I read somewhere that he shoved a bodkin into his eye to feel around what was behind his eyeball.
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Holy Hell Isaac Newton was one weird dude..
- Thread starter ThousandEyes
- Start date
As smart as Newton was, he still lost millions in the stock market. There was a bubble in South Sea shares in 1720, and he made £7K. A few months later he got back in, and ended up losing £20K, which is the equivalent of over $3M now. Apparently he forbade anyone from speaking the words "South Sea" in his presence for the rest of his life.
I'm reading about the company in Wikipedia and lol the only mention about Network is to deliver this amazing quote from him:
Isaac Newton said:
This eerily remind me to the Bitcoin reaction circa 2016-2017.
This cannot be overstated. He is one of the most important individuals in the history of humanity. He is basically the reason naturalism broke up into more specific sciences. He was the one of the key reasons that the west finally shook off the defeatist attitude that the world was too mysterious, and life was too short to actually discover or understand its inner workings. Modern (natural) science, and the philosophy of how science should be conducted owe basically everything to this man.
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Dee's perpetually fascinating. There's the argument to be made, which was made by the Dame Frances Yates, that Dee's travels in continental Europe provided the seedbed for the Rosicrucian movement as it developed. Should this be the case, you can trace a direct lineage from the ideas of Dee to the ideas of Hegel-- with all the widespread effects on history that naturally causes. That the man who coined the term "British Empire" and constructed its policy goals would create a philosophical lineage terminating in Marx is fascinating to think about, especially in light of his millenarian theology.
Enochian's a fascinating language, too. It's got the grammar of English with a bit of Hebrew construction, but the words are quite odd. More fascinating is the seemingly programmatic enochian watchtowers and the strange acrostic tables received by Kelly. Fascinatingly, these became the capstone of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's magical system, and the whole thing's building up to being able to work with it. The magic of the A∴A∴ naturally operates along similar lines.
Climate change kills us all.
Newton laughs at us from the afterlife.
Oh yeah zero doubt dude would have been a hardcore redditor in our modern age
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Wasn't Kelly kind of an idiot. I always saw Dee was really the true intellectual of the duo
To say he was an idiot is to really sell him short. Anybody who's that creative and charismatic of a confidence artist shouldn't be called an idiot. Remember, he managed to woo King Rudolph for a good few years before things went ultimately to pot. Before he met Dee, he had his ears cropped for counterfeiting . I believe he was also something of a Solomonic magician in his own right, which was apparently a source of friction for the angels he was working with (but I can't tell you off the top of my head). More than anything, you get a read of Kelley as an impulsive man with a penchant for dishonesty who was, nevertheless, kind to the people he cared about (at least, according to his daughter).
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Dee was brilliant though. He also was a skilled mathematician, and also I believe had the largest personal library in all of Europe at the time.
Guy invented classic physics and people sit here virgin shaming.
We deserve our current situation.
We deserve our current situation.
Spoiler alert: No one in the history of time is smart about everything.
Oh, unquestionably. The man was a genius, and his mathematical manuscripts designed to be for the common man probably had a profound effect on England that we can't yet apprehend. Ultimately, Dee's contact with the angels is well-attested. Stuff like his Hieroglyphic Monad is barely understood in full. And you need to understand, too, that just like Newton, it's likely his interest in the esoteric buoyed his interest in the practical up until the angel sessions. Trithemius once expounded that cryptography was a secular product of the ability for a man chosen/empowered by God to ascend up into heaven. Even though the Steganographia only was published by the time Dee was at death's door, I suspect this aspect of philosophy was something that Dee either shared independently or came to agree with via Trithemius' students. Seems unlikely the ardent spymaster would never had heard of those things from the father of cryptography himself.
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What's interesting about the Rosicrucians is that they were a German order and yet were mainly influenced a lot by Englishmen. Dee is probably the most influential western occultist only rivaled by Agrippa and maybe Crowley
Possibly. The question of "most influential occultist" is complicated by the nature of the occult. For example, there's one single guy who influenced the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Theosophy, Rudolph Steiner, and the very O.T.O. Crowley would one day come to make his own. Barely anybody knows who he is but his system IS the Western Mystery Tradition, effectively.
Dee's incredible influence is, bizarrely, contrasted with the sheer impenetrability of the parts of his system that are original to him. They are inversely related.
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So Crowley was more of a follower overall? What about Agrippa and his 3 books of occult philosophy?
Crowley didn't follow a damn person, no. He took over the O.T.O. from its original founders and mixed it with his own religion of Thelema, effectively making it the Church Body of Thelema. And he ultimately acted as an emissary in the Golden Dawn split. He took quite a bit of agency.
