Banca occulta di Pero: il 62enne arrestato a Cassarate aveva precedenti penali e permesso B nel Canton San Gallo. Emergono legami con Lugano e società ticinesi.

Ecco le riduzioni del potere d’acquisto a secondo della pensione mensile. Da 1.550 euro a 6.000 euro: cinque simulazioni

Ecco le riduzioni del potere d’acquisto a secondo della pensione mensile. Da 1.550 euro a 6.000 euro: cinque simulazioni

_The weighing of the heart, from the Book of the Dead of Hunefer, Nineteenth Dynasty, Egypt. The British Museum (EA 9901). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons._ _From an Egyptian scribe’s papyrus to a Swedish painter’s secret canvases, the history of art is crowded with the occult. But the strangest discovery is not that artists illustrated hidden doctrines. It is that, again and again, the image is where those doctrines were actually thought._ > If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. > > — William Blake, _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ (c. 1790) There is a popular image of “occult art”, and it usually looks like an album cover: a pentagram, a goat, a candle, a woman in black, perhaps a skull for good measure. It belongs to a world of posters and horror films, and it suggests that the occult in art is a kind of decoration, a dark costume that painters occasionally put on. The truth is stranger, older and much more elegant. For most of human history, there was no clear border between the image and the sacred machinery it served. An Egyptian papyrus was not a picture _about_ the afterlife; it was equipment for it. An alchemical emblem was not a pretty illustration of a laboratory recipe; it was a way of thinking about matter that could not easily be said in prose. A Swedish painter in 1907 was not decorating Theosophy; she believed she was receiving a commission from beyond. **The occult in art was never only an illustration of secret doctrine. Very often, the picture is where the doctrine was actually thought.** That is the thread I want to follow across five thousand years. Before I begin, a warning about soup. It is very easy, in a subject like this, to throw everything into one pot: Egyptian gods, Christian saints, Hermes, alchemists, Theosophists and Surrealists, all stirred together into one vague “mystical tradition”. They are not one tradition. Christian symbolism, Renaissance Hermetism, early modern alchemy and modern occultism have different sources, different goals and very different ideas about God. I will try to keep them in separate bowls. Let us begin with a scale. ## A heart on the scale The image at the top of this post is one of the most famous pages ever painted. It comes from the papyrus of Hunefer, a royal scribe of the Nineteenth Dynasty, around the thirteenth century BCE, now in the British Museum. It is part of what we call the _Book of the Dead_ , a modern name for a collection of spells that the Egyptians themselves called something closer to “spells for coming forth by day”. Read it from left to right, like a comic strip. Anubis, with the head of a jackal, leads Hunefer by the hand. Then Anubis kneels at a balance, and on one pan lies Hunefer’s heart, on the other the feather of Maat, the principle of truth and cosmic order. Thoth, with the head of an ibis, stands ready to write down the verdict. Beside the scale crouches Ammit, part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus, waiting to devour the heart if it proves heavy with wrongdoing. Hunefer passes, and Horus presents him to Osiris. The curiosity here is functional. These papyri were placed in the tomb because the words and images were believed to work. The picture was not commentary on the judgment. It was a guarantee of the outcome, painted in advance. The scale balances, of course. It always does in these papyri. That is the first lesson of occult art: the image can be a tool. ## Mysteries on a wall in Pompeii Leap forward more than a thousand years, to a villa just outside the walls of Pompeii. In one room of what is now called the Villa of the Mysteries, a painted frieze, usually dated to around 60–50 BCE, wraps around the walls with almost life-size figures against a deep red background. We see women, a child reading from a scroll, a Silenus playing a lyre, satyrs, a kneeling woman whose back is about to be struck by a winged figure with a whip, and, at the center, Dionysus lounging in the lap of a female figure, perhaps Ariadne. Most scholars connect the scenes with the cult of Dionysus, and many read them as some form of initiation, possibly connected with marriage. Here is the honest curiosity: nobody knows exactly what the frieze depicts. The