Elizabethan occult philosophy feels less like studying history and more like auditing a laboratory
Reading about Elizabethan occult philosophy feels less like studying history and more like auditing a laboratory where theology, mathematics, and angelic linguistics were sharing the same bench.
The Cabala, in this setting, struck me as applied melancholy with a return ticket. A disciplined descent into symbolic darkness, yes, but with rails. You enter the labyrinth of correspondences, numbers, divine names, planetary hierarchies. You feel the weight of Saturn on the skull. Yet there is always a ladder back out. Structure. Commentary. A sanctioned map of the invisible.
The Enochian manuscripts feel different. They are what happens when you lose the ticket.