How the Occult Transformed Philosophy & Spirituality

there is a kind of dual tragedy when it comes to situating thinkers in Western ASO terorism into the larger scope of intellectual history the most egregious failure in my opinion is simply that of academic philosophy just failing to even include such thinkers in what we might call the Western cannon at all I would dare say that academic philosophy is just simply bigoted against such figures but the truth of the matter is that mainstream at least academic philosophy isn't educated enough about these figures to even be biased against them in the first place they're just sidelined

through institutional ignorance and well just ignoring them you perhaps be shocked to learn that I got a PhD in philosophy and never once was a class even offered on neoplatonism or medieval philosophy all of it for that matter much less a survey of Ault philosophy not even possible despite the profound effect such philosophy has had on Western intellectual but also of course our spiritual history as well but aside from this failure another and again much more reasonable mistake also gets made in my opinion understandably most people coming to thinkers in the occult tradition they're not

coming there as part of a history of the study of philosophy but for practical spirit spiritual reasons further because these thinkers basically aren't taught in philosophy or religious Studies classes in an academic setting or basically any setting most folks come to them either as hyp specialists in those specific types of ult philosophy or as autodidacts and there are both attendant limitations in both respects and thus while Agrippa or John D are the focus of serious study their place in the larger Arc of intellectual and spiritual history is is often just missed from this specifically practical

angle and again that's a far more forgivable and far more reasonable kind of intellectual mistake I suppose than you know the wholesale ignoring it in academic philosophy thus a cult philosophy just sort of languishes away fundamentally underappreciated precisely as philosophy especially philosophy with a larger framework of the history of philosophy itself and that's why I try to create content on this channel that highlights occult philosophers and their contributions to the history of philosophy more generally they deserve to be respected as philosophers as much as occultists so with that in mind I want to turn to

how Renaissance and early modern Occult Philosophy profoundly challenged nominalism the dominant metaphysical Paradigm of that day through the rebirth of metaphysical categorical realism in both hermetic and Occult Philosophy now if those terms aren't totally clear to you what they mean just stick around we'll make it more clear later hopefully make sure to subscribe for weekly explorations of topics in esoteric history and if you'd like to support the work of providing accessible evidence-backed and pre content on topics like this I'd hope you consider supporting my work over at my patreon or checking out the merch for

that we have at the channel if you're new to the study of esotericism make sure to check out my study guide which helps to situate you within the broader field and give you accessible and reliable Tex for the study of the occult and if you're interested in historical books actual antiquarian volumes in the occult and the mystical check out my bookstore esoterica or rare books you can find all those links in the description and in the Ping comment below but now let's turn to how Renaissance realism challenged the dominant Scholastic philosophy of nominalism leading a

kind of metaphysical realist Insurrection a realist Revolution I'm Dr Dr Justin Sledge and welcome to esoterica where we explore the Arcane in history philosophy and religion [Music] [Music] to frame out this important moment in philosophical history we have to rewind all the way back to where a great many perhaps all Western philosophical problems emerged the positions of Plato and Aristotle those guys and in this case in what we call the problem of universals language and logic especially categorical Logics like that developed famously by Aristotle often function by relating particulars to Universal categor just think of

the major and minor terms in a syllogism for instance when I say something like Socrates is a human or three is a number I'm locating the particular Socrates and the particular number three within the larger category of both humans and numbers respectively furthermore there's a related question about to what degree the language that I use to perform that categorization has any metaphysical impact on either the particular or Universal now I know for my philosophy folks out there that's going to sound a bit odd for my magic people out there it won't sound odd at all

perhaps even absurd honestly but it's going to matter a good bit in just a little bit when we get to discussions again of magic but what we have between PLO and Aristotle are basically the two dominant answers to how to deal with the question of universals as I'm sure you all know Plato famously answers that at least some Universal are in fact metaphysically real those of course are the forms or the ideas of the platonic philosophy that is Socrates and number three are particularized as such because they participate to use the platonic language in the

