First the Mortal Remains

Abstract

This book explores the possibility of attributing a “new name” to the idea of the comprehension and production of signs. The path we take to realize such an objective entails coming to terms with the “name” of the Angel. Regardless of the cultural angelic fads today, there is one issue that is, to say the least, very problematic: that of verifying and documenting human contact with “real” Angels. The fact is that today an angelophany is judged in the same way as a purported sighting of aliens and UFOs; as neural convulsions whose end product is the experience of psychosis. This is how the ratio-logical mind set distances itself from the nightmare of a bizarre past. But the problem is that all contemporary intellectual practices in the West belong to the same genealogy that the alchemic- hermetic thinking mind, for whom the Angel constituted something much more than merely a sign of contact with the invisible, established centuries ago. For example, Michael H. Keefer has convincingly argued that Renaissance hermeticism is at the base of Descartes’s search for a new way of understanding the world; the meditations that the French philosopher experienced during November 1619 are informed by the spirit of hermetic philosophy. Descartes’s intention in the meditations was to sever his mind from his body with the goal of achieving “disembodied knowledge.” The fact is that the first and thirteenth dialogues of the hermetic Pimander find their hub in a dualist ascesis in which the final aim is that of being witness to a visual epiphany.¹