Endnotes
PREFACE
1. Laplace quoted in Étienne Gilson, From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species, and Evolution (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 91.
2. Ibid., 92.
3. Nagel, introduction to his Mind and Cosmos (Kindle e-book version, no page number).
4. Pierre Mabille, Mirror of the Marvelous, trans. Jody Gladding (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1998), 14.
5. Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 138.
6. Ibid., 139.
7. Ibid.
CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: IDEAL OBJECTS AND THEIR FOREBEARS
1. Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), xix.
2. Gimpel, 141.
3. Couliano, Eros and Magic, 23.
4. Poincaré quoted in Émile Meyerson, Identity and Reality, trans. Kate Loewenberg (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1989), 248.
5. Ibid., 248.
6. Charles Hinton, Speculations on the Fourth Dimension: Selected Writings of Charles H. Hinton, ed. Rudolf v. B. Rucker (New York: Dover Publications, 1980), 125.
7. Ian Stewart, “Portraits of Chaos,” New Scientist, November 4, 1989, 22.
8. Ibid., 23.
9. Ioan Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism, trans. H. S. Wiesner and the author (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 7.
10. Ibid., 195.
11. Ibid.
12. Davies quoted in The Faber Book of Science, ed. John Carey (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 501.
13. For Chardin’s conception of the noosphere, “the terrestrial sphere of thinking substance,” see his Let Me Explain (London: Collins/Fontana, 1974), 17 et seq. The existence of Popper’s “third world” is the central proposition within his Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
14. Couliano, Tree of Gnosis, 2.
15. Chomsky, quoted in Richard L. Gregory, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 420.
16. Ibid.
17. Couliano, Tree of Gnosis, 239.
18. Ibid., 242.
19. Goethe, quoted in ibid., 4.
20. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959), 1:7.
21. Spengler, Decline of the West, 1:180.
22. René Thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis (Reading, MA: W. A. Benjamin Inc., 1975), 323.
23. Ibid.
24. Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, trans. A. Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 10.
25. Ibid., 11.
26. Ibid., 21.
27. Ibid., 22.
28. Umberto Eco, “The Return of the Middle Ages,” in Travels in Hyperreality: Essays (London: Picador, 1987), 75.
29. Le Goff, Medieval Imagination, 10.
30. E. R. Dodds, “New Light on the ‘Chaldean Oracles,’” postscript to Hans Lewy’s Chaldean Oracles and Theurgy: Mysticism, Magic and Platonism in the Later Roman Empire (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1978), 695.
31. See Hans Jonas, “The Gnostic Syndrome,” in Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 266.
32. Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Éclaircissements: Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 36.
33. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: The Free Press, 1990), 11.
34. Ibid., 27.
35. Antoine Faivre, “What is Esotericism?” Interview with Antoine Faivre, in Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions 31 (Spring 1994): 62.
36. Eco, “The Return of the Middle Ages,” 69.
37. Ibid., 70.
38. Ibid., 71.
39. Andrew Weeks, German Mysticism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 9.
40. Roger Ames, cited in Sachiko Murata, The Tao of Islam (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 10.
41. Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 7.
42. Ibid.
43. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Ark Publishing/Routledge, 1983), xiv.
44. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the “New Science” on Seventeenth-Century Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 124.
45. Le Goff, Medieval Imagination, 3.
46. Ibid., 4.
47. Karlheinz Stockhausen, Towards a Cosmic Music (Dorset, UK: Element Books, 1989), 8.
48. Couliano, Eros and Magic, 37.
49. Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 64.
50. Alfred North Whitehead, Science in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 36–37.
CHAPTER 2. SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE: HERMETIC RESONANCES IN CYBERNETICS, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, AND CYBERSPACE
1. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:503–4.
2. Tippler quoted in Anthony Liversidge, “Interview with Frank Tippler,” Omni 17, no. 1 (October 1994): 96.
3. Martin Davies, “What Is a Computation?” in Mathematics Today: Twelve Informal Essays, ed. Lynn Sheen (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1978).
4. Vernor Vinge, “Technological Singularity,” Whole Earth Review 81 (Winter 1993).
5. The discussion of phase transitions and the charaterization of “complexity” are indebted to mathematician/computer scientist/novelist Rudy Rucker in his video, The Rudy Rucker Video, and his book The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005); see bibliography.
6. Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1915), 36–37.
7. Wheeler quoted in Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines (London: Fourth Estate, 1994), 9.
8. See C. Bennett and R. Landauer. “The Fundamental Physical Limits of Computation,” Scientific American 253, no. 1 (1985): 38–54.
9. Vinge, “Technological Singularity,” 91.
10. Brian Copenhaver, Hermetica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), Corpus Hermeticum XI, “Mind to Hermes,” 41.
11. Ibid.
12. Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London and Chicago: Routledge & Kegan Paul/University of Chicago Press, 1977), 27.
13. Lewontin cited in Jesper Hoffmeyer, “The Swarming Cyberspace of the Body,” Cybernetics and Human Knowing 3, no. 1 (1995): 17.
14. Ioan Couliano, Expériences de L’Extase: Extase, Ascension et Récit Visionnaire de L’Hellenisme au Moyen Age (Paris: Payot, 1984), 22.
15. Ibid., 23.
16. Gurdjieff quoted in P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 217.
17. Ibid., 217.
18. Ibid., 219.
19. Orthelius quoted in Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, vol. 12 of Collected Works (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 430.
20. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 429.
21. Peter Arhem, “On Artificial Intelligence and Neurophysiology: Two Necessary Questions,” in Real Brains, Artificial Minds, ed. John L. Casti and Anders Karlqvist (New York: Elsevier Science Publishing Co., 1987), 181.
22. Hoffmeyer, “Swarming Cyberspace,” 16.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 19.
25. Ibid., 20.
26. Ibid., 22.
27. Ibid., 16.
28. Irenaeus, in his Against Heresies 1.6.3, quoting the hierarch of a Ptolemaic Gnostic school. In Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 36.
29. Collected in Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972).
30. Ibid., 452.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 453.
33. Ibid., 454.
34. Republished as The Human Use of Human Beings (New York: Avon Books, 1967).
35. Carl Jung, Seven Sermons to the Dead, in The Gnostic Jung, ed. Robert A. Segal (London: Routledge, 1992), 182.
36. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 456.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 457.
39. Collected in Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
40. Ibid., 73.
41. Ibid., 74–75.
42. Ibid., 80.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 130.
46. Serres, Hermes, 82.
47. Ibid., 83.
48. John Donne, from his sermons, quoted in Nicolson, Breaking of the Circle, 59.
49. Kepler quoted in ibid., 150.
50. Ibid.
51. Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 139.
52. A brief recounting of Costa de Beauregard’s conception is found in Marie-Louise von Franz’s introduction to Aurora Consurgens (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), x.
53. Ibid.
54. Quoted in Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 31.
55. Costa de Beauregard in ibid., 33.
56. Serres, Hermes, 83.
57. John Maynard Keynes’s characterization of Newton in his tercentennial tribute in 1942; quoted in Toulmin, Cosmopolis, 15–16.
CHAPTER 3. BODY DOUBLES
1. K. Joel, quoted in Anna T. Tymiencka, Leibniz’ Cosmological Synthesis (New York: Van Gorcum & Co., 1964), 85.
2. G. R. S. Mead, The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in Western Tradition (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1967), 41.
3. Eugene Jolas, ed., Transition: An Intercontinental Workshop for Vertigralist Transmutation (The Hague: Edité par Servire Press, 1935), 98.
4. Ibid.
5. Jonas, “The Gnostic Syndrome,” 264.
6. See Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (London: Routledge, 1992), where he discusses the Gnostic interpretation of the Pythagorean concept of harmonia as “the general essence of a power system.”
7. In Flesh/Intervention 21/22 (Sydney, Australia: Intervention Publications, 1988), 30.
8. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 133.
9. Mach quoted in ibid.
10. See Herman Weyl, Symmetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952).
11. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1961), 129.
12. Couliano, Eros and Magic, 5.
13. Quoted in Steve Odin, Process Metaphysics and Hua-Yen Buddhism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1982), 124.