Eternal perfect forms of humanity or numerical or number I suppose for Plato these forms were witnessed by our prear souls largely forgotten when we got shoved into a body when we got incarnated and they're remembered as we come to learn new things new things thus you actually don't learn geometry but your soul remembers it as you study it in this life as it's done in the Mino so mathematical entities and especially conceptual entities like goodness and Justice and Beauty exist as general categories in a perfect Eternal realm of being we live in the realm of

becoming which human beings interact through the organ as it were of their souls for Plato the soul is an organ of perception specifically perception of the forms for his part Aristotle thought that the platonic forms were nonsense and that Universal categories are simply conventional names for sets of things for which the term is is used is used in an equivocal manner to discuss that Socrates is a human or that three is a number doesn't for Aristotle imply the existence of those categories outside of their linguistic or of logical use they're just conventions for how we

put stuff inside of linguistic boxes or sets so to speak and to a large degree these two positions set the typologies of how to deal with the problem of universals down to this day Plato's position is that some abstract objects have their own independent existence and those categories are in fact real entities just as real as you or I perhaps even more real than you or I this position is known as realism and those entities are variably said to exist in their own realm in the mind of God or in what we might call moderate

realism as found in folks like dun scotus they actually exist as sort of Concepts within the human mind but they're still in there and they're still real on the other hand nominalism is a position that Universal categories or abstract objects like numbers exist in name only from the Latin nomen nominalism categories Universal and mathematical objects are simply conventions of language and logic by which we communicate ideas or perform mathematical and logical functions further both Aristotle and Plato were more or less conventionalists when it came to the philosophy of language which is just to say that

they held that language was basically of no intrinsic metaphysical bearing on either the particulars or the universals that they discuss though Plato does sometimes seem to suggest that language has its Origins and natural signs which means they're not totally arbitrary in the way that modern curan semiotics assumes the relation of sinus signifier to be arbitrary now while I'm sure they were partial to Greek I doubt that they thought of Greek as having any more metaphysical bearing on the entities spoken or written about in those languages and again I'm sure they thought Greek was better than

other languages although I think that many Greeks did have a preference to thinking that hieroglyphic writing down in Egypt did have some kind of inherent metaphysical power come back to that in just a moment and for our purposes it's worth noting that by the early European Middle Ages there just were the European Middle Ages the Middle Ages didn't really occur anywhere else but it was platonism that appeared to be the FrontRunner for philosophical dominance St Augustine pseudo dianus and jonis scotus origina not to be confused with the later D scotus for the you know famous

for the concept of the ontological univocity of being Fame were all much more in the camp of Plato and therefore something of the realist Camp typical thinking that the forms were literally thoughts and the perfect ideas of God's mind further language itself was considered to be a kind of divine gift linking human beings with God being part of that whole we're created in the Divine image business however that platonic Bend was not to last with attack starting with abelard and the translation projects of Aristotle from Arabic especially as those translations were shaded as we might

say with the commentaries of aoes the 12th and 13th century saw a dramatic shift to nominalism and while there were many moderate realists holdouts Scholastics like Thomas aquinus and dun scotus did hold on to a moderate form of realism again with those categories existing really but as mental objects primarily William of aam Fame for his razor everyone mischaracterizes and that he kind of didn't even invent history is a strange thing this way Henry of aam would lead a full frontal assault on the last vestages of realism with nominalism or terminis flowering after the mid 14th

century batonic realism had basically been crushed if it ever had a chance to get off its feet in the Middle Ages now of course that didn't stop occult practitioners who I'm sure didn't give a damn about what debates were going on among Scholastics because they were concerned with experimental results recall that the medieval term for these kind of medieval spells are experimenta and not highly abstract granular metaphysical arguments and that's witnessed by dozens of magical manuals that proliferated through the Latin West during this period but I would suggest that for an intellectually Rich Philosophy for

