On return in 1553 Dee took up the position of rector at Upton-upon-Severn parish in Worcestershire, in which position he had time to write. In 1555, he was arrested and charged with calculating for having cast horoscopes of Queen Mary and Princess Elizabeth; the charges were expanded to treason against Mary. Dee appeared in the Star Chamber which was a very serious business. At that time Star Chambers major role was to get rid of the queens enemies real or imagined. It was a secret court with no witnesses (only written accusations), no formal indictments, and no real rules. If convicted of treason, Dee would probably have been executed. He managed to clear his name but he was then handed over to a bishop for a religious examination. He cleared himself again but he had acquired a reputation that would follow him all of his life.
Today is the feast day of Martha of Bethany, as well as of her brother Lazarus of Bethany. I am going to focus on Martha today. Next year on this date, Deo volente, Ill give you the story of Lazarus. Martha appears in three well known stories, one in Lukes gospel and two in Johns.[]
Please note that if you are more comfortable in a language other than English there is a Google translate app in this sidebar.
In 1564, Dee wrote the Hermetic workMonas Hieroglyphica(The Hieroglyphic Monad), an exhaustive Cabalistic interpretation of a glyph of his own design (pictured), meant to express the mystical unity of all creation. He travelled to Hungary to present a copy personally to Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor. This work was highly valued by many of Dees contemporaries, but the loss of the secret oral tradition of Dees milieu makes the work difficult to interpret today.
Today is the feast day of St Francis of Assisi, without doubt one of the best known and best loved saints of all time. He is probably most frequently remembered as a lover of animals, and because he is the patron saint of animals, his feast day was chosen in 1931 as World Animal Day,[]
Boil the rice until it is soft but not mushy. When cooked, drain and add the butter in small chunks, stirring until it is melted. Let the mixture cool slightly.
Today is the birthday (1904) of Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dal i Domnech, 1st Marqus de Dal de Pubol usually known simply as Salvador Dal, surrealist master and moustache specialist. Although he is best known for his paintings he had a hand in a great many fields cinema, theater set design, fashion, photography, and[]
By the early 1580s, Dee was growing dissatisfied with his progress in learning the secrets of nature and with his own lack of influence and recognition. He began to turn towards the supernatural as a means to acquire knowledge. Specifically, he sought to contact angels through the use of a scryer or crystal-gazer, which would act as an intermediary between Dee and the angels. Dees first attempts were not satisfactory to him, but, in 1582, he met Edward Kelley, who impressed him greatly with his abilities. Dee took Kelley into his service and began to devote all his energies to his supernatural pursuits. These spiritual conferences or actions were conducted with an air of intense Christian piety, always after periods of purification, prayer and fasting. Dee was convinced of the benefits they could bring to humankind. Kelleys written work is remarkable for its sheer mass, its intricacy and its vividness. Dee maintained that the angels laboriously dictated several books to Kelley, some in a special angelic or Enochian language. It is not entirely clear whether Kelley was a clever fraud.
On this date in 1835, HMS Beagle, with Charles Darwin aboard, reached the Galpagos Islands. The ship landed at Chatham, or San Cristobal, the easternmost island of the archipelago. His visit to the Galpagos Islands is justly famous because of the observations he made there that helped him develop the general principles of natural selection.[]
To practice magic is to be a quack; to know magic is to be a sage.
Today is the birthday (1774) of John Chapman, generally known as Johnny Appleseed, Swedenborgian Christian missionary, early conservationist, and folk hero. Chapman was known as Johnny Appleseed because of his large number of fruit tree plantings. He is regarded informally as the patron saint of orchardists in the U.S.A., and today is commonly celebrated as[]
My name is Juan Alejandro Forrest de Sloper. Daily I post an anniversary with a suitable recipe du jour. Although the anniversary material is often really prominent, try to remember that, first and foremost, this is a FOOD BLOG.
