Michael Scot: ‘for the souls which have left this life for the other know and see everything.’

The passing through the veil (the Greek word ‘ἀποκάλυψις’ [ap-ok-al‘-oop-sis] means ‘revelation’)

I am not a fan of using pictures as illustrations for my blog, mainly for copyright reasons [the above is in the public domain]. Although I take the above to be a visual metaphor for the elation felt by any alchemist who has discovered the Philosophers’ stone (but the real one, the spiritual one), the book where this engraving is said to have appeared first, i.e. in Camille Flammarion’s L’atmosphère : météorologie populaire, in the edition of 1888, this black-and-white engraving was in fact used to illustrate a passage already present in the first edition of L’atmosphère (1873) which in English reads as follows: A missionary of the Middle Ages even tells us that, in one of his voyages in search of the terrestrial paradise, he reached the horizon where the earth and the heavens met, and that he discovered a certain point where they were not joined together, and where, by stooping, he passed under the roof of the heavens. . . . And yet this vault has, in fact, no real existence!
translation by C.B. Pitman (1874)
https://archive.org/details/atmosphere00flamiala/page/102/mode/2up?q=middle+ages

As for me, I am going to use this illustration as a metaphor for Michael Scot’s claim that ‘the souls which have left this life for the other know and see everything.’

I find the soul to be such a fascinating topic*. The more so as even today we still do not know that much about the soul. As I am no longer an adherent of materialism, I love to read about insights or opinions on the soul that pre-date our materialistic Weltanschauung (conception of the world).

In November 2019, in an anthology of esoteric texts published in French and compiled by Pierre-André Riffard, I came across a magical ritual for the purpose of summoning a very important spirit attributed to Michael Scot (or Scotus) which reminded me very much of one which the Italian self-declared magus Cagliostro (Giuseppe Balsamo, who claimed to be Count Alexander of Cagliostro) is said to have performed in front of some aristocrat whose name I cannot recall presently (see ‘Cagliostro: I still have not done my homework!’).

So I tried to find out a little more about Michael Scot and invariably I came to read a few passages of his famous astrological treatise, Liber introductorius (Michaelis Scoti Astrologia cum figuris). As I perused through the edition and translation of the Latin text made by Glenn Michael Edwards (1978) in March 2020, a sentence caught my attention and has remained at the back of my mind ever since. In the Latin of Michael Scot, this sentence reads as follows: ‘Anim[a]e enim transit[a]e de hac vita in alteram omnia sciunt et vident.’ (‘For the souls which have left this life for the other know and see everything.’)

This sentence struck me as important because I had read some accounts of near-death experiences where the person who had made it to the other side and come back to continue with their life on Earth claims to have been able to understand everything, all the secrets of the universe when he (or she) was on the other side – which I take to be a form of omniscience. Unfortunately, I do not know enough about Michael Scot and the intellectual tradition which shaped him to determine whether this claim (‘For the souls which have left this life for the other know and see everything.’) was pure intuition or invention on his part or whether Michael Scot had read about it somewhere else.

Whenever a sentence truly resonates with me to the extent that I feel compelled to consign it to one of my many electronic files of notes, I often try to read it in its oldest incarnation – be it Ancient Greek, Latin, French, English, Italian, Spanish or German. My compulsion to do so probably stems from the times we live in and which are characterised by lies and lying – be it from the media, from our governments or whether it is lies about history and so on and so forth.

Roughly a month ago as I was checking my notes for the symbology of number nine (there are passages in Liber introductorius where Michael Scot discusses the nine openings of the human body, the nine main demons or the nine spheres of heaven) and I also came across a reference to some form of immaculate conception attributed to the Muslim sage and philosopher Averroes in Latin translations dating back to the sixteenth century (which also made me recall this sentence of Michael Scot which fascinates me so much because Michael Scot was responsible for introducing Averroes to Christian Europeans), I remembered that I had still not checked whether ‘anime enim transite de hac vita in alteram omnia sciunt et vident’ was indeed to be found in the Liber introductorius.

I was elated to discover that since I had first looked for digitised manuscripts of the text back in March 2020, the manuscript (NAL 1401) kept at the Archives of the French National Library had been digitised in the meantime (it was uploaded to the Gallica website in December 2020) and that I had forgotten to check the copy (BSB Clm 10268) belonging to the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich.

Unfortunately, the Latin used in both manuscripts relies so much on abbreviations that one could almost describe the text as shorthand in mediæval Latin. Given that I did not take any mediæval Latin palæography classes when I studied History at the University of Geneva, locating the sentence in each manuscript on my computer monitor proved to be a bit too much of an eyesore at first. Fortunately, once I had found the title of the chapter I was looking for, De noticia humane natura, it did not take me too long to find my favourite sentence written in Latin in each manuscript of Liber introductorius – well, I must admit that the little challenge I had set for myself was certainly made easier by the elaborate calligraphic symbol which had been drawn by each copyist so as to mark the beginning of this particular sentence!

BSB Clm10268, folio14

NAL 1401, folio31v

As to the question of determining whether this sentence belongs to a school of thought which originated only in the Middle Ages or whether it was formulated in Greco-Roman Antiquity or even earlier, this is an endeavour that I shall leave for another time... [But here are two suggestions to start one’s research should anybody be interested: a) Pamela Sheingorn, ‘“And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest”: The Soul’s Conveyance to the Afterlife in the Middle Ages’, in Art into Life, ed. Carol Garrett Fisher and Kathleen L. Scott, Michigan State University Press, 1995, pages 155 to 182 and, of course, b) Lynn Thorndike, Michael Scot, London, 1965.]

* Links
Glenn Michael Edwards, The Liber Introductorius of Michael Scot, Dissertation presented to the Faculty of The Graduate School of the University of Southern California, September 1978
http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15799coll36/id/111855