the hermetic shakespeare

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THE HERMETIC SHAKESPEARE

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

AT NOTRE DAME de NAMUR UNIVERSITY

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH

By

Nethanael L. Payne IV

Fall, 2013



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© 2013

by

Nethanael L. Payne IV



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I certify that I have read this thesis and that in my opinion it is fully adequate, in scope and

quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of Arts in English.

___________________________________

Vincent Fitzgerald, Ph.D.

Professor of English Literature

Thesis Director

I certify that I have read this thesis [creative writing project] and that in my opinion it is fully

adequate, in scope and quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of Arts in English.

_____________________________________

Jacqueline L. Berger, M.F.A.

Master of Arts in English Literature Program Director

Thesis Director

Approved for submission to the School of Arts and Humanities at Notre Dame de Namur

University.

_____________________________________

John Lemmon PhD. Dean, College of Arts and Sciences



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Dedicated to La Tanya, Nathaniel, Nicole & Kristianna



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Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge all of the hard work, research, and dedication to the subject of

Hermeticism, Humanism and Renaissance Magic that has come before me in order to make this

once fanciful notion a reality. This work is built upon the shoulders of giants.



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Abstract

As Ethan Allen Hitchcock says of the hermetic nature of literary works in the opening

lines on his Remarks on the Sonnets of Shakespeare: “Hermetic writing is a species of painting;

and as no artist upon canvas can be permitted to interpret his own picture, so no artistic hermetic

writer can be allowed to translate into didactic statements the meaning of his own scripture or

writing.” Hermeticism is a set of philosophical and religious beliefs that appear in the Roman

Empire by the 2nd century AD with the appearance of a series of texts we now call the Corpus

Hermeticum. As a class, Hermetic texts are focused upon the Greek “tou philosóphou líthos”, in

Latin the “lapis philosophorum,” and in English the “Philosophers Stone”. Hermeticism was

compounded of many different strains of religious and philosophical belief that were current in

the Roman Empire at that time. Of course all of these beliefs developed from beliefs that are far

older. In order to begin to understand the origin of Hermetic thought, the individual ancient

strands of beliefs that were woven into it must be separated and examined individually.

Associations with Hermeticism begin with the Egyptian God Thoth continuing with the classical

Greek God Hermes, and finally Hermes Trismegistus and the books attributed to him.

Trismegistus, first mentioned on an ibis shrine in Saqqara, Egypt 172 BCE, was not only

envisioned by Plato to have been identical with Djhuti (Toth) naming him originator of

arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy amongst other things, or a contemporary of Moses as

Augustine had done; but was also, by the time Ficino writes ‘lawful philosophy is no different

than true religion’, seen as the uniter of reason and faith, or the polarities of the logical,

mechanistic, rational world, and that of faith, intuition, feelings and the world beyond form.

During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus



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enjoyed great credit and were popular among alchemists, writers, scientists and artists of all

walks of life. The "hermetic tradition" therefore refers to alchemy, magic, astrology, and related

subjects. The texts are usually distinguished in two categories: the "philosophical" and

"technical" hermetica; the former deals mainly with issues of philosophy, and the latter with

magic, potions and alchemy. The most famous of these texts was the Emerald Tablet also known

as Smaragdine Table, Tabula Smaragdina, or The Secret of Hermes, a text purporting to reveal

the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone, and its transmutations. Claimed to be the work of Hermes

Trismegistus, this short and cryptic text was highly regarded by European alchemists, thinkers

and artists as the foundation of their art, and in particular its Hermetic tradition. A hermetic

interpretation of the texts will offer another lens with which to interpret the artistic, social,

philosophical or political movements in Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets in Renaissance culture

and thought.



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Table of Contents

Chapter I: Nature & Natural Magic

Prospero the Magician: Renaissance Magic in The Tempest 2

Unseen World: The Profound in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 13

Chapter II: Tragedy & The Saturnian Tradition 21

Hamlet: A Semiotic View of his World 22

The Saturnian Tradition in Shakespeare’s Tragedy Othello 31

Chapter III: Beauty’s Rose Might Never Die 41

Beauty’s Immortal Rose: Shakespeare’s Hermetic first Sonnet 42

Works Cited 49

Bibliography 52



Chapter I

Nature & Natural Magic



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Prospero the Magician: Renaissance Magic in The Tempest

Shakespeare’s magnificent work The Tempest lends itself to a multiplicity of critical and

theoretical interpretations in the study of Renaissance science, culture and superstition. Within

the context of humanist and Hermetic philosophy the ideals of Nature and natural magic play a

significant role in defining Prospero as magus. This magician is able to represent the natural

world and distinct existing order to visitors of his isle in order to confound the senses and

expectations of the world at large. The audience of Shakespeare’s time is to see Prospero as a

redemptive character. The Tempest is a play of repentance, power, revenge and fate that may also

be understood, much like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, under the guise of fantasy, dream,

magic, metaphor or imagination. Ellen Belton’s “When No Man Was His Own: Magic and Self-

Discovery in The Tempest”, Robert Egan’s “This Rough Magic: Perspectives of Art and

Morality in The Tempest”, Jacquelyn Fox-Good’s “Other Voices: The Sweet, Dangerous Airs of

Shakespeare’s Tempest”, and Peter French’s John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus

represent Shakespeare as a playwright presenting a world of magic, mysticism and mystery

which fall under the spell of Renaissance magic and ritualistic belief.

Magic was not a belief relegated to the fringes of early modern society throughout

England and the European continent. On the contrary, the accepted notion of witches, mages, or

enchanters reached the highest levels of the social order as seen in the preface of

“Daemonologies, in Forme of ane Dialogue” written by none other than the king of Scotland,

James VI, and later James I of England.



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The fearefull aboundinge at this time in this countrie, of these detestable slaves of the

Devill, the Witches or enchaunters, hate moved me (beloved reader) to dispatch in post,

this following treat of mine… (XI)

The very man who would later be known as King James of England was no stranger to

the occult notions of magic in the Renaissance period. Therefore, the notion that Prospero could

easily be regarded as something other than a practitioner of magic must be evaluated carefully.

The belief in witches, wizards, warlocks and enchanters permeated the totality of European

societies from the king down. This belief shaped the development of Western societies in terms

of religion, art, and even in politics. Not admitting to a belief in magic at this point in time was

not a viable option; as the Church inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger in their book

Malleus Maleficarum (1484) argue, failing to believe in magic was heretical to then Church

doctrine:

But this is contrary to the true faith, which teaches us that certain angels fell from heaven

and are now devils, and we are bound to acknowledge that by their very nature can do

many wonderful things which we cannot do. And those who try to induce others to

perform such evil wonders are called witches. And because infidelity in a person who has

been baptized is technically called heresey, therefore such persons are plainly heretics.

(pp 2-3)

According to Kramer and Sprenger, the punishments for denying the existence of magic,

and therefore angels and demons or witches, could then be as severe as the punishments for

proclaimed witches themselves. Magic, as was incorporated into the overall belief structure of

the time, is clearly not only seen as Satanic, but rather as value neutral. From the perspective of

the Medieval Christian church, the Catholic Church itself practiced magic by producing effects



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on inanimate objects; inducing psychosomatic symptoms, or by working miracles in the Mass

with music, incense, wine, or transubstantiation. Magic, however, used by non-Christians such as

Jews, Muslims or even Reformists was, at the time, considered witchcraft. Naturally, the goals of

the Reformation were to replace the centralization of spirituality, moving supreme authority of

salvation from the Church to the individual. Allowing a singular person or persons to be

responsible for one’s own salvation is a philosophy which naturally leads one towards

humanism, whereby one may ‘fashion’ him or herself by exploring one’s inner potential.

Humanists concern themselves with the possibilities of humanity and believe people may

obtain spiritual perfection. These are the same beliefs which underlie Hermeticism. Hermeticism

deals with raising the awareness or consciousness of the practitioner, allowing it to reach a

transcendent state where the practitioner may then manipulate the natural world. This magical

manipulation is done via the understanding of ‘sympathies’. (i.e. every part of the natural world

has a corresponding part in the celestial and spiritual worlds that operate in sympathy with one

another). This is the way in which the supernatural manifests itself through Prospero in The

Tempest.

According to Hermetic philosophy, a person can learn to manipulate this metaphysical

system of sympathies consciously and in so doing raise his or her own consciousness and place

within that system. In his De Occulta Philosphia, the Renaissance occultist Cornelius Agrippa

articulates how such a person could do so. According to Agrippa there are three types of

“magic”:

First, natural magic, the manipulation of forces in the world of elements, mostly based on

notions about so-called sympathies . . . Second, mathematical magic, operations

performed on the basis of insights into mathematics and its subdivisions (arithmetic,



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geometry, music, astronomy, and mechanics) . . . Third, religious magic, rituals of magic

intended to establish contact with inhabitants of supercelestial worlds—that is, spiritism.

(Johannisson 252-53)

In her pioneering research into Hermeticism in the Renaissance and its influence on the

development of modern science, Frances Yates examines the core texts of the philosophy, the

Corpus Hermeticum, those supposedly written by the so-called Hermes Trismegistus. During the

Renaissance, this Hermes was believed to have been an Ancient Egyptian priest, “almost

contemporary of Moses, a Gentile prophet of Christianity, and the source—or one of the sources

with other prisci theologi —of the stream of ancient wisdom which had eventually reached Plato

and the Platonists” (Yates 234). In this body of work, the origins of humanity are described, just

as the Holy Bible describes the Adam of Genesis.

The Hermetic man in the "Pimander" [the most recognized work of the Corpus] also falls

but can also be regenerated. The regenerated Hermetic man regains the dominion over nature

which he had in his divine origin. When he is regenerated, brought back into communion with

the ruler of ‘the all’ through magico-religious communion with the cosmos, he regains his

divinity. (235).

