[ExI] Feel Safer Now?

Amara Graps amara at amara.com
Mon Mar 17 00:52:12 UTC 2008


John Grigg:
>And if the foundation of Western Witchcraft had come from Islamic
>culture then we probably would see them being very closely monitored by
>various national governments.

Ahem.. John, more thoroughness in your research please. Some links
historically exist between the The Witch Hunt and alchemy [1]. And then
from the alchemists, you can draw links to Islam and practically any
and all religions.

The Sufis / alchemists are at home in all religions because they believe
that Sufism is the secret teaching within all religions. To them, Islam
is a 'shell' of Sufism as equally as other religions are a 'shell' of
Sufism. The Sufis were historically persecuted by the Muslims (they
didn't define 'Allah' the same way), but that varied over time; other
times Islam protected them, so that explains the fact that Sufi thought
has an eastern flavor. Plus various concepts like "picture words" [2]
were perfect in the Arabic language.

Amara

References
[2] http://www.amara.com/athousand/Onethousandandone.html#picturewords

[1]
Copying and pasting from my 2 year old post at cosmicvariance
on Jul 8th, 2006 at 3:09 pm by me, Amara.

http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/07/04/foreign-correspondent-checking-in/#comment-103770

[...]
Anyway, I have a hobby-ist interest in the 2000 year historical trail of
the alchemists, and have a good reference book at home: Promethean
Ambitions by William Newman.

Witchcraft and alchemy. It's not a true link in the sense that the Canon
Episcopi was written about three centries before the transmission of
alchemy from the Islamic world to Europe. The Canon text gives no
indication to the aurific art (witchcraft). It was only much later that
some sources connected the two.

The Canon episcopi written about the 10th century, addresses two claims
of the time. The first is that certain heretical women worship the pagan
goddess Diana in large groups to which they have been transported over
great distances in a single night on the backs of beasts, and the second
is that the same women or others can be transformed into animals. The
Canon rejects the idea that anyone can really change his shape or
species as heretical and forbids the belief in the shape changing power
of women. So this document is a reference to witches.

About the mid to late thirteenth century, Dominican monk Martinus
Polonus wrote in his Margarita decreti encyclopedia an entry for alchemy
which begins with the phrase "alchemy seems to be a false art, because
he who believes one species to be able to be transferred into another,
except by the Creator Himself, is an infidel and worse than a pagan".
These words were echoed by subsequent writers and so alchemy and the
Canon episcopi was then linked.

To clarify definitions: Historically, alchemy is primarily an art of
transmutation: one metal is turned into another, one living creature
erupts out of the substance of another. Art was defined following
Aristotle, which is: to 1) perfect natural processes and to bring them
to a state of completion not found in nature itself (i.e. improve), and
to 2) only imitate nature without fundamentally altering it, i.e.,. to
imitate various aspects of the natural world.

So shapeshifting and alchemy was linked by Polonus, but it was not tied
to the Devil until the middle 1400s, when a Franciscan monk named
Alfonso de Spina analyzed the question of the Canon whether witches can
undergo spatial transport at tremendous speed and whether they can
change their shape, and he says that only the Devil can do this. He
links alchemy and shapeshifting and then with this line:

"The cause is that he (the Devil) knows how to apply actives to
passives, as appears in those things that the magicians of Pharaoh did.
But that the Devil may cause one man to be converted to a serpent, bird,
or plant - this is impossible for him. Therefore, many perverse
Christian alchemists are decived having pacts with demons, and believing
that they transmute iron into gold through their art."

De Spina and other monks rejected the idea the nature could be improved
upon by 'art', and a large text named Malleus was subsequently written.
The text denied the power of witches and gave a denunciation of alchemy.
This book went through at least 26 printings between 1487 and 1669 and
became the witchhunter's guide. The Devil and demons were endlessly
discussed and debated alongside the alchemical art-nature debate.

Albertus Manus straddled both sides of the alchemy (pro/against) debate,
but it was his student, Thomas Acquinas, who continued strongly Manus'
anti-alchemy position. Acquinas' position was that demons were between
humans and God, and more powerful than humans. At that time, many of the
Medieval arguments against alchemy stemmed from giving demons too much
power. Since alchemy represented a high point of the arts in its
relationship to nature, it was a useful yardstick to assess the things
that demons could or could not do. But the 'transmutation' of the
alchemical art-nature debate into one involving demons, then
unfortunately led to the Great Witch Hunt.


-- 

Amara Graps, PhD      www.amara.com
Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado



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