"Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: The Nun Who Dreamed the Cosmos" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre of the World: His Life, Work, and the Search for Universal Knowledge"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
November 12
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: The Nun Who Dreamed the Cosmos
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Sometime in
the late 1660s, in the viceregal palace of Mexico City, a teenage girl stood
before a panel of some forty learned men: theologians, philosophers,
mathematicians, historians, and poets, summoned by the Viceroy himself to test
whether her famous erudition was real. According to her first biographer, she
fended off their questions the way a royal galleon fends off a swarm of little
canoes. The Viceroy never forgot it. Neither did New Spain.
Her name
was Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez, and the world would come to know her as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,
the “Tenth Muse.” Born on November 12th, in a village in the shadow of two
great volcanoes, she would become one of the greatest poets of the Spanish
language, a fearless defender of women’s right to learn, and the author of a
strange, luminous dream-poem steeped in the Hermetic wisdom of her age…
The day of her
birth is well attested, but the year is not. Her first biographer, the Jesuit
Diego Calleja, gave 1651, while a baptismal record discovered centuries later
suggests 1648. Either way, she was born in San Miguel Nepantla, beneath the
volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, the illegitimate daughter of a criollo
mother and a Basque father who seems to have played little part in her life. By
her own later account, she learned to read at about three by tagging along to
her older sister’s lessons, devoured her grandfather’s library, and begged her
mother to let her dress as a boy so she could attend the university in Mexico
City. When that was refused, she taught herself, mastering Latin in a
remarkably short time and cutting off her own hair whenever she failed to learn
something as quickly as she’d resolved, since, as she reasoned, a head so empty
of knowledge had no business being adorned.
Her brilliance
carried her to court as a lady-in-waiting to the Vicereine, and then to
that famous examination. But marriage held no appeal, and in 1669 she took vows
in the Hieronymite convent of San Jerónimo, a choice she later explained
frankly as the best available path for a woman who wanted, above all, to study.
Her convent cell became something close to a salon, visited by scholars and
viceroys alike, and Calleja claimed her library ran to thousands of volumes,
alongside a collection of musical and mathematical instruments. The figure may
be inflated, but the portraits painted of her, seated before shelves of books,
leave no doubt about how she was remembered.
Among the
authors on those shelves, few mattered more than Athanasius Kircher, the German Jesuit
polymath in Rome whose lavishly illustrated volumes on Egypt, optics, music,
and magnetism were devoured across the Baroque world. Kircher was a Christian
Hermeticist in the tradition of Ficino and Pico, convinced that Hermes Trismegistus
and the Egyptian hieroglyphs preserved a primordial wisdom that foreshadowed
Christian truth. Sor Juana cites him by name in four separate works, and her Neptuno alegórico
of 1680, the elaborate allegorical program she designed for a triumphal arch
welcoming a new viceroy, draws deeply on the mythographic and emblematic
learning that Kircher and his predecessors made fashionable. As the Mexican
poet Octavio Paz
observed, few minds of that era were immune to the fascination of Hermes
Trismegistus and the hieroglyphs, and Sor Juana’s certainly wasn’t.
That
fascination reaches its height in Primero sueño
(“First Dream”), a philosophical poem of 975 lines published in Seville in
1692, which Sor Juana modestly called a mere “little paper.” It opens with a
pyramid-shaped shadow rising from the earth toward the stars as night falls.
The world sleeps, the body sleeps, and the soul, freed from the senses, ascends
to attempt the impossible: to grasp the whole of creation in a single
intuition. Overwhelmed, it retreats and tries again, climbing the ladder of
knowledge category by category, until its ambitions collapse like Phaethon’s
fall from the sun chariot. Then dawn breaks, the body wakes, and the poem ends
with a woman, the speaker revealed at last, opening her eyes to the morning
light. Scholars have traced its imagery directly to Kircher: the pyramids that
frame the poem, the interplay of light and shadow drawn from his treatise on
optics, and above all the magic lantern, the projecting device Kircher
described, which Sor Juana uses to picture the fleeting images of the dreaming
mind.
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Paz’s influential reading placed it squarely within the Hermetic tradition, and its structure does recall the soul-journeys of Kircher’s Iter exstaticum and the ancient philosophical dream-visions that came before it. Yet other critics have pointed to a crucial difference. In those traditions, the ascending soul is guided and ultimately rewarded with revelation. Sor Juana’s soul travels alone, has no angelic guide, and receives no final vision. It’s a Hermetic ascent that ends not in illumination but in the humbling limits of human understanding. Sor Juana was a devout Catholic nun, not an occultist in any modern sense, but she inhabited the same Baroque world of Christian Hermeticism that Kircher did, and she used its language to write something entirely her own.
Her boldness
eventually cost her. In 1690, she wrote a sharp critique of a famous sermon by
the Portuguese Jesuit António Vieira, and the Bishop of Puebla published it,
with a covering letter written under the pseudonym “Sor Filotea de la Cruz”
that praised her intellect while urging her to set aside secular learning for
sacred study. Her reply, the Respuesta a Sor Filotea of 1691,
is one of the founding documents of feminist thought in the Americas. She
traced her lifelong hunger for knowledge, defended the right of women to study
and teach, and observed, with characteristic wit, that much could be learned of
natural philosophy while cooking, adding that if Aristotle had cooked, he would
have written a great deal more.
Within a few years, she had parted with her library and instruments, reportedly giving the proceeds to the poor, and renewed her religious vows. Whether she acted under pressure from church authorities or from a sincere spiritual turn remains one of the most debated questions in Mexican literary history. In April 1695, an epidemic swept through her convent. She nursed her sisters, caught the illness, and died. Today her face appears on Mexican currency, her poems are taught across the Spanish-speaking world, and Primero sueño stands as one of the great visionary poems of the Western tradition, written by a woman who taught herself the cosmos and refused to apologize for wanting to understand it.
Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre
of the World: His Life, Work, and the Search for Universal Knowledge
By Joscelyn Godwin | Inner
Traditions
Joscelyn
Godwin’s Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre of the World, published by Inner
Traditions, is a large-format, lavishly illustrated study of the man often
called the last Renaissance scholar to attempt universal knowledge. Godwin,
emeritus professor of music at Colgate University and one of the most respected
scholars of Western esotericism, organizes Kircher’s sprawling output into
thematic chapters on frontispieces, antiquity “misread,” “preserved,” and
“imagined,” natural phenomena, music, machines both magnetic and optical, maps,
exotica, images of the gods, and didactic images. Each section explains what
was known in Kircher’s day, what he contributed, and where he went gloriously
astray, accompanied by the extraordinary engravings that made his books famous
across the world, from Rome to Mexico City.
What makes it
the perfect pairing for today’s post is that it lets readers see, quite
literally, the images Sor Juana was thinking with. Godwin presents Kircher as
both a serious scientist and a Christian Hermeticist in the tradition of Ficino
and Pico, whose work on Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Kabbalah, alchemy, and the
mysteries of Hermes Trismegistus captivated the Baroque imagination. His
chapters on optical machines, including the magic lantern, and on Kircher’s
Egyptian studies illuminate the very passages of Primero sueño that
scholars connect to Kircher’s influence.
This is a
study of Kircher rather than of Sor Juana, and readers wanting her own words
will need a good translation of her poems and the Respuesta. It’s also a
substantial, coffee-table-sized volume, best enjoyed slowly, image by image.
But for readers who finished today’s post wondering what the Tenth Muse saw
when she opened Kircher’s books in her convent cell, Godwin’s magnificent
volume is the next best thing to standing beside her.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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