It is this Hermetic man that the Renaissance humanists imagined as the ultimate

fulfillment of human potential. It is no wonder that the Church, bound by its Medieval—even

draconian—mysticism, distrusted such Hermetic humanism and its Reformist antecedents. It

called into question the value of the Church’s magic.

The old Medieval image of an order of which man was a part was broken. Man can avail

himself of ordered forms to sublimate things in God or to hurl them into the darkness of

abnormality, the monstrous, and the chaotic. The controversy between true, natural magic and



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ceremonial magic amounted to this. True magic was defended because it was work which made

use of the given forms in order to construct an ascending Chain of Being. Ceremonial magic, on

the other hand, was attacked because it was work which led into the abyss of sin and chaos

(Garin 91).

It is at this point that the figures of the witch and wizard emerge. The wizard or magus

epitomizes the values of Hermetic humanism. The witch, however, is the embodiment of the

fears surrounding it, particularly on the part of the Church.

Because Hermetic humanism was viewed from opposing positions, it is only natural that

the qualities that define witches and wizards should be dichotomous. The most obvious

distinction between the two is gender: witches were predominantly female and wizards were

predominantly male. This is a natural polarity in light of the patriarchal structures of most

Medieval and Renaissance societies. Since humanism suggests an inversion of the established

social order, giving the individual precedence over the collective and—it would appear—the

commoner over the noble, it would seem that a logical end result would be the overthrow of the

male by the female. It is understandable then that a fear of such a topsy-turvy world would result

in the demonization of the female. Since magic usage is about displays of power, it is expected

that a man wielding such power in a patriarchal society would be viewed positively whereas a

woman wielding the power would be a perversion.

These various power dynamics regarding witches and wizards are seen in Shakespeare’s

The Tempest . Prospero, the primum mobile of the world of the play, is a dominant Christian male

and an educated man of aristocratic birth. While it is his excessive devotion to his Hermetic

studies that causes his overthrow as Duke of Milan, it is his hard-earned mastery of those studies

that allows him to reshape his world as he sees fit in order to restore natural order to it.



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Hermeticism as noted is marked by a metaphysical awareness of the underlying structure of

reality. The Hermetic philosopher is able to see past the constructs of the physical plane to the

true Platonic forms beneath them. As Prospero says:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherent, shall dissolve;

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep (4.1.148-56).

In this most celebrated passage Prospero is doing more than commenting on the

transitory nature of all things. He is offering a glimpse into the mists of reality. Reality, like the

masque the spirits performed in the play, is “baseless” and “insubstantial.” It is an illusion

lacking substance. Of course Prospero, himself is an illusion, a figment of a playwright’s

imagination, as he acknowledges here in the last line. Not only is this passage metaphysical, it is

also metatheatrical, breaking the fourth wall and reminding the audience that the reality in which

they are engrossed is nothing more than a dream within a dream.

BJ Gibbons argues that the perception of the natural world was shifting in Early Modern

England as many before had seen nature as “a threatening and hostile realm, beyond the control



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of even the most extensive of human powers” (19), but then began to view the natural world as

positive and controllable (41). Gibbons relates this to The Tempest, as he writes, “Shakespeare’s

Prospero boasted about his control over nature” (38). Shakespeare emphasizes the belief that

man could work with nature, along with human texts and philosophies, and utilize it to improve.

Yet, this mastery over nature had a higher purpose than simply the growth of power. Gibbons

quotes the anonymous author of the alchemical text The Sophic Hydrolith, who writes that

alchemy is for “the glory of [God and] his most Holy name, and for the good of thy suffering

fellow man” (112). Along this line of thought, Shakespeare likely models Prospero after the

“self-styled magus” John Dee (Hopkins 21), who wrote that the “essential powers of magic are

located in a higher spiritual drive of the soul to achieve proximity to God.” (Brann 178).

Ellen Belton has argued that Prospero’s complete “higher purpose is not immersion in the

inner self, but union with something that is outside and, in Shakespearean terms, higher than the

individual” (134), and Robert Egan has discussed Prospero’s morality, stating that he must seek

“to purge the evil from the inhabitants of his world and restore them to goodness” (175).

Much of the criticism has emphasized the more positive nature of Prospero’s magic, and hinted

at its relation to virtue and humanism.

Prospero reveals the humanist and Hermetic manner in which he has mastered nature

when he relates his history to Miranda after the opening scene’s tempest. Prospero states that he

has been “so reputed / In dignity and for the liberal arts” (I.ii.735) and had been “rapt in secret

studies” (I.ii.77), or the study of mystical texts. In the very growth and development of occult

theory, the “secret studies” that Prospero seeks to follow, there lies a foundation of humanism.

Here one may suggest the occult and humanism stem from a particular view of spiritual

salvation, redemption, and even rebirth. (i.e. from what was once a purely mystical doctrine in



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Hermeticism, springs forth the seed of the humanist as well as Protestant reformations seen in the

writings of Giambattista Vico, or Martin Luther).

Shakespeare also assigns the Hermetic magus the capability to be enormously powerful,

and Prospero’s ability and control over nature is demonstrated time and again. At the start of the

play via the spirit Ariel, Prospero calls forth a storm that shipwrecks a group of people, among

whom are Prospero’s brother and the king of Naples, who are responsible for Prospero’s

imprisonment on the deserted island which he refers to as his ‘cell’. The magus Prospero is the

individual that can command the elements that care not “for the name of the king”. (I.i.17) Once

this magical power is established as the domain of the exiled former duke, Shakespeare

establishes Prospero as being superior in strength to King Alonso with power, not divine right,

akin to the powers of a god:

The morality of magic is always a concern, and there is often a fine line between moral

and immoral actions. Prospero is not presented as godlike in terms of infallibility or as a

Nietzscheian superhuman despite having supernatural control and power. In Prospero’s use of

magic to deceive the senses of the shipwrecked crew, his purpose, as Erasmus would say, must

not be to “cloud” their senses, rather to illuminate them in the Hermetic sense.

It is imperative that Prospero himself have a comprehensive and flawless moral vision of

his world. He must perceive not only what is evil in men and what, ideally, they should

be, but also what men are, and what relationship he, as a man, bears toward them.

Without such a clarity of vision, the exercise of his art may result in corruption for

himself and chaos for those around him. (Eagan 175)

With his power and rage fueled by a dozen years of planning, Prospero strays somewhat

from his initial virtuous motive. Throughout the single day that the crew is shipwrecked on the



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island, Prospero’s actions grow harsher, and he is not even completely balanced at the beginning;

he must find virtue and balance in himself before he can truly educate his “students”. A Neo-

Platonist could argue it is Prospero’s imbalance within his tripartite soul structure which

threatens his role as a humanist and magician or mage as one side may be tilted away from

reason and more towards passion or opinion: “Reason itself is vulnerable to error and

corruption,” (Belton 135). Prospero himself does not have a comprehensive or flawless moral

view as human beings themselves are not, by nature, flawless moral beings. Erasmsus notes that

the revival of ancient, i.e. Hermetic, knowledge should be for the “knowledge of Christ” not to

“cloud men’s eyes with smoke” (83). As a humanist duke, Prospero should, ideally, represent

both the philosopher-king of Plato’s Republic as much as the Aristotelian mean. Prospero should

understand the philosophical notions of virtue while being able to also act upon such precepts.

Jacquelyn Fox-Good notes that Prospero’s “decision to forgive his enemies is precipitated by

Ariel” (264). Ariel tells Prospero that his charms are so strong upon his enemies, “That if you

now beheld them, your affections / would become tender...Mine would, sir were I human”

(V.i.16-20). Prospero replies in kind, “And mine shall” (V.i.2l). “Hast thou, which are but air, a

touch a feeling / Of their afflictions, and shall not myself, / One of their kind, that relish all as

sharply / Passion as they, be kindlier mov’d than thou art?” (V.i.24).

Prospero realizes that he is human, “one of their kind” and has flaws and “passion” as well. He

needs to use his magic to show his enemies virtue, as “the rarer action is / In virtue than in

vengeance” (V.i.27-8). Where once fury overran his reason, Prospero manages to see the error of

his ways. Being able to illustrate the concept of virtue on the island will allow him to “transfer

the new order he has created to the social hierarchy back home” (Belton 135). In forgiving his



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enemies and teaching them by his own example, Prospero believes that they will use the

knowledge to create a better Milan or Naples.

In “The Tempest”, Shakespeare details the progression of Prospero from a duke too

absorbed in his studies to provide for the wellbeing of others, to a revenge-driven magus, to a

man who uses his acquired knowledge and power to illuminate virtue for others. “[S]poken in a

meter used elsewhere in the play only by Ariel in his short speech before the masque, and in his

songs” (Fox-Good264) further emphasizing Ariel’s influence on him, Prospero states:

“Now all my charms are all o’erthrown, / And what strength I have’s mine own, / Which

is most faint” (Epi. 1-3).

He shows humility and illustrates the recognition of his own imperfect state as a human.

Prospero has risen in mystical power, but has realized that it has almost been at the expense of

his spiritual welfare. In this final section, he states that he desires “Spirits to enforce, art to

enchant” (Epi. 14) but the audience’s “prayer” (Epi. 16) to release him. Through the

methodical, humanist study of the occult and the use of the supernatural, Prospero has ascended,

and his powers have been such that he has controlled both kings and clowns, spirits and

monsters. Yet, Shakespeare concludes the play with Prospero overthrowing his charms for his

natural and human strength, strength in both rationality and in love. This is not to say that his

superhuman powers are somehow immoral, or without merit; rather, in finishing his showpiece

with Prospero relying on his human qualities alone, Shakespeare illustrates that it is the human,

and the humanist process, that carries the most value. Fox-Good states that Shakespeare

present:“a world in which all manner of things – spirits, banquets, goddesses – take

shape and then disperse, seem present then absent, appear and disappear at will” (253-254);

I would emphasize that humans, with all their potential, are that which remain constant.



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Shakespeare shows in The Tempest not that the supernatural “charms” are necessary, but that

society needs human strength, and needs true humanism to build the virtuous, ideal world.

