transmite o insiruire de termeni meniti sa puna potentialul cititor: a. pe fuga b. pe ginduri. Daca cititorul face parte din categoria b si are curiozitatea sa rasfoiasca putin, bravo lui, s-ar putea sa aiba sansa unei lecturi reusite. Daca, in schimb, ramine doar cu citirea prezentarii si renunta (categoria a, deci) acest neajuns cade absolut in circa lui S.A. Pentru ca, asa cum spuneam, are o prezentare anosta, rasuflata si presupus intelectuala din care nu pricepi nimic.

Thank God pentru prezentarea in engleza la editia din 1987 Eros and Magic in the Renaissance Chicago Original Paperback

It is a widespread prejudice of modern, scientific society that "magic" is merely a ludicrous amalgam of recipes and methods derived from primitive and erroneous notions about nature. Eros and Magic in the Renaissance challenges this view, providing an in-depth scholarly explanation of the workings of magic and showing that magic continues to exist in an altered form even today.

Renaissance magic, according to Ioan Couliano, was a scientifically plausible attempt to manipulate individuals and groups based on a knowledge of motivations, particularly erotic motivations. Its key principle was that everyone (and in a sense everything) could be influenced by appeal to sexual desire. In addition, the magician relied on a profound knowledge of the art of memory to manipulate the imaginations of his subjects. In these respects, Couliano suggests, magic is the precursor of the modern psychological and sociological sciences, and the magician is the distant ancestor of the psychoanalyst and the advertising and publicity agent.

In the course of his study, Couliano examines in detail the ideas of such writers as Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola and illuminates many aspects of Renaissance culture, including heresy, medicine, astrology, alchemy, courtly love, the influence of classical mythology, and even the role of fashion in clothing.

Just as science gives the present age its ruling myth, so magic gave a ruling myth to the Renaissance. Because magic relied upon the use of images, and images were repressed and banned in the Reformation and subsequent history, magic was replaced by exact science and modern technology and eventually forgotten. Couliano's remarkable scholarship helps us to recover much of its original significance and will interest a wide audience in the humanities and social sciences.

extremely dense and erudite book about magic/occultism in the renaissance, featuring quite a bit of space devoted to your friend and mine, giordano bruno. argues, among other things, that bruno's magic system(and the related system of memnotechnics) was an effective science of mass manipulation, intended to allow the magician to control individuals and more so groups of people, in a way that is sort of a precursor to modern day mass psychology/public relations/etc. also has some cool shorter sections on demonology and the effect of the protestant reformation on the european imagination. after reading this i am seriously entertaining the idea that giordano bruno was a forerunner of mkultra

Este libro es una auténtica joya. Recomendado tanto si vienes con curiosidad filosófica, literaria o cultura general (/histórica). El contenido es denso y riguroso, pero el estilo de Culianu lo hace ligero y se entiende todo perfectamente si lo lees en orden. Su estilo impersonal salpicado con una ironía muy medida, lo hacen ameno. Recomendadísimo. Ojalá lo reediten.

This was really good. Not only did I get a great insight into how much Renaissance magic owed to Greek philosophy but I got a great insight into where our modern culture really came from.

Historians of religions being as insufferable as always but that's not news :)) Interesting if a little unapproachable.

Un saggio di quelli che, per complessita' e bellezza, vien voglia di riprendere appena terminati. "Eros e magia. " e' probabilmente uno dei capolavori antropologici del '900 per come scopre e analizza quel filo rosso che, dalla filosofia greca classica, passando per il neoplatonismo rinascimentale, si collega in modo inaspettato con le odierne discipline psicologiche, scientifico-sociali. Culianu descrive in maniera a dir poco entusiasmante il passaggio epocale dall'eta' umanistico-rinascimentale a quella protomoderna. Sono gli albori della societa' del dominio apparente della speculazione scientifico induttiva. Non e' stata una cesura netta come si puo' credere. La figura del mago rinascimentale, abile operatore in grado di gestire le mille forme dell'eros, dell'astrologia, dell'alchimia, della negromanzia, non si e' dissolta improvvisamente sotto i colpi del nuovo che avanzava con roghi, torture e repressione. I lasciti sono stati enormi e insospettati. Interessante l'identificazione della Riforma come motore primo di questo cambiamento culturale del quale "non si sentiva il bisogno". Cambiamento in definitiva reazionario e repressivo (la controparte cattolica si allineera' di buon grado) indirizzato all'eliminazione spietata dell'immaginario fantastico rinascimentale cosi' aperto e variegato. I cascami liberali e democratici della Riforma sono quindi letti come un accidente di percorso e non una conseguenza diretta, cosi' come la nascita del metodo scientifico sarebbe in realta' alienazione dalla Natura. Natura che cessa di essere tramite e punto di incontro tra Dio e Uomo per diventare la principale causa di separazione.

