Views such as [a licensed psycologist and pastor James] Friesen’s [author of Uncovering the Mystery of MPD, linking multiple-personality disorder to the workings of satanic cults], which one might be tempted to dismiss as those…
Category: Florilegium
George E. Marcus on the paranoid overtones of anthropology
* Take for example the ambitious and comprehensive corpus of Pierre Bourdieu, which makes visible through an elegant and complex framework a kind of politics of value and status that could appropriately be understood in…
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George E. Marcus on paranoia within reason
Indeed, we believe that there are at least two broad contexts or conditions of contemporary life that make the paranoid style and conspiracy theories an eminently reasonable tendency of thought for social actors to embrace.…
Ioan Culianu on second-language acquisition
Trithemius informed his friend of the projected work whose first book would be entitled Steganography (in our day it would be called cryptography), “which, when published, will astonish everyone.” This first outline comprised four volumes…
Ioan Culianu on magician State vs. police-State
Let us suppose that A is a multiple individual, a crowd with uniform reactions. B is a prophet, the founder of a religion, or a political leader, who, using magic techniques of persuasion, subjugates A.…
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Ioan Culianu on De vinculis in genere and The Prince
Bruno is the first to exploit the concept of magic to its ultimate conclusions, envisaging this “science” as an infallible psychological instrument for manipulating the masses as well as the individual human being. Awareness of…
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Ioan Culianu on the history of ideas
The originality of an era is not measured by the content of its ideological systems but rather by its “selective will,” that is, according to the interpretive grille it interposes between preexisting contents and their…
Ioan Culianu on phantasia
On the other hand, the body opens up to the soul a window to the world through the five sensory organs whose messages go to the same cardiac apparatus which now is engaged in codifying…
Ioan Culianu on magic (intro)
The magic that concerns us here is theoretically a science of the imaginary, which it explores through its own methods and seeks to manipulate at will. At its greatest degree of development, reached in the…
Mark Sedgwick on Halford Mackinder and Russian Eurasianism
Russian Eurasianism has various origins, the earliest of which is the work of the nineteenth-century philosopher Konstantin Nikolayevich Leontyev, who articulated ancient convictions of “Russian particularism.” It was found also in Russian émigré writers of…
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