14. Couliano, Eros and Magic, 5.
15. See Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, 4.143.
16. Couliano, Eros and Magic, 9.
17. Ibid.
18. The phrase is Couliano’s.
19. Couliano, Eros and Magic, 6.
20. Aristotle, quoted by Dodds in Proclus, The Elements of Theology, ed. E. R. Dodds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 316.
21. Proposition 209 in Proclus, ibid., 183.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. “The Astral Body in Neoplatonism” in Proclus, Elements of Theology, appendix 2, 320.
25. Ibid.
26. Couliano, Eros and Magic, 23.
27. Koyré’s description of More, in Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 125.
28. More, quoted in ibid., 128.
29. Wallis quoted in Michio Kaku, Hyperspace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 34.
30. Quoted in Eugene Garin, Astrology in the Renaissance: The Zodiac of Life, trans. Carolyn Jackson and June Allen (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 8.
31. Ioan Couliano, Psychanodia I: A Survey of the Evidence Concerning the Ascension of the Soul and Its Relevance (Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1983), 1.
32. Mead, Doctrine of the Subtle Body, 9.
33. Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (London: Macmillan, 1984), 27.
34. Alex Wayman, The Buddhist Tantras: Light on Indo-Tibetan Esotericism (New Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1996), 151.
35. Edward Conze, Buddhism: Its Essence and Development (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1975), 37–38.
36. Ibid.
37. L. A. Waddell, The Buddhism of Tibet, or Lamaism (New Delhi: Asian Education Services, 1991), 127.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., n. 5.
40. Ibid.
41. Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 418.
42. Ibid.
43. Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, Clear Light of Bliss (London: Tharpa Publications, 1982), 8.
44. Ibid.
45. Herbert V. Guenther, Treasures on the Tibetan Middle Way (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1976), 45.
46. Ibid., 126.
47. Ibid., 137.
48. Chögyam Trungpa, The Lion’s Roar: An Introduction to Tantra (Boston: Shambhala, 1992), 40.
49. Ibid., 41.
50. Trevor Legget, Zen and the Ways (Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1987), 183.
51. Ibid.
52. Toshihiko Izutzu, “The Ontological Ambivalence of ‘Things’ in Oriental Philosophy,” in The Real and the Imaginary: A New Approach to Physics, ed. Jean E. Charon (New York: Paragon House, 1987), 189.
53. Nicholas of Cusa cited in Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1984), 189.
54. Einstein, A., B. Podolsky, and N. Rosen, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description Be Complete?,” in Physical Reality, ed. Stephen Toulmin (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970).
55. David Deutsch and Michael Lockwood, “The Quantum Physics of Time Travel,” Scientific American (March 1994): 74.
56. Gyatso, Clear Light of Bliss, 137.
57. Ibid., 23.
58. Guenther, Treasures on the Tibetan Middle Way, 108.
59. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 187.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. Langton quoted in Steven Levy, Artificial Life: The Quest for a New Creation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), 117.
63. Langton in ibid., 326.
64. Ibid., 328.
CHAPTER 4. METAPHYSICAL GEOMETRY
1. William James, Some Problems of Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1911), 4.
2. Michele Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), 1.
3. Spengler, Decline of the West, 1:314.
4. Ominipresence and omnipotence are “almost mathematical concepts,” says Spengler, ibid., 1:312.
5. Ibid., 1:313.
6. Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press/Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 8.
7. Couliano, Eros and Magic, 194.
8. Ibid., 195.
9. Spengler, Decline of the West, 1:313.
10. Gilbert Durand, On the Disfiguration of the Image of Man in the West (Ipswich, UK: Golgonooza Press, 1977), 3–4.
11. For an exposition of the notion of the “commonplace” in literate culture before the advent of Romanticism, see Walter Ong, “Romantic Difference and the Poetics of Technology,” in Rhetoric, Romance and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (London: Cornell University Press, 1971), 255–83.
12. See Jerry Fodor, The Language of Thought (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975).
13. Carl B. Boyer, A History of Mathematics, rev. Uta C. Merzbach (New York: Wiley, 1989), 632.
14. A brief account of the Banach and Tarski paradox and its antecedents—from which I derive my understanding of it—can be found in Edward Kasner and James Roy Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1979), 181–82.
