The Rosicrucian Enlightenment

Yates is again tracing the magical roots of the late Renaissance, this time in the Jacobean Age. The Rosicrucian manifestos appear in 1614-15 and herald a new age whereby all thought will be known. John Dee, renaissance magus in Elizabeth's court, appears as one of the major influences on the manifestos, also incorporating Paracelsian alchemy, but seeking inner gold. "The Rosicrucian movement is aware that large new revelations of knowledge are at hand, that man is about to arrive at another stage of advance, far beyond that already achieved…And the Rosicrucians…are concerned to integrate these into a religious philosophy."

This movement is also strongly associated with the court of the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, who married the daughter of James I of England in 1613. This marriage represents an alliance of Protestant forces in Europe to keep the Catholic Hapsburgs and the post Council of Trent counterreformation in check, and perhaps to wrest the Holy Roman Empire and especially the German states, from Hapsburg control. Yates makes it clear that Frederick overplays his hand--especially after James I refuses to come to his aid, a move that disgusted English Protestants and helped foster the attitudes that led to the Glorious Revolution of 1848-- after the "defenestration of Prague" in wresting the throne of Bohemia from Ferdinand, who revoked the religious toleration promulgated by Rudolph II. Frederick's crushing defeat in 1620 seemed to promise the total annihilation of all Protestant forces in Europe until Gustavous Aldophus saved the day, but only after the Thirty Years War devastated much of Germany.

Rosicrucianism was pretty much a spent force by then, but the ideas gave rise to the Royal Society, to Masonic Lodges, and occupy an important background of thought and attitude in the coming Scientific Revolution. "The world, nearing its end, is to receive a new illumination in which the advances in knowledge made in the preceding age of the Renaissance will be immensely expanded. New discoveries are at hand, a new age is dawning. And this illumination shines inward as well as outward; it is an inward spiritual illumination revealing to man new possibilities in himself, teaching him to understand his own dignity and worth and the part his called upon to play in the divine scheme."

Author: Yates, Frances

Date Published: 1972

Length: 322

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The Arts of Memory

Dame Yates spends the first 200 pages or so reconstructing the classical arts of memory--developed primarily by Simonides and Cicero--and continued through the medieval thinkers Albertus Magnus, Aquinas, and Raymond Lull--and moving into the Renaissance with a long chapter on Camillo's Theatre of Memory. But it is really the chapters on Bruno that the book starts moving into interesting territory, for Bruno's various and convoluted memory projects are really his religio-magico techniques that lead to gnosis, to unification of the cosmos and man through the mind of the magus.

The mind of man holds archetypal images that can be retrieved and activated by the magus through the arts of memory that allows him to achieve a vision of unity of the One through the All, and the All through the One. "the art of memory was … the inner discipline of his religion, the inner means by which he sought to grasp and unify the world of appearances" The creation of this vast memory apparatus that tries to unify all knowledge is really an attempt to articulate Chardin's noosphere, I think, and to lead to the salvation both of man and of the universe by tapping "into the powers of the cosmos, which are in man, himself."

But Dame Yates also makes clear, as she did in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, that this search for a method also underlies the search for a method that undergirds the thinking of Bacon, Descartes and Leibniz--"the profound conviction that man … can grasp, hold, and understand the greater world through the power of his imagination" and "prepared the way for the conception of a mechanical universe, operated by mathematics."

Author: Yates, Francis

Date Published: 1966

Length: 389pp

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Brain Rules

One of the first books that I read on the Kindle, which makes highlighting and saving information very easy. Medina, a molecular biologist, outlines 12 rules based on the anatomy and physiology of the brain that will help us lead healthier and more productive lives. Many of the current educational and business environments that we work in are absolutely counterproductive to the ways out brain works, and we must change them if we expect different results from ourselves, our classroom, our businesses.

Our brains evolved to solve problems related to solving problems quickly in an unstable environment. The ways that our brains perceive, encode, and store information are based on this highly mobile, flexible learning pattern based on exploration. The means, for example, that we must exercise frequently to keep the brain alert and healthy, that long term stress is absolutely destructive of our brain's ability to quickly adapt to situations, that we must get enough sleep--and naps--to give the brain time to digest, reorganize, and recover the information taken in during our waking hours. Multitasking is a myth that wastes our "attentional" energies; we learn much better through exploration than rote memory; audiences check out within 10 minutes of any presentation; vision trumps all other senses, but even then what we perceive is based on previous experiences, so that two different people have different experiences and interpretations of the same event.

I found Medina's ideas fascinating, even if a bit shallow or simplistic at times, but I wonder how realistically his ideas can be implemented. Certainly his ideas have important implications for education, and for business, but I don't see school districts or international corporations incorporating them any time soon.

Author: Medina, John

Date Published: 2008

Length: 301

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