Title of work: Electrolyte Artist: Judit Fritz Konstfack, Ädellab   ABSTRACT How much of the ocean have I filtered while in tears? Many times, while growing up on an island have I laid eyes on the enormous surrounding body of water and wondered – is the sorrow still in there? In small portions the human body and the bodies of nature exposes each other as part of their own content. Offering a glimpse into a constant material flow. Diffusing the boundaries between object and subject. A material flow that makes it impossible to tell what anything really is, because it has already evolved. My tears taste like the ocean. So does my sweat. I Find comfort in knowing I constantly take part in something that is beyond my human comprehension. That I don’t need to fully understand why I am here, because it is obvious that I, and everyone else play a part. We just don’t know the whole scene. Though a post humanistic angle I have investigated the close relation between matter, material, the human body and the bodies of nature, to find a connection point which decreases the hierarchy between object and subject. By crystallizing matter derived from human body fluids and building a machinery that portrays the process I invite the perceiver to a closeup of their part in a never-ending system. The agency of this project is to raise questions rather than finding answers, as I believe the human is in need of reevaluating their way of thinking when it comes to material and resources. I have tried to shift focus from the human perspective and self-centeredness into a set where we participate rather than being the perceiver. Alchemy was used as both a method and as an art historical reference, as the alchemical mindset is to learn through the act of making. This has been blended with modern days technology and imagination to build a body of work that balances between science and art. While being heavily based on theory and research, the body of work is a translation in which I allowed myself to freely portray how I imagine the travelling of matter is systemized. I created a working place where studies of the unseen is concentrated and visualized. Where the many sorrows and the hard work of human beings crystallize into solids, becoming nature again. Or was it ever not? And vice versa. Throughout the project, even though separated from everything that I connect to being human, the crystals made from pure matter derived from sweat and tears could not be separated from the knowledge of their origin. Even as objects, I see them as subjects. A conclusion that shed light upon the relativeness between bodies. A conclusion that brings life into what is often seen as dead, simultaneously showing the complex machinery of an emotional being.

This paper looks at the emerging conflict between natural philosophy and empirical science in the late sixteenth century by examining the events surrounding the supposed discovery of gold in northern North America by Martin Frobisher in 1577. The discovery of gold in a region thought incapable of producing the metal, and the subsequent assays of ore mined from that region served as a catalyst for conflict between different understandings of the natural world. Proponents of natural philosophy and empirical science each used their theoretical tools to prove or disprove the value of the ore, reflecting the larger discussions taking place about the nature of the natural world.

<p>Jean d’Espagnet (c. 1564–1637?) was a magistrate and presiding judge at the<em> parlement </em>of  Bordeaux  in  the  late  sixteenth  and  early  seventeenth  centuries.    He  served  on  the  court  from 1590 until retiring in 1615, from 1600 as a <em>président</em>, a venal office of significant power and social standing. After retirement he wrote three books which comprise his literary and intellectual legacy.Together they speak to the fertile philosophical ground of the late Renaissance and present a vision of order and God’s cosmos deeply influenced by Neoplatonism,  Hermetism,  Paracelsianism, Neostoicism,  and  medieval  alchemy,  as  well  as  d’Espagnet’s  judicial  education  and  social experience as a magistrate.  