A potential ideal world is just one of the creations that the humanist system of education and

white magic could bring in Early Modern England. Humanism and Hermetic natural philosophy

are both ways to combat ignorance and the immorality of demonic power and false alchemy.



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Unseen World: The Profound in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Scholarship on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, has often ranged from being

dismissive of the merits of the comedy, to enthusiastic promotion of its virtues of love, coupling,

and the union of the sexes. Puck, Bottom, and Theseus have all been much subjected to

interpretation and exploration in order to understand the role and function of the comedy as

much as a work of art as for social, cultural or religious implications. Does this comedy have

anything profound to express to an audience? The key to understanding where the profundity of

the play rests is to understand the nature and role of these parallel existing worlds of reality and

the dream state. Puck’s speech in Act V.I lines (268-287) with the help of Theseus’ speech in

Act V.1 (12-22) shed light on this timeless place beyond the reaches of our everyday experience,

the role of the faeries, and the cycles of life, death, and regeneration. The world of the

imagination, between the waking senses and the dream is where the power of life, death and

rebirth are one. In this world ruled by the faeries, timelessness, impulse, intuition and spirit

merge to create form. It is in this realm where lovers are joined and the process of creating future

generations has its start, in the world of the dream or heart.

Reading Puck’s speech in Act V.I, (268-287) gives a window into the role and nature of

the fairies and sprites of the forest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. An utopia full of mysticism,

magic, and myth is ever present in the worlds between waking-life, death, and the dream state.

The realm of Puck, Oberon and Titania exists as counterpart to the left-brained world of reason,

logic, and the rational mind. In this world Shakespeare reaches beyond the spectrum of the



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visible eyes to the unseen eye of imagination which resides in dreams operating in total darkness.

The roots of this can be seen in Theseus’ speech in Act V.1 (12-17)

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Theseus sets the stage, urging us to imagine the poet or writer as one who accesses this space

between the vast known and unknown worlds in order to create form in the guise of nouns or

objects. Poets are creative forces of nature which bring forth the unseen into the visible world by

aid of imagination and by extension the dream world. As Theseus says,

“Such tricks hath strong imagination/ That, if it would but apprehend some joy, / It comprehends

some bringer of that joy;” (V.1, 18-19). Thus the word or ‘logos’ as voice or written script

functions as tools of the imagination, bringers of joy, we as mortals are apt to apprehend. It is

important to note the object or individual identified as the poet, is not the ‘bringer’ or source of

the joy, but rather a conduit by which the bringer of that joy expresses it in a way we as both

audience and participants may receive said feeling.

In this way so to function the faeries of the forest, admittedly lesser ‘gods’ within the

pantheon of Greek myth, they themselves are not ‘bringers’ of these sources of joy as they are

literally and figuratively actors on the stage set forth by the greater forces known to them as the

collective Greek gods. The forest dwellers are agents of the unseen world acting on its behalf by

bringing mortals closer to understanding the nature of the unseen world of creation that makes



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form from ‘airy nothing’. Even when Theseus tries to repudiate the claims of the lovers’

experiences “Or in the night, imagining some fear, / How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear!” (V.I,

21-22). Hippolyta is not as quick to dismiss the testimonies of all four that have shared in the

same illusion.

“And all their minds transfigur’d so together, /More witnesseth than fancy’s images/ And grows

to something of great constancy;” (Act V.I, 24-26). Hippolyta having a rebuttal to her husband

who is not just any man but one of authority indicates that Theseus, though king, does not have

the final word or, by extraction, complete understanding of all the forces of the unseen world

himself. This is significant in the respect that all kings derive their authority from divine right

and are thusly de facto rulers for the unseen—in this case “God”—on earth. Therefore, even

Theseus, favored of the gods, as king of Athens, is still an actor upon the stage of the greater

unseen world.

The unseen realm of the sprites and faeries exists in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in

tandem with the world of reason, logic, temporality, and the visible eyes. Not everyone is privy

to this magical world where potions and joy are conjured and life, death, and dreams merge.

Theseus and Hippolyta both are not privy to this other realm though their positions in the real

world are unquestioned. Therefore exposure to the unseen world of imagination is not dependent

upon one’s physical or material wealth or status in the waking world. In fact, it counts for naught

as even Bottom gains access behind Nature’s veil. The role then of the poet’s eye functions

independently of the world of the ‘real’ if not separate from it completely. What we are dealing

with is a force or ‘bringer’ that speaks to the intuitive, creative, emotive faculties which utilize

the eye of imagination as the realm of logic and reason uses the visible spectrum.



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Puck begins his speech telling us he is out and operating in the hours of darkness when

honest labor sleeps after the day’s toils and creatures of the night awaken into a world where we

as mere mortals literally and figuratively cannot see with our eyes: “Now the hungry lion roars,

/And the wolf behowls the moon; /Whilst the heavy ploughman snores, /All with weary task

fordone” ( V.I, 268-271).

The ploughman representing the common person is fast asleep, too tired to keep his eyes open if

he wanted to, he must ‘see’ Puck with the eye of imagination as he cannot seek said world during

the day as he is hard at work. This time of the day is also where we are shown the order of things

are reversed, here the lions and wolves have advantage over mankind, being able to see in the

dark. The hierarchy of Nature has changed. This only reaffirms our assertion that Theseus,

though king, does not rule here, at this time or place.

“Now the wasted brands do glow, /Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud, /Puts the wretch that

lies in woe/ In remembrance of a shroud.” ( V.I, 272-275). There are several allusions to death

within the next few lines and death and the dream state are closely linked not only in literature

but in appearance as the dead often look asleep. The wasted brands or end of a burning fire

conjures images of the end of an evening, warmth and cozying down into bed, welcoming sleep.

Even the owl is connected to the death imagery. According to Paul Johnsgard ( North American

Owls: Biology and Natural History, Smithsonian Institution Press), Mesopotamian tablets from

2,300 B.C. depict the goddess Lilith as winged or bird-footed, typically accompanied by owls, a

significant association because Lilith was Sumeria's goddess of death, dovetailing with the idea

and image of the shroud of remembrance.

“Now it is the time of night/ That the graves, all gaping wide, /Every one lets forth his sprite, /In

the churchway paths to glide.” ( VI, 276-279). Shakespeare repeats and emphasizes the



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connection between the worlds of night, death, and the dream. It is clearly evident we are now at

night, and many things, including the end of the actual play are fast approaching. Sprites or

spirits of the newly deceased move from their graves to be judged for the next life by

symbolically entering into the realm of the unseen by way of church paths to the hereafter. But

even in this state there is regeneration taking place in the guise of sleep for the weary. Those who

let out their sprites are not all dead, some in fact are only dreaming, those whose wandering

‘sprites’ return by morning reemerge refreshed, renewed for the forthcoming day:

“And we fairies, that do run/ By the triple Hecate’s team/ From the presence of the sun,

/Following darkness like a dream, /Now are frolic.” ( V.I, 280-284)

The most striking image in these lines is that of Hecate. Hecate is the Greek goddess of magic,

witchcraft, the night, moon, ghosts and necromancy. In statuary Hecate was often depicted in

triple form as a goddess of crossroads. All of these elements are seen in Puck’s speech. From

every sprite that is let forth from a gaping grave to the crossroads of the churchway paths, to the

magic potions and enchantment that takes hold of lovers during the night, we see Shakespeare

has incorporated the trinity of images of Hecate into this dream of a play. The three forms, Luna,

the moon, Cynthia, in heaven, and Diana on Earth as the note to the text says gives a feminine

counterpart to the masculine trinity of Father, son and Holy Ghost. In many respects this is a

symbolic representation of the right-brain, typically seen as feminine, creative, intuitive. As

Diana, Hecate counters Apollo, the sun god and god of the seven muses and of music and poetry.

We see this illustrated as Puck mentions that the faeries “run…/From the presence of the

sun/Following darkness like a dream”. In fact they are ‘frolic’ as it is night, the light of day is

done and now they may have their turn to play in the world.



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Faeries are chasers of the dream; they do not live by the eyes of vision and the reason and logic

that accompany the sun. Their realm is that of the uncanny, where timelessness gives way to

endless creative possibility. This is exemplified by having the dead, the sleeping, and the hidden

forces of nature all at work under the same lens of the unseen world. It is also worth noting the

significance to which in Elizabethan England there was an assumed terrestrial feminine

counterpart to God the Father whose realm was that of the heavens. Theodore Roszack in his

work The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology writes about this Hecate-like

figure that eventually disappeared all together from Renaissance science until the reemergence of

systems theory in the 1970s. This would speak to the people of the time in being comforted

terrestrially by God’s counterpart on Earth who prepares the way for the sprites to join him in

heaven, bearing them forth into new life or by preparing the stage or grounds where new life is

seeded, either in the soil or the womb by lovers, also at night. Even one of Shakespeare’s better

known contemporaries, Ben Jonson, consecrates his dead daughter’s body to “heaven’s queen”,

also invoking similar images to Puck’s “triple Hecate’s team”.

With safety of her innocence;

Whose soul heaven's queen, whose name she bears,

In comfort of her mother's tears,

Hath placed amongst her virgin-train:

Where, while that severed doth remain,

This grave partakes the fleshly birth;

Which cover lightly, gentle earth! (Ben Jonson, On my First Daughter, 2-8)



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Heaven’s queen, the embodiment of Cynthia is seen here, giving credence that this was not

singularly a Shakespearian phenomenon. The virgin-train and the moon represents Diana, as she

is the virgin goddess, whilst the gentle earth invokes Persephone, the final aspect of the tripartite

structure. Persephone, ever intertwined with Hades and the underworld, undoubtedly represents

Thanatos or death and the end of the physical or material world wherein Puck says, “Now it is

the time of night/ That the graves, all gaping wide, /Every one lets forth his sprite, /In the

churchway paths to glide.” Thus Hecate, as heaven’s queen, is also symbolically “God’s” queen

and partner, the moon to the sun.