mysteries of the ancient world were called mysteries for a reason. Initiates were forbidden to reveal what happened, and, remarkably, most of them kept the secret. So the most famous painting of an ancient mystery cult is also a locked room. We can describe every figure and still not be sure of the plot. It is the perfect emblem of the problem I will face for the rest of this essay. The art shows us the door, but it rarely hands us the key. ## Hermes on a cathedral floor Now let us step into a church, because the next surprise happens on the floor. In 1488, at the entrance of Siena Cathedral, a marble inlay attributed to the Sienese artist Giovanni di Stefano was set into the pavement. It shows a venerable bearded man in a tall hat handing a book to two figures, one of them in Eastern dress. His left hand touches a tablet held up by sphinxes, inscribed with lines from the _Asclepius_ , one of the Hermetic texts. The inscription below names him: _HERMES MERCURIUS TRISMEGISTUS CONTEMPORANEUS MOYSE._ Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, contemporary of Moses. To a modern visitor, it looks almost scandalous: a pagan sage welcoming the faithful into one of the great cathedrals of Italy. To a Renaissance Christian, it made perfect sense. A few decades earlier, Marsilio Ficino had translated the Greek _Corpus Hermeticum_ into Latin for Cosimo de’ Medici, and many humanists believed these texts were extraordinarily ancient, the wisdom of an Egyptian sage who, like the Hebrew prophets, had glimpsed the truth before Christ. The floor of Siena places Hermes among the pagan witnesses, just inside the door, as a forerunner. The irony arrived in 1614, when the scholar Isaac Casaubon showed that the Hermetic texts were not as old as Moses at all, but products of the early centuries of the Christian era. The sage, it turned out, was a contemporary of the Church Fathers. But the marble had already been laid, and it is still there. This is the first bowl I want to keep separate. The Siena Hermes is not occultism in the modern sense. It is Christian humanism looking for allies in the ancient world, and choosing to honor them with stone. ## The alchemists paint their laboratory Alchemy produced some of the most beautiful and baffling images in European art, and the reason is simple: alchemists rarely wrote plainly. Consider three treasures. I. The **Ripley Scrolls** , long painted rolls named after the fifteenth-century English alchemist George Ripley, though the attribution of their verses to him goes back to Elias Ashmole in the seventeenth century. The surviving copies, produced over a long period, are crowded with dragons, birds, a vessel holding the alchemical marriage, and a great serpent. II. The **Rosarium philosophorum** , first printed in Frankfurt in 1550, with a series of twenty woodcuts. A king and a queen meet, embrace, join in a bath, die, rot, and rise as a single crowned figure with two heads. The name “rosarium” has nothing to do with the Catholic rosary; it meant a garden, a gathering of the sayings of philosophers. III. The **Splendor Solis** , an illuminated German treatise. Its most famous copy, in the British Library, is dated 1582 and contains twenty-two full-page miniatures in colors and gold: kings drowning, a hermaphrodite holding an egg, a series of flasks in which birds and dragons transform, and the sun rising over a city. What do these images mean? Some historians of science read them as coded laboratory instructions. Others, following the psychologist Carl Jung, read them as maps of inner transformation. Most scholars today agree they could be both at once: in the alchemical imagination, the purification of a metal and the purification of a soul were not separate projects. What is certain is that the image did work that language could not. A woodcut of a king and queen in a bath is easier to remember, and harder to steal, than a page of procedures. ## The melancholy angel In 1514, Albrecht Dürer engraved what may be the most interpreted print in the history of art. _Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1943. Public domain (Open Access)._ A winged figure sits in gloom, her face in shadow, a compass idle in her hand. Around her lie the tools of geometry and carpentry: a plane, a saw, nails, a sphere, a strange truncated polyhedron. A starving dog sleeps. A putto scribbles. In the sky, a comet blazes over a rainbow, and a bat-like creature carries the title: _Melencolia I_. And on the wall behind her, there is a square of numbers. It is a four-by-four magic square. Every row, every column and both diagonals add up to thirty-four. In the middle of the bottom