This dissertation explores the foundations of d’Espagnet’s philosophy of nature, tracing the development of certain philosophical ideas from ancient sources such as the Platonic and Hermetic traditions through medieval and Renaissance philosophers like Ramon Lull, Pseudo-Geber, and Marsilio Ficino to d’Espagnet and his contemporaries.  Paracelsian chemical medicine found some  acceptance during d’Espagnet’s lifetime, though not without struggle and dangers to its adherents.  This project also examines the context of d’Espagnet’s life and experience as a judicial elite in a kingdom and community beset by religious strife and political uncertainty.It argues that d’Espagnet and his fellow magistrates desperately sought order in the midst of these troubles,  and  that d’Espagnet echoed across all his writings this  concern  for  order  alongside a particular set of ideas about gender, shared by his fellow magistrates, according to which feminine passions  were  the  root  of  disorder  and masculine  reason was  the  antidote.    This gendered understanding of order was fundamental to d’Espagnet’s thought and reinforced by his syncretic reading of ancient and modern philosophical textsalongside his own experience, leading him to produce a unique and consistent syncretic philosophy that sought to answer definitively some of humanity’s oldest questions about the nature of matter, man, and the cosmos.</p>

The artist discusses her Master of Fine Arts exhibition, Inside, Outside, In-Between, held at the Carroll Reece Museum on the campus of East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, Tennessee, from February 26 through March 13, 2008. The works included in this exhibition are a collection of paintings that employ the use of traditional and non-traditional materials to explore the connections between place and memory. These pieces are investigations into materiality and process, combining local beeswax, sticks, garden soil, charcoal, and ashes together with oil, shellac, oil pastel, pencil, and other traditional artist's materials. Ideas discussed include materiality, process, composition, cropping, collective and selective memory, landmarks, archaeology, gardening, borders and boundaries, parietal Paleolithic art and the art of the Abstract Expressionists, ritual, alchemy, time, liminality, and the influences of Michelle Stuart, Mary Frank, and Cai Guo-Qiang.

This qualitative study aims to examine Swedish middle school teachers’interpretation of the new curriculum of religious education (RE) whichcomes into effect in the fall of 2022(Lgr 22). The curriculum of REunderwent, like many other school subjects, significant changes to itsformulations. Historically, RE has been prone to change in its content andphrasing. These changes in formulation resulted in a shift in the Swedishteachers practice as well as their perspective of what abilities are relevantfor students to acquire through teaching. It is therefore of interest tosurvey changes that are perceived as prominent in Lgr 22, their effects onteachers’ perception of the subject as well as teachers’ predictions ofchange in planning for RE. Four themes emerge through Popkewitzprocess of alchemy in an attempt to analyze the teacher’s interpretationof RE in Lgr 22. First off, the result indicates a transition from ananalytically predominant curriculum to instead advocate shaping of thestudents understanding of the actions of others. Secondly, the resultindicates an inconsistency in defining the content of RE. Teaching of worldreligions is presented with a strong classification and appears unanimousthroughout the teachers’ interpretations. Questions of life and ethics(QOLE) are presented as weak in classification and is not well definedwithin the framework of the RE curriculum. Finally, there seem to be nocorrelation between the approach teachers take towards studying a newcurriculum and the coherence between QOLE and the RE curriculum andthe commentary material. Teachers who throughout their careerfrequently changed school forms, present a stronger coherence whenasked to describe their approach to QOLE. The study occurs during thecurriculums initial applicational state where the need of continuousresearch regarding its practical application is necessary. Researchregarding teachers’ didactical literacy when discussing and contemplatingRE is required as well. There is also a need of developing the dialoguebetween the field of religondidactics and the national agency of education.