To see the world through the eyes of lovers is not to see the world of our rational senses;

it is emotive or intuitive rather than logical, spiritual or ethereal than physical, chaotic than

organized or spontaneous than structured. This is why love and the heart are the realm of the

dream state and are governed by the unseen or ‘veiled’ forces that Pierre Hadot calls the veil of

Isis in his book The Veil of Isis: An essay on the history of the Idea of Nature: “ These ideas on

the role of the imagination had considerable repercussions in the Renaissance and the Romantic

period under the influence of the tradition of ‘natural magic’…the imagination has a kind of

magical power, which it exercises by the mere presence of an image” (65) and that “from the

Middle Ages down to the Romantic period, it was granted that there is an invisible force in

thought and imagination, capable of producing visible effects” (66) or as “Roger Bacon said…

‘Nature obeys the thoughts of the soul’” (66). There is a concerted point to see the imagination as

the “soul’s body”. Hadot quotes Porphyry which is the inverse of an earthly existence and a

physical form affirmed by the physical laws and senses, including, chiefly, sight.

We may suggest the soul ‘sees’ through the eye of imagination, whereby we define imagination

to include that which sees the unseen and the unseen being that which not yet is or once was and



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no longer is, i.e. the process of the hidden cycles of life, death and birth or Renaissance. Thus the

nature of the profound in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is literally and figuratively veiled from

both sight and empirical sense but not from perception, detection, feeling nor intuition. It is a

play about how closely the unseen world really is to us even if it seems imperceptibly distant

from our eyes when it is displayed as the other side of the coin. We may even apply this idea

when considering the nature of scholarship on Shakespeare’s comedies, where the profound is

not sought as readily as in drama where gravitas leads the way for the expectation of the

profound to appear.



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Chapter II

Tragedy & The Saturnian

Tradition



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Hamlet: A Semiotic View of his World

Much has been made of Hamlet’s psychology, agency, will and function as dramatis

persona. Freud, Lacan, and Graber give us a psycho-analytic account of Hamlet vís a vís the

imagery and symbolism of the world of Hamlet’s Denmark. The imagery of Hamlet’s speech in

Act 3, scene 1, has been analyzed contextually in order to bridge the gap from Hamlet’s own

world perspective to that of the audience. If one may assume that the verbiage of the Prince of

Denmark speaks to the world he knows, contemplates, and strives to understand, then by

extension, one may also presume Hamlet’s soliloquies indelibly mark how he literally and

metaphorically ‘speaks’ to himself as the premier inhabitant of his world. The images and

symbols he uses in order to contemplate the meaning of his own internal struggle give a window

into his particular time and place, and, furthermore, his standpoint . A semiotic view of Hamlet’s

most profound speech in Act 3, scene 1 (lines 55-88), on whether ‘to be’ or not reveals not only

how this is Hamlet’s most candid view of his own personal perspective, but also the importance

of the semiotic nature of imagery and symbol in making his particular worldview and thus the

angle of the story within the drama itself. A careful analysis of the imagery and symbols will

shed light not only on Hamlet as an emotive or psychiatric entity, but also the world from which

he draws the inspiration in order to speak in such terms.

We begin not with the most often quoted “To be, or not to be” as functionally, in terms of

rhetoric, this statement is a device utilized in order to introduce the concept of a dialectical

division within the persona of Hamlet himself. “To be, or not to be” is an irreducible argument

and thus becomes the theme and over-arching metaphor of the speech in terms of Hamlet’s own

sense of self pulling him in opposing directions, his will and desires misaligned. As Garber says

in her deconstruction of Hamlet , “The ghost--is a cultural marker of absence, a reminder of loss.



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Thus the very plot of Hamlet replicates the impossibility of the protagonist’s quest” (Garber,

300). There is at once a sense of futility in the images Hamlet chooses to describe his mood,

thoughts, or world. The absurdity of Hamlet’s first remark leads directly into visually absurd

images: “Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer/ The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

/Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing, end them” (3.1, 56-59).

The fortune Hamlet speaks of is the esoteric, and even Hermetic, idea of the wheel of fortune, the

cosmic wheel which determined the fates of kings from the most ancient societies to those of

Greece or Rome or Hamlet’s own predicament when he believes his father, Hamlet the elder, to

have been poisoned in the ear whilst sleeping in his orchard. Naturally, the wheel of fortune is

also very closely associated with Tarot, as well as astrology. Even Hippocrates, the ‘father’ of

medicine, is anecdotally said to have uttered that a physician without knowledge of astrology has

no right to call himself a physician. Classically, Aristotle in his Ars Poetica notes the

involvement of gods, in the form of the fates or wheel of fortune, is an expected marker for the

making of tragedy. This suffering, used in its original Latinate context patiens, to suffer, or to

endure, comes by way of the wheel of fortune, instantly tying Hamlet back to other great

‘sufferers’ in the tradition of tragedy from Oedipus Rex, to Medea, to Antigone; each hero or

heroine endures the fate and role that has been laid before each, suffering the various slings or

arrows from personal loss of honor or reputation, office-- in the case of Oedipus his kingship--to

the loss of loved ones. With this particular allusion, the audience’s a priori knowledge of the

template of tragedy is called to action. The audience’s role in tragedy is to connect emotionally

to the plot in order to undergo a cathartic experience. Therefore, we may presume that Hamlet’s

inner world, in order to draw in an audience emotionally, must be open--if not exposed--to the

spectators and readers alike.



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Taking arms “against a sea of troubles” is naturally an absurd image of Man, in this case

Hamlet, fighting an enemy without real form or proportion, but also as vast as it is deep. This

troubled sea Hamlet speaks of is his own soul. The sea is an iconic image at once representative

not only of death and the unknown, but also the soul and the various images and accounts given

of its nature or form from ancient philosophy to the religious traditions of Hamlet’s time. Hamlet

understands he is a tragic character enacting a role seemingly thrust upon him by fate, thus his

cursing ‘outrageous fortune’. He has no thought of living through whatever has been set in store

for him as he sees himself as battling against a foe more cunning than Claudius, as Claudius is

not meant to be represented by the sea. If the king is not the insurmountable odds that Hamlet

deems futile, then the sea must come to embody something that may be seen to be as boundless

as the seas, the soul of man itself.

Thus if Claudius, the usurper, murderer, and incestuous adulterer is not the greatest foe of

the protagonist, then the only human form of opposition Hamlet truly faces in the play is himself,

his nature, or the nature of his own identity and being. Hamlet’s struggle against the gods or fate

is internalized rather than externalized as would be the case in antiquity. These themes, alongside

those of Hamlet’s wondering if he is able to fulfill his destiny even if he may think it a bitter pill

to swallow, constitute the framework from which Hamlet addresses himself as a person with his

own motivations independent of his quest to revenge the ghost or memory of his father.

Hamlet’s contemplation of the soul and the nature of its realm in the form of the sea is

juxtaposed with the notion of the soul’s having an existence the body itself will never

experience. The pun with consummation, particularly in terms of semantics and image being

both the seed of beginnings and its final result or an ‘end’ is particularly figurative in tone and



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esoteric in meaning; thus consummation is at once both one’s beginning and end, bound together

and yet seemingly opposed. Hamlet continues in his preoccupation with the idea as he says:

To die, to sleep-

No more, and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to; ‘tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d (3.1, 59-62).

Hamlet speaks of the end of the physical form on more than one occasion whilst implying and

imagining the ‘world of the soul’.

To die, to sleep-

To sleep, perchance to dream-ay, there’s the rub,

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil (3.1, 63-65).

Shakespeare’s alliteration and metonymy in the phrase ‘To die, to sleep” are repeated in the text

of the speech enabling an association between death and sleep in order to view sleep and death as

a point of equanimity rather than seeing ‘consummation’ as a terminating end. Functionally,

within the text, this assumption and assertion must be made in order to question ‘what dreams

may come’. Let us also not forget that in Elizabethan England, and even in modern French la

petite morte, the little death, is synonymous with consummation. This substitution is at the level



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of Hamlet’s own level of logic and ideation. In one sense, his notion of death has changed. The

vision of the ghost and knowledge of the trial Hamlet the elder must face have made him

reconsider the emphasis placed upon the physical world and its restricting forms or ‘mortal coil’.

Hamlet is now aware of a whole ‘world’ or sphere he is also heir to, that is, the realm of the

spirit. As a prince, Hamlet rules by divine right and the grace of God, implying favor is also

given in the next world. The dialogue between the two clowns in Act 5, scene 1 clearly illustrates

this feeling when they speak of the burial of the ‘drowned’ Ophelia:

“FIRST CLOWN: Is she to be buried in Christian burial when she willfully seeks her own

salvation?

SECOND CLOWN: I tell thee she is, therefore make her grave straight. The crowner hath sate

on her, and finds it a Christian burial.

“FIRST CLOWN: How can that be unless she drowned herself in her own defense?” (5.1, 1-7)

The clowns, acting as agents of comedy and satire are able to veil the piercing critique of divine

favor to those of prestige or office. Thus even Hamlet considering his own end is not viewed as

sacrilegious as he is of the honored lineage and still sacred even if yet profaned by contemplating

meeting his maker willfully. As the first clown asserts and indeed reminds, “If this had not been

a gentlewoman, she should have been buried out a’ Christian burial.” (5.1, 22-24).

Hamlet then, even in contemplation of suicide, never worries for his soul. He

contemplates dreams and not infernal punishments. He speaks of the dreams in wonder: “To

sleep, perchance to dream-ay, there’s the rub, / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

/”. This is not the mind of a man worried about his place in the realm of spirit. Hamlet is as

secure in his position in heaven as he is on earth; thus he can imagine actions outside of



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consequence as exemplified in his rash killing of Polonius whereupon he says in Act 3, Scene 4:

“I do repent, but heaven hath pleas’d it so/ To punish me with this, and this with me, / That I

must be their scourge and minister.” (3.4, 173-175)

The origin of Hamlet’s half-hearted apology is the same root at the heart of his belief as a prince,

and heir to the king, consumed with the duties of office, that his ‘burthen’ is to be aligned with

divine will in order to have and maintain the favor he does receive.

