Magiciens et sorciers – jeux sur l’imaginaire dans un monde éloigné
Magicians and Sorcerers – Games on the Imaginary in a Remote World

Summary/Abstract: Every age is primarily characterized by a new hermeneutic perspective, by a novel manner of ‘reading’ the world rather than by a capability of radical innovation. As Ioan Petru Culianu states in Eros et magie à la Renaissance (1984) it was the Reformation which produced, initially in Europe, the phenomenon he calls “the censorship of the imaginary”. The ideological censorship imposed by the Reformation generates modifications of human personality. According to Culianu, any sector of human existence can be defined as a mental game following certain rules with uncertain results. Therefore, religions, magic and modern science are nothing but mental games constructed on a well-known binary principle. The coexistence of good and evil as well as the consequences of the changes mentioned above are reflected, in a comic, but no less relevant way, through the antimonde and paramonde in Cyrano de Bergerac’s Letters For and Against Sorcerers (Letters XII and XII, published with other texts, under the more general denomination Lettres Diverses, mostly between 1654-1662). The narrative is built around a strange meeting between the author and the famous Sorcerer or Magician Agrippa (Agrippa von Nettesheim).

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