Agrippa's Three Books are, of course, massively influential, but Agrippa has antecedents as well-- he was, after all, instructed by Johannes Trithemius (who allegedly instructed Paracelsus too) and backed by his own occult circle of mutual aid. As influential as the Three Books are, they also aren't really the common foundation of so many magical texts. For example, John Dee's magical system, it turns out, was influenced heavily by a text called the Summa Sacre Magice which dates back to the 14th century.
Trying to determine a set of "most influential occultists" runs into the same problem as trying to figure out if Newton was the most influential physicist-- both stood on the shoulders of giants.
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thank you for your discussions man . I would love to learn Enochian it's defintelly the most complex of western magical systems but western occultism seems to be mostly dominated by Kabbalah today
Yunno, you'd think so, but most Jewish practitioners would emphatically disagree. What's typically utilized is a Hermetic strain of the Kabbalah which is considered more of a reference manual combined with the Golden Dawn iteration of the pathworking the Tree, a la the Cicero's Garden of Pomegranates. It barely contains any contents of Yetziraic Kabbalah, for example, which perhaps has more in common with the Enochian system than may at first be apprehended-- both utilize an iterative, permutative approach to language and the construction of holy names of power, after all. The Summa Sacre Magice goes into it, apparently. The places and times match up as well. The author of the Summa Sacre was a Catalonian Spaniard and he would have been in a position to actually contact and study with the Kabbalists personally and peruse the Sefer Yetzirah.
Again, there's that big historical undercurrent nobody explores because it's magical but it's so massively influential.
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Deffers, I admire your knowledge of the occult man that must of been a lifetime study. Do you have any resources for Enochian and Dee's life work that would be a good place to start
It seems many famous scientists were odd. I guess it makes sense, grand unorthodox thinking seems to court eccentricity. Didn't Tycho Brahe die because he refused to urinate, or was crushed by his donkey falling down his stairs or something weird like that?
You'd be surprised-- I've been intermittent in my study of the occult. Most of my research happens in bursts with years of relative inactivity. I'm not actually published in the field so I doubt I count as a scholar. Tell you what, I'll PM you some stuff, since I'm derailing the hell out of your thread which is very good. To get it back on track...
I don't know about Brahe in particular, but I can tell you a neat story about Johannes Kepler. He had to defend his mother from being burned at the stake as a witch. Later on in life, he would describe revelations about the planets being inscribed in regular polyhedra. Posthumously, he released Somnium, the story of a witch who sold her son and was reunited with him later on, only to have a demon reveal to them the nature of the planets and their movement in the heavens.
You kind of have to realize that this sort of thing was normal during his times. It's not fair to judge the man by modern standards. And this doesn't really take away much from his achievements and contributions to humanity.
There were plenty of things that Newton did that were not normal for his, or any, time. And within his time, Newton feared ostracism for his continued interest in alchemy. It was quite out of fashion.
A thin line separates insanity from genius. You do need to think a bit out of the box to come up with ideas that aren't commonly accepted. It's just some people swerve far too much into improbably scenarios. Newton was a man of great ego and power and some wild beliefs.
"If I have seen further than others, it's because I am surrounded by dwarfs." -- Murray Gell-Mann (1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles)
edit. WHOA unclosed window necrobump! Sorry.
Not in this example and not generally.
There's theoretically only one ultimate answer to "why" and the way it's been asked historically demands an agency or intelligence- so it's a faulty question and Newton was effectively passing the buck.
"I can go this far and predict any outcome. Someone else can figure out "what" (not really "why") causes gravity. The "why does gravity work? " question has been far more thoroughly answered since- and applications for that knowledge are limitless so it's not sophistry either-
now gravity is also a great example of how useless "why" can be- because we still don't fully understand all the mechanics at play in two apparently unconnected objects at infinite distance acting on each other- Einstein explained that they're not really unconnected because they're connected in space time and they're both distorting it- so the tendency is for them to "roll" towards each other along the mutual path of their respective distortion. So you can still ask "why?" But that question can't be answered by a philosopher- it has to be answered with more and better science.
philosophy is still useful for thinking about how to think and to consider the anthropomorphic elements of life (which of course is practically everything) but "why" is almost always a faulty question and the value of philosophy is less in it providing answers and more in its evolution of what and how to question.
a vast swathe of formerly purely philosophical questions have tedious and obvious answers that inevitably change "why?" To "how?" which is good and why philosophy remains relevant.