row, two cells read 15 and 14: the year of the engraving, hidden in the arithmetic. This is not a random puzzle. In the Renaissance tradition of astrological magic, squares of this size were associated with Jupiter, and Jupiter was believed to temper the heavy influence of Saturn, the planet of melancholy. As the art historian Karl Anton Nowotny and others have argued, the square on the wall works almost like a talisman, a planetary remedy hung beside the melancholic genius. The National Gallery of Art notes that scholars have also connected the print to Agrippa’s _De occulta philosophia_ , which classified melancholic inspiration into levels, the lowest being imagination, perhaps explaining the “I” in the title. Notice the precision of the claim. Dürer is not illustrating a ritual. He is painting a mind, and among its furniture he places a tool of astral magic. Curiously, Dürer’s 1514 date has a peculiar consequence: the full printed edition of Agrippa’s book appeared only in 1533, after the engraving. So if Agrippa influenced Dürer, it was through earlier circulating ideas or manuscripts, not through the book as we know it. The square itself has older roots in the manuscript tradition of magic squares. The angel cannot fly. The square cannot be unseen. ## Bosch and the glass vessel Before Dürer, in the Low Countries, Hieronymus Bosch had painted _The Garden of Earthly Delights_ , now in the Prado: a triptych of paradise, a crowded garden of naked figures, giant fruits and birds, and a hell of musical instruments and torture. For centuries, people have tried to decode it. One influential reading, by the art historian Laurinda Dixon, argues that much of its strange imagery echoes the equipment and language of alchemy: glass vessels, egg-shaped containers, towers like furnaces and distillation flasks, the processes of heating and transformation. It is a fascinating reading, and it should be held lightly. Other scholars read the same painting through Christian morality, sin and the follies of the flesh. What the debate shows, more than any solution, is that by Bosch’s time the visual vocabulary of alchemy had become part of the shared imagination of Europe. A flask could be a laboratory tool, a moral symbol and a cosmic womb all at once. Bosch belongs, above all, in the Christian bowl. But he reached into the alchemist’s cupboard for his props. ## The oratory and the laboratory In 1595, in Hamburg, the physician and alchemist Heinrich Khunrath published the first edition of his _Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae_ , the “Amphitheater of Eternal Wisdom”. It is one of the most extraordinary books ever printed, a fusion of Christian devotion, Kabbalah, magic and alchemy, illustrated with large circular engravings. _Heinrich Khunrath, The Alchemist’s Laboratory, from Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae, 1595. Designed by Hans Vredeman de Vries, engraved by Paullus van der Doort. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (University of Wisconsin–Madison copy)._ The most famous plate shows a great hall split in two. On the left, a man kneels in an _oratorium_ , a prayer tent, with open books before him. On the right is the _laboratorium_ , with its furnace and flasks. In the middle, a table holds musical instruments, and the cloth beneath them says that sacred music puts evil spirits to flight. Over the far door are two words: _Dormiens vigila_ , “sleeping, keep watch”. The architecture was drawn by Hans Vredeman de Vries, one of the great masters of perspective of his age, which is why the hall seems to stretch so convincingly into the distance. The whole plate is an argument without a paragraph. Prayer and experiment are not enemies; they are two rooms in the same house. The word itself is the pun: _lab-oratorium_ , work and prayer. The book was not welcomed everywhere. It was condemned by the theology faculty of the Sorbonne in 1625. ## Fludd draws the cosmos A generation later, the English physician Robert Fludd tried to draw the universe. His _Utriusque cosmi historia_ , “The History of Both Worlds”, the macrocosm and the microcosm, began appearing in 1617 at Oppenheim, printed by Johann Theodor de Bry. Its engravings show the cosmos as a series of concentric spheres, a monochord stretched from heaven to earth and tuned by a divine hand, and the human being inscribed in circles of planets and elements. Fludd’s images were so ambitious that they provoked one of the most interesting quarrels of the scientific revolution. Johannes Kepler, who also believed in cosmic harmony but built it on measured astronomy, attacked Fludd’s analogical diagrams. Fludd answered. The exchange ran for years. It is a wonderful moment to stop and look. Here are two men who both believed the universe was musical. One drew it with symbols, the other with numbers. We remember Kepler as a scientist and Fludd as an occultist, but in 1619 the line between them was a matter of method, and it was being argued in pictures. ## Music for an alchemical emblem The same Oppenheim workshop produced, in 1617, a book that should be better known: Michael Maier’s _Atalanta fugiens_. _Michael Maier, Atalanta fugiens, Emblem II, “Nutrix ejus terra est” (The earth is his nurse), 1617. Engraving attributed to Matthäus Merian. