The Occult Sciences in Byzantium

The Occult Sciences in Byzantium PDF Author: Paul Magdalino
Publisher: La Pomme d'or
ISBN: 9548446022
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
This volume represents the first attempt to examine occult sciences as a distinct category of Byzantine intellectual culture. It is concerned with both the reality and the image of the occult sciences in Byzantium, and seeks, above all, to represent them in their social and cultural context as a historical phenomenon. The eleven essays demonstrate that Byzantium was not marginal to the scientific culture of the Middle Ages, and that the occult sciences were not marginal to the learned culture of the medieval Byzantine world.

The Occult Sciences in Byzantium

The Occult Sciences in Byzantium PDF Author: Paul Magdalino
Publisher: La Pomme d'or
ISBN: 9548446022
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
This volume represents the first attempt to examine occult sciences as a distinct category of Byzantine intellectual culture. It is concerned with both the reality and the image of the occult sciences in Byzantium, and seeks, above all, to represent them in their social and cultural context as a historical phenomenon. The eleven essays demonstrate that Byzantium was not marginal to the scientific culture of the Middle Ages, and that the occult sciences were not marginal to the learned culture of the medieval Byzantine world.

Kabbalah and Sex Magic

Kabbalah and Sex Magic PDF Author: Marla Segol
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271091061
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
In this provocative book, Marla Segol explores the development of the kabbalistic cosmology underlying Western sex magic. Drawing extensively on Jewish myth and ritual, Segol tells the powerful story of the relationship between the divine and the human body in late antique Jewish esotericism, in medieval kabbalah, and in New Age ritual practice. Kabbalah and Sex Magic traces the evolution of a Hebrew microcosm that models the powerful interaction of human and divine bodies at the heart of both kabbalah and some forms of Western sex magic. Focusing on Jewish esoteric and medical sources from the fifth to the twelfth century from Byzantium, Persia, Iberia, and southern France, Segol argues that in its fully developed medieval form, kabbalah operated by ritualizing a mythos of divine creation by means of sexual reproduction. She situates in cultural and historical context the emergence of Jewish cosmological models for conceptualizing both human and divine bodies and the interactions between them, arguing that all these sources position the body and its senses as the locus of culture and the means of reproducing it. Segol explores the rituals acting on these models, attending especially to their inherent erotic power, and ties these to contemporary Western sex magic, showing that such rituals have a continuing life. Asking questions about its cosmology, myths, and rituals, Segol poses even larger questions about the history of kabbalah, the changing conceptions of the human relation to the divine, and even the nature of religious innovation itself. This groundbreaking book will appeal to students and scholars of Jewish studies, religion, sexuality, and magic.

Word and Image in Medieval Kabbalah

Word and Image in Medieval Kabbalah PDF Author: M. Segol
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 113704313X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
The Sefer Yetsirah (the Book of Creation ) is a core text of the early kabbalah, yet scholars have struggled to establish even the most basic facts about the work. This project attempts to discover the ways in which diagrams accompanying the text and its commentaries show trends in the development of the kabbalistic tradition as a whole.

Gates of Light

Gates of Light PDF Author: Joseph ben Abraham Gikatilla
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
ISBN: 9780761990000
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
This central text of Jewish mysticism was written in thirtenth-century Spain, where Kabbalah flourished. Considered to be the most articulate work on the mystical Kabbalah, Gates of Light provides a systematic and comprehensive explanation of the Names of God and their mystical applications. The Kabbalah presents a unique strategy for intimacy with the Creator and new insights into the Hebrew Scriptures. In the Kabbalah, aspects of God emanate from a hierarchy of Ten Spheres interconnected by channels that may be disrupted or repaired through human activity.

