1310. Paris. A woman named Marguerite Porete is burned at the stake in the Place de Grève. Her crime: writing a book called The Mirror of Simple Souls, a mystical treatise describing the soul’s union with God in terms the Church found intolerable. She had…
Søren Kierkegaard Was Engaged To A Woman Named Regine Olsen. He loved her. The journals make it clear; she was the cornerstone of his emotional life, the person around whom everything else organized itself, the proof that he was capable of the kind of attachment…
In the early fourteenth century, in the northern regions of what is now France and Belgium, a woman wrote a book. Her birthdate remains unknown. Her appearance, unrecorded. The details of her daily life, lost. What survives is the book. And what the book cost…
The historical accounts of Bruno’s personality are remarkably consistent. Brilliant. Difficult. Impatient. Unable to suffer fools. Prone to public quarrels. Incapable of the diplomatic performance that academic life required. Willing, even eager, to attack the intellectual authority of people who had done nothing to earn…
Francisco Varela was born in Chile in 1946. He trained as a biologist and mathematician, arriving eventually in the laboratory of Humberto Maturana at the University of Chile. What he found there would define the first major arc of his intellectual life. Maturana had been…
The third Hermetic principle is called Vibration. Nothing rests. Everything moves. Everything vibrates. The principle appears in the Corpus Hermeticum as the description of a living, animate universe; a cosmos in continuous motion at every level of its expression. The Kybalion states it this way.…
A papal document. 1329. In agro dominico, In the Field of the Lord. Twenty-eight propositions condemned. A man’s life’s work declared heretical by the highest authority in the Western world. The man himself was already dead. They condemned him anyway. That is the first thing…
Bruno walked fourteen cities across fifteen years. Geneva. Toulouse. Lyon. Paris. London. Oxford. Wittenberg. Prague. Helmstedt. Frankfurt. Zurich. Padua. Venice. And finally Rome, where the walking ended. Each city was a world. A complete, self-contained system of belief, authority, social organization, and intellectual permission. Each…
The second Hermetic principle is called Correspondence. As above, so below; as below, so above. As within, so without; as without, so within. The principle derives from the Emerald Tablet, one of the most compressed documents in the Western esoteric tradition. The full text runs…
There is a definition of the human being that has held for two thousand years. Aristotle gave it. Philosophers repeated it. Scientists inherited it without examining it. The definition goes something like this: the human being is a rational animal. Reason is the distinguishing feature.…