Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's just shy of midnight, so here we go with a new Magic Monday. The picture is the only surviving image of George Ripley, one of the great alchemists of the medieval English tradition -- believe it or not!  (Ahem.)  A canon -- i.e., a priest who lived a monastic life -- at Bridlington Priory in England, he wrote several highly influential books on alchemy, the most widely read being The Compound of Alchemy. His work was studied closely by such later alchemical notables as John Dee and Isaac Newton. (Yes, that Isaac Newton. Did any of your teachers ever mention to you that Newton put more time into studying alchemy than he did into working out the laws of gravity and motion? No, I didn't think so -- but it's quite true.)    

Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. Any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here.

I've had several people ask about tipping me for answers here, and though I certainly don't require that I won't turn it down. You can use the button below to access my online tip jar. If you're interested in political and economic astrology, or simply prefer to use a subscription service to support your favorite authors, you can find my Patreon page here and my SubscribeStar page here.

With that said, have at it!

***This Magic Monday is now closed -- and yes, this means you. See you next week!***
 

Comments

[robertmathiesen]

Brown is very much a real college, actually a university, in Providence, Rhode Island. It was founded in 1764, and thus it is one of the half-dozen or so oldest universities in British North America. In the 1990s, it still maintained a program for extra-departmental experimental courses, and I launched two courses under its aegis: "Magic in the Middle Ages" (actually a general history of magic from Antiquity to recent times, with its focus on the Middle Ages) and "Women, Magic and Power" (a history of women-led magical religions in the US from the late 1700s up to about 1970. Although we discussed how magic actually works, or appears to work, during the last three weeks of the semester in the first of these courses, it was still basically a historical course.

[(Anonymous)]

Now, those sound like interesting classes!