John Dee Quatercentenary Conference

The call for papers for the John Dee Quatercentenary Conference is now available.

CALL FOR PAPERS
St John’s College, Cambridge
21 – 22 September 2009

2009 marks the quatercentary of the death of the great Elizabethan polymath, John Dee (1527–1609). This interdisciplinary conference will commemorate the occasion by bringing together scholars and students from a range of fields, including intellectual and cultural history, history of science and mathematics, literature, and history of the book, to consider the extraordinary range of Dee’s interests and enterprises. The conference is hosted by Dee’s first Cambridge college, St John’s, and provides a unique opportunity to examine some of Dee’s own books in the Old Library under the guidance of Julian Roberts, co-editor of John Dee’s Library Catalogue.

Confirmed speakers include Stephen Clucas (Birkbeck, University of London) and Nicholas Clulee (Frostburg State University).

Julius Evola’s Path of Cinnabar

This June Integral Tradition Publishing will release the first English translation of Julius Evola’s autobiography The Path of Cinnabar

Julius Evola is a renowned Dadaist artist, Idealist philosopher, theoretician of politics and Fascism (although not himself a Fascist), ‘mystic,’ anti-modernist, and scholar of world religions…. Much more than an autobiography, The Cinnabar Path in describing the course of Evola’s life illuminates how the traditionally-oriented individual might avoid the many pitfalls awaiting him in the modern world. More a record of Evola’s thought process than a recitation of biographical facts, one will here find the distilled essence of a lifetime spent in pursuit of wisdom, in what is surely one of his most important works.

(via Mark Sedgwick)

Cinema of the Occult

Carrol L. Fry, author of Cinema of the Occult: New Age, Satanism, Wicca, and Spiritualism in Film, is interviewed on John Morehead’s Theofantastique about his new book.

Movies about the occult are, well, movies after all and are made for profit not education. The occult is by its nature sensational and sensationalism sells. Filmmakers have target audiences, but they want to reach a broad spectrum of customers. And you have to remember that a lot of films that adapt occult paths are part of the horror genre, and that audience demands sensationalism. So even those Wiccan films that give a favorable spin to the Old Religion might well offend not only Wiccans but conservative Christians, the former because they don’t accurately reflect their beliefs and practices and the latter because they are made at all.