Journal
The history of ideas, with the bibliography at the foot. No rituals, no promises and no predictions: every claim says where it comes from.
It can be read in order: the articles come in sections, and each one follows the one before.
The soul of the world
1Anima mundi: the world's soul, from Plato to Jung
For more than twenty-three centuries people have said the world has a soul, and each age meant something different. Here is the path with the texts that could be read, and a musical scale that Plato describes in numbers and that you can hear.
2The scientific attempt to measure the world's soul
For almost twenty years a network of random number generators tried to detect when the whole world feels the same thing at once. It is the closest relative of what this Observatory does, with a different method, and its story shows how such a claim is checked, or not.
3Collective effervescence: Durkheim's idea and the evidence
More than a hundred years ago a sociologist proposed that gathering at the same time, and gathering again at regular intervals, creates something no one has alone. It is the idea behind this site's world hour. Here it is with its critics, with what has been measured since, and with the arithmetic that makes it necessary.
4Synchronicity: Jung's meaning and what the data say
Synchronicity is the name Jung gave to a meaningful coincidence between events that do not cause each other. Here are his definition, his cases (the scarab, the fish), Kammerer's number series, the horoscope experiment that Jung himself put down to chance, and what statistics says.
Saturn and Hermes
5Melancholy: Ficino, Saturn and Dürer's engraving
For centuries the sadness of those who study had a humour, black bile, and a planet, Saturn. Ficino treated it as a price of thinking and wrote how to pay it with less harm. Dürer engraved it in 1514, and his engraving holds a square you can check with sums.
6Who was Hermes Trismegistus, and did Hermes really exist?
Hermes Trismegistus, “thrice-greatest Hermes”, was born of blending the Greek god Hermes with the Egyptian Thoth. There is no evidence of such a person. Here is what Cicero, Lactantius and Augustine said, what the Poimandres says, how Casaubon took the legend apart in 1614 and what is known today.
7The Kybalion: a 1908 book that claims to be millennia old
The Kybalion presents itself as the wisdom of Hermes in ancient Egypt and has been very influential since the twentieth century. It was published in 1908. Here are its seven principles, what the book itself says of its origin, what it does not mention, and what is known about the real Hermetic texts.
8Ouroboros meaning: the snake that eats its own tail
The ouroboros, or uroboros, is the snake that eats its own tail and forms a circle. It has no single meaning: depending on who draws it, it is the universe, “one is the all”, an alchemical operation, a prison or a monster to be slain. Here are the sources, one by one.
Alchemies of the world
9Chinese alchemy: the search for immortality with cinnabar
Chinese alchemy has its own texts, its own words and its own question: how to make something that lasts. Here is what Ge Hong wrote around the year 317, read in Chinese, and what came after: the elixir that killed emperors, the body as a cauldron, and gunpowder.
10Arabic alchemy: from al-kīmiyā' to the Emerald Tablet
Between the 8th and 11th centuries an alchemy was written in Arabic that then passed into Latin. Here are Jabir, of whom it was already said in the 10th century that he had never existed; al-Razi, who wrote that alchemy is "closer to the necessary than to the impossible"; and the Emerald Tablet, whose oldest version is Arabic and does not say the same as "as above, so below". Read, wherever possible, in the sources: Ibn al-Nadim's Fihrist, al-Tabari, Ibn Khaldun, de Sacy, Ruska, Robert of Chester and Newton's manuscript.
11Avicenna against the alchemists: the "Aristotle" paragraph
Ibn Sina (Avicenna) wrote around 1021–1023 that alchemists can imitate but not change one species of metal into another. Here is that paragraph sentence by sentence, in Arabic, medieval Latin and English: in Arabic it is more cautious, and the Latin Middle Ages read it as if it were Aristotle's.
12Indian alchemy: mercury and the body that does not die
In India the alchemy of mercury is not mainly after gold but after a body that does not fall apart, so as to be liberated while alive. Here is what the Rasahṛdayatantra says, read in Sanskrit, its eighteen steps, al-Biruni's testimony and what is known today about those preparations.
13Philosopher's stone: what it is and is it real?
The philosopher's stone is the substance that, according to the alchemists, turned common metals into gold and served as a medicine. Nobody found it. Here is who claimed to have seen it, what Spinoza found out in 1667, who Nicolas Flamel really was and how much gold accelerators have made.
14The dose makes the poison: what Paracelsus really said
“The dose makes the poison” is the basic principle of toxicology and is credited to Paracelsus. It was written in German in 1538, and it does not say exactly that. Here is the original sentence, the quarrel it was written in, what it means today, what it does not mean and what Paracelsus thought of alchemy.
15Newton and alchemy: the papers and the laboratory
Isaac Newton spent decades on alchemy, and over a third of the papers auctioned in 1936 were alchemical. Here is what Newton's assistant told of the laboratory, what Newton read and copied, the symbols, what the Opticks says and how later ages judged it.
16Newton's letter to Oldenburg, 1676: full text and summary
On 26 April 1676 Isaac Newton wrote to Henry Oldenburg about a mercury of Robert Boyle's that grew hot with gold, and asked for the letter to be kept private. Here is the full text, a summary and notes, free to copy with attribution.
