Robert Fludd
Robert Fludd (* 1574 in Milgate Park, Kent; † September 8, 1637 in London) was a British philosopher, theosophist and physicians.
Life
Fludd was born in the county of Kent in England. He began his medical studies in 1592 at the University of Oxford. After traveling in France, Italy and Germany, he practiced as a doctor in London. As a philosopher, and Theosophist he was heavily influenced by Nicholas of Cusa and Paracelsus.
He was a follower of esoteric thought good, and the author of several writings on this subject. His main work was esoteric Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris Metaphysica, physica atque technica Historia, being with greater world of the macrocosm, so the Universe, meant that the small world of man as a microcosm. His views he supported ( almost every page ) with many quotations of Hermes Trismegistus in Poimandres, so the translation of the Corpus Hermeticum of Marsilio Ficino and the Asclepius. Fludd was thus in a hermetically - Kabbalistic tradition of the Renaissance, in the argument advanced by Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola direction. Close to him by the Christian Kabbalists next Mirandola Johannes Reuchlin.
The second volume of the microcosm, the technical story he wants to tell, adorns a man with a hovering triangular halo, which symbolizes its divine origin. At the foot of man is a monkey with the Fludd symbolizes the art by which man reflects and imitates nature. In the segments of a circle, the treated arts or techniques are shown, which are discussed in the chapters then: prophecy, geomancy, the art of memory, Genethliologie ( the art of horoscopes ), physiognomy, palmistry and pyramids of science. Fludd's pyramids are a symbol for the up and down movements or interactions between the divine / spiritual and the earthly / physical.
Attacked by Marin Mersenne Fludd, who wrote, inter alia, Fludd's two worlds based on the unproven " Egyptian " theory, according to which man would contain the world was let ( the doctrine of the Hermetica ) and from the Asclepius the assertion of Mercurius, man a great miracle and God. William Foster, a clergyman who attacked him as a magician. The astronomer Johannes Kepler, Fludd to handle because of the pictures and hieroglyphs used in its books. The figures used by hermetic style of Fludd, Kepler established his truly mathematical diagrams opposite.
Fludd held, in fact, on the authority of the Hermetica, although Isaac Casaubon in 1614 stated that they had appeared in the Christian era. Fludd believed but still the Hermetica as an authentic product of ancient Egyptian wisdom.
Robert Fludd appeared with his writings as defenders of the Rosicrucians, not one of the Rosicrucians but to himself, as he admitted in his book Summum bonum under his pseudonym " Joachim Frizius ". Supposedly he was an " adopted " member of the London Society of Freemasons (after Sonnekalb ).
Aftermath
The contemporary German artist Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer has devoted student Robert Fludd cycle, impressed by his statement, have each plant has its counterpart in the sky in the form of a star. So he created especially a book with 18 pages double leaden, decorated on both sides with acrylic on pictures in mixed media. The book has the title For Robert Fludd - The Secret Life of Plants.
Writings
- Tractatus de Rosea Cruce Apologeticus integritatem Societatis defensive dens, Leiden 1617
- Tractatus theologico - Philosophicus, Oppenheim 1617
- Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris Metaphysica, physica atque technica Historia ( metaphysics and natural and artificial history of the two worlds, namely the macro - and the micro- cosmos ), 2 vols, Oppenheim, Frankfurt 1617
- Tractatus secundus. De Naturae Simia seu technica macro cosmi historia, Oppenheim 1618, Frankfurt 1624
- Monochordium Mundi symphoniacum J. Kepplero oppositum, Frankfurt 1622
- Philosophia sacra et vera christiana seu Meteorologia cosmica, Frankfurt 1626
- Sophiae cum memoria certamen, 1629
- Clavis Philosophiae et alchymiae, 1633
- Philosophia Moysaica, Gouda in 1638, engl. London 1659th