an intellectually Rich Occult Philosophy to flourish nominalist intellectual hegemony is an exactly the most Coptic environment especially especially if that nominalism trivializes the role of language and metaphysics something virtually inimical to most theories of premodern magic however nominalism was about to get a black eye and the Occult Philosophy was about to get a scale force wind in its sails that wind in the sails took three forms to my mind the first two have to do with the rediscovery and publication at the very heart of metaphysical realism you guessed it it's Plato the return of the

repressed and his intellectual and spiritual inheritors including platinus poery yamus and the whole gang as you may know with the exception of the tus Plato was basically unknown through the Latin Middle Ages and while Plato's influence could be felt indirectly through strange mistranslations of texts like platinus that people thought was Aristotle the philosopher himself and his Works didn't have a direct impact because they couldn't because they just weren't there however through the mid-15th century marcelio ficino would provide the herculan service of rendering the platonic Corpus along with the works of Scholars that we now refer

to as the neoplatonists now it's hard hard to imagine a world in which over the course of basically a decade or so the work of the most foundational philosophers of all time to go from complete obscurity to basically instant accessibility the printing press is invented at the same time they're doing all these translations it's just impossible to overstate just how quickly and radically ficino's translations transformed European intellectual and spiritual life forever and among the many revolutions to come metaphysical realism was back on the agenda in a dramatic way for the first time really in basically

500 years up to this point secondly and also indirectly thanks to arm man fucino again was the arrival of the Corpus hermeticum important for what was believed about it perhaps even more than what was taught in it especially in the translation that ficino kind of did the hermetica promised to be the recovery of profoundly ancient even primeval wisdom at this time the pervasive belief was that ancient wisdom was nearer to the Divine source of all knowledge and was therefore more pure and more true the Corpus amicum was thought to be the teachings of course of

the ancient Egyptian Sage Hermes Tris magistus Hermes the thric great sometimes heralded as the teacher of Moses himself sometimes Herald is that on the floor of mosaics and churches the prisca theologia proved decisive over and against Scholastic philosophy because in so far as this ancient wisdom was simply nearer to the Divine truth it could simply undermine the entire Scholastic Corpus whel it didn't even need to make an argument it was just ancient and trer and that's precisely what began to happen an open Assault on what Renaissance humanists and ASO terrorist took to be a stolid

metaphysically meaninglessly obscure Scholastic philosophy it was Gothic in the bad sense the followers of dun scotus became the dun men and they became reduced to Dunes hence the origin of that term of course hermetic ideas such as the semi- divine nature of the human being the macro micro cosm relation and an overall warming to theurgical and magical practices would also begin to transform European spiritual and intellectual life finally metaphysical realism would get an unlikely Boost from our buddies over there in cabala primarily developed in the 13th century there in Spain in France though inheriting incredibly

important texts like to say for yets from late Antiquity cabala would adopt a radical type of indigenous Jewish realism for the cabalists reality itself was for through Divine speech and thus the Hebrew language was no mere convention it was a sacred language lash kodesh recall the Torah had God speaking creation into being in texts like the saer yetzer expound upon and systematize really systematize this notion into both a cosmogenic theory but also a magical practice think Golem production further thought and language are bound up with Divine activity in the mind of cabalist such that the

human mind is said to commune with the Divine Mind through superrational prophetic intercourse performed at some level in Hebrew and through Hebrew that's the abalia piece however for the first few centuries of its development the cabala was a highly esoteric literature and practice known only to a very tiny group of rabinal Elites its impact on the larger Arc of European intellectual or spiritual life was therefore marginal if it had any impact whatsoever that would also start to change beginning at exactly this time period in the mid 15th century the exact same time period that platonism

and hermeticism were also reemerging and it would be ficino's younger colleague Pico DEA mirandela who would spearhead the introduction of cabala into the wider European intellectual and spiritual landscape he did this by employing several converted Jews Pico would orchestrate translations of several key cabalistic texts arguing that the cabala 2 contained primeval truths Primal truths again the knowledge of which was necessary to restore the proper dignity dignitas to the human being so much so that magic and cabala were the best proofs of the truth of Christianity over and against the dominant Scholastic Paradigm and the Scholastic