From 1542 to 1546 Dee attended St. Johns College, Cambridge. Because of his superior intellectual abilities he was made a founding fellow of Trinity College, where the clever stage effects he produced for a production of AristophanesPeaceprocured him the reputation of being a magician that clung to him through life (it did not mean then what it means now to be a magician). In the late 1540s and early 1550s, he travelled in Europe, studying at Leuven and Brussels, and lecturing in Paris on Euclid. He studied with Gemma Frisius (who was a mathematician and instrument maker), and through him became a close friend of his former student, the cartographer Gerardus Mercator. Dee returned to England with a significant collection of mathematical and astronomical instruments.
A good teacher must be able to put himself in the place of those who find learning hard.
Constants activities reflect the socialist struggle to come to terms both with the failure of 1848 and the tough repressions by the new government. He contributed to the socialistRevue philosophique et religieuse, founded by his old friend Fauvety, wherein he propagated his Kabbalistic ideas, for the first time in public, in 1855-1856 (notably using his civil name). The debates in theRevuedo not only show the tensions between the old Romantic Socialism of the Saint-Simonians and Fourierists, they also demonstrate how natural it was for a socialist writer to discuss topics like magic, the Kabbalah, or the occult sciences in a socialist journal. Constant developed his ideas about magic in a specific milieu that was marked by the confluence of socialist and magnetistic ideas. Influential authors included Henri Delaage (18251882) and Jean du Potet de Sennevoy (17961881), who were, to different extents, propagating magnetistic, magical, and kabbalistic ideas as the foundation of a superior form of socialism.
Dee returned to England in 1589 to find his library mostly destroyed and his instruments stolen. He took a position for a while as Warden (head) of a college in Manchester, but was not well received by the scholars there, so evenually he returned to London where he died in poverty in about 1608.
The magic propagated by liphas Lvi became a great success, especially after his death. Spiritualism being popular on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1850s contributed to this success. His magical teachings were free from obvious fanaticisms, even if they remained rather murky; he had nothing to sell, and did not pretend to be the initiate of some ancient or fictitious secret society. He incorporated the Tarot cards into his magical system, and as a result the Tarot has been an important part of the paraphernalia of Western magicians. He had a deep impact on the magic of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and later on the ex-Golden Dawn member Aleister Crowley. He was also the first to declare that a pentagram or five-pointed star with one point down and two points up represents evil, while a pentagram with one point up and two points down represents good. It was largely through the occultists inspired by him that Lvi is remembered as one of the key founders of the 20th-century revival of magic.
Today is the anniversary (1903) of the the Wright brothers, Orville (August 19, 1871 January 30, 1948) and Wilbur (April 16, 1867 May 30, 1912), making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight. From 1905 to 1907, the brothers developed their flying machine into the first practical fixed-wing aircraft. Although not[]
Boyle your Rice, and put in the yolkes of two or three Egges into the Rice, and when it is boyled, put it into a dish, and season it with Suger, Sinamon and Ginger, and butter, and the juyce of two or three Orenges, and set it on the fire againe.
Magic is the divinity of man conquered by science in union with faith; the true Magi are Men-Gods, in virtue of their intimate union with the divine principle.
On this date in 1964 the oldest known unitary organism, Prometheus, a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine (Pinus longaeva) tree growing near the tree line on Wheeler Peak in eastern Nevada was cut down by a graduate student and United States Forest Service personnel for research purposes. The tree was at least 4862 years old[]
Today is the birthday (1915) of dith Piaf, famed French singer who became a national icon in France, and still has an ardent following worldwide (myself included). I decided to start the post with a recording of one her most famous songs, rather than the usual portrait or icon, so that you could see her[]
When Elizabeth took the throne in 1558, Dee became her trusted adviser on astrological and scientific matters. From the 1550s through the 1570s, he served as an adviser to Englands voyages of discovery, providing technical assistance in navigation and ideological backing in the creation of a British Empire, a term that he was the first to use. In 1577, Dee publishedGeneral and Rare Memorials pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation, a work that set out his technical improvements on navigation along with his vision of an English maritime empire beginning with the New World.