15. See Kathleen Stein, “Looking for the Sweet Spot in N-Dimensional Space,” Omni 17, no. 8 (Fall 1995): 54–61.
16. These and the following considerations rely on Coomaraswamy’s “Kha and Other Words Denoting ‘Zero’ in Connection with the Metaphysics of Space,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 7, no. 3 (1934): 487–97.
17. Ibid., 487.
18. Ibid., 488.
19. L. Dieckmann, Hieroglyphics: The History of a Literary Symbol (St. Louis, MO: Washington University Press, 1970), 63.
20. Jonas. “The Gnostic Syndrome,” 264–66.
21. Ibid., 265.
22. Ibid.
23. Jean Doresse, The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1986), 269.
24. Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 36.
25. Coomaraswamy, “Kha and Other Words,” 489.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 493.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Theophrastus, quoted in Samuel Sambursky, The Physical World of Late Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 2.
31. Bhaskara, quoted in Coomaraswamy, “Kha and Other Words,” 493.
32. Dante, La vita nuova, 12:22. Cited in Julius Evola, The Yoga of Power, trans. Guido Stucco. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1992), 206.
33. Fludd, Truth’s Golden Harrow, in Robert Fludd: Essential Readings, sel. and ed. William H. Huffman (London: Aquarian/Thorsons, 1992), 162.
34. Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 279.
35. Sendivogius, The New Chemical Light, collected in The Hermetic Museum, 2 vols., ed. Arthur E. Waite (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1974), 86.
36. Seymour Feldman, “Platonic Themes in Gersonide’s Doctrine of the Active Intellect,” in Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, ed. Lenn E. Goodman (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 255.
37. Plotinus, The Six Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (Chicago: University of Chicago Press/Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 358.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Quoted in Robin Waterfield, René Guénon and the Future of the West (London: Aquarian Press, 1987), 69.
41. John Murdoch, Album of Science: Antiquity and the Middle Ages (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984), 52.
42. Quoted in George Perrigo Conger, Theories of Macrocosms and Microcosms in the History of Philosophy (New York: Russell and Russell, 1967), 34.
43. Murdoch, Album of Science, 38.
44. Nicolson, Breaking of the Circle, 25.
45. Ibid.
46. Jacob Boehme, The Signature of All Things (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., n.d.), 93.
47. Thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, 320.
48. Ibid., 98.
49. Ibid., 152.
50. Ibid., 102
51. Ibid., 152
52. Ibid., 8.
53. Ibid., 316.
54. Ibid., 119.
55. C. H. Waddington, New Patterns in Genetics and Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 44.
56. Ibid.
57. Thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, 114.
58. Ibid., 295.
59. Ibid., 299.
60. Ibid.
61. Sambursky, The Physical World of Late Antiquity, 3.
62. Jonas, “The Gnostic Syndrome,” 268.
63. Thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, 152.
64. Miller quoted in Howard Gardner, The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 90.
65. Thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, 323.
66. Ibid.
67. Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 75.
68. Hans Jonas, “Spinoza and the Theory of the Organism,” in Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 211.
69. Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 139.
70. Ibid., 130.
CHAPTER 5. THE GNOSTIC ALCHEMY OF ROBERT FLUDD
1. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1970), 274.
2. Ibid., 272.
3. Ibid., 277.
4. Ibid., 276.
5. Frederick Copleston, “Hegel and the Rationalisation of Mysticism,” in Philosophers and Philosophies (London: Search Press, 1976), 109.
6. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:235.
7. Ibid.,1:382.
8. Fludd, in Robert Fludd: Essential Readings, 59.
9. Copenhaver, Hermetica, Corpus Hermeticum I, 1.
10. Ficino quoted in Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 26.
11. See Robert Lamberton’s introduction to Porphyry’s text, Porphyry on the Cave of the Nymphs (New York: Station Hill Press, 1983).
12. See ibid. in regard to the importance of allegorical interpretation in Neoplatonic thought.
13. From the Pymander; Copenhaver’s translation quoted previously, note 10, above.
14. Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Majoris et Minoris Historia, in Robert Fludd: Essential Readings, 62.
15. Francis M. Cornford’s translation of Plato’s Timaeus in Greek Philosophy from Thales to Aristotle, ed. Reginald E. Allen (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 278.
