What do we see when we look at writing? In addition to the verbal messages conveyed by the written words, visual dimensions of script are powerful tools that hold semantic value. This dissertation focuses on one such visual element—the arrangement of written words into geometric shapes or patterns in the context of medieval Islamicate societies (1100–1250 AD)—to uncover its meanings. The dissertation offers a primary case study of the Kitāb al-diryāq (Book of Antidotes, 595 AH/1199 AD, BnF arabe 2964), an illuminated and illustrated manuscript with a variety of geometric patterns created using Arabic script. By examining a broad range of materials (scientific manuscripts, magical objects, and architectural decoration) across Late Antiquity and the medieval period, this heuristic study argues that the arrangement of script in geometric patterns was a vital medium of visualizing knowledge and transmitting knowledge—the form not only carrying cultural meanings but also shaping the reception of verbal messages. Magic is one form of knowledge that is particularly fruitful for examining the function of the geometric script patterns in general, and of the Kitāb al-diryāq in particular. This study traces the contexts in which the geometric script patterns appear, the cultural practices associated with them, and the medieval worldviews in which the patterns circulated. In considering these factors, the study argues that the combination of shape and script is embedded with knowledge that reflects the medieval scientific, magical, and popular imagination. / Graduate / 2023-06-23

The work will consists of tarot inspired large format pictures which can be used as a traditional tarot card deck. The outcome will be installation of drawings and documentation of card/pictures reading performances.

Nasir-ud-Din Muhammad Humayun (1508-1556), simply known as Humayun, was the second emperor of the Mughal Empire in India. He is often known with a discredited image in history even though recent investigations show a new, different, and regenerated perspective about him. This reconsideration is in relation to the philosophical, syncretic, and artistic pursuits and the spiritual heritage that he transmitted, which came to impact and define Mughal tradition and culture overall. Accordingly,  this thesis has on one hand the purpose to analyse and expose the not so much known “occult sciences” of Humayun, known as ‘ulum-i ghariba, which are defined in relation to their appliances and historical contexts, especially in relation to Sufism and Arabic Hermeticism. They are moreover explored in how they were experienced in the imperial administration of the early Mughal court. On the other hand, these “occult sciences” of Humayun are analysed and discussed in relation to the definitions of Western esotericism and practices of Renaissance Hermeticism as taught by Antoine Faivre, whose theory is employed for this thesis. The method used for this investigation combines a qualitative text analysis and a specific empirical approach with diachronic and synchronic applications. The result of this research shows that the “occult sciences” of Humayun help to define and confirm a wider study field of “comparative esotericism”, which goes beyond the borders of the Western culture, and which is found with its unique interpretations as an esoteric expression within Islam, and specifically at the dawn of the Mughal tradition.

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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

G. R. S. Mead is an important but neglected historical personality of the British fin-de-siècle occult, Theosophical, and post-Theosophical milieu. While previous scholars of Theosophy have portrayed the Theosophical movement as quite cohesive in nature, I argue that it might have been a lot more pluralistic, with ostensibly key Theosophical concepts being open for debate. By a careful study of Mead’s editorial activity, his debates with other Theosophists in leading occultist journal over the period 1890s through 1910s, I illustrate that Mead held alternative views of key Theosophical concepts. This gives us a clue as to how the movement of Theosophy can be characterized differently. I suggest that we speak of many different “Theosophies” rather than one singular “Theosophy” to better capture the seemingly diverse makeup of the Theosophical movement. I look at three areas wherein Mead’s views differed from those of other important Theosophists: the concept of “the Masters” as spiritual authority, which sources to turn to and how to interpret them, and the question of whether occultism should be understood primarily in theoretical or in practical terms. I propose that by seeing Theosophy as a debating ground where many different Theosophists competed over the definition of their particular kind of Theosophy, we might also better account for why so many post-Theosophical currents emerged. Lastly, Mead’s concept of “Gnosis” might have served as a bridge between his Theosophical and post-Theosophical periods, as the concept’s meaning, along with Mead’s spiritual outlook, does not appear to have changed over time. This gives some consequences to how we conceive of post-Theosophy, since he does not fit neatly within that category.