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons._ Maier was a physician who had served at the court of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. His book contains fifty engraved emblems, attributed to Matthäus Merian. Each emblem comes with a motto, an epigram, a short discourse and, astonishingly, a piece of music: a fugue for three voices. The voices are named after the myth of the title. Atalanta, the swift runner, is the fleeing voice. Hippomenes, who pursues her, is the following voice. And the golden apple he throws to distract her is the third voice, the one that lingers. So the book can be read, looked at and sung. The emblem above is the second in the series. Its motto says “the earth is his nurse”, and its epigram compares the philosophical child of the alchemists to Romulus nursed by the she-wolf and Jupiter nursed by a goat. If such small beasts fed such great heroes, it asks, how great will be the one whose nurse is the whole earth? It is one of the rare moments in history when a doctrine was written simultaneously in text, image and counterpoint. ## Goya laughs at the witches Now the mood changes. The Enlightenment arrived, and with it a new way of using occult imagery: as satire. In 1799, Francisco de Goya published _Los Caprichos_ , a series of eighty etchings attacking superstition, stupidity and the abuses of his society. _Francisco de Goya, Linda maestra! (Pretty teacher!), plate 68 of Los Caprichos, 1799. Etching and aquatint. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of M. Knoedler & Co., 1918. Public domain (Open Access)._ In plate 68, _Linda maestra!_ , “Pretty teacher!”, an old witch carries a young woman through the night on a broomstick. The title is pure irony: this is the education the young receive. Around the same time, in 1797–98, Goya painted a small series of witchcraft scenes for the Duke and Duchess of Osuna, including _El aquelarre_ , “The Witches’ Sabbath”, with a great goat surrounded by women offering it children. It is now in the Museo Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid. Goya did not believe in the goat. He believed in the people who believed in the goat, and in the damage they did. That is a different use of the occult entirely: not as doctrine, nor as a tool, but as a mirror held up to credulity. And yet, as so often happens with satire, the images became more powerful than the argument. Goya’s witches have outlived the Inquisition he mocked. ## Blake sees angels in a tree William Blake is the great exception in this story: an artist who did not borrow a system, but built one. His first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, records that as a child, perhaps eight or ten years old, Blake saw on Peckham Rye a tree filled with angels, their bright wings shining like stars among the branches. He reported visions all his life. Blake read Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish visionary, and annotated his books, first with enthusiasm and later with sharp disagreement. _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ , from which I took the epigraph, is in part a parody of Swedenborg. Blake then invented his own mythology, with its own gods, Urizen, Los, Orc, Enitharmon, and printed it himself, using a method of relief etching he devised, coloring the pages by hand with his wife Catherine. So Blake does not fit any of my bowls cleanly. He was a Christian, but a deeply heterodox one. He used the language of prophecy, but not of any school. What he gives us is the clearest example of my thesis: his illuminated books are not illustrations of a doctrine that existed elsewhere. The doctrine exists only there, word and image fused on the copper plate. ## The salons of the Rose+Croix At the end of the nineteenth century, in Paris, the occult walked into the art gallery with a great deal of noise. Joséphin Péladan, novelist, critic and self-proclaimed “Sâr”, founded an order he called the Rose+Croix of the Temple and the Grail, and in 1892 organized the first