Hamlet continues his use of absurd imagery, negating the expectations of Shakespeare’s

intended audience by sense of ironic negation. Hamlet implies that life itself, and life long-lived,

in fact should be seen as both a burden and punishment as suffering seems to exist therein. By

turning the contrary wisdom that living a long life is what one ought aspire to on its head,

Hamlet signifies his disagreement with aspects of the society he not only governs as Prince of

Denmark, but is also ruled by. As Hamlet says, ridding oneself of the mortal coil:

Must give us pause; there’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long life.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay (3.1, 67-70).

His allusion to time is interesting as it also ties Hamlet to antiquity via the ancient rites of the

classical world including patrilineal monarchy and drama. Kronos or father time, or Saturn, is

always symbolically seen and portrayed as the stern judge, the dying king, or an older man

representing the bonds of duty, responsibility, and obligation, even trial and challenge. In Latin,



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sol did not signify our sun and planetary system which bears that name; rather it was the name

for the planet Saturn, who mythologically is the father of hereditary monarchy and the last king

signifying the Golden Age before the fall of man as relayed by Hesiod in his book Works and

Days, Ovid in his Metamorphoses and even Plato’s Statesman.

Kronos then is also the ‘law’s delay’ as he is time, waiting until man’s end to cast judgment upon

him. Hamlet takes exception to the “whips and scorns of time” these are the series of tests or

challenges one faces in a lifetime. As prince or ‘first citizen’ (Latin princeps) of Denmark, he is

expected, in times of need, to preside over the fates of others: soldiers in the field of battle or

Danish subjects in arbitrational matters of law. At his role-reversal to time Hamlet baulks,

refusing to allow time to have the last laugh and judge him. Hamlet wills to judge himself; this

marks not only his tragic ‘flaw’, but also signifies why Hamlet drinks the poison after Gertrude

in Act 5. Hamlet will decide when his end will be, not Kronos. Hamlet must be in charge of his

own destiny to the last. This, in turn, connects us back not only to Aristotle’s view of tragedy and

the Ars Poetica, but also to some of the ideas similarly echoed in “Tragedy and the Common

Man” by Arthur Miller, where he laments the 20th

Century’s prevalent turn toward psychology

and psychiatry reinforced by the rise of modernism and the influence of Freud, Lacan, and Jung,

among others on our view of the human condition in terms of literary analysis, essentially

eliminating the ability for one to act heroically (in the classical context by slaying demons or

monsters) as there never is an existential threat and certainly no gods to defy.

The lines immediately following reiterate Hamlet’s connection to Oedipus and the classical

tradition of tragedy in his lament on the ‘insolence of office’ and ‘patient merit’:



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The insolence of office, and the spurns / That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes, / When

he himself might his quietus make / (3. 1, 72-74)

The “patient merit” is again this willingness of Man to suffer until the end of his days whereupon

after a life of toil there he is judged by time or Kronos. In the eyes of Hamlet this is an unworthy

judge, as his father’s ghost faced trial. As the Ghost says in Act 1, Scene 5 of his judgment: “My

hour is almost come,/ When I to sulph’rous and tormenting flames / Must render up myself.” (5.

2, 2-4) The Ghost also recounts his fate or result of his trial and judgment later in the same scene

lamenting to Hamlet the younger:

I am thy father’s spirit,

Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,

And for the day confin’d to fast in fires,

Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purg’d away. But that I am forbid

to tell the secrets of my prison-house (5. 2, 9-14).

Hamlet refuses to be judged after a lifetime of suffering and essentially forces time to judge him

up to the point where he revenges the ghost. This is why with the words “When he himself might

his quietus make” Hamlet is speaking in opposition to being judged by time after being worn

down by his trials and sufferings. It seems a cruel irony to him that the same force that decides

Man’s trials during his lifetime is also his judge and jury afterward. Hamlet is essentially

impatiens, impatient, unwilling to suffer any more slings and arrows than need be. He is rejecting

love and a wife, symbolically a role of woman and thereby family or life itself. Hamlet is



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rejecting life, and suffering to be his own judge. He refuses to play by the rules of time anymore

and in doing so attempts to overcome the authority, which Saturn or Kronos also represents

mythically, of judgment by deciding the time, manner and place of his own exit rather than being

surprised like Hamlet the elder.

Semiotically, Hamlet’s speech is replete with socio-cultural references that such a man of

education as a prince would posses. Hamlet’s familiarity with tragedy and the irony of his

position and that of the tragic heroes of antiquity is not lost on him. In his soliloquy, where he is

making the decision to face an existential threat, he accepts his own psychology may play a role,

yet the true villain is the judge himself who unfairly sits upon the bench handing man burdens in

life and either eternal damnation or salvation thereafter. Hamlet feels on the defensive against a

foe he can never best as he is armed with a ‘bare bodkin’ to face the god of time and decider of

the fates of Man. The iconic imagery of the sea, the tug of man’s will and desires against his

duties and obligations in the whips and scorns of Saturn as father time, not only formally marks

this drama as a work of tragedy, but one which understands the importance and utilization of

symbolic images that carry as many ideas and connotations as the history of the images

themselves.



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The Saturnian Tradition in Shakespeare’s Tragedy Othello

The nature of the Hermetic influence on Shakespeare’s work extends to one of

Hermeticism’s most potent symbols in the Saturnian principle. The importance of Saturn is not

only illustrated in Julius Evola’s The Hermetic Tradition, or metaphysically in The Way of

Hermes, but also in the Renaissance ideal of the great Chain of Being. Saturn, being the god of

judgment, delay, structure, and order symbolized as an old or dying king, an elder statesman, one

of age, authority, respect, even if aloof, emotionally detached or rigid, is the same as the ‘star’

associated most with Capricorn, the sea-goat. The return to a classical interpretation of the world

of tragedy vís-a-vís Aristotle’s Ars Poetica falls in line with Neo-platonic and Humanist views

prevalent at the time Shakespeare penned his plays for public consumption. The hero, much like

his counterpart rooted in antiquity, may only be considered a tragic figure should the hand or

judgment of the gods, preordained or through hubris, also appear within the context of the ‘fall’.

Thus, not only are symbolic images such as the wheel of fortune--the pinnacle from which the

exalted must tumble--but also images of upsetting the order or nature of things, i.e. Saturn, are

involved in making Shakespearian tragedy.

To assert the influence of the stars within Shakespeare at all, it is first necessary to

establish that there is a connection between the plays of Shakespeare themselves and his implied

knowledge of the ethereal world of astrology. Were there no connection to the world above in his

other plays, the contention that the God of the great Chain of Being is synonymous with the

ancient’s Saturn would be tenuous at best. Yet whether one views comedy or tragedy in

Shakespeare, the natural world of the heavens makes appearances. In Twelfth Night for example,

we see Sir Toby toying with Sir Andrew as they luxuriate the night away.



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Sir Toby: What shall we do else? Were we not born under Taurus?/ Sir Andrew: Taurus?

That’s sides and heart./Sir Toby: No, sir, it is legs and thighs...(Twelfth Night , 1,2,128-31)

Here, Venus ruled Taurus holds sway, she who delights in the good life, food, drink, love and

luxury are all associated with the star of Venus. And even though Venus does make an

appearance in other comedic plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Hermia swears to

meet Lysander, Venus is not the ‘ruler’ of this love story, but rather Neptune, who makes a later

appearance:

My good Lysander!

I swear to thee by Cupid’s strongest bow,

by his best arrow, with the golden head,

by the simplicity of Venus’ doves,

by that which knitteth souls and prospers loves,

and by that fire which burn’d the Carthage

Queen,

when the false Troyan under sail was seen,

by all the vows that ever men have broke

in number more than women have spoke... ( A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1,2, 169-173)

Neptune (alongside Jupiter), as the ruler of Pisces, is equated with the dream world and dream

consciousness:

Oberon: But we are spirits of another sort; I with the morning’s love have oft made sport;

and, like a forester, the groves may tread even till the Eastern gate all firery red, opening

on Neptune with fair blessed beams, turns into yellow gold his salt green streams ( A

Midsummer Night’’s Dream, 3.2, 388-93).



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Here, Neptune is none other than the ruler of the ocean which even in Hamlet is representative of

the dreamy receptive home of the soul and the two fish of Pisces, who rule intuition and may

pierce the veil of concrete reality and enter into the dream world of Oberon and Titania. Jupiter,

representative of all of the forestry references has his home in the fire sign of Sagittarius. Thus,

the ocean as the world of dreams is invoked as much as Venus in said comedy A Midsummer

Night’s Dream.

In King Lear we see evidence not only of Saturnian tragedy, but also of influence and mockery

of the stars in general, indicating the audience would be familiar with the particular astrological

references of the time: “Thou, Nature, art my goddess to thy law my services are bound” ( King

Lear , 1.1, 1-4). Edmund also mocks the whole affair of the stars even whilst having proclaimed

himself bound to natural law; though one wonders how to view the words and worldview of a

villain:

We make

guilty of our disaster the sun, the moon, and

the stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by

heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and

treachers by spherical predominance ( King Lear , 1,2,110-116).

Not content to disavow the stars, Edmund also signals his disdain for Saturn, e.g. the God of the

great Chain of Being, with his references to Saturn in the same speech:

[H]is goatish disposition on the charge of a star!

My father compounded with my mother under

the dragon’s tail and my nativity was under

Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and



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lecherous ( King Lear, 1,2, 121-124).

Born Capricorn, on the cusp between Sagittarius (same as the Sagittary inn, in Othello) and

Capricorn, Edmund names the given constellations associated with the star of Saturn which is

fixed along the polar axis where the constellations would have appeared in the English night sky.