There is nothing more to controlling demons than to do good and fear nothing.
Today is the birthday of John Dee (1527) who was a Tudor era English mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, occultist, navigator, and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I. He devoted much of his life to the study of alchemy, divination and Hermetic philosophy. He was considered one of the most learned men of his age, and at one point is reputed to have amassed the largest library in England. He was a pious Christian but his incorporation of occult beliefs, astrology, attempts to commune with angels, and the like ran him afoul of the church many times. Although his systems of thought were always complex, his lifes work moved in an arc from what the modern world often considers to be more acceptable and more practical investigations such as mathematics, astrology, and navigation, at the beginning, to much more esoteric explorations such as his various attempts to learn the universal language of creation from the angels to bring about the apocalyptic unity of humankind, towards the end. Although to the modern world he seems to have had fingers in many different pies, he considered that his work was an essential unity: many paths to the ultimate goal of finding transcendent truths. It is impossible to describe all of his accomplishments in a simple blog post, so here is a sampling.
When we love, we see the infinite in the finite. We find the Creator in the creation.
He looks on the wicked as invalids whom one must pity and cure; the world, with its errors and vices, is to him Gods hospital, and he wishes to serve in it.
Today is the birthday (1931) of Roger Penrose, mathematician, philosopher, and artist. I am a big fan. Some of you who read this blog regularly may wonder why I admire so many mathematicians; maybe this post will solve that puzzle. Penrose was born in Colchester on the east coast of England, and is the brother[]
Lvi began to writeHistoire de la magiein 1860. The following year, in 1861, he published a sequel toDogme et rituel, La clef des grands mystres(The Key to the Great Mysteries). In 1861 Lvi revisited London. Further magical works by Lvi includeFables et symboles(Stories and Symbols), 1862,Le sorcier de Meudon(The Wizard of Meudon, an extended edition of two novels originally published in 1847) 1861, andLa science des esprits(The Science of Spirits), 1865. In 1868, hewrote Le grand arcane, ou loccultisme Dvoil(The Great Secret, or Occultism Unveiled),published posthumously in 1898.
I had to think long and hard about a suitable recipe. I suppose angel food cake would have worked. I considered, given his support for sea exploration, of shipboard food. But even though I can bake ships biscuit, I dont recommend it. So I settled on a recipe from his era that is a cross between a rice pie and rice pudding: Tart of Ryce fromThe Good Huswifes Jewell, a Tudor cookbook for the middle class published in 1596. Remember, though, that rice was an expensive delicacy in Dees day (not to mention the spices). This would have been a special treat.
To be rich is to give; to give nothing is to be poor; to live is to love; to love nothing is to be dead; to be happy is to devote oneself; to exist only for oneself is to damn oneself, and to exile oneself to hell.
Today is Michaelmas, or, more formally, the Feast of St Michael and All Angels. In times past it was a very important day in the calendar marking the beginning of autumn (in the northern hemisphere), the end of the summer harvests, and, therefore a time for reckoning up farm laborers got paid, as did[]
Constant not only developed his occultism as a direct consequence of his socialist and neo-Catholic ideas, but he continued to propagate the realization of true socialism throughout his life. According to the narrative developed by the occultist Papus (Grard Encausse) and cemented by the occultist biographer Paul Chacornac, Constants turn to occultism was the result of an initiation by the eccentric Polish expatriate Jzef Maria Hoene-Wroski. However, this narrative had been developed before Papus and his companions had any access to reliable information about Constants life. Also, a journey to London that Constant made in May 1854 did not cause his preoccupation with magic, although he seems to have been involved in practical magic for the first time. Instead, it was the aforementioned socialist-magnetistic context that formed the background of Constants interest in magic. It should also be noted that the relationship between Constant and the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton was not as intimate as it is often claimed. In fact, Bulwer-Lyttons famous novelA Strange Story(1862) includes a rather unflattering remark aboutConstants Dogme et ritual.