Salon de la Rose+Croix, from 10 March to 10 April, at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris. Erik Satie composed music for the order, the _Sonneries de la Rose+Croix_. Péladan’s rules were deliciously absurd and revealing. The Salon rejected history painting, military scenes, portraits, rustic scenes, animals, flowers, landscapes and still lifes. It wanted legend, myth, allegory, mysticism, dream and the ideal. In other words, it wanted an art that pointed beyond the visible. The Salons were partly spectacle and partly sincere. But they mark a real turning point: for the first time, “occult” or “idealist” art was presented as a modern movement, with an exhibition, a manifesto and an audience. ## Moreau and Redon dream in color Two painters stand near the heart of this symbolist moment, though neither was a disciple of Péladan. Gustave Moreau painted Salome, Orpheus, Jupiter and the Sphinx in jewelled, almost encrusted surfaces, and when he died, he left his house and studio to the French state. The Musée Gustave Moreau opened in Paris in 1903, and it still feels like stepping into the mind of a man who lived inside his myths. Odilon Redon began in black: charcoal drawings and lithographs of floating eyes, spiders with human faces, heads rising from the waters. Later in life, he burst into color. _Odilon Redon, The Cyclops, c. 1914. Oil on cardboard mounted on panel. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons._ His _Cyclops_ is the giant Polyphemus gazing at the sleeping nymph Galatea. The monster of Homer becomes shy, almost tender, a single enormous eye full of longing. Redon was not an occultist in the strict sense. But he painted exactly the inner territory that the occultists of his day believed in: a world behind the eyes, where perception and dream are the same substance. The eye, which in Egypt guarded the dead and in Dürer surveyed geometry, here simply looks, and wants. ## The woman who painted for the temple _Hilma af Klint, The Ten Largest, No. 1, Childhood, 1907. Tempera on paper mounted on canvas. Hilma af Klint Foundation. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons._ In 1907, a Swedish painter trained at the Royal Academy in Stockholm painted ten enormous canvases called _The Ten Largest_. They show the stages of human life, childhood, youth, adulthood and old age, in spirals, petals, circles and letters, on backgrounds of orange, violet and pink. They look like the beginning of abstract art. They were painted years before the works usually credited with that beginning. Hilma af Klint had for years taken part in spiritualist sessions with a small group of women, and she believed her great series of _Paintings for the Temple_ had been commissioned by higher spiritual beings. She kept them largely hidden. When she died in 1944, she left instructions that her abstract works should not be shown publicly until twenty years after her death. In practice, they waited even longer; a major public recognition came only with exhibitions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, culminating in the Moderna Museet’s retrospective in 2013 and the Guggenheim’s in 2018. Here, finally, we are in the third bowl: modern occultism, spiritualism and Theosophy, not Renaissance Hermetism. And here my thesis becomes almost literal. For af Klint, the painting was not an image of the spiritual world. It was a message from it. ## Kandinsky reads Blavatsky Wassily Kandinsky is usually given the title of first abstract painter, and he too was formed by modern esoteric currents. In _Concerning the Spiritual in Art_ , published at the end of 1911 (and dated 1912), he describes Theosophy as one of the great spiritual movements of his time and mentions Helena Blavatsky by name. He wanted painting to work directly on the soul, like music, through color and form, without depending on the depiction of objects. It is important not to exaggerate. Kandinsky was not a Theosophical painter in the way af Klint was a spiritualist painter, and his ideas came from many sources: music, Russian religious culture, Goethe’s theory of color. But it is fascinating that two of the founding moments of abstract art, in Stockholm and Munich, were both nourished by the occult revival. Modern abstraction did not begin as a rejection of the invisible. It began, in part, as an attempt to paint it. ## Spare and the private alphabet Austin Osman Spare was a London draftsman of enormous talent, praised very young, who chose to disappear into his own strange world. For a few years, between roughly 1907 and 1912, he was associated with Aleister Crowley’s order, the A∴A∴, before going his own way. In 