Jacques Gaffarel

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The inside cover of Curiositez inouyes sur la sculpture talismanique des Persans, horoscope des Patriarches et lecture des estoiles.

Jacques Gaffarel (

occultism, gaining fluency in the Hebrew, Persian
, and Arabic languages.

His most famous work is Curiositez inouyes sur la sculpture talismanique des Persans, horoscope des Patriarches et lecture des estoiles ("Unheard-of Curiosities concerning Talismanical Sculpture of the

Patriarchs, and the reading of the Stars), which was published in French in 1629 (and translated into English in 1650, by Edmund Chilmead).[2] Gaffarel included in his work two large folding plates of "the Celestial Constellations expressed by Hebrew characters", and asserted that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet could be interpreted from the constellations
and that the heavens could be read as if a book.

The retraction written in the above-mentioned book.

His book enjoyed phenomenal success. René Descartes read it with interest and the French physician and mathematician Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) defended it. Unheard-of Curiosities was one of 1,500 books in the Library of Sir Thomas Browne and one of the varied sources of his encyclopaedia entitled Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Browne alludes to Gaffarel's astrology in The Garden of Cyrus thus:

Could we satisfy our selves in the position of the lights above, or discover the wisdom of that order so invariably maintained in the fixed stars of heaven......we might abate.....the strange Cryptography of Gaffarell in his Starrie Booke of Heaven.

Gaffarel contributed to the debate between Marin Mersenne and Robert Fludd.

On the other hand, the

Pico della Mirandola
).

References

  1. ISBN 978-0-19-256081-0
    .
  2. ISBN 978-0-691-20865-7
    .

External links

Media related to Jacques Gaffarel at Wikimedia Commons

Bibliography

Hiro Hirai (ed.), Jacques Gaffarel between Magic and Science (Rome: Serra, 2014). [1]

Saverio Campanini, Eine späte Apologie der Kabbala. Die Abdita divinae Cabalae Mysteria des Jacques Gaffarel, in T. Frank – U. Kocher – U. Tarnow (edd.), Topik und Tradition. Prozesse der Neuordnung von Wissensüberlieferungen des 13. bis 17. Jahrhunderts, Göttingen 2007, pp. 325–351.

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