Renaissance

So I was an observer, you know, so it-- Regarding scientific knowledge, there's an interesting pattern from history, you know.

Even during Renaissance, some scholars said, "We were born too late.

Everything has already been discovered." So every generation tends to treat its current knowledge as if it were nearly complete, but of course it never is, so we're always in the middle of this journey.

So for me, it's interesting to explore, and I understand that we're in the middle of this journey, and I was observer [chuckles] and I am.

So I was an observer, you know, so it-- Regarding the scientific knowledge, interesting pattern from history, you know.

Even during Renaissance, some scholars said we were born too late.

Everything has already been discovered, so every generation tends to treat its current knowledge as if it were nearly complete.

But of course it never is, so we're always in the middle of this journey.

What was the building like? What did the town feel like? What else was there to see? I told her about the brick tower of St.

Martin's Church rising over the rooftops and the old palace nearby, one of the first Renaissance buildings built in Germany.

As I answered, she began telling me things she had never told me before.

How her parents had arrived in Germany with no money or possessions.

I mean, even John Dee.

All of these Renaissance doctors and esotericists, cultists, astrologers, whatever you want to... magicians, they're understanding the elements by quality, by this Aristotelian quality of hot and dry, cold and damp.

So...

And then the degree.

And in traditional Western astrology, actually, we also have nine planets.

We have the seven classical planets plus the nodes.

People kind of discount how important the nodes are in like the Picatrix and these medieval and Renaissance texts of Western astrology.

But it's really kind of the same nine.

A Taoist ritual master isn't a ceremonial magician who happens to live in China.

A Tibetan tantric practitioner, a Mayan diviner, a Muslim scholar of occult sciences, a Jewish Kabbalist, and a Renaissance Makkas may each work with restricted knowledge, ritual power, signs, invisible agencies, or correspondences that doesn't make them members of one secret religion.

So, The Ray Chronicle isn't the story of a primordial occult tradition traveling intact across the planet.

The book explicitly rejects that idea.

Transmission doesn't simply preserve.

Transmission changes what is transmitted.

Volume 1 moves from prehistoric symbolic traces into the first written sacred technologies, the ancient Mediterranean and Asian worlds, late antiquity, the medieval esoteric ecumen, and the Renaissance recovery.

Along the way, you encounter burial and ochre, Mesopotamian incantations, Egyptian funerary texts, Chinese oracle bones, Vedic spells, Greek mysteries, Buddhist meditation, astrology, alchemy, Jewish angelology, Christian exorcism, Taoist revelation, Tantra, Islamic occult sciences, Kabbalah, African sacred systems, grimoires, witchcraft accusations, printing, colonial encounter, and the expanding circulation of hidden knowledge.

...

this is not, you know, a Renaissance painting museum.

It's not, you know, anything like that.

This is a narrative art museum, and narrative art is art that tells stories.

She's very artsy.

Well, you got to think too, like Renaissance fairs are big right now.

Cosplay is big right now.

And that's with the younger generation, including myself.

I think the prior two years they lost to them in the divisional round, so you were a couple steps away.

But in 95, you were a step away from the Super Bowl and getting back there in the culmination of the Renaissance.

So Cowboys in general, 90s Cowboys, but the 95 Cowboys.

As a Bucs fan...

You too.

Adam Jones, former Orioles outfielder, Renaissance man.

He's great.

Yeah.