Join us for this IAAM and Astro Magia co-sponsored session with Kristin Mathis about the Orphic Hymns, translation, language, and mystery. In keeping with AM’s transdisciplinary aim, this session will also feature excerpts from Ben Jeans Houghton’s film-essay Mercurial-Mecha-Morphius.
https://astromagia-org.zoom.us/j/82929244563?pwd=xcdO5GDyHbFX0OEzd6YFK1lm9BkdG4.1
The Orphic Hymns, a collection of 87 poetic invocations of deities and divine natural forces dating from the pre-Platonic period, are arguably the most complete liturgical texts surviving to us of all ancient Mediterranean Mystery religions. Since ancient times, these hymns have been noted for their “riddling” use of language, as well as their extraordinarily long lists of epithets for each deity.
Philosophers, magicians, and astrologers from Plato to Vettius Valens to Iamblichus and Proclus all believed the hymns contained great esoteric wisdom, but no modern scholar has sought to understand the hymns in light of what we know about ancient theories of language and interpretive practice, particularly as they pertain to the ancient Mysteries.
Perhaps for this reason, English translations of the hymns–from Taylor to Athanassakis–have never yet explored the full depth of the esoteric content embedded in the original Greek text. In this talk, classically trained scholar of ancient Mediterranean religion and magic Kristin Mathis explores the deeper layers of meaning in the poems, revealing surprising esoteric content that sheds light not only on the historical development of astrological magic and Western esotericism, but also on the nature of magical incantation and of language itself.
kristinmathis.com | mysteriamundi.substack.com
Kristin Mathis is a scholar of religion and ancient history; translator of Ancient Greek texts on magic, myth, and esoterica; poet and teacher. Kristin is dedicated to revealing the wildly liberatory power of the teachings of the Ancient Mediterranean ancestors to transform and undermine oppressive social structures, showing us how to connect to each other, to our earth, and to the realm of the “more than human”—animals, plants, minerals, and the wide heavens above.
‘Mercurial-Mecha-Morphius’ is a black and white film-essay comprising of many still images and narrative voice over, inspired by Chris Marker’s poetic exploration of tragic romance and möbius temporality ‘La Jetée’ (1962) and Andrej Tarkovsky's psycho-geographic odyssey ‘Stalker’ (1979) whose protagonists self-reflexive search, quests through a post-cataclysmic landscape, pregnant with perilous psychic portent.
‘Mercurial-Mecha-Morphius’ sings a cosmogenic swan song of a histories end, before speculatively exploring fictive tableaus depicting ritual technologies of stellar theurgy, whose reliquaries, figurative sculptures and votive altars are imagined amongst post cataclysmic urban environments, re-membering the techné of a once embodied Astral Magic.
By collaborating with Ai to ‘dream-into-being’ these images, I invited ambiguity, adaptation, chaos, chance, symbolism, synchronicity and the celestial into my creative process. When fed poetic esoteric prompts, Ai offered me oracular visions of the mystery’s architecture, which inspired in me a recognition of magic's insubordinate atavism and irrepressible perennialism.
Ai can impossibly illustrate the irreconcilable complexity of as yet un-arrived contexts, in ways that may move me beyond the depthless spectacle of its artifice, but can it inspire our creative capacity to create new stages, doors and thrones for the stars and planets that dance us through the metamorphic dreaming of our world?
Gnostic Animist, Artist and Astrologer Ben Jeans Houghton’s multidisciplinary practice spans votive sculpture, architectural installation, oneiric film essay, self-reflexive writing, ritual-costume, improvised performance, mantric-glossolalia and esoteric lectures. The work explores and expresses magic; the art of transformation and its methodologies, technologies, agencies, and implications, through art-praxis, as-gnosis, informed by astrological, philosophical, and metaphysical perspectives.