philosophy in fact Pico argued that through magic and cabala alone magic and cabala alone was it possible for humans to become truly exalted transforming themselves into something virtually Angelic in character though that typically gets just ignored when Pico's oration on the Dignity of man is actually taught in contemporary University settings it's one of the only text of this tradition taught and it gets mangled it's a kind of real intellectual dishonesty when the text is taught with the magic and the cabala basically amputated because of some strange irrational Enlightenment rationalism infused revisionism and while I'm very

pro- Enlightenment I love the enlightenment I'm a no on just straight up censorship of the his intellectual history and no the magic and the cabala weren't incidental for Pico's ortion they were absolutely Central making the grift of leaving it out all the more vicious so in a sense by the start of the 15th century some form of nominalism was the dominant answer to the problem of universals with a largely conventionalist theory of language then within the span of just about a generation the platonic Corpus including neoplatonism the pr theologia in the form of the Corpus

ticum and the rise of cabala in the form of Christian cabala had united into what will become the foundations of modern Western esotericism and a absolute spear against nominalism which was triumphant only decades earlier nominalism was now facing a profound intellectual existential crisis and the effects were immediate ficino's magical practice adopted a great chain of being model rather than the one in which the sublunar world was fundamentally distinct from the world of the celestial realm thus linking the human being with the Divine in a way that was almost Blasphemous in the world of Scholastic thinking

which embraced a hardcore Arista tilian world the great chain of being broke that world Pico introduced a neop Pythagorean conception of formal numbers thus making at least those abstract objects ontologically real rather than a mere C in convention or the numbers of the merchants as he had it of course cabalistic speculation introduces the idea of Hebrew as a kind of divine Ura which also has inherent metaphysical power hence you're constantly seeing all that Hebrew often very badly spelled in all those textbooks of magic though most famously of course in agria speaking of Hebrew roin would

argue for the theurgical power of Hebrew specifically in the use of the tetraman infused with a shin transforming yod VAV into a spelling of the name Yeshua Jesus of course a name that he thought through which true Miracles magic could be wrought hermetic ideas would flood into the intellectual landscape of this period with lud veol latari for the first time declaring himself a hermeticist in a Christian in 1505 the first time in history that we know of where someone use the language of hermetic hermeticist to identify themselves of course agria would publish his Suma of

magic and hermetic philosophy in 1533 representing a fully fleshed out system of Occult Philosophy a kind of occult Suma linking natural Celestial and divine magic and mysticism together into one system of restoring the Divinity with man in a sense the three books of oul philosophy was a hermetic cabalistic and magical response to scholasticism it was the Suma Maga in a way that Thomas's Su Suma theologica represented the high point in some sense of medieval theology agrius 1533 represented the high watermark in some sense of the emergent hermetic theology perhaps one of the most shocking even

frankly absurd forms of what we might call hyper realism to emerge from this period would be John de 156 for Mona hieroglyphica in that text once called the most obscure book ever written by an Englishman I wrote a master's thesis on it I agree D argues that reality can be understood and even transformed by a single powerful symbol an astrological alchemical hieroglyph D argues as much as it can be called an argument that geometry in not Hebrew geometry not Hebrew is the ontological fundamental and that the glyph he develops or discovers is able to both

capture and manipulate reality more so than any language including Hebrew in fact he calls the manipulation of the hieroglyphic monad the cabala of the real as opposed to just the cabala of what is merely spoken in de's thinking at least in that 1564 text he has radically flattened semiotics and ontology into a metaphysical realism in which the categories and their particular are collapsed into one symbol for reality such that reality just is that symbol this even allows D to claim that astrological and alchemical experimentation they can be forgone for manipulation of the monus hieroglyphica and

