MAGIC AS A SCIENCE OF IMAGINATION IN THE WORK OF IOAN P. CULIANU (1950–1991)

The freedom of thinking out everything to its ultimate consequences should never be interfered with by any authority. The dangers of freedom are not lessened by its suppression.

Ioan P. Culianu, The Tree of Gnosis

The powerful spreading of new technologies and the mass media civilization have had a subtle, stealthy effect on the human imagination, a process that has its counterpart in external reality, in historical changes and in society. The role of imagination through historical changes was extensively explored by Ioan P. Culianu, a Romanian historian of religions and specialist in Late Antiquity and gnosticism, whose research was brutally interrupted by his assassination on May 21, 1991. He was shot to death around midday inside of a toilet at the Depart-

ment of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago where he was teaching. He was only 41 years old. One of his main books is Eros and magic in the Renaissance (The University of Chicago Press, 1987), which has been translated into many languages and is probably one of the most complex and interesting 20th century studies on magic. He points out that the working of fantasy was fundamental to comprehend magical processes in the Renaissance, since magic was primarily directed to affect human imagination through the manipulation

of phantams (‘images’ in Greek). He has been also a pioneer in the study of the historical vicissitudes that caused imagination to change from a civilization based on magic, as in the Renaissance, to a modern one based on science. To the scholar, the transition from a magic-based society to a modern one is explicable primarily by a change in the imaginary.

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