3 posts tagged “occult”

Magic and study of occult arts successfully survived Renaissance and entered the Baroque era. And even more. ”Study of the occult arts remained intellectually respectable well into the seventeenth century”. It only gradually divides into the modern categories of natural science versus occultism or superstition. My research shows, that brilliant Age of Reason was on the rise in the seventeenth century, while belief in witchcraft and sorcery, and consequently the irrational surge of Early Modern witch trials, receded. This process only completed at the end of the Baroque period, somewhere around 1730s.

Contemporary scientists still met resistance, though. Christian Thomasius encountered fierce opposition as he argued in his 1701 Dissertatio de crimine magiae that it was meaningless to make dealing with the devil a criminal offence, since it was impossible to really commit the crime in the first place. In Britain, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 established that people could not be punished for consorting with spirits, while would-be magicians pretending to be able to invoke spirits could still be fined as con artists.

Several decades later, from 1756 to 1781, Jacob Philadelphia performed feats of magic, sometimes under the guise of scientific exhibitions, throughout Europe and Russia. Baron Carl Reichenbach’s experiments with his Odic force appeared to be an attempt to bridge the gap between magic and science.

During the Middle Ages the name was sometimes used to denote Greenland, Svalbard, or Iceland. A municipality in North Greenland was even formerly named Thule after the mythical place. The Thule People, A paleo-Eskimo culture and a predecessor of modern Inuit Greenlanders, was even called Thule people. Nowadays Southern Thule is a collection of the three southernmost islands in the South Sandwich Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean. The island group is overseas territory of the United Kingdom and uninhabited. The concept of Thule was so popular that this mysterious island lent its name to lends its name to the 69th element in the periodic table, Thulium.

It is interesting to note that Nazi occult mystics believed in a historical Thule and Hyperborea as the ancient origin of the Aryan race. They wrote a pile of material stating that mythical Thule, a Nordic equivalent of the vanished culture of Atlantis. They thought that a race of giant supermen lived in Thule, linked into the Cosmos through magical powers. And these inhabitants had psychic and technological energies far exceeding the technical achievements of the 20th century.

Madam Blavatsky book was followed later by other creations of the occult writers. One of them claimed that survivors from a sunken continent Lemuria were living in or on Mount Shasta in northern California. The Lemurians lived in a complex of tunnels beneath the mountain and occasionally were seen walking the surface dressed in white robes.
Later popular novels also repeated the belief that Lemurians inhabit Mount Shasta. Some of the writers linked Lemurians to Ancient Egypt, UFOs and a method of travel called vortex portals to sacred places on Earth and points unknown in the universe.

There were other fantasy descriptions of the lost continent and its inhabitants. For example, Lemuria was posted as the homeland of a reptilian race of creatures, often identified with dragons or nagas. Various bits of mythology and folklore were assembled in support, such as the Cambodian naga traditions. Folkloric claims of Australian aborigines sighting dinosaur-like creatures were also often viewed as evidence.