Romanticism & Esoteric Tradition

Romanticism & Esoteric Tradition PDF Author: Paul Davies
Publisher: SteinerBooks
ISBN: 9780940262881
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Spiritual quest is at the very heart of poetry, but in our materialistic climate as we begin the twenty-first century, this has been largely forgotten, even by those who claim to be experts in interpreting literature.How does the worldview common to the main esoteric traditions of East and West correspond to the aims of Romantic poets such as Shelley, Keats, Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth? In Romanticism and Esoteric Tradition, Paul Davies maintains that the intended meaning of the poetry and thinking of the Romantics can be understood only in the light of the spiritual teachings of those traditions.This is one of the few books that connects the creative nature of poetry to the core teachings of the esoteric tradition. It reveals the true meaning of several Romantic writers whose works have been trivialized by a culture that has marginalized the spiritual and bound itself only to material, historical, and social concerns.The author also shows that the Romantics were the first Western poets to imagine the relationship of the self to the environment as personal encounter. In this sense the Romantics recalled a long-held secret of the esoteric "human sciences" rather than inventing a new one.This book brings the deepest interests of the Romantics directly into contact with issues closest to present-day students of the spiritual traditions and holistic perspectives.

Romanticism & Esoteric Tradition

Romanticism & Esoteric Tradition PDF Author: Paul Davies
Publisher: SteinerBooks
ISBN: 9780940262881
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Get Book

Book Description
Spiritual quest is at the very heart of poetry, but in our materialistic climate as we begin the twenty-first century, this has been largely forgotten, even by those who claim to be experts in interpreting literature.How does the worldview common to the main esoteric traditions of East and West correspond to the aims of Romantic poets such as Shelley, Keats, Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth? In Romanticism and Esoteric Tradition, Paul Davies maintains that the intended meaning of the poetry and thinking of the Romantics can be understood only in the light of the spiritual teachings of those traditions.This is one of the few books that connects the creative nature of poetry to the core teachings of the esoteric tradition. It reveals the true meaning of several Romantic writers whose works have been trivialized by a culture that has marginalized the spiritual and bound itself only to material, historical, and social concerns.The author also shows that the Romantics were the first Western poets to imagine the relationship of the self to the environment as personal encounter. In this sense the Romantics recalled a long-held secret of the esoteric "human sciences" rather than inventing a new one.This book brings the deepest interests of the Romantics directly into contact with issues closest to present-day students of the spiritual traditions and holistic perspectives.

The Esoteric Tradition in Russian Romantic Literature

The Esoteric Tradition in Russian Romantic Literature PDF Author: Lauren G. Leighton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780271010250
Category : Decembrists
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The European esoteric tradition was introduced into Russia in the eighteenth century by Freemasons and continued in Russian romantic literature of the early nineteenth century. This study, which conjoins historiographical methods developed by modern scholars of esoterica and formalist methods of textual analysis, reveals the role of that tradition in Russian romantic literature. It deals extensively with Decembrism, the political conspiracy so known after its culmination in a failed attempt to overthrow the tsarist autocracy in December 1825. The Decembrist writers and other romantics influenced by Freemasonry, including Kondraty Ryleyev, Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, and Alexander Pushkin, were adept in the application of thaumaturgical skills to literature. Thaumaturgy denotes the application of arcane skills, some derived from the Cabala, to both the interpretation and creation of encoded literary texts. The Esoteric Tradition in Russian Romantic Literature also deals with the relationships between Russia's national poet and those writers who made the first major attempt at a Russian revolution. Viewing these relationships through the prism of occult imagery used in various literary works, Leighton tells an engaging story of political intrigue and communication by secret codes.

Esoteric Tradition in Russian Romantic Literature

Esoteric Tradition in Russian Romantic Literature PDF Author: Lauren G. Leighton
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271041537
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
It deals extensively with Decembrism, the political conspiracy so known after its culmination in a failed attempt to overthrow the tsarist autocracy in December 1825. The Decembrist writers and other romantics influenced by Freemasonry, including Kondraty Ryleyev, Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, and Alexander Pushkin, were adept in the application of thaumaturgical skills to literature.

Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times

Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times PDF Author: R. van den Broek
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791436110
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
This volume introduces what has sometimes been called "the third component of western culture". It traces the historical development of those religious traditions which have rejected a world view based on the primacy of pure rationality or doctrinal faith, emphasizing instead the importance of inner enlightenment or gnosis: a revelatory experience which was typically believed to entail an encounter with one's true self as well as with the ground of being, God. The contributors to this book demonstrate this perspective as fundamental to a variety of interconnected traditions. In Antiquity, one finds the gnostics and hermetics; in the Middle Ages several Christian sects. The medieval Cathars can, to a certain extent, be considered part of the same tradition. Starting with the Italian humanist Renaissance, hermetic philosophy became of central importance to a new religious synthesis that can be referred to as Western Esotericism. The development of this tradition is described from Renaissance hermeticists and practitioners of spiritual alchemy to the emergence of Rosicrucianism and Christian theosophy in the seventeenth century, and from post-enlightenment aspects of Romanticism and occultism to the present-day New Age movement.

Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition

Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition PDF Author: Antoine Faivre
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791444351
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
A historical and interpretive study of three aspects of Western esotericism from the Renaissance to the twentieth century.

William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism

William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism PDF Author: Paul Cheshire
Publisher: Romantic Reconfigurations Stud
ISBN: 1786941201
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This first annotated edition of William Gilbert's enigmatic poem, The Hurricane: a Theosophical and Western Eclogue, with extended interpretative chapters informed by Gilbert's magical and astrological writings, shows how its dark materials fed the imaginations of his friends Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey, in their formative years between 1795 and 1798.

Rubén Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity

Rubén Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity PDF Author: Cathy Login Jrade
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 029274966X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Modernism was the major Spanish American literary movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Leader of that influential movement was Rubén Darío, the Nicaraguan now recognized as one of the most important Hispanic poets of all time. Like the Romantics in England and the Symbolists on the Continent, Darío and other Modernists were strongly influenced by occultist thought. But, as the poet Octavio Paz has written, "academic criticism has ... preferred to close its eyes to the stream of occultism that runs throughout Darío's work. This silence damages our comprehension of his poetry." Cathy Login Jrade's groundbreaking study corrects this critical oversight. Her work clearly demonstrates that esoteric tradition is central to Modernism and that an understanding of this centrality clarifies both the nature of the movement and its relationship to earlier European literature. After placing Modernism in a broad historical and literary perspective, Jrade examines the impact of esoteric beliefs upon Darío's view of the world and the role of poetry in it. Through detailed and insightful analyses of key poems, she explores the poet's quest for solutions to the nineteenth-century crisis of belief. The movement that Ruben Darío headed brought Hispanic poetry into the mainstream of the "modern tradition," with its sense of fragmentation and alienation and its hope for integration and reconciliation with nature. Rubén Darío and the Romantic Search for Unity enriches our understanding of that movement and the work of its leading poet.

William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism

William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism PDF Author: Paul Cheshire
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1786948729
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This first annotated edition of William Gilbert’s enigmatic poem, The Hurricane: a Theosophical and Western Eclogue, with extended interpretative chapters informed by Gilbert’s magical and astrological writings, shows how its dark materials fed the imaginations of his friends Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey, in their formative years between 1795 and 1798.

The Spiritual History of Ice

The Spiritual History of Ice PDF Author: E. Wilson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403981809
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
At the end of the eighteenth century, scientists for the first time demonstrated what medieval and renaissance alchemists had long suspected; ice is not lifeless but vital, a crystalline revelation of vigorous powers. Studied in esoteric and exoterical representations of frozen phenomena, several Romantic figures - including Coleridge and Poe, Percy and Mary Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau - challenged traditional notions of ice as waste and instead celebrated crystals, glaciers, and the poles as special disclosures of a holistic principle of being. The Spiritual History of Ice explores this ecology of frozen shapes in fascinating detail, revealing not only a neglected current of the Romantic age but also a secret history and psychology of ice.

New Age Religion and Western Culture

New Age Religion and Western Culture PDF Author: Wouter J. Hanegraaff
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004378936
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 598

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Book Description
Recent years have seen a spectacular rise of the New Age movement and an ever-increasing interest in its beliefs and manifestations. This fascinating work presents the first-ever comprehensive analysis of New Age Religion and its historical backgrounds, thus providing the reader with a means of orientation in the bewildering variety of the movement. Making extensive use of primary sources, the author thematically analyses New Age beliefs from the perspective of the study of religions. While looking at the historical backgrounds of the movement, he convincingly argues that its foundations were laid by so-called western esoteric traditions during the Renaissance. Hanegraaff finally shows how the modern New Age movement emerged from the increasing secularization of those esoteric traditions during the 19th century. This ground-breaking publication is compulsive reading for all those involved or interested in the New Age movement.