16. Quoted in A. N. Whitehead, Adventures in Ideas (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1948), 160.
17. Ibid., 160.
18. Ibid.
19. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Pub. Co., 1980), 79.
20. A. C. Crombie, From Augustine to Galileo (London: William Heinemann, 1957), 50.
21. Dillon, J., “Solomon Ibn Gabriol’s Doctrine of Intelligible Matter,” in Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, ed. Lenn E. Goodman (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 44.
22. Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi, 64.
23. Samuel Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 75.
24. Ibid., 72.
25. Crombie, From Augustine to Galileo, 51.
26. Antonio T. de Nicolás, Avatara: The Humanization of Philosophy through the Bhagavad Gita (New York: Nicolas Hays Ltd., 1976), 281; Lama Anagarika Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism (New Delhi, India: B. I. Publications, 1987), 137.
27. Nicolás, Avatara, 281.
28. Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 137.
29. Joanna Macy, Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), 60.
30. Translated by Coomaraswamy, in Selected Papers: Metaphysics, ed. Roger Lipsey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 154.
31. Fludd, Truth’s Golden Harrow, in Robert Fludd: Essential Readings, ed. William H. Huffman (London: Aquarian/Thorsons, 1992), 151.
32. Ibid., 154.
33. Ibid.
34. Fludd, A Philosophical Key, in Robert Fludd: Essential Readings, ed. William H. Huffman (London: Aquarian/Thorsons, 1992), 117.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., 118.
37. Ibid.
38. D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 119.
39. Fernel, quoted in ibid.
40. Ibid., 120.
41. Ibid., 121.
42. Copenhaver, Hermetica, Corpus Hermeticum X, 33.
43. Jean Daniélou, Primitive Christian Symbols, trans. Donald Attwater (London: Compass Books, 1964), 75.
44. Couliano, Eros and Magic, 113.
45. For Eugenio Garin’s viewpoint, see ibid., 37.
46. Synesius, quoted in ibid., 115.
47. Synesius, in ibid., 117.
48. Al-Kindi, quoted in David Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 19.
49. Couliano, Eros and Magic, 123.
50. Fludd, Truth’s Golden Harrow, 155.
51. Ibid., 156.
52. Ibid., 159.
53. Ibid.
54. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 38.
55. Georg Feuerstein, Yoga: The Technology of Ecstasy (Wellingborough, UK: The Aquarian Press, 1990), 279.
56. Ibid.
57. G. R. S. Mead, The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in Western Tradition (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1967), 64.
58. Hierocles, quoted in Mead, Doctrine of the Subtle Body, 65.
59. Fludd, Truth’s Golden Harrow, 162.
60. Sendivogius, New Chemical Light, 109.
61. Fludd, Truth’s Golden Harrow, 164.
62. Ibid., 153.
63. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:255.
64. Couliano, Tree of Gnosis, 9.
65. Ibid., 13.
66. Quoted in Mead, Doctrine of the Subtle Body, 84.
67. Quoted in ibid., 85.
68. Ibid.
69. Fludd, Truth’s Golden Harrow, 148.
70. Methodius, quoted in Daniélou, Primitive Christian Symbols, 74.
71. Quoted in ibid., 81.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid., 86.
74. Hans Lewy, Chaldean Oracles and Theurgy: Mysticism, Magic and Platonism in the Later Roman Empire (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1978), 60.
75. Lewy’s translations, ibid., 372.
76. Carl F. von Weizsäcker, The Unity of Nature (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1971), 190.
77. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 2:161.
78. Maspero (referred to by Needham as “indispensible and brilliant” in the study of Chinese thought), quoted in ibid., 153.
79. J. Z. Young, “Brains and Worlds: The Cerebral Cosmologies,” Journal of Experimental Biology 61 (1974): 8.
80. Thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, 329.
81. Ibid, 324–25.
82. Ibid., 313.
83. Ibid., 294.
84. Ibid., 295.
85. Ibid., 296.
86. Ibid., 323.
87. Young, “Brains and Worlds,” 8.
88. J. Wheeler, A Journey into Gravity and Spacetime (New York: Scientific American Library, 1990), 11.
89. Clifford, cited in Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 153.
90. Michio Kaku, Hyperspace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 338.
91. Ibid., 75.
92. Fludd, quoted in Joscelyn Godwin, Robert Fludd, Hermetic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1979), 52.