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2016-08-31T18:06:11Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Fabio Mendia.pdf: 6392530 bytes, checksum: 6077624ba89a84a25312bf15c0c71cd1 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-31T18:06:12Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Fabio Mendia.pdf: 6392530 bytes, checksum: 6077624ba89a84a25312bf15c0c71cd1 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-04-27 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The purpose of the present research is to develop a hermeneutical process to better understand Fernando Pessoa’s Rosicrucian hued esoteric thought, within the cultural horizon of each reader, through Pessoa’s notes and the sense of the esoteric experience expressed in his poems. Its main objectives are to contribute to the understanding of Pessoa’s work and to the expansion of Western Esotericism field of research in Brazilian academy. The process adds to the rational analysis of the text the emotional experience of the poems, and is based upon Gadamer’s phenomenological hermeneutic, the imaginary, contemplative practices of several esoteric, mystical and traditional religious currents, and utilizes an adaptation of Alfonso López Quintás “Lúdico Ambital” method. The work is presented in six chapters, starting with a discussion on Western Esotericism’s definition and a brief history of its sources and main currents up to nowadays. It follows with an introduction on phenomenological hermeneutics and a discussion on religious expression, the imaginary, the “imaginal world”, and the ways religious experiences can be expressed. It includes a brief presentation of Fernando Pessoa’s life and thought, particularly his notes on esotericism, and selects 31 poems to illustrate the study. It develops and applies a hermeneutical method to interpret these poems, followed by an appendix in which the method is exemplified through fictional characters. The work is completed by an addendum containing a more complete version of the poems for reference, as well as images to better explain some esoteric concepts / O presente trabalho se propõe a estabelecer um processo hermenêutico para melhor compreender o pensamento esotérico de matiz rosacruciano de Fernando Pessoa, dentro do horizonte cultural de cada leitor, através das anotações do poeta e do sentido da vivência esotérica expressa por ele em suas poesias. Pretende com isso, de um lado, contribuir no esclarecimento deste pensamento para um melhor entendimento de sua obra, e, do outro, auxiliar a abrir mais o campo de estudo do Esoterismo Ocidental na academia brasileira. Este processo, que agrega à análise racional dos textos a vivência emocional dos poemas, se baseia na Hermenêutica Fenomenológica de Gadamer, na teoria do imaginário, na prática contemplativa de várias correntes religiosas, místicas e esotéricas tradicionais, acrescido de uma adaptação do método Lúdico-Ambital de Alfonso López Quintás de interação com os textos. O trabalho em seis capítulos se inicia com a discussão do que é o Esoterismo Ocidental e faz um breve histórico de suas fontes e principais correntes até os dias de hoje. Segue discutindo o sentido da Hermenêutica Fenomenológica; da linguagem religiosa; do imaginário e do “mundo imaginal”; e o modo como as experiências religiosas podem ser expressas. Apresenta a vida e o pensamento de Pessoa, em particular suas anotações sobre o Esoterismo, e seleciona trinta e um poemas para ilustrar o estudo. Desenvolve e aplica um processo hermenêutico para a compreensão desses poemas e, por fim, inclui um apêndice onde o método é ilustrado através do uso de personagens fictícios. O trabalho é completado por um Anexo para consultas, contendo os poemas selecionados numa versão mais completa, e algumas figuras que ilustram conceitos esotéricos

