What was Hermetic Philosophy?

What was the Rosicrucian Movement?

The movement belongs to late Renaissance Hermetism. The Rosicrucians were a mysterious sect which originated in Germany, in a Lutheran milieu. They represent the tendency of Renaissance occultism to go underworld in the 17th century, transforming what once was an outlook associated with dominant philosophies into a preoccupation with secret sects. The beginnings of that group were associated with the publication of certain texts, one of them being The (Al)chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz. Anno 1459 (1616) - a feigned autobiography narrated by a hermit, who sets out on a pilgrimage journey and takes part in initiation mysteries.

What was Hermetic Philosophy?

The Renaissance recovers the cultural heritage of classical antiquity. Among the texts studied by -the Italian Humanists were the magical treatises written between 100 A.D. and 300 A. D.. They came to be known as Corpus Hermeticum. They contain a mixture of popular Greek philosophy of the period, esp. Platonism and Stoicism, combined with Jewish and Persian influence. Corpus Hermeticum praises intuitive knowledge. The hermetic treatises usually culminate in some form of ecstasy in which the adept is satisfied -that lie has received, an illumination. Because it was believed that Egypt was the original home of all knowledge, the magical religion of Egypt was identified with the Hermetic religion of the world. When a Greek manuscript of Corpus Hermeticum is brought to Florence in 1640, Cosimo de Medici, the Florentine aristocrat orders a translation of this work - assigned to Marcilio Ficiino. Translated, the work gains immense popularity because it is mistakenly taken for a sacred, book, earlier even than Plato, and therefore nearest to the divine truth, a source for all the other texts. It was assumed that the author of this work was Hermes Trismegistos (Three Times Great). The occult magical knowledge that develops in the Renaissance under the influence of this work is referred to as Hermetic- knowledge. It privileges intuitive knowledge and disclaims any connection with evil or ignorant magic of the Middle Ages. It is closer to the philosophy of nature and stresses the element of spiritual progress. Renaissance alchemy is closely related to this phenomenon.

Dramatic irony, in literature, a plot device in which the audience’s or reader’s knowledge of events or individuals surpasses that of the characters. The words and actions of the characters therefore take on a different meaning for the audience or reader than they have for the play’s characters. This may happen when, for example, a character reacts in an inappropriate or foolish way or when a character lacks self-awareness and thus acts under false assumptions.

Revenge tragedy, drama in which the dominant motive is revenge for a real or imagined injury; it was a favourite form of English tragedy in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras and found its highest expression in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

‘ Metadrama’ refers to instances of self-reflexivity in a play, where a play draws attention to itself as a work of dramatic art.

European colonizers tended to construct the identities of colonized peoples and lands as other: undeveloped, primitive, and immature; as homogeneous objects, rather than sources of knowledge; see Anand (2007) New Polit. Sci. 29, 1 on Western colonial representations of the (non-Western) other. The colonizer was represented as having a duty which entailed both financial and emotional cost (and for many these costs were very real).

Colonial discourse analysis critically examines the role played by these representations in colonialism and imperialism, ‘rather than focusing on texts, systems of signification, and procedures of knowledge generation…a fuller understanding of colonial powers is achieved by explaining colonialism's basic geographical dispossessions of the colonized’ (Harris (2004) AAAG 96, 1). ‘The city-state of Singapore is first represented in terms of a narrative of masculine heroism’

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