The Christmas Truce was a series of widespread, unofficial ceasefires that took place along the Western Front around Christmas 1914, during World War I. Through the week leading up to Christmas, parties of German and British soldiers began to exchange seasonal greetings and songs between their trenches; on occasion, the tension was reduced to the[]
Key friends at that time include, next to Esquiros, the feminist Flora Tristan, the eccentric socialist mystic Simon Ganneau, and the socialist Charley Fauvety. In the course of the 1840s, Constant developed close ties to the Fourierist movement, publishing in Fourierist publications and praising Fourierism as the true Christianity (see Several of his books were published by the Fourierist Librairie phalanstrienne. He also embraced the Catholic traditionalist Joseph de Maistre, whose works were popular in socialist circles. An especially radical pamphlet, La voix de la famine (1846, The Voice of Famine), earned Constant another prison sentence that was significantly shortened at the request of his pregnant second wife, Marie-Nomi Cadiot.
In December 1851, Napoleon III organized a coup that ended the Second Republic and gave rise to the Second Empire. Similar to many other socialists at the time, Constant saw the emperor as the defender of the people and the restorer of public order. In theMoniteur parisienof 1852, Constant praised the new governments actions as veritably socialist, but he soon became disillusioned with the rigid dictatorship and was eventually imprisoned in 1855 for publishing a polemical chanson against the Emperor. What had changed, however, was Constants attitude towards the people. As early as inLa Fte-DieuandLe livre des larmesfrom 1845, he had been skeptical of the uneducated peoples ability to emancipate themselves. Similar to the Saint-Simonians, he had adopted the theocratical ideas of Joseph de Maistre in order to call for the establishment of a spiritual authority led by an lite class of priests. After the disaster of 1849, he was completely convinced that the masses were not able to establish an harmonious order and needed instruction.
Today is the anniversary of the day in 1911 that a local farmers son took Hiram Bingham to the ruins of Machu Picchu, eventually launching a massive project to free the city from the dense jungle that had overgrown it, and turning it into one of the most visited historic sites in the world. Bingham[]
On this date in 1602 the Bodleian Library, Oxford Universitys main library, opened for use. It has been in continuous service ever since, growing considerably over the years (now holding an estimated 11 million books). It was where I studied and did research as an undergraduate, and I still occasionally visit when I need to[]
Today is Independence Day in Vanuatu, officially the Republic of Vanuatu (Ripablik blong Vanuatu), an island nation located in the South Pacific Ocean. Vanuatu was first inhabited by Melanesian people. The first Europeans to visit the islands were the members of a Spanish expedition led by Portuguese navigator Fernandes de Queirs, who arrived in 1605.[]
Judge not; speak hardly at all; love and act.
Whisk the eggs, sugar, spices, and orange juice together and add to the rice and butter, mixing well.
In his Testament de la libert (1848), Constant reacted to the atmosphere that produced the February Revolution. In 1848, he was the leader of an especially notorious Montagnard club known for its radicalism. Although it has been claimed that the Testament marked the end of Constants socialist ambitions, it has been argued that its content is in fact highly euphoric, announcing the end of the peoples martyrdom and the resurrection of Liberty: the perfect universal, socialist order. Like many other socialists, the course of events, especially the massacres of the June Uprising in 1849, left him devastated and disillusioned. As his friend Esquiros recounted, their belief in the peaceful realization of a harmonious universal society had been shattered.
