The Hermetic Library Blog - Faint gibbering heard from somewhere near the restricted stacks

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The Hermetic Library Blog Faint gibbering heard from somewhere near the restricted stacks Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Giorgio Agamben, translated by Lorenzo Chiesa with Matteo Mandarini.The Kingdom and the Glory was issued a short while before The Sacrament of Language, but in the plan of Agamben s Homo Sacer project, the first book follows the second, and that is the sequence in which I read them. They are closely connected in theme, exploring points in which concepts cross or transcend the boundaries between the theological and the political. The Kingdom and the Glory is a much larger undertaking in both scope and scale.The work of the book is a Foucauldian (i.e. neo-Nietzschean) genealogy of glory as an operator in the conceptual justification of economy and government that is, in the theological and political registers, respectively. (The ancient theological sense of economy is distinct from its modern significance.) It touches on esoteric fields such as Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, and Grail legendry. But it also traces its concerns through the vertebral canon of philosophy from Aristotle through Heidegger, as well as the entire span of Christian theology.As The Sacrament of Language was trained on the performative language of the oath, so The Kingdom and the Glory in large measure revolves around the nature and function of acclamation. Section 8.19 in particular is a valuable inquiry into amen as the acclamation par excellence of Christian liturgy.Some of the political consequences of the insights in this 2007 book seem to cast light on the fragility of the legislative function in putative democracies like that of Germany in the first part of the 20th century or the United States in the 21st. The sovereignty of the people is inadequately manifested by the legislature, which allows for the usurpation of its kingdom by the government of the executive, and the collapse of what Agamben calls in theology the providential machine. My hat is off to translators Chiesa and Mandarini, not only for making Agamben intelligible in English, and for keeping track of the various linguistic registers among which he navigates, but for introducing me to two English words. In the course of reading this book, I learned tralatitious (152) and epenetic (246). Also, I forgive them for using mythologeme in lieu of mytheme (106).Consistent with my prior reading of Agamben, I found this book difficult and rewarding. Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Snake, the Crocodile, and the Dog [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher] by Elizabeth Peters.This seventh volume of the adventures of Victorian Egyptologist Amelia Peabody Emerson is very much a serial installment. It is hard to imagine enjoying it much without having read several of the earlier books, especially The Crocodile on the Sandbank, Lion in the Valley, and The Last Camel Died at Noon. In fact, this text frequently deploys the advertising footnote: dropping the title of a previous novel into the bottom margin of the page in order to explicate an allusion to earlier adventures. The feature reminds me of nothing so much as 1960s and 70s Marvel comic books, with the continuity cross-references jammed into the corners of panels. The Snake, the Crocodile, and the Dog also continues author Peters metafictional jockeying of material from H. Rider Haggard. This time, she introduces Leo Vincey a character whose name is lifted from the protagonist of Haggard s She. The occasional line drawings introduced in The Last Camel Died at Noon do not persist in The Snake, but there are still several maps to help the reader understand the path of the expedition. The maps are clear, but it s hard to refer to them, because they are inserted individually in the course of the text, and there is no table or index to note their locations. On a related issue, the Editor s Note at the beginning refers quite inaccurately to a glossary appendix on page 339, evidently failing to account for the revised pagination of the paperback edition I read. I was a little worried by the addition of yet another dependent to the Emerson household at the end of the previous book, and I wondered how an exciting pace could be maintained in the face of such elaborate parental concerns. Peters thankfully managed to have the Emersons leave the children in England for the 1898 archaeological expedition to Egypt in The Snake, and the occasional letters from young Ramses provide excellent comic relief, as well as a clever supplementary plot-line. The relief is necessary, in my view, because of the circumstance of Radcliffe Emerson s traumatic amnesia, which gives this story more tension and sadness than were typical of the earlier volumes. The resolution of the plot involves multiple reveals, the later of which certainly caught me off-guard. But there s also an intimation of a significant plot point undetected by the narrating sleuth Amelia herself. I m sure it will be fulfilled in later stories. Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Mystical Marriage: Symbol and Meaning of the Human Experience [Amazon] by Gerhard Wehr, translated by Jill Sutcliffe.The Mystical Marriage is mostly a historical survey of Western religious and esoteric traditions oriented toward marital symbolism and the Jungian notion of the conjunctio. As an introductory survey, it is suitably wide, but not at all deep. The material is important, but I managed to get through the first 70% of this book without learning anything at all. The chapter on Conjugal Kabbalistic Mysteries uses some Romanized Hebrew that is alien to any system of my acquaintance: the Crown is given as Keter elyon and Wisdom as Halma. The subchapter on the Myth of Androgyny is appended to the Jacob Boehme chapter, and although it works through to the ideas of Rudolph Steiner in the twentieth century, it avoids the most interesting developments of the esoteric androgyne in the nineteenth (i.e. Levi s Baphomet and Balzac s Seraphita). Later sections of the book provided me with more benefit. The chapter on Novalis was likewise in a primer mode, but due to my relative ignorance of the subject matter I found it somewhat rewarding. In the eleventh chapter, Wehr discusses an interesting case study that should perhaps be grouped with Ida Craddock s Heavenly Bridegrooms: a German housewife whose experiments in automatic writing led to a marital union with a disincarnate entity named Lot. The final chapter offers the little bit of practical information in the volume: dreams, fairy tales, and religious meditation are presented as Paths to the Symbol of Coniunctio.  The whole study is quite Teutonocentric, emphasizing continuity from Meister Eckhart and the Theologia Deutsch through Luther, Boehme, and German Rosicrucianism to C.G. Jung and his disciples. Translator Jill Sutcliffe has done a fairly mediocre job. German grammatical idioms often persist, as for example in this (self-referential?) sentence: It needs no special debate to know that this is incorrect. (115) Wehr s bibliography is retained with all titles in German, including items originally translated from English such as Evelyn Underhill s Mysticism. The reader may infer that Sutcliffe has not conformed the Underhill quotes to the English original, but has subjected them to double-translation.I m not unimpressed with Wehr s range of sources and interests, and it may be that he has written more intensive studies which would benefit me. But taken as a whole, I would not recommend this book in its current translation. The Irmengard Bardo report of the eleventh chapter is the only reason that it will remain in my collection for the time being.The Hrmtc Underground Network is a group of sites and blogs that are connected together through their relationship to the mission and subject matter of the HermeticLibraryatHermetic.comComments or questions? Proudly powered by WordPress

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