This research is a curiosity for the spaces outside the gender binary, the spaces where an “I” and a “we” could manifest unencumbered by this hierarchical binary[1]. The binary is often in gender research considered a system of understanding sexed peoples in this world based on their differential position in relation to one another. Gender as a “social category imposed on a sexed body”[2] arose in academic usage by feminists in the 1980s, it was introduced to dismantle the idea of separate spheres, and yet it “does not have the power to address existing historical paradigms”[3] and has therefore remained anchored in the idea of two, the male and female identity, and even whilst the idea of male and female social identities has been expanded to contain other sexed and gendered bodies, , the idea of an agendered subject is sparsely addressed. In essence this work seeks to address the binary of existence and non-existence in the bio-social-psychological world that is gender studies, to attempt to find the alchemical magic that creates a new cartography of gender, or at least a sliver of new territory.                Gender is currently one of the base categories of identification in a world built on: §  religious narratives in which “God/s” made only man and woman.  §  biological determination which posits a dependent binary relationship based on gametes.  §  and systemic thinking grounded in Patriarchal thinking.  Whilst the spaces outside the gender binary have become more thinkable in recent decades with the advent of Transgender studies[4] as an academic field, Irigaray[5] offers that the space outside the binary structure offers only “social and psychological damage”[6] to anyone seeking to inhabit it. This thesis thus explores a particular identity cartography which I here call the alchemy of agender, in reference to the potentially mythical, potentially magical space outside of the “norm”.    This research does not claim to cover all theories of power, subjectivity, sexual difference, or the growing body of knowledge within gender studies, pertinently transgender studies, queer studies, and intersectional studies. Conversely, I start from lived experience, both my own; in encountering questions and concerns from the students I teach; and the lived experience of others which manifests in a desire of a community to speak themselves into existence.                In my 8 years of teaching variations of gender studies I have observed that the language and space young people have for imagining and queering their gender has steadily increased. Yet, agender is still very unexplored as a concept, with a constant question of “why do we need gender?” accompanying my student’s reflections. Throughout human history we have examples of agender/non-binary/queer/non-conforming individuals, creating an “I” and a “we” that is outside, beyond or uninhibited by the gender binary, or at the very least the infamous, and equally at times unwelcome, “third wheel” to the binary.    With this research I would like to follow two intertwined threads; a short and questionable diachronic journey of agender; secondly to posit what an “I” and a “we” without and beyond gender might constitute, succinctly to explore how agender/ non-binary identities are formed. Our thought system allows for feminine males and masculine females, or a patchwork of gender traits blended in what is recognized as non-conforming or gender queer, yet I am curious if agendered experiences offer merely another blend or an entire alternative.   In my quest to draw a cartography of agender, I am motivated by the concept of eidetic reduction, this being the Husserlian approach that argues that we can determine the limitations of a phenomena through exploration of lived experiences of that phenomena. For this research, it means gathering experiences from self-identified agender individuals online to determine the essences of this experience. Namely eidetic reduction is when one moves from lived experience, to a more abstract essence, through to a kind of collective categorization of a concept. This is achieved through identifying experiences that are unique to the group in question. In this I am excited to see how exploring agendered experiences can create gender magic, and consequently a possibility to re-imagine who you or I might be.   Succinctly an online ethnographic study of agender discussions will be used to ascertain if there is something unique about the agender experience, how it might differentiate from a trans* experience or a gendered experience.  [1] Scott, J.W. (1986) Gender: A Useful category of Historical Analysis. The American Historical Review, Vol 91, No. 5, pp.[2] Scott, J.W. (1986) Gender: A Useful category of Historical Analysis. The American Historical Review, Vol 91, No. 5, pp.1056[3] Scott, J.W. (1986) Gender: A Useful category of Historical Analysis. The American Historical Review, Vol 91, No. 5, pp.1057[4] In the western world the advent of this field is associated with an article written by Sandy Stone published in 1987 entitled, “The Empire strikes back: A posttranssexual manifesto” (first presented at a UCSC conference entitled "Other Voices, Other Worlds: Questioning Gender and Ethnicity"). [5] Braidotti, R (2003) Becoming Woman: or sexual difference revisited. Theory, Culture and Society, Vol.20, Issue 3, pp. 43-64[6] Braidotti, R (2003) Becoming Woman: or sexual difference revisited. Theory, Culture and Society, Vol.20, Issue 3, pp. 43-64