93. Newton, quoted in John Carey, ed., The Faber Book of Science (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 33.
94. Leibniz, Principles of Nature and of Grace, in Leibniz: Philosophical Writings, ed. G. H. R. Parkinson (London: J. M. Dent Ltd., 1992), 203.
95. Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 12.
96. John H. Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1931), 418.
97. Ibid.
98. Young, “Brains and Worlds,” 16.
CHAPTER 6. THE GNOSTIC LEIBNIZ: OR WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE AN ATOM?
1. Whitehead, Adventures in Ideas, 160.
2. Ibid., 161.
3. Whitehead, from Process and Reality, quoted in Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition, 420.
4. Whitehead, Adventures in Ideas, 157.
5. Toulmin, Cosmopolis, 16.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 17.
8. Ibid., 24.
9. Leibniz, “Towards a Universal Characteristic” (1677), and “Preface to the General Science,” in Leibniz: Selections, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951), 19–20; 17.
10. Leibniz, “Preface to the General Science,” 16.
11. Ibid., 22.
12. George M. Ross, “Leibniz and Alchemy,” Studia Leibnitiana: Magia Naturalis (Wiesbaden, Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1978), 166.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 172.
15. See Michael Sendivogius’s statement from his New Chemical Light, quoted in chapter 3.
16. New Essays on Human Understanding, in Leibniz: Philosophical Writings, 171.
17. Ross, “Leibniz and Alchemy,” 177.
18. As far as contemporary scholarship can tell, Leibniz first used the word monad in a letter to the Marquis de Hospital in July 1695, the year of publication of New System.
19. See “Conway” in The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Simon Blackburn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 83.
20. Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism, trans. R. M. Wilson (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1987), 57.
21. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, 150.
22. Leibniz, New System, and Explanation of the New System, in Leibniz: Philosophical Writings, ed. G. H. R. Parkinson (London: J. M. Dent Ltd., 1992), 117.
23. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, 161.
24. Monadology, in Leibniz: Philosophical Writings, ed. G. H. R. Parkinson (London: J. M. Dent Ltd., 1992), §75, 191.
25. Letter to Basnage (1698), in Joseph Politella, Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Cabalism in the Philosophy of Leibniz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvannia Press, 1938), 4.
26. Quoted in Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening, trans. H. E. Musson (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1996), 103.
27. Quoted in Politella, Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Cabalism, 35.
28. Edward Conze, “Buddhism and Gnosis,” in Further Buddhist Studies (London: Bruno Cassirer, 1975), 16.
29. Ibid., 17.
30. Ibid.
31. Barfield, Saving the Appearances, 48.
32. Bohr quoted in Abraham Pais, Niels Bohr’s Times (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 314; Pais’s insertion.
33. Ibid., 432.
34. Bohr in ibid.
35. Ibid., 433.
36. Ibid., 432.
37. Leibniz, Monadology, §47. 186.
38. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, 150.
39. The Soncino Press edition of the Zohar translates it as “flash”; see The Zohar, trans. M. Simon and Dr. Paul P. Levertoff (London: Soncino Press, 1984), 1:380.
40. The full title of this work is Arithmetische Beschreibung der Moralweisheit von Personen und Sachen, woraus das gemeine Wesen besteht, nach der pythagorischen Kreutzzahl in lauter tetraktische Glieder eingetheilt, published in Jena in 1674. See Politella, Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Cabalism, 8.
41. Leibniz, Theodicy, part 3, quoted in Politella, Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Cabalism, 28.
42. Zohar, Book Vayeze, 156a, 101.
43. Leibniz, Principles of Nature and Grace, in Leibniz: Philosophical Writings, 201.
44. Ibid.
45. Gershom Scholem, “Knorr von Rosenroth” in Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, n.d), 10:1118.
46. Ernst Benz, Mystical Sources of German Romantic Philosophy (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1983), 48.
47. Scholem, “Knorr von Rosenroth,” 10:7.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., 3:8; Politella, Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Cabalism, footnote 29.
