Emmanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish scientist and mystic, held that the soul of a man was a 'spiritual fluid' diffused throughout the body, and that the medium for its diffusion was the blood, which was thus imbued with power from the divine source. On the other hand the French occultist Eliphas Levi spoke of blood as 'the astral light made manifest in matter', the astral light in this context being the vital principle of the etheric world.
Blood was regarded by all peoples throughout history as a magic substance of tremendous psychic potency and was therefore universally hedged in by taboos. It was the sign of supreme sacrifice; it sealed covenants; it betokened both maidenly virtue and the magic power of virgins. If split on the earth blood cried aloud for vengeance...'There is scarcely any natural object with so profoundly emotional an effect as blood'.
Benjamin Walker, Beyond the Body: The Human Double and the Astral Planes
circa this past spring during my esoteric jihad / yukio mishima phase.
The Qabalah describes the universe as divided into four separate “Worlds”. The first is Atziluth, the Archetypal World, the world of Pure Spirit which activates all of the other worlds which evolve from it. The second world is Briah, the Creative World, the level of pure intellect. The third is Yetzirah, called the Formative World because here are found the subtle and fleeting patterns behind matter. The final World is Assiah, the active world containing both the physical world of sensation and the unseen energies of matter.
Robert Wang, The Qabalistic Tarot: A Textbook of Mystical Philosophy
The very notion of culture is an artifact created by bracketing Nature off. Cultures — different or universal — do not exist, any more than Nature does. There are only natures-cultures, and these offer the only possible basis for comparison. As soon as we take practices of mediation as well as practices of purification into account, we discover that the moderns do not separate humans from nonhumans any more than the totally superimpose signs and things.
[…] Absolute relativism presupposes cultures that are separate and incommensurable and cannot be ordered in any hierarchy; there is no use talking about it, since it brackets off Nature. As for cultural relativism, which is more subtle, Nature comes into play, but in order to exist it does not presuppose any scientific work, any society, any construction, any mobilization, any network.
—Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern
Untitled #289
From Blue and red light: or, Light and its rays as medicine; showing that light is the original and sole source of life, as it is the source of all the physical and vital forces in nature and that light is nature’s own and only remedy for disease by Seth Pancoast, 1877.
Context: Weblog | Books | Videos | Music | Etsy
astronomical/astrological diagrams
from an astronomical-astrological composite manuscript, alsace, 15th c.
source: Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 1370
Cognitive conceptualization of borderline personality disorder
Hal Straus and Jerold Jay Kreisman, Sometimes I Act Crazy