Alienated Minority

Alienated Minority PDF Author: Kenneth Stow
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674044050
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
This narrative history surveying one thousand years of Jewish life integrates the Jewish experience into the context of the overall culture and society of medieval Europe. It presents a new picture of the interaction between Christians and Jews in this tumultuous era. Alienated Minority shows us what it meant to be a Jew in Europe in the Middle Ages. The story begins in the fifth century, when autonomous Jewish rule in Palestine came to a close, and when the papacy, led by Gregory the Great, established enduring principles regarding Christian policy toward Jews. Kenneth Stow examines the structures of self-government in the European Jewish community and the centrality of emerging concepts of representation. He studies economic enterprise, especially banking; constructs a clear image of the medieval Jewish family; and portrays in detail the very rich Jewish intellectual life. Analyzing policies of Church and State in the Middle Ages, Stow argues that a firmly defined legal and constitutional position of the Jewish minority in the earlier period gave way to a legal status created expressly for Jews, who in the later period were seen as inimical to the common good. It was this special status that paved the way for the royal expulsions of Jews that began at the end of the thirteenth century.

Kabbalah in Italy, 1280-1510

Kabbalah in Italy, 1280-1510 PDF Author: Moshe Idel
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300155875
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
This survey of the history of Kabbalah in Italy represents a major contribution from one of the world's foremost Kabbalah scholars. Idel charts the ways that Kabbalistic thought and literature developed in Italy and how its unique geographical situation facilitated the arrival of both Spanish and Byzantine Kabbalah.

Abraham Ibn Ezra, the Book of the World

Abraham Ibn Ezra, the Book of the World PDF Author: Avraham ben Meʼir Ibn ʻEzra
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004179143
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
The present volume offers the first critical edition of the Hebrew text of the two versions of Ibn Ezra s Book of the World, accompanied by an English translation and a commentary. These twin treatises represent the first Hebrew work, unique in medieval Jewish science, to discuss the theories and techniques of historical and meteorological astrology that had accumulated from Antiquity to Ibn Ezra s time, on the basis of Greek, Hindu, Persian, and Arabic sources. This volume also incorporates the first critical edition, translated and annotated, of M sh Þall h s Book on Eclipses, a work dealing with mundane astrology whose Hebrew translation was ascribed to Ibn Ezra, as well as a study of three brief texts in which Ibn Ezra conveyed his own opinion about mundane astrology.

Knowledge of God and the Development of Early Kabbalah

Knowledge of God and the Development of Early Kabbalah PDF Author: Jonathan Dauber
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004234276
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
In Knowledge of God and the Development of Early Kabbalah, Jonathan Dauber offers a fresh consideration of the emergence of Kabbalah against the backdrop of a re-evaluation of the relationship between Kabbalistic and philosophic discourse.

Through a Speculum That Shines

Through a Speculum That Shines PDF Author: Elliot R. Wolfson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069121509X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
A comprehensive treatment of visionary experience in some of the main texts of Jewish mysticism, this book reveals the overwhelmingly visual nature of religious experience in Jewish spirituality from antiquity through the late Middle Ages. Using phenomenological and critical historical tools, Wolfson examines Jewish mystical texts from late antiquity, pre-kabbalistic sources from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, and twelfth- and thirteenth-century kabbalistic literature. His work demonstrates that the sense of sight assumes an epistemic priority in these writings, reflecting and building upon those scriptural passages that affirm the visual nature of revelatory experience. Moreover, the author reveals an androcentric eroticism in the scopic mentality of Jewish mystics, which placed the externalized and representable form, the phallus, at the center of the visual encounter. In the visionary experience, as Wolfson describes it, imagination serves a primary function, transmuting sensory data and rational concepts into symbols of those things beyond sense and reason. In this view, the experience of a vision is inseparable from the process of interpretation. Fundamentally challenging the conventional distinction between experience and exegesis, revelation and interpretation, Wolfson argues that for the mystics themselves, the study of texts occasioned a visual experience of the divine located in the imagination of the mystical interpreter. Thus he shows how Jewish mystics preserved the invisible transcendence of God without doing away with the visual dimension of belief.

Jews in Byzantium

Jews in Byzantium PDF Author: Robert Bonfil
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004203559
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 1059

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Book Description
Byzantine Jews: Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures is the collective product of a three year research group convened under the auspices of Scholion: Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The volume provides both a survey and an analysis of the social and cultural history of Byzantine Jewry from its inception until the fifteenth century, within the wider context of the Byzantine world.