Who knew that Evola was just Bruno 2.0? This book may be the best I've read in a long time. Utterly mind blowing application of medieval magic that you can see played out today in media and government. This book quite literally changed the way I see the world. I will be investing much time into reading the source materials for this book. The knowledge you get from this book, if applied, weighs as much as the knowledge of every self-betterment book written in the last 50 years combined. I cannot stress the importance of this book. My Lord, no wonder the author was assassinated.

A book that combines my love for Giordano Bruno with a study on magic as social and individual manipulation? And written by a young but well loved University of Chicago professor who was heavily into politics and the occult, only to be murdered in mysterious circumstances? I think this was written specifically for me (even though I was only 2 when it was published)! Very good, scholarly book. My 5 stars however may be a little biased.

A challenging read, but the author makes a solid case about the current scientific worldview and the worldview of Renaissance magicians being related and that the current view point addresses some of the psychic needs addressed in the Renaissance, and neglects others.

Very difficult, deeply interesting. I need to go straight back to the beginning and try agaain as I know I missed so much.

I loved this book for its wide-ranging overview of magic in the Renaissance. I thought Culianu did an excellent job connecting trains of thought from different cultures and times to show how concepts of eros and magic evolved up to the Renaissance.

Midway through, though, I wondered whether it was worth continuing. I enjoyed reading about how the evil eye was theorized to function, how Giordano Bruno saw Queen Elizabeth as a type of Diana, and how you can tell someone has a melancholic temperament. These are all interesting facets of the Renaissance, and yet part of me couldn't help but feel that it all had little to do with this present world that I live in.

I am so glad I kept going. The third section of this book addressed this question in exactly the far-seeing, holistic way I had hoped for. According to Culianu, the world we inhabit bears the scars of the Reformation and Counter Reformation, both of which served to eliminate imagination and to banish God from Nature:

The Reformation leads to a total censorship of the imaginary, since phantasms are none other than idols conceived by the inner sense.

As soon as God withdraws into his complete transcendence, every human attempt to examine his design runs into a ghastly silence. This "silence of God" is, in reality, silence of the world, silence of Nature.

This is quite different from the world of the Renaissance, which "conceived of the natural and social world as a spiritual organism in which perpetual exchanges of phantasmic messages occurred. That was the principle of magic and of Eros, Eros itself being a form of magic."

Culianu leaves us with both despair and hope: "our civilization continues to die in the trenches dug by the Reformation and the political events that followed it," and yet, a new Renaissance and birth of the world is possible.

Ioan drops you right in pretty deep at first: if you've no familiarity with the Art of Memory or Marsilio Ficino or Giordano Bruno, it will probably be intimidating. I had read Frances Yates' The Art of Memory so I was somewhat familiar with these wizards, but even so I felt a bit dizzy. Once the fine details behind the science of pneuma, the universal medium of fantasy, is laid down, the going is smoother, and by the end all of the strange particulars are assembled into a very clear (and very surprising) picture of how the Church, quantitative science, and iconoclasm have contributed to the exile of magic from our culture.

