No comments about When Night Fell: An Anthology of Holocaust Short Stories.

No comments about Martens, Sables, and Fishers: Biology and Conservation (Comstock Book).

2 comments about The Jewish Alchemists.

1. I was very pleased to find that, like Patai's HEBREW GODDESS, this book combines thorough and excellent scholarship with translations of rare sources that are otherwise impossible to find. Patai does not claim the Jewish Patriarchs were alchemists, but in his broad chronological exploration of the topic begins with the historical development of later attributions of the Alexandrian alchemist Miriam by Arabic and other alchemists to one of the biblical Miriams of the New Testament or to Miriam, wife of Moses. The Alexandrian alchemist Mirian, like Cleopatra, was considered by Zosimos and others to be one of the great founders. As one would expect, her identity was eventually attributed to legendary times by medieval practitioners. Her Jewish name implies to Patai and other scholars that the earliest historical Jewish practice of alchemy developed in the heterodox Hermetic and Gnostic schools of Alexandria during the second to fourth centuries of the Common Era. Patai's voluminous research thoroughly explores the Jewish-Islamic stream of alchemy through early and late medieval periods. It provides, for the first time, a basis for students of the Western mystery tradition to understand the Jewish-Egyptian-Spanish esoteric stream that derived from the Pythagorean and Gnostic school of Akhmim near Nag Hammadi and Thebes in Upper Egypt, which indirectly produced such mysterious literary figures as "Abramelim the Mage." A good supplement for Patai's absolutely essential work would be Peter Kingsley's research on the survival of Neo-Pythagroean and Hermetic tradition in Akhmim, from which the Arabic Hermetic scientists, philosophers, and alchemists derived their knowledge.



2. The "Kirkus Review" description (quoted as part of the Amazon listing) seems to miss the point. Although historians of both Alchemy and Judaism have been in agreement that the Jewish role in the development and spread of alchemy was either non-existent or tiny, the alchemical texts themselves insist otherwise. The main lines of development have been traced from Hellenistic Egypt, through the Islamic world, and into Christian Europe, with little or no need for Jewish sources or transmitters, and most Jewish historians have been satisfied (or delighted) to agree.
   
   Indeed, in influential writings on the psychological meanings of alchemical symbolism, C. G. Jung went so far as to reclassify the several Jewish alchemists cited and quoted in Alexandrian Greek documents as really Jewish Christians. (He had a theory that transmutation was a material metaphor for transubstantiation, which required a Christian origin before alchemy reached Islam.)
   
   The late Raphael Patai amassed a huge amount of information, including alchemical manuscripts in Hebrew (translated with commentaries herein), and set about to consider the cases of supposed alchemists described as Jewish, and real alchemists supposed by someone to be Jewish, in detail. While many particular instances are unconvincing, the interplay he demonstrates between medicine and alchemy on the one hand, and alchemical and mystical circles on the other, does suggest that at least a minor theme in Jewish intellectual life has been ignored by modern scholarship.
   
   The main problem with the book is that it really requires backgrounds in both Jewish and alchemical studies to follow and judge Patai's arguments. However, to be fair, it does not offer itself as a primer in either subject. You will have to look elsewhere, and there is ample bibliographic information.
   
   A few examples of what it offers:
   
   Harry Potter fans will here encounter the real Nicholas Flamel of Paris (a real man, if not necessarily really an alchemist), and his supposed Jewish source-book for the philosopher's stone. Patai does not seem to me to advance the argument much, but he does demonstrate that the legend is part of a larger body of material about Jewish books falling into Christian hands. He also has some useful comments on the obliviousness of English and European scholars to each other's writings on Flamel, and some deeply embedded errors of translation in English-language treatments.
   
   Patai's argument for a genuine Hebrew original of the "autobiography" of the magician and alchemist "Abramelin" is interesting, but he manages to misrepresent Gershom Scholem's changes of mind on the subject. Scholem, in a note in "On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead" (German edition 1962, English translation 1991; pages 314-315, note 24 to "Tselem: The Concept of the Astral Body"), which Patai does not cite, explains that since first treating it as Jewish in 1925 he had found Renaissance Christian sources for the book's Jewish concepts and post-biblical Hebrew and Aramaic. However, it is worthwhile to have Patai's citations of the German version, in addition to that translated from French into English by MacGregor Mathers in 1898 (reprinted some years ago by Dover). (Also, some of A.E. Waite's reasons for rejecting the Jewish origin of the text, in his "Ceremonial Magic," such as the paternal blessing of children and the concept of guardian angels, are actually minor evidences for it!)
   
   There is an interesting, and to my mind inconclusive, reconsideration of some the works formerly attributed to the Christian mystic Ramon Lull (various spellings), and their possible Jewish background.
   
   Working notes of actual alchemists, including a multi-lingual dictionary of instruments and materials which is valuable evidence of cross-cultural influences in several directions.
   
   All in all, a useful book for anyone already familiar with basic works on the history of alchemy, or with an interest in Jewish studies, and a good addition to a library with at least basic collections in both these subjects.

No comments about Hope, Help, Healing with ARCHANGEL RAPHAEL and THE ANGELS.