Today is the birthday (1810) of liphas Lvi Zahed, born Alphonse Louis Constant, French occult author and ceremonial magician. liphas Lvi, the name under which he published his books, was his attempt to translate or transliterate his given names Alphonse Louis into classical Hebrew. Constant was the son of a shoemaker in Paris. He attended the seminary of Saint Sulpice from 1830, studying to enter the Roman Catholic priesthood. However, while at the seminary he fell in love and left in 1836 without being ordained. He spent the following years among his socialist and Romantic friends, including Henri-François-Alphonse Esquiros and so-called petits romantiques such as Grard de Nerval and Thophile Gautier. During this time, he turned to a radical socialism that was decisively inspired by the writings of Flicit de Lamennais, the former leader of the influential neo-Catholic movement who had recently broken with Rome and propagated a Christian socialism. When Constant published his first radical writing(1841, The Bible of Liberty), he was sentenced to an eight-month prison term and a heavy fine. Contemporaries saw in him the most notorious disciple of Lamennais, although the two men do not seem to have established a personal contact. In the following years, Constant described his ideology as communisme no-catholique and published a number of socialist books and pamphlets. Like many socialists, he propagated socialism as true Christianity and denounced the various denominations as corruptors of the teachings of Christ.
Lvis works are filled with various definitions for magic and the magician. They are also replete with general wisdom which should see great light in my neverendingly humble opinion:
Lvi believed that physical preparation for deep ritual was vital and diet was a key component. During the process he abstained from meat and ate simply. Being a vegetarian in France or England in the mid-nineteenth century was no easy task. There were, however, advocates of a diet that was supposedly healthier than normal. By modern standards the health benefits are questionable. This recipe is for a vegetarian version of British steamed pudding using mushrooms in place of meat. It comes from the Vegetarian Society of London which was founded in 1847.
Put the mixture into a well greased 10 inch round baking dish and bake for about 35 minutes or until the top is golden.
Supposedly on this date in 1307 William Tell shot an arrow into an apple on his sons head. The legend as told by Tschudi (ca. 1570) reports that William Tell, who originally came from Brglen, was known as a strong man, mountain climber, and an expert shot with the crossbow. In his time, the Habsburg[]
Today is International Chocolate Day. Well, actually, there are several dates that lay claim to this distinction, but I have chosen this one because its a slow day in the anniversary world. I could give you a whole song and dance about the history of chocolate, but Im not going to. Instead I am going[]
Constant resumed the use of openly socialist language after the government had loosened the restrictions against socialist doctrines in 1859. FromLa clefon, he extensively cited his radical writings, even his infamousBible de la libert. He continued to develop his idea of an lite of initiates that would lead the people to its final emancipation. In several passages he explicitly conflated socialism, Catholicism, and occultism.
I had a lot of difficulty converting the 16th century recipe for the modern cook, mainly because of the oddity of boiling rice then adding egg yolks and boiling some more. Certainly by my tastes this would have made a nasty concoction as a base for a dish. This not at all like a modern rice pudding because there is no dairy involved. Elizabethans might have added more sugar; they had sweet tastes.
Today is the birthday (1606) of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. I dont feel the need to give you an art history lesson here. Im assuming you all know what a Rembrandt looks like and that he painted Biblical stories, stories from Classical myths, and portraits (including lots of self portraits some of[]
In 1583, Dee met the visiting Polish nobleman Albert ?aski, who invited Dee to accompany him on his return to Poland. With some prompting by the angels, Dee was persuaded to go. Dee, Kelley and their families left for the Continent in September 1583, but ?aski proved to be bankrupt and out of favor in his own country. Dee and Kelley began a nomadic life in Central Europe, but they continued their spiritual conferences, which Dee recorded meticulously. He had audiences with Emperor Rudolf II in Prague Castle and King Stefan Batory of Poland, and attempted to convince them of the importance of his angelic communications.
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One pint of mushrooms, half a pound of bread crumbs, and two ounces of butter. Put the butter in the bread crumbs, adding pepper and salt, and as much water as will moisten the bread; add the mushrooms cut in pieces; line a basin with paste, put in the mixture, cover with paste, tie a cloth over, and boil an hour and a-half. It is equally good baked.
In Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet there is this line: Come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen (Act 1 sc iii) Lammas is August 1, so today (Lammas Eve) is Juliets birthday. Romeo and Juliet was one of Shakespeares earliest plays (written some time between 1591 and 1595). It was a popular audience pleaser throughout[]