Cette dissertation possède un abordage qualitatif et se base sur l´ethnographie réalisée pendant la période de septembre 2013 au décembre 2014 au cours des conférences publiques offertes hebdomadairement par la Loge Théosophique Dharma, localisée dans la ville de Porto Alegre. L´objectif de cette étude consiste à analyser comment les préceptes de la Théosophie Moderne s´articulent et sont agenciés par les sujets de recherche en son quotidien. À partir de l´observation participante, de conférences semi-structurées, et recherche dans la littérature théosophique, il a été possible conclu quelle compréhension de Théosophie Moderne présentée par les sujets analysés chez Loge Théosophique Dharma se met si tant en lieu et place d´une courante de spiritualisme du siècle XIX qui preserve des caractéristiques de l´exotérisme, de l´occultisme, et les réligions orientales selon les écritures de Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, mais s´ajoutent également des références à la réligiosité et pratiques de l´univers Nouvelle Ère. / Esta dissertação possui uma abordagem qualitativa e baseia-se na etnografia realizada no período de setembro de 2013 a dezembro de 2014 em palestras públicas oferecidas semanalmente pela Loja Teosófica Dharma, localizada na cidade de Porto Alegre-RS. O objetivo desse estudo consiste em analisar como os preceitos da Teosofia Moderna articulam-se e são agenciados pelos sujeitos de pesquisa em seu cotidiano. A partir da observação participante, de entrevistas semi-estruturadas e pesquisa na literatura teosófica, foi possível concluir que a compreensão de Teosofia Moderna apresentada pelos sujeitos analisados na Loja Teosófica Dharma se coloca tanto entre o lugar de uma corrente do espiritualismo do século XIX que preserva características do esoterismo, do ocultismo, e das religiões orientais conforme os escritos de Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, mas soma também referências a religiosidades e práticas do universo Nova Era. / This study has a qualitative approach and based on the ethnography conducted from September 2013 to December 2014 in public lectures offered weekly by Theosophical Dharma Lodge, located in Porto Alegre-RS. The aim of this study is to analyze how the precepts of Modern Theosophy are articulated and are touted by research participants in their daily lives. From participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and research in theosophical literature, it was possible to conclude that understanding of Modern Theosophy presented by the analyzed subjects in the Theosophical Dharma Lodge arises between the place of a spiritualism current of 19th century that preserves esotericism, occultism and Eastern religions features as the writings of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, but also adds references to religiosities and practices of the New Age universe.

Cette dissertation possède un abordage qualitatif et se base sur l´ethnographie réalisée pendant la période de septembre 2013 au décembre 2014 au cours des conférences publiques offertes hebdomadairement par la Loge Théosophique Dharma, localisée dans la ville de Porto Alegre. L´objectif de cette étude consiste à analyser comment les préceptes de la Théosophie Moderne s´articulent et sont agenciés par les sujets de recherche en son quotidien. À partir de l´observation participante, de conférences semi-structurées, et recherche dans la littérature théosophique, il a été possible conclu quelle compréhension de Théosophie Moderne présentée par les sujets analysés chez Loge Théosophique Dharma se met si tant en lieu et place d´une courante de spiritualisme du siècle XIX qui preserve des caractéristiques de l´exotérisme, de l´occultisme, et les réligions orientales selon les écritures de Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, mais s´ajoutent également des références à la réligiosité et pratiques de l´univers Nouvelle Ère. / Esta dissertação possui uma abordagem qualitativa e baseia-se na etnografia realizada no período de setembro de 2013 a dezembro de 2014 em palestras públicas oferecidas semanalmente pela Loja Teosófica Dharma, localizada na cidade de Porto Alegre-RS. O objetivo desse estudo consiste em analisar como os preceitos da Teosofia Moderna articulam-se e são agenciados pelos sujeitos de pesquisa em seu cotidiano. A partir da observação participante, de entrevistas semi-estruturadas e pesquisa na literatura teosófica, foi possível concluir que a compreensão de Teosofia Moderna apresentada pelos sujeitos analisados na Loja Teosófica Dharma se coloca tanto entre o lugar de uma corrente do espiritualismo do século XIX que preserva características do esoterismo, do ocultismo, e das religiões orientais conforme os escritos de Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, mas soma também referências a religiosidades e práticas do universo Nova Era. / This study has a qualitative approach and based on the ethnography conducted from September 2013 to December 2014 in public lectures offered weekly by Theosophical Dharma Lodge, located in Porto Alegre-RS. The aim of this study is to analyze how the precepts of Modern Theosophy are articulated and are touted by research participants in their daily lives. From participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and research in theosophical literature, it was possible to conclude that understanding of Modern Theosophy presented by the analyzed subjects in the Theosophical Dharma Lodge arises between the place of a spiritualism current of 19th century that preserves esotericism, occultism and Eastern religions features as the writings of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, but also adds references to religiosities and practices of the New Age universe.