Eros and Magic in the Renaissance offers a compelling historical theory of modern Western culture, its institutions and their origins. Couliano suggests that modern Western culture was predominantly conceived and developed during the piques of the European Reformation – presented less as a progressive movement than a conservative one – against the idiosyncratic and imaginative excesses of Renaissance ideals. The Renaissance, then, is framed as a period of imaginative and creative acculturation culminating in the institutional reform of the European Reformation. A reform which ultimately sought to establish a ubiquitous social dogma under the pretense of shared communal values.

However, Couliano does not accuse any particular order or individual of the Reformation's apparent reactionary agenda, but, instead, explicates the broad stabilizing forces and attributes them to cultural trends emanating from the most influential intellectual circles of the time. The philosophical underpinnings of Western antiquity are mentioned regarding their distinction between reproduction and love and the importance of identifying the universal aspects of the eros and the human soul. By the time we arrive to sixteenth century Europe, this distinction – of reproduction and love – and its importance are found to be conflated not just with one another, but with many other arts, philosophies and theologies.

It is no surprise, then, that we find only a few intellects at the time were actually observant enough to see the confusion and also willing to speak out against the popular and appealing theories of the age. Seeing as these efforts were more akin to cultural critiques, Couliano leads us through the relevant works of Ficino and Bruno, among others, in an attempt to establish a potential origin of the modern social institutions.

The bulk of Couliano's theory concerns the sixteenth century notion of the Phantasm (roughly today's psychosomatic symptom) and the contested ideas of these terrifying emotional instabilities and their contraction. The leading idea of Phantasmic contraction at the time claimed that Women, in their possession of [fetishized] beauty, were primary vectors of infection. Of course, as this was sixteenth century Europe, the only potential victim here was the Man. The contraction of a Phantasm and its unfolding maladies were deemed quite serious, many even endowing the Phantasm with a deadly objective, and, so its cure was never a guarantee. The potential remedy of the time was one of indulgence. Indulgence in the images of Phantasy and their subsequent representation in the physical and creative work of the infected.

The baselessness and arbitrariness of such a simplistic theory was the primary incitation for Bruno's earliest work. He goes so far as to label Patrarch (a well respected Italian Renaissance poet) a "repressed sensualist" and that people like him were "lacking the intelligence to apply himself to better things … thereby yielding to the tyranny of base, idiotic and filthy bestiality." It is with these critiques that Bruno states with clarity that "the realm of physical love must be separated from the realm of divine contemplation," and from here, the germ of his further development of the Phantasm and their subsequent use in particular forms of "social magic".

Drawing further support from the culture of the same period, Couliano says that "Machiavelli's Prince is the forebear of the political adventurer, a type that is disappearing." So, it is with Bruno's De Viniculis, that he describes as "the prototype of the impersonal systems of mass media, indirect censorship, [and] global manipulation…" and so Bruno, as suggested by Couliano, appears to be among the first contributors of psychoanalytical theory. It is no wonder, then, that there was no better term for the informing of public opinion, its control and its ability to incite mass action, than the existing term "interpersonal magic."

In fact, Couliano makes clear that the Inquisition itself was, at least in part, a final attempt by the decaying institutions and officials of the Church to prevent the spread and further development of what they saw as a contentious and aberrant worldview. This interpretation becomes all the more apparent in considering how rampant the use of these "magicks" were and the Church's confusion in discerning and understanding them. Couliano reveals other cases of "magic" that, while still psychologically directed at particular individuals, were used to curry favors and heighten the prestige of anyone who was willing to determine and convincingly fulfill the desires of a needy patron or audience.

Ultimately, it is the cultural dialectic which drives and directs social trends in the immediate term and forms particular historical trends in the long term. Given the Reformation was enabled by the arrival of the printing press and the potential mass distribution of ideas, it certainly seems plausible, as Couliano suggests, that the modern theory of scientific philosophy and its social aims has a far more contentious and dubious history than is typically assumed.

Couliano includes so much information in this work that I'm hardly contented by my summary above, as it suggests far more linearity than I think is due. However, much of it was thought provoking and interesting and I'd recommend it to anyone with at least some knowledge of Western philosophy and some ideas of the Renaissance notion of magic and phantasy (insofar as they were treated in absolute sincerity), especially if you are interested in the history and/or philosophy of modern science.