From the late Victorian period to the early twentieth century, Arthur Machen's life and his writing provide what Deleuze and Guattari argue to be the value of the minor author: Contemporary historical streams combine in Machen's fiction and non-fiction. The concerns and anxieties in the writing reflect developments in their times, and exist amid the questions incited by positivist science, sexological studies, and the dissemination and popularity of Darwin's theories and the interpretations of Social Darwinism: What is the integrity of the human body, and what are the relevance and varieties of spiritual belief. The personal and the social issues of materiality and immateriality are present in the choice of Machen's themes and the manner in which he expresses them. More specifically, Machen's use of place and his interest in numinosity, which includes the negative numinous, are the twining forces where the local and the common, and the Ideal and the esoteric, meet. His interest in Western esotericism is important because of the Victorian occult revival and the ritual magic groups' role in the development of individual psychic explorations. Occultism and the formation of ritual magic groups are a response to deep-seated cultural concerns of industrialized, urban modernity. Within the esoteric traditions, the Gnostic outlook of a fractured creation corresponds to the cosmogony of a divided cosmos and the disjointed realities that are found in Machen's late-Victorian literary horror and supernatural fiction. The Gnostic microcosm, at the local level, and the mesocosm, at the intermediary position, are at a remove from the unified providence of the greater macrocosm. The content of the texts that I will analyze demonstrates Machen's interest in the divided self (with inspiration from Robert Louis Stevenson), and those texts consider the subject of non-normative sexuality and its uncanny representations, natural and urban, as a horror that is attractive and abject--a source of fascination and a cause of disgust. The view that I state is that Machen wrote late-Victorian, post-Romantic Gothic literature that is not dependent upon either the cares of Decadence for artificiality or the disavowal of Gnosticism of the worth of mortal life and experiences in the material world. Machen's outlook is similar to Hermeticism, and like the Hermeticists he enjoyed many of the pleasures available in the world and in the narratives of ecstatic wonder that he found: the power of archetypal myth and local lore; good food and drink; travel between country and city; and close associations with friends and family, modest in number and rich in quality. The Great God Pan, The Three Impostors, or, The Transmutations, "The White People," and the autobiographies Far Off Things and Things Near and Far are the primary sources in my study. The enchantment of place and the potential and active horrors of the countryside and the city of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods inform Arthur Machen's life and his literary world. The influence of Machen's childhood in his native county of Gwent, in South Wales, and his adult residency in everywhere from low-rent to more-desirable areas of London feature prominently in two volumes of his fiction, which appeared in the influential Keynotes Series published by John Lane's Bodley Head Press in the 1890s: The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light (1894), and The Three Impostors, or, The Transmutations (1895). Those works of fiction indicate a major pattern in Machen's outlook and imagination. For instance, the The Great God Pan presents Machen's late-Victorian re-invention of Pan, the classical rustic Arcadian god of Greek mythology. The Pan demon--or sinister Pan--evidences an aspect of threatening vitalistic nature that appears at the indefinite center of sexual concealment. Male characters act in secrecy by necessity due to the Labouchère Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Machen uses the more beneficent, affirming aspects of the Pan figure for the short story "The White People" (1899) in the long middle section titled The Green Book. However, threats to female adolescence and sexual sovereignty, and contending principles of female and male energies, unpredictably strike through the more sinister and in the more beneficent of Machen's tales, which include the prose poems of Ornaments in Jade. These factors sometime destroy life, and seldom conceive or sustain its creation. Yet the