When seen in context of scala naturae or the natural ladder or stair-way, one sees that a

strictly hierarchical religiously ordered Chain of Being, where God is he who has ordered the

universe in the Great Chain of Being is put to use by the playwright. This symbolic interpretation

of what was literal at the time of writing is also touched upon by Carl Jung in Man and His

Symbols regarding the ordering of the mind of modern man:

Modern Man does not understand how much his ‘’rationalism’’ (which has destroyed his

capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the

psychic ‘’underworld.’’ He has freed himself from “superstition” (or so he believes), but

in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral

and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break-up

in world-wide disorientation and dissociation (Jung, 84).

Thus in Othello there are a preponderance of symbols associated with the tragic star that

go unrecognized as the modern reader is now dissociated from the world of Nature and her

veiled symbols. To recognize the references in Othello to astrology and Saturn is to know what

‘traits’ are also associated with the star itself. As Iago says referring to Cassio, “By debitor and

creditor--this counter-caster, he, in good time, must his lieutenant be, and I God bless the mark!

his Moorship’s ancient.” (Othello, 1,1,30-33) When seen Hermetically, Othello, the general, is

now connected, tethered, to the Saturnian principle. According to Hermeticists like Evola,

“Saturn is the ancient and the “divine” (or sulfurous) and at the same time it is inverted Gold--



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Lead--as the vulgar body;...” (The Hermetic Tradition, Julius Evola, 80). Capricorn, being an

earth sign, is also associated with money, status, and those things which bring about certainty

and concreteness. Capricorn is also prone to doubt that which it cannot order, or control, or

understand. Iago tells Cassio:

“Put money in thy purse, follow thou the

wars;...put money in thy purse--...put but money in thy purse. These Moors are

changeable in their wills--fill thy purse with money. The food that to him now is as

luscious as locusts shall be to him shortly as acerbe as the coloquintida.--...Therefore put

money in thy purse. If thou wilt needs damn thyself, do it a more delicate way than

drowning. Make all the money thou canst...therefore make money. A pox a drowning

thyself! (Othello, 1,3, 340-355).

Here Iago’s truncated speech to Rodrigo has but one real imperative and two clear themes

connecting both pecuniary funds and the sea (sea-goat) back to Saturnian rule and control. In

fact, control is one of the major themes of this particular tragedy. The noted Italian philosopher

“[Giordano] Bruno believed you could control other people by ‘’binding’’ them or forming

‘’bonds’’ with them. By binding their will to yours you could guide their decision-making

processes. Bruno felt every bond was fashioned from Eros; those things that we love.” (Stout,

The Sheep’s Clothing, Bridling Othello, 217) As Stout says of these ‘bonds’, “The most

important of all bonds is the bond of Venus and of love in general,...the opposite of love’s unity

and evenness is the bond of hate...love is the bond of bonds.” (Stout, p 218) In essence part of

this tragedy is the struggle for the soul of Othello. The imperative question for the character of

Othello is whether or not he trusts into the embodiment of his hopes in Desdemona, representing



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love, life and continuation of his line, or fears in the guise of the honest Iago who fills his mind

with self-consciousness and doubt.

As Stout says, “Honigmann in his introduction to the Arden Edition of Othello (108)

points out that Iago and Desdemona can be regarded as metaphysical characters who compete for

Othello’s soul.” (Stout, p. 220) Here the duality of human nature or even the tripartite aspects of

man’s soul shines through if we consider the astrological importance of Sagittarius in the play.

As Stout points out in his essay, “Twice in Act 1 the Sagittary is mentioned (1.1.156) and

(1.3.116); it is an inn operating under the sign of Sagittarius (the Centaur). Sagittarius is the

symbol of the half-man/half horse. It is the place Othello is to be found. Sagittarius was regarded

as representing humanity’s dual nature; rooted half in the animal world--subject to fate and

uncontrollable passions and half in the spiritual world--...These are the characteristics that define

Othello; they are also the different qualities Iago and Desdemona appeal to” (Stout, 220).

Even Jung chimes in here, allowing our modernized senses to reach back and view this

changing, modernizing society and the complexity of subtle influences at work. Such forces,

when seen collectively, prey upon either the highest ideals and aspirations or basest fears of

Medieval society undergoing a pendular shift in the way it viewed itself, and its potential futures:

Anthropologists have often described what happens to a primitive society when its

spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilization. Its people lose the

meaning of their lives, their social organization disintegrates, and they themselves

morally decay (Jung, 84).

This changing of the guard in terms of European self identity, intellectual, spiritual and cultural

understanding of the world and their place in it was in many ways at odds with the order and

structure externally imposed by the Medieval Church for nearly one thousand years before the



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flowering of arts and sciences on the once isolated European continent. This expansion of

understanding, however, was not without cost.

As scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become dehumanized. Man feels

himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature and has lost his

emotional ‘’unconscious identity’’ with natural phenomena. These have slowly lost their

symbolic implications…This enormous loss is compensated for by the symbols of our

dreams. They bring up our original nature--its instincts and peculiar thinking.

Unfortunately, however, they express their contents in the language of nature which is

strange and incomprehensible to us (Jung, 85).

In fact, the Renaissance gives birth to Protestantism, the German reformation, and Meister

Eckhart’s reinterpretation of the spirit as ‘intellectus’. As I have indicated elsewhere when

speaking of German Mysticism the direction in which German mysticism, post Augustinian

influence, was poised to travel was quite clearly initiated in the inner/outer worlds of Eckhart.

Linguistically speaking Eckhart also did some translation or interpretation of text, most likely for

his sermons, though nothing of the scope provided by Martin Luther. These translations include

not only passages from Confessions, from which Eckhart drew considerable inspiration, but also

in his translation or interpretation of John 1:1’s ‘in the beginning’ as intellectus. This naturally

would signify a change in meaning from the original Latin as well as any future German

considerations as to the nature of God. And as Jung reminds us, “...what was the spirit is now

identified with intellect and thus ceases to be the Father of All.” (Jung, 85)

This struggle for power and control over Othello, the desire to truncate his will and

ability to follow his own reason and act on his own behalf, is also a form of emasculation. The

audience is witness to the prototypical great older man, soldier, general, one of authority,



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reduced in the eyes of those around him for the pleasure of others. As Iago reminds us in Act

One, scene three, “Thou art sure of me--go make money, I have told thee often, and I retell thee

again and again I hate the Moor. My cause is hearted: thine hath no less reason. Let us be

conjunctive in our revenge against him. If thou canst cuckold him, thou dost thyself a pleasure,

me a sport. There are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered” (Othello, 1,3,

361-367). Here the womb of time (Kronos) is also invoked along with the idea of corrupting

what once was golden, that is, Othello’s reputation. Evola offers the explanation that Saturn was

one who suffered emasculation, thus a Saturnian figure may also suffer something similar:

Saturn also suffered emasculation, after which he hid in Latium, [Italy] but Latium (from

latere) is nothing more than a duplication of the idea of hiding oneself,...we have

explained the emasculation as the deprivation of the power, which is equivalent to the

premature reaping of the corn...Other possible meanings of the myth might be seen here

in an allusion to the transformation of connections that refer to Lead in the sense of a

corruptible body, which Saturn himself devoured and destroyed (Evola, 80).

Evola is not alone in sensing this nature of the Saturnian emasculation. In one sense, the

corruption and binding of Othello’s will to that of Iago’s is an emasculation of the will, and the

will is often equated to the masculine libido, Martian desire, and drive or power to achieve goals

or aims independent of restrictive or outside forces.

We are made aware of the natures of men by Iago who identifies himself with Toth, or

Hermes before remarking on the essence of Virtue: “[S]ince I could distinguish betwixt a benefit

and an injury, I never found a man that knew how to love himself...I would change my humanity

with a baboon” (Othello, 1,3, 312-316). Both the baboon and Ibis bird were symbols of the god

Toth, the same associated with the Greek Hermes, and later Hermetic and Neoplatonic Hermes



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Trismegistus. The connection to the Hermetic in this sense allows one to recognize the symbolic

nature of the language that must be understood, digested, and interpreted in terms both literal and

metaphorical: “Virtue? A fig!...Our bodies are our gardens to the which our wills are

gardeners;...If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality,

the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to the most preposterous conclusions.”

(Othello, 1,3, 319-329)

This understanding of the sensual part of the Saturnian nature is what is termed the broad canvas

with which Shakespeare has to paint his picture of the story of Othello. Stout suggests a

connection to the star of Capricorn vis-a-vis Othello’s own personality:

It is here I must address the colour of Othello. The fact he is a Moor is important to the

storyline, it makes him an outsider but I believe he must be a black Moor for symbolic

reasons. Black is the colour associated with melancholy and with Saturn...Othello, like

Saturn, represents death and he embodies Bruno’s definition of a melancholic

personality...having Othello exhibit both a passionate, sensual nature along with strong

contemplative powers gave Shakespeare a broad canvas to work with (Stout, 226).

The astronomical and astrological connection of Shakespearian tragedy to Saturn is based

upon the Renaissance notion of the Great Chain of Being and the strong Neo-platonic and

Humanist traditions that were reforming the European worldview undergoing its greatest cultural

shift since the fall of the Roman Empire and the establishment of the Catholic Church in the

A.D. period. The Aristotelian notion of the gods of his time being responsible for tragedy would

have had to have been modified to be accepted within the cultural framework of Elizabethan

England for the sake of decorum if naught else. If God, rigid, structured, ordered, and

judgmental, had a place for all under the domain of heaven, he could satisfy the greater



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monotheism while also serving as the embodiment of gods of Aristotle’s Ars Poetica and the

definition of tragedy passed down from the Greeks to the Renaissance, where the philosophy of

Aristotle was the basis of Western education. And yet as Stout quotes A.C. Bradley, “...in

Othello one could get the impression “that fate has sided with villainy”.” (Stout, 228) rather than

being necessarily just. This judgment in tragedy is based upon the upsetting of the order of the

given time, and in this Othello, penned somewhere around the year 1604, only a century after the

fall of Granada and Moorish Spain in 1492, is an example of one man upsetting the new order

being established underneath his feet. As David Newell says, on one level:

Othello is about a black man in a white man’s world...Our initial perception of Othello is

masterminded, as is so much in this drama, by Iago. His opening conversation with

Roderigo and his ribald taunting of Brabantio sketch for us a barbaric, incontinent

savage, a typical stage negro. But that image is shattered the very first time the audience

encounters the Moor. In his calm dignity, courage and urbane courtesy, he seems to step

straight off the pages of Castiglione’s Courtier . Beside him the native Venetians appear

trivial, dwarfed by his presence and silenced by his poetry...But then Iago cannot stomach

poetry. And what he cannot enjoy he must destroy ( Harper Collins Complete Works of

William Shakespeare, 1168).

