Folk Figures, Lucie On The Left, Barbora On The Right (From The Ethnographic Museum In Prague)

In Gurdjieff’s cosmology, The Universe is represented by the symbol of the Enneagram. The Enneagram itself is composed of three symbols

Russell A. Smith, Gurdjieff: Cosmic Secrets

The Arbatel De Magia Veterum (Arbatel: On the Magic of the Ancients) is a grimoire of ceremonial magic that was published in 1575 in Switzerland. It was likely edited by Theodor Zwinger, and published by Pietro Perna. The actual author of the text remains unknown, but scholars suggest Jacques Gohory as a possible candidate.

The Arbatel mainly focuses on the relationship between humanity, celestial hierarchies, and the positive relationship between the two. The Olympian spirits featured in it are entirely unique to this grimoire. Unlike other grimoires, the Arbatel exhorts the magus to remain active in their community (instead of isolating themselves), favoring kindness, charity, and honesty over remote and obscure rituals. The teachings of Swiss alchemist Paracelsus greatly influenced the writing of this work, though it is also deeply rooted in classical culture, Ancient Greek philosophy, the Sibylline oracles and the philosophy of Plotinus.

Originally written in Latin, these selected ten pages come from a later German translation of the work, dated to 1686.

A stone marker at a holy site dedicated to the dual lunar cult of Tanit and Astarte; Phoenician night goddesses worshipped from the Bronze Age through classical antiquity, alongside their horned consort Ba'al Hammon, “Lord of Braziers”, classically associated with Saturn.

Frank Close, Lucifer’s Legacy: The Meaning of Asymmetry

The very notion of culture is an artifact created by bracketing Nature off. Cultures — different or universal — do not exist, any more than Nature does. There are only natures-cultures, and these offer the only possible basis for comparison. As soon as we take practices of mediation as well as practices of purification into account, we discover that the moderns do not separate humans from nonhumans any more than the totally superimpose signs and things.

[…] Absolute relativism presupposes cultures that are separate and incommensurable and cannot be ordered in any hierarchy; there is no use talking about it, since it brackets off Nature. As for cultural relativism, which is more subtle, Nature comes into play, but in order to exist it does not presuppose any scientific work, any society, any construction, any mobilization, any network.

—Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern

Diagrams from a thirteenth-century version of the Ars Notoria.

Petitot 1771

reciprocal system of theory