50. Politella, Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Cabalism, 6.
51. Leibniz, New System, 117.
52. Ibid.
53. Leibniz, Principles of Nature and Grace, 195.
54. Leibniz, New System, 121.
55. Leibniz, Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese, trans. and intro. H. Rosemont and Daniel Cook, Monograph no. 4 of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1977), 66.
56. Yu-lan Fung, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (New York: The Free Press, 1966), 278.
57. Ibid., 284.
58. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 558.
59. Ibid.
60. Leibniz, Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese, 14–15.
61. Ibid., 16.
62. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 558.
63. Ibid., 505.
64. Ibid., 90; 297.
65. Fung, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, 285.
66. Alan Watts, Tao: The Watercourse Way (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1981), 46.
67. Henry More in C. F. Knorr von Rosenroth, “In Amica Responsione contentis,” in Kabbalah Denudata, 2 vols. (Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlag, 1974), 175.
68. Knorr, Kabbala Denudata, 251. In Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1954), Scholem states that “sphere” is the most likely original meaning of sephira.
69. Leibniz, Monadology, 190.
70. Ibid.
71. Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (New York: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1983), 405.
72. Andrei Linde, “The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe,” Scientific American 271, no. 5, (1994): 32–39.
73. Leibniz, Monadology, 190.
74. Zohar, (32a), 1:131.
75. Rudolph, Gnosis, 67.
76. Leibniz, Principles of Nature and Grace, 202.
77. Quoted in Frank, 152.
78. Adolph Frank, The Kabbalah, rev. and trans. I. Sossnitz (New York: Arno Press, 1973), 138.
79. Knorr, Kabbalah Denudata, 1:185 et seq.
80. “The Tripartate Tractate,” in James Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1977), 67.
81. Gershom Scholem, ed., Zohar: The Book of Splendour (London: Rider and Company, 1977), 79.
82. Lawrence Fine, Safed Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), 6.
83. Freeman Dyson, “Characterizing Irregularity,” Science, May 12, 1978, 677.
84. Mandelbrot, Fractal Geometry, 405.
85. Ibid., 406. He refers, of course, to Leibniz’s creation of the differential calculus.
86. Fine, Safed Spirituality, 8.
87. Leibniz, “Letter to Wagner,” in Leibniz: Selections, 508.
88. Ibid., 506.
89. Leibniz, “Fifth Letter to Clarke,” in Leibniz: Philosophical Writings, 227.
90. William A. Wallace, “Causes and Forces in Sixteenth-Century Physics,” Isis 69, no. 248 (1978): 411.
91. William Gilbert, On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies, trans. P. Fleury Mottelay (Chicago: University of Chicago Press/Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., 1952), 104.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid.
94. Zohar, Book Terumah, (172a), 4:95.
95. Ibid., Book Vayehi, (245a), 2:378.
96. Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, 5.
97. Plato, Timaeus (34), 449.
98. Archer-Hind’s translation quoted in Philosophical Writings of Henry More, ed. F. I. Mackinnon (New York: AMS Press, 1969), 302.
99. Ibid.
100. Leibniz, “Fifth Letter to Clarke,” 82.
101. Ibid., 83.
102. Leibniz, New Essays, 161.
103. See Blackburn, Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 139; and George Gale, “The Anthropic Principle,” Scientific American 245, no. 6 (December 1981), 154–71.
104. Sambursky, The Physical World of Late Antiquity, xii.
105. Syrianus quoted in ibid., 5.
106. Abraham Pais, Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Universe of Albert Einstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 289.
107. Einstein quoted in ibid., 289.
108. Thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, 152.
109. Lasswitz quoted in Meyerson, Identity and Reality, 246.
110. Ibid., 247.
111. Ibid., 248.
112. David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue with David Bohm (London: Routledge, 1994), 5.
113. Ibid.
114. Thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, 152.
115. Meyerson, Identity and Reality, 249.
116. Ibid.
117. Leibniz, Monadology, 14.
118. Timothy Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), 183.
119. Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 186.
120. Meyerson, Identity and Reality, 249.
121. Charles Hartshorne, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1970), 113.
122. Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism, 280.