Recherches sur la magie antique

Fritz Graf, La magie dans l'Antiquité gréco‐romaine, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1994, 322 p.

André Bernand, Sorciers grecs, Paris, Fayard, 1991, 513 p.

P. Charvet et A.‐M. Ozanam, La magie. Voix secrètes de l'Antiquité, Paris, NiL Editions, septembre 1994.     

Cernuda,poeta de un sur imposible

This article examines the poetics that Luis Cernuda developed throughout his life in connection with its sublime illusion of a genuine Spanish south through the romantic recreation he made of his native Seville, in several texts written from exile: they are various poems of The Reality and Desire and the essays Digressions on Romantic Andalusia and History of a Book, and, above all, the autobiographical prints from Ocnos, in which Albanio's sensitive experiences reflect both the meditative elegance of Cernuda's childhood and adolescence and the utopian promise of a true relationship with the world beyond the social hypocrisy of bourgeois capitalism and the coercion of Franco's dictatorship. My intention in this article is to weave innovatively, in a consistent and documented way, the biographical events with the artistic intentions of the poet, to reveal original interpretive links between desolate reality and the desire for transcendence in his strange lyrics.     

L'impasse des querelles sur la grace au dix-septieme siecle

Gershom Scholem wrote his famous article, “Redemption through sin”, in 1937, and J.L. Talmon gained the inspiration for his first book, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, in the years 1937–1938 at the time when the Moscow trials revealed to the world the bitter reality of what was happening in the Soviet Union. Scholem and Talmon were contemporaries and witnesses of the transformation of communism in the Soviet Union from a vision of egalitarian and universal redemption into a bureaucratic and nationalistic despotism. The major scholar of the history of religious Messianism and the major scholar of the history of secular Messianism both widened the scope of their investigations—the first extending them into the history of Sabbataianism and the second into the French Revolution—and both reached a similar conclusion: both recognized, as Scholem put it, “the profound truth relating to the dialectics of history … of the historical process whereby the fulfilment of one political process leads to the manifestation of its opposite. In the realization of one thing its opposite is revealed”. The two great Israeli historians of ideas plumbed the depths of one of the most fascinating and at the same time tragic manifestations of la condition humaine: the human challenge of bringing the heavenly city down to the vale of tears, and the price that men have to pay for their Messianic passion.     

Une Note de Max Weber sur les Danseuses Indiennes

The long note which Max Weber devotes to traditional Indian dancers in his study on the sociology of religions in India, Hinduism and Buddhism, is commented upon here through a comparison with one of the first German studies which deals with dance in India, The World history of the dance by Curt Sachs. Three themes are discussed: the relationship between the arts of the body and scholarly knowledge; the specificity of sacred arts, in this case the magical arts and the forms which correspond to them, such as the modes of apprenticeship which assure their transmission (understood as a «hereditary charisma»); the vision of women and the notion of the pure and the impure.