VMs: Offlist post to the VMS mailing list

[Pamela Richards <spirlhelix@xxxxxxxxx>]

Off list message From Jeff Haley to Nick Pelling
 
The very reason that Ficino and Agrippa were
appropriating past theology and myth are Central to
the VMS.
 
There will be lots of people jumping on the VMS
bandwagon starting early next year so everyone on
this list should now start protecting their areas of
research. Just an advanced warning because I believe
late comers should not steal the credit of
others. More on this when the time is right.
 
Jeff (offlist)
 
 
> Hi Pamela,
> 
> At 16:13 21/09/2004 -0700, Pamela Richards wrote:
> Yes, in traditional astrology, the daemon is the
> "spirit" or "angel" to whom we are bound.  We are
> said
> to have a "good" one, the "Agathos daemon", which we
> find on the cusp of the eleventh house, and an
> "evil"
> one, "Cacodaemon", (really!) for "Dogma" fans, found
> on the cusp of the twelfth or sixth.  When Ficino
> speaks of the spirit of a star being bound to a
> human
> being, he uses the term daemon, which may be loosely
> translated "guiding spirit".  Guiding for good for
> for
> bad, either way, the spirit is thought to guide us
> to
> live out our fate.  The good one could be thought of
> as a "guardian angel".  See also Arippa, below.
> 
> 
> I suppose I'm developing a quite different
> appreciation of the roots of
> Quattrocento humanism from the picture painted by
> most books. It was less a
> time of appreciating the classics than appropriating
> them - of myth-making
> rather than demystification. Think postmodernism
> rather than logical
> positivism (if you want to think about either much).
> :-
> 
> Agrippa and Ficino both operated within that
> humanist research programme:
> and as such, played fast and loose with their
> sources, in their attempts to
> construct (as had Alberti) fake modernist structural
> takes on
> politically-charged issues of the moment. That is,
> they constructed
> mythological frameworks, rather than reported them -
> humanism's central myth
> is its own internal decorum and responsibility to
> its sources, whereas in
> fact it had little or none of either.
> 
> I don't know of any evidence of any prior text
> linking named fixed stars to
> named d[a]emons: daemons, as Apuleius described,
> were typically thought to
> occupy the sub-lunary space, well below the stars. I
> suppose all I'm saying
> is beware of relying on authors like Ficino and
> Agrippa, whose approach
> involved a large degree of myth-making - a careful
> analysis of the
> intellectual history supporting their frameworks
> would be required, and I'm
> not sure any books currently do that (but please
> tell me if I'm wrong on
> that count).
> 
> BTW, did you mean that the agathos daemon is on the
> cusp of the tenth and
> eleventh house?
> 
> Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....
> ]]
> 
> 


=====
"I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing, than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance."

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