To warm up for some future posts about the 17th century Rosicrucian apologist John Heydon, here are images of the portraits that appear as frontispieces to several of his works. History has been unkind to Heydon - commentators dismissing him as an outright plagiarist of Francis Bacon, Fludd, Gaffarel and Agrippaamongst others. While I don't ( Read more... )

I've been fascinated by Athanasius Kircher's "Arca musarithmica" since I saw a photograph of a surviving specimen in Jamie James' The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science and the Natural Order of the Universe. I've not had the courage to begin trying to decipher Kircher's discussion of it in the Musica Mirifica section of Musurgia ( Read more... )

Well, I suppose the best way to ease myself into blogging is to start with a list of links - the first post in a series I'll be calling Harmonia Mundi... a cliché, I know, but I suppose clichés are the essence of tradition ( Read more... )