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Magnus, Albertus, * ca. 1200 (near Lauingen), † 15 Jan 1280 (Cologne) 1. Life …

Fortune, Dion (ps. of Violet Mary Firth), * 6 Jan 1890 (Bryn-y-Bia, Llandudno, Wales), † 8 Jan 1946 (London) Occultist [→ occult / occultism] author, founder of the group which eventually became the Society of the Inner Light, originally conceived as an “outer court” of the → Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Fortune was initiated into the Golden Dawn in 1919 (adopting the magical motto Deo non Fortuna, whence her pen name) but was subsequently evicted on account of personal conflicts with Moina Mathers (1865-1928, colleague and by then widow of → S.L. McGregor Mathers). Fortune c…

Bacon, Roger, * ca. 1215 (place unknown), † ca. 1292 (place unknown) English philosopher, educated at the Universities of Oxford and Paris (where he lectured on Aristotle in the 1240s), author of works on a broad array of topics including optics, semantics, physics, and theology. Bacon entered the Franciscan Order in the late 1250s, perhaps after returning to Oxford. Between 1265 and 1268, he compiled his encyclopedic and ambitious works, the Opus Maius, Opus Minus and Opus Tertium, undertaken for Pope Clement IV (Pope from 1265-1268) in the hope of persuading him to authorize a radical program of educational reform for theologians. The Pope's death in 1268 put an end to Bacon's hope of acquiring a papal aegis for his project. An entry in a late 14th-century chronicle of the Friars Minor asserts that Bacon was imprisoned in the late 1270s by the Minister G…

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Intermediary Beings I: Antiquity 1. Introduction The …

Magic I: Introduction When contemporary academics discuss “magic”, in most cases the assumptions which guide their understanding of it are variations on a few influential theories. First, there is the “intellectualist” understanding of magic linked to the names of E.B. Tylor and J.G. Frazer. Tylor, in his foundational Primitive Culture of 1871, defined magic as based upon ‘the error of mistaking ideal analogy for real connexion’ (Tylor 1771, I, 116). Tylor's assumption was that primitive man, ‘having come to associate in thought those things w…