April 16-18 , 2004
During the recent consciousness explosion, a huge amount of attention has rightly been given to the Eastern spiritual paths, but we have neglected the profound esoteric traditions that permeate the evolution of Western culture.
This workshop aims to bring alive the Western esoteric tradition, reveal its color and vitality, investigate its many mysteries, and show its acute relevance to the contemporary world. We will begin with the old Celtic culture of Britain and Ireland and see how it helped to shape the Arthurian and Grail traditions. From there, our attention will shift to the Renaissance, to the “more powerful philosophy” that was first articulated at the Platonic Academy in Fifteenth Century Florence. Under the guidance of Marsilio Ficino, lover of wisdom, healer, and musician, and Pico della Mirandola, phenomenal linguist and original Christian cabalist, the Academy seeded a hermetic and neo-platonic philosophy that profoundly influenced many of the most creative figures of the Renaissance from the Medici court to Elizabethan England.
Our gaze shifts next to the alchemical world of Renaissance Bohemia where figures like the magus John Dee and alchemists like Michael Maier and Heinrich Khunrath brought magic and science together amid the winding cobbled streets and spires of Prague and Cesky Krumlov. Simultaneously, in Elizabethan England, many of the leading poets and writers, like Philip Sidney and Walter Raleigh, embraced the ‘occult philosophy’ and wove an esoteric and Celtic mythology around the Virgin Queen. The movement came to a head with The Rosicrucian Enlightenment of the early Seventeenth Century when a general spiritual reform of the world was proclaimed in manifestoes, and dark counter forces massed to crush this beautiful awakening.
The workshop will conclude by examining the contribution of the Austrian philosopher, spiritual teacher, and educator, Rudolf Steiner, whose penetrating and brilliant work can be seen as a modern worldview consistent with the deepest esoteric mysteries of the West and of world culture. We will use lecture, discussion, meditation, illustrations, and humor in explorating this half-forgotten wisdom.
Ralph White is co-founder of the New York Open Center and editor of the award-winning LapisMagazine.org. Born in Wales, he is a life-long world traveler whose story of adventure in the remote mountains of Eastern Tibet was recently published in Tibet: True Stories. He produced and edited The Rosicrucian Enlightenment Revisited and has organized a series of highly regarded international conferences in Bohemia, Florence, and Britain on the Western Esoteric Tradition. He has also taught at New York University and is a writer on contemporary holistic issues for a wide variety of magazines.If you don’t know anything about any of this, come and you will know. We are honored to welcome our esteemed colleague on his long overdue first visit to Rowe.