Stargates: The Magic of Images from Heka to the Monas Hieroglyphica continues for two more dates in the Autumn Term 2021, hosted by the Warburg Institute.
Stargates is an online lecture series dedicated to the material aspects of making magical images, including the arsenal of objects and media which allow the maker to manipulate the flow of stellar influences. The roots of the question are Egyptian; they lie buried in a passage of the hermetic text, Asclepius, which explains how Egyptian priests "make gods" by shaping images able to attract the souls of the stars. Herbs, stones and aromas "which have an occult virtue of divine efficacity", words, sounds and fumigations are the other ingredients of this magic panoply, which has been discussed and enriched from Antiquity to the Renaissance and beyond.
Considering small portable talismans and large artworks, this lecture series features seven leading scholars who offer a broad historical perspective. Combining a wide range of disciplines including archaeology, history, art history, anthropology, philosophy and cultural history, they will discuss both the "making" and the "mechanism" of these stargates, capable of bringing the stars down to earth. Following a chronological sequence in order to underline the transformations, continuities, and discontinuities from ancient to "modern" practices, this series builds on the legacy of the Warburg Institute scholars D.P. Walker and Frances Yates. Our two final lectures detailed below will be focusing primarily on magic images.
Organised by Luisa Capodieci (Frances A. Yates Long Term Fellow, Warburg Institute).
14 October 2021: 5.30pm (UK time / BST) via zoom - Wouter Hanegraaff (University of Amsterdam): 'Terrestrial Gods and Statues of Light'
"In this lecture I will discuss the famous (or notorious) passages about animated statues in the Asclepius, an important Hermetic treatise in Latin that is based on a lost Greek original known as the Logos Teleios. It is well known that Augustine condemned Hermes Trismegistus' praise of what Christians were bound to see as idolatry; and the Hermetic practice of statue animation came to be seen as a model of talismanic magic since William of Auvergne. First of all, I will place Hermes' discussion with his pupil Asclepius about statues in the social and political context of third-century Roman Egypt; secondly, I argue that it is most plausibly interpreted in the context of Iamblichean theurgy; thirdly, I will ask and try to answer the question of how we may explain the conviction of practitioners that statues could actually come alive; and finally, I will discuss the connection of these "god-making passages" to the other famous part of the Asclepius, Hermes' lament about the imminent decline of Egypt."
Booking: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/events/stargates-wouter-hanegraff
10 November 2021: 5.30pm (UK time / GMT) via zoom - Jean-Patrice Boudet (Université d'Orléans): 'Magical Images in Late Medieval Manuscripts'
"In the last centuries of the Western Middle Ages, following the translation of magical texts from Arabic (and even Hebrew and Greek) into Latin, dozens of manuscripts include magical images of all kinds. Other endogenous magical traditions, such as the Ars notoria, generate their own images. We will try to draw up a typology of these images, designated by technical terms (imagines, figurae, sigilla, characteres, pentaculae, candariae, notae, etc.), to see what are the functions of these images and the relations they have with the texts in which they are inserted, and to ask the question of whether the whole of these texts and images form together a more or less coherent system of representation of the world."
Booking: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/events/stargates-jean-patrice-boudet
Jon Millington
Academic Engagement and Impact Officer
The Warburg Institute
School of Advanced Study | University of London
Woburn Square | London WC1H 0AB
T: +44 (0)20 7862 8910 | E: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/
The School of Advanced Study at the University of London is the UK's national centre for the facilitation and promotion of research in the humanities and social sciences.
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