Magic Eros

Someone must have been munching on magic mushrooms more like to come up with the awesomely arbitrary plot to this glossy Pasta Porn video. Though attributed to Francis Carrello, also responsible for the Nikki Andersson vehicle PATHOS, the presence of usual suspects such as Dan Slonisko and Kathleen Stratton on photography (terrific job, by the way) and editing respectively seems to suggest the involvement of the late, questionably great Joe D'Amato at some stage. Credited screenwriter D'Salvo was believed to be a latter-day hardcore pseudonym for Poppa Joe until he continued to make porn long after D'Amato had deceased with flicks like PECCATO ORIGINALE and EUPHORIA, not to be confused with Brad Armstrong's excellent epic bearing the same title. This initial suspicion was lent credence by the movie's momentary take on Zalman King's WILD ORCHID. D'Amato had managed to plunder just about the entire King back catalog for lazy variations of varying explicitness, his soft-core 11 DAYS, 11 NIGHTS – ripping off 9 AND A HALF WEEKS – the most accomplished of a sorry bunch.

Bossy corporate bitch Anita Blond (paradoxically a brunette here) has her eye on some revolutionary virtual reality software. In hot pursuit of company director Mike Foster, who fled to Switzerland just as his signature was needed, she leaves her voluptuous assistant Erika Bella in charge. That's the straightforward bit, taking up the first ten minutes or so. Subsequently, every semblance of narrative logic flies out of the window as non-sequiturs begin to pile up. There's an apparent stalk 'n' rape of the bountiful Bella (star of D'Amato's PAPRIKA) blending into Anita's consensual caper on the plane, neither ever referred to again. Influences range from such obvious contenders as Andrew Blake and Michael Ninn, both of whom were being aped all over Europe at the time, to far less likely candidates as David Lynch and George Pal ? Leading man Karim, as a shady playboy of frankly unintelligible intentions, turns into Tom Thumb for one Mondo Bizarro sequence that's sure to leave your average video voyeur scratching his skull in disbelief.

Now I may be a twisted son of a gun – well, there's no doubt about that, actually – but this flick's pig-headed persistence to fly off on a radically different tangent at the drop of a bra (giving the impression of being cobbled together from a number of discarded projects) won me over in spades. In true, yet probably unintentional, anarchist fashion, anything can and frequently does happen. On top of that, you get to see some of the globe's finest females – hey, this is Euro porn, after all – discard their duds and making members disappear in all three therefore intended cavities. Turns out Capra was correct, sometimes it really is a wonderful life !

Eros and Magic in the Renaissance

It is a widespread prejudice of modern, scientific society that “magic” is merely a ludicrous amalgam of recipes and methods derived from primitive and erroneous notions about nature. Eros and Magic in the Renaissance challenges this view, providing an in-depth scholarly explanation of the workings of magic and showing that magic continues to exist in an altered form even today.

Renaissance magic, according to Ioan Couliano, was a scientifically plausible attempt to manipulate individuals and groups based on a knowledge of motivations, particularly erotic motivations. Its key principle was that everyone (and in a sense everything) could be influenced by appeal to sexual desire. In addition, the magician relied on a profound knowledge of the art of memory to manipulate the imaginations of his subjects. In these respects, Couliano suggests, magic is the precursor of the modern psychological and sociological sciences, and the magician is the distant ancestor of the psychoanalyst and the advertising and publicity agent.

In the course of his study, Couliano examines in detail the ideas of such writers as Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola and illuminates many aspects of Renaissance culture, including heresy, medicine, astrology, alchemy, courtly love, the influence of classical mythology, and even the role of fashion in clothing.

Just as science gives the present age its ruling myth, so magic gave a ruling myth to the Renaissance. Because magic relied upon the use of images, and images were repressed and banned in the Reformation and subsequent history, magic was replaced by exact science and modern technology and eventually forgotten. Couliano’s remarkable scholarship helps us to recover much of its original significance and will interest a wide audience in the humanities and social sciences.

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