ONLINE: For over a millennium, some of the most powerful practitioners of magic in the West were not outsiders but clergy working within monasteries, cathedrals, and even the Vatican. This course explores how the institutional church absorbed and reshaped folk and public rituals, transforming them into a controlled spiritual infrastructure. We will examine how the church’s public rejection of “magic” often served to regulate rather than eliminate it, including the Inquisition’s focus on clerical spell-casters and the preservation of forbidden texts in the Index. These practices contributed to the development of Western esoteric traditions. Through a lecture-based approach, the course also introduces the philosophical and Hermetic ideas underlying these practices, including the role of the pontifex—the pope—as a symbolic bridge between the spiritual and material worlds. | Lecture + Q&A.
Max enrollment: 45.
