(09-06-2023, 02:53 PM)merrimacga Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The public, especially the lower classes, throughout time has had a taste for the - shall we say - exotic and fantastical, even crude and vulgar. I'm sure someone here could come up with some better examples.

(09-06-2023, 12:41 PM)merrimacga Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think I would hesitate to call the VM visionary art, which is a relatively new art form. Carl Jung is credited with coining the term in 1933 in his book, Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Wikipedia has a good definition, quoting or paraphrasing one of the most prominent visionary artists today, Alex Grey: "Visionary art is art that purports to transcend the physical world and portray a wider vision of awareness including spiritual or mystical themes, or is based in such experiences."

Quote:In addition, to supplement the prayers and exercises, there are figurae - or diagrams - which were collated to compose a separately classified section of the Liber visionum, contained in the third book which John calls the Liber flgurarum.

The Liber flgurarum constitutes the second system of the Liber visionum, and works in tandem with the prayers and exercises of the first system. While praying or executing the other requirements of the Liber visionum, the practitioners used imagery, mostly figures of the Virgin Mary or the planets, to focus their devotions and lead them into contemplation. Contemplation would eventually culminate in an ecstatic experience in which practitioners would receive some type of information. At the novice level this revelation would most likely have been a general understanding of a liberal art. At the advanced level, however, one could elicit specific information from the Virgin Mary. Thus at the most sophisticated levels, the Liber visionum became a method by which one could, with some consistency and relative ease, engage in mystical visions. This methodology does not differ greatly from that of the Ars Notoria, yet as one begins to analyze John's prologue, it becomes apparent that John and the practitioners of the Ars Notoria do not employ the same intercessory mediators, the beings who enable them to receive ecstatic visions.

Quote:The Books of Visions was an attempt to reconcile the goals of a condemned, medieval, ritual magic text, the Arts Notoria after which it was loosely modeled. The new magic text was a vision by the Virgin Mary to John, and unlike its predecessor, was pleasing to God and free of demonic corruption. However, the text was later considered heretical and sorcerous, and the purity of John's work was questioned. It was burned at the University of Paris in 1323.

Fanger has been working in archives across Europe and has unearthed seven extant manuscripts containing full and partial texts of the Book of Visions. She is currently working with Nicholas Watson on an edition, translation and study of the Liber florum doctrine celestis, a work including prayers, images, visions, and autobiographical materials also by John of Morigny.

Quote:John of Morigny (fl. c. 1301–15) is important both for what his writing reveals about the culture of learned magic at the turn of the fourteenth century and for his own contribution to that culture, the Liber florum celestis doctrine. The Liber florum is an unusual work, some 55,000 words in its most commonly circulated form, comprising a devotional autobiography with visions (the Book of Visions), a long liturgy for knowledge acquisition (the Book of Prayers) and a work of meditative figures (the Book of Figures). Unknown between the mid-sixteenth and late twentieth centuries, copies of the book began to be noticed in the late 1980s. The majority of its more than twenty currently known manuscripts have been found over the last fifteen years. It survives in two authorial versions, the Old Compilation (OC) (1311) and the New Compilation (NC) (1315), and two versions of a later redaction.