The Evil Eye, Thanatology, and Other EssaysPark, Roswell
Religion
The Evil Eye, Thanatology, and Other Essays
Park, Roswell
Bruno, Giordano, 1548-1600; Evil eye; Knights of Malta; Medicine; Mythology; Religion; Students
The mystic or Cabalistic notions of Harvey's day have just been
mentioned. Under them we may recognize many degenerate products and
amalgamations of the real doctrines of Paracelsus. The doctrines of
the Rosicrucians, as well as of Zoroaster and the Cabala, were revived
and made to do strange work. There was, for instance, that Sir Kenelm
Digby, who died in 1605, a King's chamberlain, who posed among the
English as a so-called Rosicrucian. It was he who suggested the famous
"_sympathetic powder_," which was to be applied to the weapon by which
a wound had been inflicted, after which the _weapon_ was anointed and
dressed two or three times a day, while the wound itself was carefully
bound up with dressings and left alone for a week. This was perhaps
much the better course, but it will show what strange notions prevailed
in those days.
What it meant to run counter to ecclesiastical policy and theological
dogma appears not only in such tragedies as terminated the lives
of Bruno and many other martyrs to science, but in such facts as
these; for instance, when in 1624, just when Harvey was preparing to
publish his work, some young chemists in Paris, seeing the benefit
of the experimental method, broke away from Aristotle and the canons
of theological reasoning, the faculty of theology appealed to the
Parliament of Paris, which latter prohibited all such researches, under
the severest penalties.
This was the time too when such exhibitions as the following were
altogether too frequent;--One Quaresimo, of Lodi, came out with
a ponderous work entitled "A Historical, Theological and Moral
Explanation of the Holy Land," in which he devoted great space to the
question of The Dead Sea and the salt pillar supposed to represent
Lot's wife, dividing a long chapter upon the subject into three parts,
dealing with the method and the locality of this transformation and the
question of the existence at that time of her saline remains. Thus,
with his peculiar powers of reasoning, he was able to decide the exact
point where the saline change took place, and finally showed that the
statue _was still in existence_.
Lord Bacon was also an older contemporary of Harvey, having been born
in 1561 and dying in 1626, shortly after the appearance of Harvey's
great work. His services to analytic science need no description here,
but it is worth while to remember that Harvey, like many others, must
have come under his influence and have profited by his teachings in
logic and analysis.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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