Joscelyn Godwin's Articles and Minor Writings
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This site contains summaries, commentaries, and links to Godwin's minor writings from 1970 to the present. For the books that he has authored, coauthored, edited, and translated, see his website:
21. “Hearing Secret Harmonies.”
The American Theosophist 73 (1985): 182-95.
Another pre-publication excerpt from Harmonies of Heaven and Earth (see no. 20), treating mysterious music heard in nature and its possible origin.
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This journal ceased publication in 1996, and was replaced by Quest Magazine, website:
https://www.theosophical.org/membership/departments/quest-magazine
22. “A Background for Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens (1617).”
Hermetic Journal 29 (1985): 5-10.
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This complemented my edition of the 50 fugues, emblems, and epigrams of Maier’s work, which was published in the Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks series by Adam McLean, also editor of this journal. A cassette tape of a complete recording accompanied the work. It followed my first visit to the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica in Amsterdam and meetings with the founder, Joseph Ritman, and the librarian, Frans Janssen. Twenty years later I wrote a much enlarged version for the Spanish edition of Atalanta Fugiens (see no. 69).
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Adam McLean’s website:
23. “Priests, Professors, & Gurus.”
Gnosis 2 (1986): 35-38.
A cynically humorous paper about how the modern university has taken on the role of the medieval church, together with all its faults, illustrated with appropriate collages by Ron D. Henggeler. I gave the paper in 1984 at the “Hermetic Academy,” a self-styled group within the American Academy of Religion, where I first met Antoine Faivre and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. These two eminent professors represented the alternative directions that the group might have taken: either as a vehicle for Schuonian Traditionalism, or for the academic study of the Western Esoteric Tradition. It was the latter that prevailed.
Gnosis Magazine was published by the Lumen Foundation, founded by Jay Kinney, and edited by Richard Smoley. It ceased publication with the 51st issue in 1999.
24. “Saint-Yves d’Alveydre and the Agarthian Connection.”
Hermetic Journal 32 (1986): 24-34; 33 (1986): 31-8.
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A sabbatical year in Paris, 1985-86, and my attendance at the lectures of Antoine Faivre and Jean-Pierre Laurant at the Sorbonne, marked a transition from musicology to more general esoteric history. This was the first of several studies of Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, which took advantage of his neglected manuscripts in the Sorbonne Library. They showed how his Sanskrit teacher introduced him to the idea of the underground kingdom of Agarttha and its language of Vattanian, which after the publication of Saint-Yves’ suppressed book Mission de l’Inde entered the popular occultist milieu (see no. 77). This gifted but credulous and self-inflated esotericist believed that he was an emissary of the “King of the World,” a notion taken up in the 1920s by the “Polaires” that even gained the support of René Guénon. Later, in Arktos, I would disentangle the myth of Agarttha from that of Shambhala.
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Adam McLean’s journal was the only possible venue for this long and specialized article. For his website, see:
This was the first full-length book to appear from Phanes Press, founded by the scholar and entrepreneur Dr. David Fideler. It is based on the self-published work of the early 20th-century Neoplatonist Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie, and much expanded and clarified by Fideler. Phanes went on to publish many important works on classical philosophy and esotericism, its list eventually passing to Red Wheel/Weiser. My Foreword restates some of the ideas aired in “Pythagoreans, Today?” (no. 18).
Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph R. Strayer, vol. 10 (New York: Scribners, 1987), 1-5.
The entry was commissioned on the strength of my book of 1981, Mystery Religions in the Ancient World, perhaps not knowing how far that lay outside official scholarship. I took the opportunity to extend the usual limitation of the term to the classical world by including Near Eastern religions such as the Druses and Nusairis, and by considering the degree to which Judaism and Christianity might qualify. (The curious heading “Mystery Religions – Poland” simply refers to the alphabetical scope of this tenth volume.)
27. “La genèse de l’Archéomètre de Saint-Yves d’Alveydre.”
L’Initiation (Paris), no. 2 of 1988: 60-71; no. 4 of 1988: 153-66.
Here I took a spade to the roots of Saint-Yves’ creation, a mixture of psychism, religious fervor, and Hermetic syncretism. The article included long excerpts from Saint-Yves’ manuscripts and hand-drawn reproductions of his tables, copied in the Sorbonne Library. My intention was to show how such “universal” but actually personal systems come into being and gather adherents. Nonetheless, it was welcomed by the centenarian journal founded by Saint-Yves’ admirer Papus, and led to friendly correspondence with its editor Yves-Fred Boisset. I included a summary of my findings in the chapter on Saint-Yves in L’ésotérisme musical en France, 1750-1950 (English title: Music and the Occult). Later I made a condensed version for David Fideler’s new journal, Alexandria. For that text, see no. 27A.
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The two-part article is also accessible on the website of L’Initiation:
https://www.linitiation.eu/telechargement/L-Initiation-1988-2.pdf
https://www.linitiation.eu/telechargement/L-Initiation-1988-4.pdf
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27A. “The Creation of a Universal System: Saint-Yves d’Alveydre and his Archeometer.”
Alexandria 1 (1991): 229-49.
A condensed version of the two-part article in French (nos. 27.1 and 27.2), adapted for the new journal founded and edited by David Fideler. This was the first, and so far the only time that Saint-Yves’ system had been summarized for an Anglophone readership.
28. “Facing the Traditionalists: an Approach to René Guénon and his Successors.”
Gnosis 7 (1988): 23-27.
Reprinted in Jay Kinney, ed., The Inner West (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2004): 292-303.
Since the 1970s I had been working out my own grateful but ambiguous relationship to the Traditionalist school, after reading many works by Guénon, Coomaraswamy, Schuon, Burckhardt, and other contributors to Studies in Comparative Religion (see nos. 1 and 2), and meeting Marco Pallis and Richard Nicholson, the only Buddhists of the group. With the conviction that under the domination by Muslims, and to a lesser extent Orthodox Christians, Traditionalism had declined from a “Perennial Philosophy” into a “Perennial Religion” demanding adherence to one of the “great religions,” I set out my reasons both for respect and dissent. Much later I wrote a modified version for New Dawn, the Australian magazine (see no. 91).
29. “H.P.B., Dorjeff, and the Mongolian Connection.”
Theosophical History (London) 2/7 (1988): 253-60.
My first of many contributions to this journal, which initiated a scholarly and impartial approach to the history of the Theosophical Society and its many precursors and offshoots. This article comments on a curious episode related in Paul Brunton’s posthumous Notebooks, reporting hearsay that the Theosophical master “Koot Hoomi” was in fact the Russian Buddhist Aghvan Dorjeff. Without pretending to know the truth of the matter, I offered this analysis in order to “thicken the plot,” much as I later supported the researches of K. Paul Johnson (see no. 46).
Theosophical History was founded in London by Leslie Price in January 1985, and ran through Vol. III, No. 2. In 1990 the editorship passed to James A. Santucci in Fullerton, California, and the numbering resumed with Vol. III, No. 1. See the website:
I had met Perkin Walker (1914-1985) at the Warburg Institute around 1980, together with his pupil Dr. Penelope Gouk, and he had encouraged my study of speculative music. Antoine Faivre invited me to write a Foreword to the translation of Walker’s Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella for the series “Bibliothèque de l’Hermétisme,” in which two of my own books appeared, and, as always, improved my French.