presence of esoteric concepts in those same narratives offers non-rational alternatives to the attainment of gnosis. The Three Impostors, the second of Machen's Keynotes volumes, with its plot of conspiracies and dark secrets not only suggests Machen's interest in the criminal underworld and involvement with the ritual magic groups of the late-nineteenth century, but also his caution about the dark attraction of that glamour and how those occult groups and leaders operated. The Horos case and trial of 1901 and the Charles Webster Leadbeater scandal of 1906 provide support for Machen's circumspection. However, as a skeptic of the occult in practice, but as a reader and writer who had a deep interest in the esoteric as a subject of study, Machen's literary writing presents a variety of tensions between belief in the idealism of spiritual realities and the necessity for clear and grounded reason in consideration of preternatural phenomena. The interest in the abnormal functioning of bodies, a convention of Gothic fiction, appears in Machen's work in correspondence to the status of Sexology and the proliferation of studies of human sexuality in the late Victorian period. Especially important is the concept of sexual inversion, a term for homosexuality that was popularized in the works of the scientific researchers Richard von Krafft-Ebing, in Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), and Havelock Ellis, in Sexual Inversion (co-authored by John Addington Symonds), which is the first volume of Ellis's series Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897). The final chapters of Machen's The Great God Pan are set in 1888 in London, and there is a direct reference to the White Chapel murders (i.e., the Ripper crimes). Therefore, I analyze Machen's fiction for its gendered focus on abhuman qualities, abnormal behavior, and violence: the abhuman as understood by Kelly Hurley, and violence in London as a version of Walkowitz's London as City of Dreadful Delight. Another historical context exists because the year before Machen finished the first chapter, "The Experiment," the Cleveland Street affair and its scandal occurred and included a royal intervention from the Prince of Wales to halt any prosecutions (1889). In The Great God Pan, Helen Vaughan, who passes from salons in Mayfair to houses of assignation in Soho, represents a dynamic, unified force of being and becoming that draws from and revises the multiple but fractured personality of Stevenson's Jekyll. Likewise, The Green Book girl in the short fiction "The White People" experiences a communion of gnosis that separates her from the social life and conditions of her father, a lawyer, and his middle class world of the British Empire's materialist legal structures. The esoteric and otherworldly, and the physical and material, combine, fragment, and transcend in the local world and the greater cosmos imagined by Arthur Machen. / English

This study focuses on two areas: alchemy (Part I) and rituals of initiation (Part II) in the works of Miguel de Cervantes, focusing on Don Quijote de la Mancha as my main case study. The first part analyses the function of alchemy and how it can be interpreted throughout the works and various literary genres of Cervantes. It will demonstrate that the texts of Cervantes contain both explicit and implicit allusions to, as well as different aspects of alchemy, such as operative and spiritual alchemy and how these are ultimately used by Cervantes as a means of expression. The author draws from this rich source and modifies these means of expression in order to achieve various results: sometimes with wit or in relation to fraud; at other times it focuses on inner alchemy relating to chivalry in what I have called spiritual chivalry, which has the aim of self-improvement and ultimately, gnosis. Regarding the chivalric rituals of initiation, according to this investigation chivalry serves as both satire and representation of the alchemical process in the case of Don Quijote, which finds its key moments during the rituals. In this sense alchemy and chivalry are studied as two sides of the same coin, in which the search for something higher, an object (the philosopher stone, the beloved), subjects the protagonist to continuous transmutations and puts him in contact with the transitory, that is, liminal states, people and spaces. From this perspective Don Quixote de la Mancha is built upon liminal poetics. My approach, which follows the tenets of analogical hermeneutics, is included within the framework of the Western Esotericism Studies. The 16th and 17th centuries were a fertile age for alchemy throughout Europe. In Spain, alchemy and other esoteric disciplines co-existed with the Spanish Inquisition and its body for the control of ideas and texts: censorship. By being ambiguous and putting into dialogue different ideas of alchemy, Cervantes not only allowed readers to reach their own conclusions, he also protected his work from censorship.