1913 he published _The Book of Pleasure_ , illustrated with his own drawings, where he developed a highly personal system, including what he called sigils: monograms made by combining letters into a single design. I will not describe the method, because this is not a manual. What matters for us is the artistic idea behind it: the conviction that a drawn sign, stripped of its ordinary meaning, could reach a part of the mind that words cannot. It is a theory of the image as much as a theory of magic. In Spare, the line between drawing and magic disappears entirely. That is why his work, almost forgotten for decades, has been rediscovered both by occultists and by art historians. ## The Surrealists and the occultation The Surrealists were not occultists, but they were fascinated by everything the rational world had rejected: dreams, chance, madness, mediums, alchemy and magic. In his _Second Manifesto of Surrealism_ of 1929, André Breton called for “the profound, veritable occultation of Surrealism”. Scholars still debate exactly what he meant; it was at least partly a call for secrecy and seriousness, partly a gesture toward esoteric tradition. In 1948, the Swiss-born Surrealist painter Kurt Seligmann published _The Mirror of Magic_ , a history of magic in the Western world that became a reference for many artists. In Mexico, two women exiled from Europe by the war, Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, became close friends and created some of the most extraordinary occult-inspired paintings of the twentieth century: women alchemists in towers, kitchens that are laboratories, spirals of thread that weave the world. Their works are still under copyright, so I cannot show them here, but they are well worth seeking out. What the Surrealists took from the occult was not a creed. It was permission: the permission to treat the image as a door rather than a window. ## The tarot that took five years The last stop is a deck of cards. In 1938, Aleister Crowley began working with the painter Lady Frieda Harris on a new tarot. What was expected to take months took about five years. Harris painted the cards, often repainting them as Crowley revised his ideas, until 1943. The paintings were exhibited in London in 1942. Crowley’s book explaining them, _The Book of Thoth_ , appeared in 1944 in a limited edition of two hundred copies. Neither of them lived to see the deck printed as cards. That happened only in 1969. Harris’s images, still protected by copyright, are a meeting point of everything in this essay: Egyptian gods, Hermetic and Kabbalistic symbolism, alchemical marriages, astrological signs and the geometry of modern art, all on seventy-eight cards. It is the only place in this story where the bowls are deliberately mixed, because Crowley’s own system, Thelema, was built precisely as a synthesis. Even here, the thesis holds. The cards are not decorations for a book. The book is a commentary on the cards. ## The picture that keeps a secret So let us walk back through the gallery. I. In Egypt, the image was equipment: a judgment painted in advance, so that it would come out right. II. In Pompeii, the image was a locked door, showing an initiation without revealing it. III. In Siena, the image was an argument in marble, inviting a pagan sage into a Christian house. IV. Among the alchemists, the image was a language for transformations that prose could not carry, and in Maier, it could even be sung. V. In Dürer, it was a portrait of a mind, with a planetary talisman hung on its wall. VI. In Goya, it was satire; in Blake, a new religion; in Péladan, a movement; in af Klint, a message. VII. And in the twentieth century, it became a theory of art itself: the idea that a picture can reach where words do not. Each of these belongs to its own world, and they should not be blended into a single “secret tradition”. But they share something that is not a doctrine. They share a trust in the image. **The occult in art was never only an illustration of secret doctrine. Very often, the picture is where the doctrine was actually thought.** And perhaps that is why these images still disturb us, long after the doctrines behind them have been forgotten, refuted or dismissed. The words can be argued with. The picture just keeps looking back. * * * Reply by email

La Procura aveva chiesto di convalidare la misura del carcere

La Procura aveva chiesto di convalidare la misura del carcere

MILANO (ITALPRESS) Una vera e propria ‘banca occultà al servizio della criminalità organizzata, con fatture false per oltre 110 milioni di euro e circa 68 milioni trasferiti su conti esteri e successivamente convertiti in cri...