Okay, it's been pretty quiet on here lately!
I've been so busy getting the next volume together that I haven't been able to post anything for awhile; and the last reading doesn't seem to have caught anybody's imagination. This one may not either, but let's find out!
So the next reading is pp 83-118, the passage from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables about Waterloo. I have a feeling that this will continue to lie outside many of our main areas of interest, though the Napoleon myth is big enough to contain esoterica. Some potential prompts:
I'll be travelling for the next two weeks so I won't be able to stir things up on the blog very much, but starting in November we'll move onto Vol. II of the reader, which will be posted later this week as PDF or to order the physical book. (The printer's proof is in the mail now.) We'll be beginning Romanticism, getting into the avant-garde, various crazy political cults, and lots of really interesting topics for research. Since we'll be dealing with my own major area of study, we'll be reading a ton of texts that have not been published for over a century, and some stuff which has never been printed in English. So even if the next few weeks remain pretty quiet on the Shadow School front, come November we'll have a renewed push and I have little doubt that some pretty interesting stuff will come out of it!
I've been so busy getting the next volume together that I haven't been able to post anything for awhile; and the last reading doesn't seem to have caught anybody's imagination. This one may not either, but let's find out!
So the next reading is pp 83-118, the passage from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables about Waterloo. I have a feeling that this will continue to lie outside many of our main areas of interest, though the Napoleon myth is big enough to contain esoterica. Some potential prompts:
- Reputedly, Napoleon (like all famous people, reputedly) was a Freemason, which could open up to some fun conspiracy theories and secret societies..
- I once almost secured for my archive, and then lost the bid on, a book on divination and phrenology that claimed to have been found among Naploeon's manuscripts at Elba after his death. Hmmm...
- The Carbonari, which began in Italy as an underground resistence-network to the Napoleonic regime, quickly became national scope, and the Italian, French, and German Carbonari groups became a training-ground for revolutionaries who would become important in the European revolutions of 1830 and 1848.
- There's all kinds of gossip about Napoleon, his background, his love-life, etc. If, of course, we deign to stoop to such petty things! (why not?)
I'll be travelling for the next two weeks so I won't be able to stir things up on the blog very much, but starting in November we'll move onto Vol. II of the reader, which will be posted later this week as PDF or to order the physical book. (The printer's proof is in the mail now.) We'll be beginning Romanticism, getting into the avant-garde, various crazy political cults, and lots of really interesting topics for research. Since we'll be dealing with my own major area of study, we'll be reading a ton of texts that have not been published for over a century, and some stuff which has never been printed in English. So even if the next few weeks remain pretty quiet on the Shadow School front, come November we'll have a renewed push and I have little doubt that some pretty interesting stuff will come out of it!
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