The alchemy of the soul
17Persian alchemy: copper, gold and the soul in Ghazali
In Persian, "alchemy" also came to name an inner work. Ghazali wrote "The Alchemy of Happiness" around 1100 and says the book deserves the name more than the alchemy of gold does. Here is what it says, read in Persian, and its limit: the soul, it writes, is not measured.
18Metals and soul in the Marifetname, without saying "alchemy"
The Marifetname (1757), an Ottoman encyclopedia in Turkish, has almost all the pieces of this series: the universal soul, metals made of mercury and sulphur, the ladder of perfection and the body as a small world. But in the text I could read, the word alchemy never appears.
19Suhrawardi and the Simurgh: Avicenna's bird, in Persian
Suhrawardi (1154–1191) wrote three bird texts in Persian. One is a translation of Ibn Sina's treatise of the bird; in another a hoopoe becomes a Simurgh in a thousand years; in a third the Simurgh's mirror dazzles. Here they are, read in Persian and set beside Attar's poem.
20Attar and the Simurgh: seven valleys and a mirror
Attar of Nishapur wrote, around 1177, a poem in which birds seek their king, the Simurgh. Here it is read in Persian and measured: 4697 couplets, of which the seven valleys are less than a fifth; how the story really ends; and what Rumi says about Attar, which is not what circulates.
21Rumi's reed: the lament of separation
Rumi lived in Konya and wrote in Persian. The great book opens with a reed that weeps because it was cut from the reed bed, and keeps company with those who are unwell and those who are well. Here are those lines, read in Persian, their alchemy, and the Rumi that circulates and is not Rumi's.
22The dark night of St John of the Cross, read in the text
The "dark night of the soul" has become a phrase for bad times. In the text of John of the Cross the poem is joyful, the treatise explains the pain and breaks off halfway, and John separates the night from melancholy. Here is what it says, read in Spanish, with a note of care.
The soul facing death
23The "Tibetan Book of the Dead" is a 1927 title
The "Tibetan Book of the Dead" is called in Tibetan "liberation through hearing in the intermediate state", and it is a text read aloud to the dead, by name, for fourteen days and more. Here is what it says, read in the 1927 edition, and what that edition added to it.
24Egypt's "Book of the Dead" is a name from 1842
The "Egyptian Book of the Dead" is not a book and was not called that: it is a collection of spells that a German Egyptologist named in 1842. Here is what the papyrus of the scribe Ani, from around 1250 BCE, says — the hall that demands you know the names of a door, the forty-two denials, the heart you must beg not to betray its own owner — read in the 1895 translation, and how that papyrus reached London.
25Mictlan, the Aztec “hell” you did not go to for your sins
In the two previous articles, what decided a dead person's fate was what they had learned or what they had done. In ancient Mexico, according to what Friar Bernardino de Sahagún recorded, something else decided it: the way you died. Here are the three places the dead went, the four-year road to Mictlan, and the person made of three parts that came apart at death — read in Sahagún's Spanish and in an anthropologist from Mexico's national university.
26Orí: the head the Yoruba choose before they are born
The three previous articles follow the soul after death. This one goes the other way: to what happens before birth. For the Yoruba of Nigeria, each person chooses their orí —their "inner head", their destiny— kneeling in the house of a potter who does not always fire his heads well; a gatekeeper seals the choice, and on crossing it is forgotten. Ifá, the Yoruba system of divination, is the way to recall what was chosen. Read in Samuel Johnson, a pastor at Oyo who wrote his history of the Yoruba in 1897, and in two recent studies.
Memory
27Memory palace: the method of loci, and does it work?
The memory palace is a technique for remembering lists by placing each item, as a striking image, at a spot along a route you already know. Here is its Greek and Roman origin, the rules of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, its limits according to Quintilian and what neuroscientists have measured.
28Why was Giordano Bruno burned at the stake?
Giordano Bruno was an Italian Dominican friar and philosopher, famous for an art of memory and for an infinite universe, whom the Inquisition burned alive in Rome on 17 February 1600. Here is why, told from the Venetian and Roman records, the sentence and a witness's letter, read in Italian and Latin.
29Ebbinghaus forgetting curve: what the 1885 data really show
The forgetting curve is the graph showing how what we learn fades over time: a lot in the first hours and less and less afterwards. Here are Ebbinghaus's seven original data points (1885), read in German, what they actually measure, the formula and the 2015 replication.
30Akashic records: what they are and where the idea came from
The Akashic records would be a memory of everything that ever happened, kept in the "akasha" and readable by some seers. The word is old Sanskrit; the idea of the records is from the nineteenth century. Here is who wrote it first, when and in what words, read in Sanskrit, English and German.
Grimoires
31Key of Solomon: what it is and who really wrote it
The Key of Solomon is a book of magic that claims to have been written by King Solomon for his son. Its oldest copies are from the Renaissance, and the Church banned it in 1564. Here is what it contains, what it says about itself and what the manuscripts say, read in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, German and English.
Every light in the sky is someone who said how they were.