Culture And Cosmos Vol 19 1 And 2 Celestial Magic [Paperback]

From the editorial by Nicholas Campion:

All the papers published here deal with the human relationship with the sky, for that is the brief of Culture and Cosmos. Faced with the task of organizing the papers into themes, it became clear to me that one practice pervaded most of the submissions: alchemy. And one process was dominant: transformation. Magic is then above all a practice, a word which reminds us that it has practical consequences. And that consequence, our contributors conclude, is personal transformation. Such transformation may take us closer to the divine, or make us more self-aware, or may enhance good fortune. But it always locates the individual within the transformative process, rather than apart from it.

We begin with two papers which I have categorized as Theory. Michael Harding muses on the meaning of magic in relation to Wittgenstein and Heidegger, while Jos? Manuel Redondo takes us back to the Platonism of Late Antiquity on which so much of the European tradition is based.
We then move on to Practice, beginning with Liz Greenes sweeping account of Gemstone Talismans in Western Magical Traditions, Claire Chandlers examination of one text in the collection we know as the Greek Magical Papyri. M. E. Warlick then focuses on the alchemical Transgendering of Mercury, and Karen Parham considers the key alchemical text, the Aurora Consurgens.

The section on Transformation and Ascent represents a different kind of practice. Alison Greig begins with an exploration of Angelomorphism and Magical Transformation in the Christian and Jewish Traditions, and Christine Broadbent moves to Islamic mysticism in her paper on Celestial Magic as the Love Path: The Spiritual Cosmology of Ibn Arabi. Hereward Tilton moves into the early modern world in his study of the Invocation of Planetary Spirits in Early Modern Germany, and Joscelyn Godwin in his paper on Astral Ascent in the Occult Revivls*