On another level, the Saturnian level, Othello has upset the applecart by playing a character

outside the newly encroaching order where he, tragically, no longer has a place set as high as it

once was in this new Renaissance Great Chain of Being and is judged accordingly.



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Chapter III

Beauty’s Rose Might Never

Die



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Beauty’s Immortal Rose: Shakespeare’s Hermetic first Sonnet

One of the lesser investigated avenues of interpretation in Shakespearian sonnets is that

the object of desire in his earliest sonnets, Beauty’s Rose , is something other than a person,

mistress, or lover being pursued, rather it is a spiritual or metaphysical union common to Neo-

Platonists, humanists, and Hermeticists of the Renaissance era. Yet with the help of such works

as The Divine Pymander, The Emerald Tablet of Hermes, The Kybalion, all attributed to Hermes

Mercurius Trismegistus as well as Ethan Allen Hitchcock’s Remarks on the Sonnets of

Shakespeare, first published in 1864, such works invite other, if classical, readings of the

imagery behind the poet’s immortal first sonnet. A close reading and analysis of the first sonnet

which will be referred to as ‘ Beauty’s Rose’ will show the divinely spiritual ideals of love,

nature and the human condition calling forth notions of divine love, grace and beauty far beyond

that which any wiry-haired mistress could inspire upon the implied author of said ‘love sonnets’.

At first glance the first two lines of Shakespeare’s premier sonnet, “From fairest

creatures we desire increase, / that thereby beauty’s rose might never die,” (Collins Complete

works of William Shakespeare 1363) the underlying ideas come forth like a partially covered

image. On the one hand, Nature may be implied, the feminine presence of fertility, regeneration,

and immortality via the continuation of a lineage that too may share in the cycle of life and

experience. On the other hand, however, if we read the ‘fairest creatures’ to be women,

‘beauty’s rose’ is undoubtedly associated as the flower of youth, vitality, or the beauty of

woman. Yet, were one to view the same flower with a philosophical, metaphysical eye, one

might see the “object addressed in the Shakespeare Sonnets is analogous to what [Sidney] calls

Immortal Beauty and Immortal Goodness...these are not to be regarded under any form of the

imagination, but conceived as spiritual” (Hitchcock 17) This first sonnet’s object is also its



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subject as Shakespeare extends his metaphor in the next two lines, “But as the riper should by

time decease, / his tender heir might bear his memory: /” (Shakespeare 1363). In the sonnet

addressed to Beauty’s Rose we see how one may view a mistress as something other than that of

the lover of the implied author. Taking this notion of inspiration as a female muse is not a novel

invention by Shakespeare. The nine muses as marshaled about by Grecian Apollo were not only

conceived of as beautiful young women, but also as agents presiding over a particular sphere or

style of writing or other arts from grammar, to geometry, to music, or astronomy. Of those

dedicated to the written craft, muse Thalia is the protector of comedy, Melpomene, the protector

of Tragedy, Erato, the protector of love and love poetry, Polymnia, the protector of the divine

hymns, and Calliope is the superior Muse. She accompanies kings and princes in order to impose

justice and serenity. She is the protector of heroic poems and the rhetorical arts. In fact, even

viewing poetical works as a form of heir or offspring is seen even in Shakespeare’s

contemporary Ben Jonson, when in his poem “On my first son”, Jonson refers to his departed

yearling as his “best piece of poetry”. This process of anthropomorphizing the writing process as

a relationship complete with the birth of a body of work dovetails with the conception of

perfecting the spirit via the creation of works prevalent in Hermetic mysticism. Hitchcock

attaches his own ideas to the concept of viewing the relationship of writer to the art of writing

when he says,

[T]he poet addresses the Spirit of Beauty...as the foundation of art...the lines are an

invocation to the Spirit of Beauty to become...his mistress,...his Muse or Inspiration, in

order that he might perpetuate his sense of beauty into some adequate poetic form,

which,...he calls an HEIR, precisely in the sense in which this word is used in the poet’s

dedication of Venus and Adonis to the Earl of Southampton...This poetic heir is the child,



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the son, &c., so often referred to in the most of the first sixteen or eighteen Sonnets

(Hitchcock, 18).

This anthropomorphizing of beauty into a human ideal spiritualizes matter and

materializes spirit, whereby the natural and supernatural, as is typical in Hermetic philosophy,

merge, allowing for the perfecting of art and thus the spirit through application and proper

understanding of the true essence of this Platonic beauty. Hitchcock adds, “[T]he poet’s Sonnets,

the verses which he ‘compiles,’ are the fruit, the very born of that which, in the 1st Sonnet, is

figured as Beauty’s Rose...this is the Spirit of Beauty, or the Beautiful in the Platonic sense;...in

perfect harmony with the spirit of nature” (Hitchcock 22). With this view of Shakespeare’s

sonnet we have opened the possibility of seeing his art in both higher and lower forms. On the

lower, more literal level it describes the physical realities of Nature, being, and the cycle of life.

On the higher, more spiritual plane, we have entered the world familiar to Plato and the ethereal

Platonic forms outside the existence of mere objects or qualities but embodied in them. I have

addressed this concept previously when discussing Plato and his Republic.

Platonic forms, from which true knowledge is gained, exist in an archetypical world of

universals outside of the world of our everyday experience or consensus reality where types

(archetypes) and properties are believed to adhere to objects, (the blueness of the sky or redness

of an apple for example) rather than the other way round. This is the world of the cave, of belief

and not the world of true universal illumination. Only those who are psychologically capable of

perceiving goodness are able to pursue the greatest good in Truth and have a conception of what,

if anything, in the world of simulacra exists in the Real world—the world of forms. Shakespeare

continues to corporealize beauty from the world of universals, bringing the metaphysical



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traditions of the ancients down to earth in order that the everyday senses might understand the

manifest nature of the divine in more humble terms.

“But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes, / Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-

substantial fuel, / Making a famine where abundance lies, / Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too

cruel. /” (Shakespeare 1363). Lines five through eight of the sonnet, as in Hamlet “hold the

mirror up to nature” as the implied author evaluates himself vis-a-vis the relationship fed with

self-sustained fuel that makes famine where nature produces abundance. Here, the baser aspects

of man are present-- the ability to turn paradise into a wasteland and be ruled by contrary

instincts making one’s own self an enemy of progress, spiritual growth, and enlightenment.

Hence, Shakespeare refers to this imaginary self as “Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.

/” To the (implied) author, there is no external obfustication deterring the seeker of ‘beauty’s

rose’ , rather, all that would oppose him is within his own being. It is in confronting the mirror of

his own nature, that he understands how the poet as seeker impedes his own progress towards

spiritual perfection through art and nature. Poetry within the context of Shakespeare’s first

sonnet stands as the art, the craft, and the practice by which one peers underneath what Pierre

Hadot would call the veil of Isis.

“If man feels nature to be an enemy…which resists him by hiding its secrets, there will

then be opposition between nature and human art, based on human reason and will…If, on the

contrary, people consider themselves a part of nature because art is already present in it, there

will no longer be opposition between nature and art;...human art, especially in its aesthetic

aspect, will be in a sense the prolongation of nature, and then there will no longer be any

relation of dominance between nature and mankind.” (Hadot 92). Naturally, (no pun intended)

the Renaissance is prior to the greater technological boom of the latter 17th and 18th centuries



Payne 46

which were to follow the Enlightenment period, thus there is not the same pull of modernization

standing contrary to an earlier agrarian past on the inner realm of man as later poets would claim.

“Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament, / And only herald to the gaudy spring, /” Lines

nine and 10 mark the transitional rite of spring in both human experience in the realm of the

physical existence upon earth as well as the spiritual birth of the individual upon the pursuit

towards spiritual growth from being “fresh” or ‘green’ and “gaudy”. Within the first rite or

birthing, spring for both the human being and spiritual being, the potential exists for this “fresh

ornament” to be transformed or transfigured by the process of growth and perfecting of the non-

physical. And just as the flower buds or sprouts from seed, so too do the human counterparts:

“Within thine own bud buriest thy content / And, tender churl, mak’st waste in

niggarding. / Pity the world, or else this glutton be, / To eat the world’s due, by the grave of

thee.”

As the heroic couplet closes we have gone from “gaudy spring” to “the grave of thee” in

this case being the lifetime of one person. Simultaneously, whilst describing the physical lifespan

of the human being, the idea of the invocation to the higher spirit of beauty, that is, the divine,

Platonic archetypal forms is also, in lines 11 and 12, apparent in the “bud”, the immature flower

of beauty’s rose. If the pursuit of life is wasted, or profits the soul or spirit of man nothing who

derides it, by neglecting cheapening its value, “niggarding”, “the grave”, spiritual death is the

result. One must, therefore, spend time with the bud, stimulating its growth with proper care to

ensure this once gaudy ornament turns, evolves, and fulfils its potential as beauty’s rose, the

higher aspects of divine love and beauty, which are more rewarding than any mortal mistress of

the flesh.