No comments about The Boys of the Archangel Raphael: A Youth Confraternity in Florence, 1411-1785.

1 comments about Michelangelo and Raphael in the Vatican: With Botticelli, Perugino, Signorelli, Ghirlandaio, and Rosselli.

1. I bought this book while at the Vatican so I could understand all the paintings I was about to see. It was an outstanding help and I have since shown it to numerous people who have fallen in love with all the pictures and explanations. In fact, I am ordering a copy for my mother-in-law for fear that she will not be able to relinquish my copy! One of the best parts of the book is that it shows you fold outs of the entire fresco and then spends many pages with close up pictures describing in detail what is included in the large frescos.

1 comments about Reich Speaks of Freud.

1. Even though this book was written, or at least the current edition was edited, at a stage of Reich's life when he was beginning to succumb to paranoid fantasies of a global nature, there is still much richness here in the facts about Freud's conservatism and Reich's up front personal exchanges on the most decisive issues that led Reich to launch his own branch of psychology relying, at first, on Marxist understandings of social struggle as well as of the understanding that patriacharchy was not the only form of society that 19th Century and early 20th Century anthropologists from Morgan to Malinowski had shown and that Marx and Engels had pointed to.
   
   Reich exposes that Freud had realized the conflict between his discovery of how pathologies spread from sexual repression and Freud's staunch support for conservative patriachal antiwoman family morality and those structures as practiced by the middle classes in early 20th Century Europe. He explains how Freud then developed a series of non materialist and non scientific "complexes" and "drives" and the entirely nonsensical "theory of sublimation" to try to reconcile this contradiction.
   
   Reich's response to his mentor's contradictions in the 1920s was to launch a psychology that refused to accept sexual repression, conservative sex morality, and patriarchal sex roles, a pyschology that linked itself to the need to overturn capitalism and put working people in power. He became recognized as one of the world's most effective pyschoanlysts, but also built a political movement, first in Austria, then in Germany that involved thousands fighting against Fascism and for women's rights and sexual freedom especially for the youth.
   For this Reich earned the emnity of Hitler as well as the stalinist Communist party of Germany which expelled him as a Trotskyist. Sadly, after the defeat in Germany, Reich descended from his political and pyschoanalytic theories to an increasing reliance on the spurious idea of orgone energy--a basic natural universal energy released in good sex and later, according to Reich, floating through the universe. Sadly, this led him to increased paranoia that disarmed him before the sad frame up the McCarthyite witchunt used to frame him up and send him to prison in Lewisburg Pennsylvania to die.
   
   This book does bare marks of Reich's later paranoia and his orgone theory. Yet, there are enough traces of his actual conversations with Freud to provide an necessary addition to our knowlege of Freud's motivations and limiations.
   
   
   Oh well, if you want to see the grandeur of a revolutionary vision of how the neurotic problems of capitalist mental health can be overcome read his early writings like the Sexual Struggle of the Youth and The Sexual Revolution. If you want to read an outstanding analysis of why conservative "family values" politics are essential to capitalist society and how they can be defeated by a struggle for women's rights, sexual freedom, and true liberation, read The Mass Pyschology of Fascism.

No comments about Psychological Debriefing: Theory, Practice and Evidence.

1 comments about Tat Tvam Asi / That thou art (The Path of Fire According to the Asparsavada).

1. Then I would recommend to read this book: Here Raphael chose the form of a dialogue between master and disciple (Antonio) to introduce Antonio (& therefore the reader) step-by-step into the topic: Advaita, Shankara, Asparsayoga, the Unity of Western and Eastern traditions etc.
   I was touched by the Chapter 'Bodily death': The disciple comes to the Master in desperation as his brother had died suddenly and unexpected. Raphael's answers show impressingly (for me quite unexpected) the radical view of the realized (totally unattached, non-resistant) Advaitin. The chapters 'The Origin of Subconsciousness' and 'Compensations of The Ego' give practical advise for the Path: Here Raphael explains how (permanently repeating) thought-patterns & -habits start (are 'born') and also, that and how they can be discharged/ dissolved again. Sentences like the following made me 'pause':
   "but the identification with what we are not leads us into conflict and suffering. Man believes he is the body, desire, intellect etc., but these things are only different aspects of illusion-maya; behind these distorting appearances there is the true Being, that which was never born and which will never cease to be." (p. 49) "Realization yields to those who truly love it ... If there is a burning thirst for a total solution of the existential problems at all levels an degrees, then one is ready to travel up the road of no return. Besides, it would be advisable not to set yourself limits of time, or to imagine that realization should materialize according to one's preconceived sentimental ideas." (p. 75) "Remember this, my dear one, the Harmony of the entire world depends upon your inner Harmony." (p. 78) "Only he who is watchful saves himself. ... Watchfulness is total self-awareness, it is complete openness; as long as there is watchfulness there are no impediments or obstacles within our psychic spatiality. Whosoever is watchful is outside of time." (p. 105) "Remember that everything happens at the right time. ... Whosoever travels down the way of return, every event will present itself to him at the right moment. The disciple need not worry about anything except maturing his understanding." (p 106)

No comments about History Of The Modern Music Of Western Europe: From The First Century To The Present Day (1848).