Trataremos de estabelecer os pontos de relação e contato entre as práticas da pintura medieval e a operatória alquímica, ou, noutras palavras, a relação entre o ateliê e o laboratório alquímico. Investigaremos cuidadosamente algumas receitas para produção de pigmentos presente em manuais de ateliê e técnicas de pintura, situados entre os séculos IX e XVI, procurando indicar como variadas substâncias e ingredientes foram igualmente empregados e manipulados por pintores e alquimistas em busca de perscrutarem os segredos da matéria e realizarem suas Obras. Em um segundo momento, procuraremos explicitar a maneira como pintores e alquimistas se relacionavam com seus ingredientes e operações. Desamparados de conhecimentos cientificamente complexos e sem possuírem sofisticados instrumentos de medição, estes artífices exploraram inúmeras substâncias e realizaram suas obras contando apenas com seus cincos sentido corpóreos tato, paladar, olfato, visão e audição. É, pois, essa dimensão corpórea e sensível que garantirá uma longa série de profundos e sutis conhecimentos sobre as substâncias trabalhadas por esses artífices, e que nos permitirá refletir sobre a dimensão da Arte-Educação. Assim, orientados por uma compreensão fenomenológica, indicaremos como as práticas de ateliê e do laboratório alquímico configuram-se como itinerários de formação que possibilitam a realização e refinamento de uma Educação de Sensibilidade. / In a way to establish the touching points and the relationship between the medieval painting practices and alchemical operationd, or, in other words, the relationship between the artistc studio and the alchemical laboratory, it will be carefully investigate some recipes for pigments production in studio manuals and painting techniques located between the ninth and sixteenth centuries, seeking to show how painters and alchemists used and manipulated various substances and ingredients while tryed to unraveld the secrets of matter and perform their Works. Secondly, it will be explained how painters and alchemists were related to their ingredients and operations. Destitute of complex scientifically knowledge and without having sophisticated measuring instruments, these craftsmen explore numerous substances and performed their works with only the five tangible sense - touch, taste, smell, sight and hearing. Therefore, this body and sensitive dimension that will ensure a long series of deep and subtle knowledge of the substances worked by these artificies, it will allow us to reflect on the extent of Art Education. Therefore, guided by a phenomenological understanding, it will indicate how the studio practices and alchemical laboratory are configured as learning itinerary (training route) that enable the performance and refinement of the Education of the sensitivity.

Este estudo busca evidenciar a natureza utópica de A Rosa do Povo, explorando algumas das tensões que envolvem o processo de constituição do sujeito lírico, dentre as quais destaco: a problemática da projeção do sujeito para o espaço público da rua, em poemas que se tornam longos para dar lugar às diferentes vozes da coletividade, face ao resguardo de certa autonomia descompromissada do eu poético; as relações entre lírica e sociedade, diante das exigências político-sociais da década de 1940. Essas tensões são lidas sob o enfoque do conceito da utopia, que possibilita verificar, em cada poema analisado, uma mensagem poética específica, a um só tempo crítica e esperançosa. Ainda que cada composição seja lida como fragmento autônomo, os poemas também se articulam no conjunto da obra, simbolizada pela rosa. A interpretação dessa imagem, que se repete ao longo do livro e condensa a sua multiplicidade temática, permite ao leitor uma visão do todo. Procuramos demonstrar como esse processo de construção poética acaba por evidenciar também o uso simbólico de operações alquímicas, de modo que se possa compreender a obra como uma espécie de utopia alquimista, inserida que está num processo ininterrupto de materialização e desconstrução do canto, a refletir a concepção drummondiana acerca da precariedade do poético. / The purpose of this research is to show the utopic nature of A Rosa do Povo, exploring some of the tensions that involve the development process of the liric subject in which among others I would highlight: the projection of the public space in poems that last long to make possible a multiplicity of voices of colective, in face of the uncompromissed autonomy of the poetic subject; the acqward relationship between liric and society, in face of the social politcs needs of the 1940 forties. These tensions are understood, over the concept of the utopic society, that allows us to verify, in each of the researched poem, a specific poetic message, at the same time critic and full of hope. Even understood as an autonom fragment, each one of the poem gather in the whole of the book, represented by the \"rose\". This image interpretation, that come over all long the book, condense the tematic multiplicity and allows the reader a sight of the whole of the book. We seek to demonstrate how this process of poetic construction ends up also highlighting the symbolic use of alchemical operations so that we can understand the work as a kind of \'alchemist utopia\', part of an uninterrupted process of materialization and deconstruction of the poem, that reflects the drummondianas conception of the precariousness of the poetic.