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The emphasis here, as in all Hermetic writings, is that the spirit, the mind, is the all. As

listed in chapter II The Seven Hermetic Principles in the “ Kybalion”, the first principle is the

principle of mentalism. “The ALL IS MIND; The Universe is Mental--The Kybalion. This

Principle embodies the truth that “All is Mind”. It explains that THE ALL (which is the

Substantial Reality underlying all the outward manifestations and appearances which we know

under the terms of “The Material Universe”; the “Phenomena of our material senses) is SPIRIT

which in itself is considered and thought of as AN UNIVERSAL, INFINITE, LIVING MIND.”

(Kybalion 36) This understanding of the divine is also apparent within the realm of German

mysticism. As I have indicated before, another influential motif which German mysticism acquired

relatively early on is the Pauline term for God omnes in omnibus-all in all- which, according to Weeks,

“not only sustains the view that God is in all things: it eventually yields the implication that all things are

contained in all other things. Immanence and transcendence,…visible and invisible… The visible external

finite temporal and natural world consists of an array of symbols and systems of symbols”

Bringing us to a correlation of mysticism and Nature and the importance the idea of one, Nature,

bears in relation to natural mysticism and later literary and philosophical movements. However, this

borrowed Greek idea phusis, from which the ideas of Natural Philosophy and physics derive, becomes

fundamentally important once clarified by Hadot.

“In book 10 of the Laws (Plato), we find an allusion to people who have devoted themselves to

‘investigations on nature’ [phusikoi] They oppose what is produced by spontaneous growth/birth

(phusei,… fire, water, earth and air,… They are utterly wrong says Plato, because… they considered

material causes to be the primary cause of growth of the universe…. Plato continues, what is most ancient

and original is the soul because it is the movement that moves itself.

Having gone from being an abstract ever-presence, Nature now is seen as, and represented by, the

predicates of spirit and veil, that which on the one hand is omnes in omnibus and also hidden in plain



Payne 48

sight. This compliments the mystical workings of the world in much the way Augustine, Eckhart and

early German mystics approach their conceptions of God and Nature.

The heroic couplet completes the idea that any who would feast greedily upon the manifestations

of the physical world without tending to his or her spiritual hunger will result not only in a

corporeal, but also mental, and thus, spiritual death of the human entity.



Payne 49

Works Cited

Abrams, M. H., and Stephen Greenblatt. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York:

Norton, 1999. Print.

Anglo, Sydney. “Evident Authority and Authoritative Evidence. :The Malleus Maleficarum.”

The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft. London: Routledge & K. Paul,

1977. Print.

Belton, Ellen R. “When No Man Was his Own: Magic and Self-Discovery in The Tempest”

Toronto: University of Toronto Quarterly: A Canadian Journal of the Humanities. 55.2b

1985. Print

Egan, Robert “This Rough Magic: Perspectives of Art and Morality in The Tempest”

Shakespeare Quarterly 23.2 New York: AMS Press 1972. Print

Erasmus, Desiderius. An Age of Gold The Portable Renaissance Reader. Ed. James Bruce

Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin. New York: Penguin. 1981. Print.

Evola, Julius. The Hermetic Tradition: Symbols and Teachings of the Royal Art. Rochester, VT:

Inner Traditions International, 1995. Print.

Fox-Good, Jacquelyn “Other Voices: The Sweet, Dangerous Airs of Shakespeare’s Tempest”

Shakespeare Studies 24 Madison, NY: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press 1996. Print.

French, Peter J. John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus

London: Routleddge & Kegan Paul. 1972. Print.

Gibbons, B.J. Spirituality and the Occult: From the Renaissance to the Modern Age.

London: Routledge. 2001. Print



Payne 50

Garin, Eugenio “Magic and Astrology in the Civilisation of the Renaissance” Articles on

Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology, vol 11: Renaissance Magic. Ed. Brian P. Levack.

New York: Garland Publishing. 1992. Print.

Hadot, Pierre. The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature

Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. 2006. Print

Hitchcock, Ethan Allen. Remarks on the Sonnets of Shakespeare: With The Sonnets. Showing

that they belong to the Hermetic class of Writings, and Explaining their General Meaning

and Purpose Charleston:Nabu Public Domain Reprints. 1864

Jacobus, Lee A. The Bedford Introduction to Drama 6th Ed Documenting Sources in Mla Style:

2009 Update. N.p.: Bedford/st Martins, 2009. Print.James I, King of England. Demonology: Includes News From Scotland, on the Death of a

Notable Sorcerer. Ed. GB Harrison. San Diego. The Book Tree. 2002.

Johannisson, Karin. “Magic, Science and Institutionalization in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth

Centuries.” Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in

Early Modern Europe. Ed. Merkel, Ingrid, and Allen G. Debus Washington: Folger

Shakespeare Library, 1988. Print.

Johnsgard, Paul A. North American Owls: Biology and Natural History. Washington:

Smithsonian Institution, 1988. Print.

Jung, C. G., and Marie-Luise Von Franz. Man and His Symbols. London: Pan, 1978. Print.

Payne, Nethanael. “Platonic Forms as Archetypes of all Manifestation”. 2008.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XnQ5KDVnfqVsHdrFOR7nmLh6YLrLfWI2UtUZ

wbT0NN0/edit

“A Synthetic Approach to Understanding German Mysticism”. 2009.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A1qVzL4rNPN3OBzIcwaJGdLhjzZPwkXpIY7Ld

pznAlw/edit

Roszak, Théodore. The Voice of Earth: [an Exploration of Ecopsychology]. New York:

Touchstone, 1992. Print.

Shakespeare, William, and Peter Alexander. Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1994. Print.

Stout, S. W. In Sheep's Clothing: The Arcane, Profane and Subversive in Shakespeare.

Calgary: Greenbeast Design, 2008. Print.



Payne 51

Yates, Frances A. “The Hermetic Tradition in Renaissance Science. Articles on Witchcraft,

Magic and Demonology” vol. 11 Renaissance Magic. Ed. Brian P. Levack. New York:

Garland Publishing. 1992

Trismegistus, Hermes. The Emerald Tablet of Hermes and The Kybalion Ed Smith, Ma’ati Jane

Dr.C. Hyp. Msc. D. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. 2008. Print.



Payne 52

Bibliography

Abrams, M. H., and Stephen Greenblatt. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York:

Norton, 1999. Print.

Anglo, Sydney. “Evident Authority and Authoritative Evidence. :The Malleus Maleficarum.”

The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft. London: Routledge & K. Paul,

1977. Print.

Belton, Ellen R. “When No Man Was his Own: Magic and Self-Discovery in The Tempest”

Toronto: University of Toronto Quarterly: A Canadian Journal of the Humanities. 55.2b

1985. Print

Egan, Robert “This Rough Magic: Perspectives of Art and Morality in The Tempest”

Shakespeare Quarterly 23.2 New York: AMS Press 1972. Print

Erasmus, Desiderius. An Age of Gold The Portable Renaissance Reader. Ed. James Bruce

Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin. New York: Penguin. 1981. Print.Evola, Julius. The Hermetic Tradition: Symbols and Teachings of the Royal Art. Rochester, VT:

Inner Traditions International, 1995. Print.

Fox-Good, Jacquelyn “Other Voices: The Sweet, Dangerous Airs of Shakespeare’s Tempest”

Shakespeare Studies 24 Madison, NY: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press 1996. Print.

French, Peter J. John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus

London: Routleddge & Kegan Paul. 1972. Print.

Gibbons, B.J. Spirituality and the Occult: From the Renaissance to the Modern Age.

London: Routledge. 2001. Print

Garin, Eugenio “Magic and Astrology in the Civilisation of the Renaissance” Articles on

Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology, vol 11: Renaissance Magic. Ed. Brian P. Levack.

New York: Garland Publishing. 1992. Print.



Payne 53

Hadot, Pierre. The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature

Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. 2006. Print

Hitchcock, Ethan Allen. Remarks on the Sonnets of Shakespeare: With The Sonnets. Showing

that they belong to the Hermetic class of Writings, and Explaining their General Meaning

and Purpose Charleston:Nabu Public Domain Reprints. 1864

Jacobus, Lee A. The Bedford Introduction to Drama 6th Ed Documenting Sources in Mla Style:

2009 Update. N.p.: Bedford/st Martins, 2009. Print.

James I, King of England. Demonology: Includes News From Scotland, on the Death of a

Notable Sorcerer. Ed. GB Harrison. San Diego. The Book Tree. 2002.

Johannisson, Karin. “Magic, Science and Institutionalization in the Seventeenth and EighteenthCenturies.” Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in

Early Modern Europe. Ed. Merkel, Ingrid, and Allen G. Debus Washington: Folger

Shakespeare Library, 1988. Print.

Johnsgard, Paul A. North American Owls: Biology and Natural History. Washington:

Smithsonian Institution, 1988. Print.

Jung, C. G., and Marie-Luise Von Franz. Man and His Symbols. London: Pan, 1978. Print.

Payne, Nethanael. “Platonic Forms as Archetypes of all Manifestation”. 2008.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XnQ5KDVnfqVsHdrFOR7nmLh6YLrLfWI2UtUZ

wbT0NN0/edit

“A Synthetic Approach to Understanding German Mysticism”. 2009.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A1qVzL4rNPN3OBzIcwaJGdLhjzZPwkXpIY7Ld

pznAlw/edit

Roszak, Théodore. The Voice of Earth: [an Exploration of Ecopsychology]. New York:

Touchstone, 1992. Print.

Shakespeare, William, and Peter Alexander. Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1994. Print.

Stout, S. W. In Sheep's Clothing: The Arcane, Profane and Subversive in Shakespeare.

Calgary: Greenbeast Design, 2008. Print.

Yates, Frances A. “The Hermetic Tradition in Renaissance Science. Articles on Witchcraft,



Payne 54

Magic and Demonology” vol. 11 Renaissance Magic. Ed. Brian P. Levack. New York:

Garland Publishing. 1992

Trismegistus, Hermes. The Emerald Tablet of Hermes and The Kybalion Ed Smith, Ma’ati Jane

Dr.C. Hyp. Msc. D. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. 2008. Print.

the hermetic shakespeare

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