articol Ackroyd2.pdf

We all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out." -Robert McCammon I remember when I was six years old and I saw my first magic film. It was a cinematic adaptation of a Russian fairy tale about Ruslan and Ludmila. I was absorbed by the screen and transported into an enchanted forest inhabited by tree sprites, fire spirits, mermaids with painted skin and green hair, talking birds and dancing bears. I was there alongside the princess Ludmila, when she was abducted by a sorcerer-dwarf with an enormous white beard, when she fought off his army of elvish-blue guards with silk pillows, and when she escaped into a forest of white reef corals, and made her way across a bridge of floating ice. I didn't understand much about epic battles between good and evil, but I knew that I didn't like the sorcerer-dwarf and that I felt immediately drawn to the wise, old magician who lived in the forest and could communicate with the animals and resurrect the fallen hero with the elixir of life.

To describe a London besotted with transformative arts, Ben Jonson’’s The Alchemist (1610) appropriates practices and modes of thought from alchemy, particularly ideas about the generation and renement of life derived from the work of the Ger- man alchemist Paracelsus. Paracelsian chymistry was a considerable expansion of alchemy’’s domain, arguing that all substances——not just the metals traditionally manipulated by alchemists——could be transformed through alchemy. The refinement and creation of human beings and other living things, rather than gold, was the pinnacle of this art. The Alchemist is a product of the wide dissemination of alchemical practices and modes of thought in Jacobean London. It serves as Jonson’’s attempt to describe a world reinvented by human action and the creatures of art that would inhabit it. Adapting ideas from Paracelsian alchemy——particularly the process of creating a homunculus, or artificial man——Jonson creates his own artificial humans: the play’’s characters. While The Alchemist’’s promised new world blows up with Subtle’’s lab, at least one enduring new creature is invented: the mercurial Face, drama’’s homunculus.

Poetica (Berlin). 44. Band 2012 Heft 1-2

The author offers us a glimpse into his quest until his death, to understand and control mind, body, matter, time and space. A fascinating report, which the publisher describes in the foreword as ‘biographical notes’ and ‘an essay’. A search for the hidden powers of the soul.

Nuances, Volume 4 Issue 2, 2018

This essay and its purposes are twofold; it commences with an interactive discussion on the broad ideas associated with the module of Reincarnation as propagated primarily in Hinduism. The textual references are drawn from Swami Abhedananda's scholarly yet simplified explanation of its doctrines. The essay bifurcates thereon - in the first section I strive to demonstrate its application and simultaneous mutation in Mary Shelley's 'The Last Man', whereas in the second and last section I study the devolution and Reincarnative transfiguration in H.G. Wells's 'The Island of Doctor Moreau'.

Exploring Written Artefacts

Manuscripts are movable objects and colophons normally represent the most efficient means of tracing the paths taken by a book during its (sometimes) extended life. This short article deals with an unusual case of a manuscript and of the work it contains, whose itinerant life is narrated by a long and extraordinary title that provides surprising technical details about the book form, the writing material, and the historical events surrounding it.

E.R.O.S. (http://www.erosjournal.co.uk/), 2013

Translation is essentially an act of reproduction, and every translation is marked by the degree to which it simultaneously differs and remains identical to the original. Even that most elementary of reproductive acts is no exception: the duplication by division of certain single-celled organisms signified by the title under which Schizogenesis was originally published in French, La Scissiparité, necessarily introduces difference in the preservation of sameness. Accordingly, I decided against translating the title literally as "Scissiparity" and have opted instead for the neologism "Schizogenesis," so as to better convey the philosophical and metaphorical sense in which Bataille employed the term in several contemporaneous and connected texts, such as The Accursed Share and the epilogue to On Nietzsche. The title and the term suggests doubling, twinning, doppelgangers and split personalities, while signifying philosophically a critical moment in which continuity and discontinuity, immanence and transcendence, the self and the other (self) emerge out of an undifferentiated superposition in a process of bifurcation. 1

Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Scienes (Springer), 2020

Since antiquity, the concept of homunculus (“little human being” in Latin) was associated with mimetic, Promethean speculations on the ability to imitate the work and function of nature by means of human art, especially the art of alchemy (Newman 2004; LaGrandeur 2013). In the early modern period, a notable one was the version advanced by Swiss physician and natural philosopher Paracelsus (1493/1494–1541).