how language and Mathematics are derived from the monad and the role the symbol will play in the general reform of the whole world all of it now these claims are grandiose even a bit absurd if we're going to be honest but it just goes to show how far metaphysical realists were willing to push this form of thinking it's clear that in less than a hundred years since the printing of the Corpus of medicum in 1471 realism was reaching a kind of fever pitch in fact D would push it even further famously his conversations with angels

would reveal the very speech of God used to conjure creation itself and which would bring about the apocalypse with the anian language we again have a full collapse between Linguistics and metaphysics semiotics and ontology now if many of these names and books I'm discussing are unfamiliar to you that's totally well that's normal this channel is called esoterica for a reason or if you just need a refresher but I've covered many of these texts and thinkers in other episodes and I'll leave some of the links to those if you want to go flesh out some of

these ideas in more depth so go check the comment out and the links in the description to take a look at those episodes but the point I want to drive home here is that the rise of the Renaissance philosophy the rise of Renaissance occultism and early modern esoteric philosophy it did not occur in a intellectual vacuum and that it's crucial to situate it in that larger intellectual and philosophical cont context if we're really going to make sense of it which is already pretty hard to begin with otherwise it's just an already obscure philosophy and often

intentionally made more difficult well it just becomes completely incomprehensible but oddly it's often precisely this context that is ignored by practitioners and it's only the context that's studied by mainstream philosophy one gets only the one and one gets only the context and for me nether of those situations are intellectually or philosophically adequate if we're going to study this material carefully so realism won right the great hermetic Revolution no it didn't both realism and nominalism would both face a new threat in the form of the emergent rationalism and empiricism of the 17th century further more accurate

dating of the Corpus sedicum would derail its claim to being primeval wisdom it was St to the second or third centuries however the realist Revolution brought on by cabala hermeticism and platonism would forever make its Mark known in the history of philosophy and esoteric schools of thought were all here to stay they survived in paracelis and theosophy and Rosicrucianism and of course the rise of initiatory societies nominalism would also continue and while modern philosophy courses teach it like rationalism and pism just you know put everything on the track to H there were philosophers like Suarez

and other Scholastic philosophers that just kept on keeping on pism is Alive and Well if you know marginalized over there in Catholic Stan but it's still out there at nram somewhere so even scholasticism has in some sense survived just as much as the Occult Philosophy both ultimately rather sidelined so what about realism these days like in academic philosophy you think that given the rise of modern Linguistics and semiotics where the Orthodoxy there is the relationship of sign and signifier is arbitrary that this would be the the kingdom of the nominalists but the story is actually

a bit more complicated in the most recent 2020 filp paper survey where philosophers get to State their positions on various philosophical matters and they get to do so anonymously where they might tell the truth the survey found that when asked about the ontology of abstract objects about 39% accept or lean towards realism a close second 37% lean towards nominalism and 23% landed on the deeply philosophical position of other yeah realism is just ever so slightly in the lead a result that honestly I found to be pretty shocking now of course I think that some of

that is probably mathematical realism specifically that mathematical entities are real but one must wonder if the Hermetic revolution of the 15th century had never occurred would it just be like 80% nominalism triumphant I don't know but that's worth considering regardless the rise of the Occult Philosophy is an fascinating and important moment in the development of Western intellectual and spiritual life and I'd insist insist that it deserves to be understood as an important part of our philosophical development as well and it should be studied and taught as such and with this brief analysis of the philosophical

problems of universal and the relationship of language to metaphysics we can see I think pretty clearly that it's played an absolutely decisive role Shifting the conversation from the dominance of Scholastic nominalism in the 14th century to something much more rich and complex by the mid 16th century and thus at the very birth of modernity that's no small thing and it should be appreciated as part of the history of philosophy now I'll be coming back for more episodes exploring how esotericism and philosophy and occultism all interacted influenced and transformed the history of philosophy in future episodes

should make sure to stick around more about the relationship of philosophy and the Occult as we think more about it here on the channel until then I'm Dr Justin Sledge and thank you thank you for watching esoteric where we explore the Arcane in history philosophy and religion [Music] [Music]