– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011) Such philosophical streams have recently been revived and renewed by the analytic philosopher Stephen E. Braude, who as a graduate student and self-described arrogant…
Category: Florilegium
Jeffrey Kripal on telecom
– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011) It was out of thousands of stories like these that Myers coined the term telepathy in 1882, no doubt after the then cutting-edge technology…
Jeffrey Kripal on the occult
– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011) Occultism, from the Latin occultus for “hidden” or “secret,” is a broad umbrella term that scholars use to discuss a wide variety of ideas,…
Ioan Culianu on Harold Bloom
– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992) Yet, as Richard Smith perceptively noticed, Harold Bloom is today the only author of both essays and fiction who consciously identifies…
Ioan Culianu on nihilism
– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992) If nihilism is the state that ensues from the “unbuilding” of transcendence and the attitude that pursues transcendence in order to…
Ioan Culianu on Cathars
– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992) As far as reversed biblical exegesis is concerned, the two religions of the Cathars continue to activate new possibilities inherent in…
Ioan Culianu on Philo
– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992) Philo’s influence on early Christian Logos theories was overwhelming. Did he influence gnostic mythology as well? From our perspective, the question…
Ioan Culianu on inverse exegesis
– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992) If the starting point of gnostic myth is the exegesis of the Book of Genesis, it is not an innocent exegesis.…
Ioan Culianu on trees and games
– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992) We see how, from a seed, Gnosis grows into a tree that starts to split into branches; some branches remain virtual,…
Ioan Culianu on gnostic myth
– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992) In principle there could be no serious objection to a Platonist who would assert that the god of Genesis is actually…