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101. "Music as Esoteric Practice." 

Temenos Academy Review 21 (2018): 160-81.

 

This resumes the theme of my first article (no. 1) by reflecting on how composition, performance, and especially listening to music can contribute to or even constitute an esoteric path. It continues my contributions as the only musicologist among the Fellows of the Temenos Academy, and the most frequent contributor of musical essays to its journals.

For the Academy’s website, see:

www.temenosacademy.org

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102. "Queen Anne's Gift of Silver to the Onondaga Indian Chapel." 

Silver Studies 34 (2018): 22-38.

 

A second article (after no. 90) combining my interest in antique silver with the limited resources of Upstate New York. Archival and material research in Albany and Syracuse led to reconstructing the history of the magnificent silver communion service that Queen Anne gave to the Onondaga Indian Chapel in 1710. Since the chapel was never built, St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Albany took charge of the silver, and holds it to this day. The article explains the political background of colonial New York State, the visit to London of the four “Indian Kings” which occasioned the queen’s gift, the rival claims to guardianship of the silver, and the most recent settlement. It includes a list of all the known Queen Anne silver in American churches.

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Silver Studies is the annual publication of the Silver Society, based in London. See its website:
http://www.thesilversociety.org/

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103. "Gnosis and the Arts: Music."

In The Gnostic World, ed. Garry Trompf et al. (London: Routledge, 2019), 688-92.

 

This contribution to a large collective work was invited by Professor Trompf, with whom I had worked on the publication of John Fletcher’s thesis (see no. 84). It suggests examples of how music has been, and can be used as a vehicle for higher knowledge. Like my contributions to the Octagon and ESSWE collections (nos. 92 and 105), it served to give music some presence in the growing world of academic studies of esotericism.

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See the website:

https://www.routledge.com/The-Gnostic-World/Trompf-Mikkelsen-Johnston/p/book/9781138673939

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104. "Magic for Grown-ups: the Work of the Ur Group." 

New Dawn 172 (Jan.-Feb. 2019): 65-69.

 

The editor of the Australian magazine New Dawn, David Jones, has often allowed me to promote my books in his pages, by writing more or less popular articles about their subject matter, which he always illustrates in an inventive and decorative way. (See nos. 72, 73, 75, 89, 91, 96, 97). In return, I hope to educate a readership that leans more to the sensational and the conspiratorial than to the esoteric and philosophical.

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In 2000, I helped Michael Moynihan to edit the English translation of the first volume of the Ur Group’s papers, and promised that after I retired I would translate the remaining two volumes myself. This I did, enabling the second volume to appear in 2019 and the third in 2021, all from Inner Traditions. The article’s title expresses the difference between the Ur Group’s concept of magic and its amusing but misleading depiction in the Harry Potter books.

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105.  "Music? What Does That Have to Do with Esotericism?”

In Hermes Explains: Thirty Questions about Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Peter J. Forshaw, Marco Pasi (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 113-19.

 

At the 2019 conference of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE), the participants were surprised to be presented with a beautifully produced volume, written by thirty members of the society and intended to educate a wider public about its activities and subject matter. Many of the essays had frivolous or cute titles, like the questions often heard by those engaged with these studies. The three editors are faculty members of the sole academic department exclusively devoted to Hermetic and esoteric studies, that of Amsterdam University in the Netherlands.

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See the websites:

https://www.esswe.org/

https://www.amsterdamhermetica.nl/

https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463720205/hermes-explains

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106. "Meeting a Philosopher."

In The Art and Science of Initiation, ed. Jedediah French and Angel Millar (London: Lewis Masonic, 2020), 147-56.

 

A personal memoir of my friend and teacher Anthony Damiani, founder of Wisdom’s Goldenrod Philosophic Center, covering the years 1968-1984. Written at the invitation of Dr. French, whom I met at international conferences on Western Esotericism. The volume is a collection of essays on initiation, mostly from the masonic point of view. My essay describes another form that I believe initiation can take, without rituals or traditional procedures.

 

See the publisher’s website for the book:

https://www.lewismasonic.co.uk/esoteric/the-art-and-science-of-initiation.htm

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107. "The Mahatma Letters."

In Imagining the East: The Early Theosophical Society, ed. Tim Rudbøg and Erik Reenberg Sand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 133-55.

 

Originating in 2015 as a paper at the conference of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE) in Riga, Latvia, this is an objective analysis of the letters to A. P. Sinnett and A. O. Hume, signed by Koot Hoomi and Morya, the purported masters behind the Theosophical Society. In preparation, I revisited the actual letters in the British Library, which I had first seen some thirty years previously, and examined both the letters and the relevant files of the Hare brothers. My conclusion is that Madame Blavatsky was basically responsible for the letters, but that there was an element of unconscious invention, already evidenced in her youth, and (for those able to permit the possibility) some paranormal phenomena around their creation and delivery.

 

See the volume’s website:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/imagining-the-east-9780190853884?cc=us&lang=en&

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108. “Edward and Stephanie Godwin’s Book Illustrations.”

Studies in Illustration 74 (Spring 2020): 26-35.

 

After discovering the existence of the Imaginative Book Illustration Society and its thrice-yearly bulletin, Studies in Illustrations, I proposed an article about my parents, who illustrated about twenty books from 1948-1954. The Membership Secretary and editor, Martin Steenson, asked that it should include a complete and detailed bibliography, which I was glad to research and compile. The illustrations that he chose favor my father’s early work (before he changed his name from Edward Scott-Snell).

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See the society’s website:

https://bookillustration.org/

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Most of the original drawings for these illustrations are in the Kerlan Collection of Children’s Literature of the University of Minnesota Library. See the website:

https://www.lib.umn.edu/clrc/kerlan-collection

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109. Music and Its Powers in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499).

Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humahistes/Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies 39 (2020-2021): 263-76.

 

Invited by John Haines and Julien Véronèse, the editors of this special number on “Magie et Musique, 1100-1600,” I returned to Francesco Colonna’s  Hypnerotomachia which I had translated in 1999 and discussed in general in The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance, to consider the role of music in the story. The fifty or more instances of music cover the traditional range of musica mundana, humana, and instrumentalis, to a degree not found in any comparable epics. Music, in fact, seems ubiquitous in Poliphilo’s world, and the examination of its many forms and genres reveals not only wide knowledge on the author’s part, but a surprising anticipation of performance practices such as would normally be expected a century later, such as the predominance of six-part vocal and instrumental ensembles.

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110. “Beyond the Cosmic Ladder: The Ultimate State, According to Julius Evola and Paul Brunton.” Theosophical History 20/3 (2020): 261-78.

Theosophical History XX/3 (2020): 261-78.

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My early and decisive encounter with Paul Brunton and his philosophy, thanks to Anthony Damiani (see no. 106), and long engagement with Julius Evola’s thought, first met through reading Damiani’s copy of Rivolta contro il mondo moderno, required some reconciliation. This article points out the “curious coincidences” of their beginnings, their relations with Theosophy and opinions of Krishnamurti, their concepts of human liberation, and the divergence of their political and metaphysical attitudes.

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