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Europe has become an unfashionable idea in these days. Distrust and malaise roam around, hearts have grown cold. Athens’s plight is seen as an alien business, and all over the continent particular interests prevail. No love, no sympathy, no solidarity. And the Eastern frontier is again under the threat of war. We are prisoners of a history that hasn’t happened yet. Crimea. The image I have on my mind is coming from there, from this disputed corner of land where so much European blood was spilled two centuries ago, and which is once again the epicentre of telluric passions. It is there that Adam Mickiewicz was sent in exile 20 years before another European war touched it. He fell in love with it, and wrote a series of sonnets that every European should read today. Before it is too late. The image is the green grass of Crimea, caressed by the warm wind of the Ackerman Steppe. It’s the sea-meadows across which the boat of the poet’s imagination can sail, hoping one day to return to his long-lost Ithaca.
Marco Pasi is Associate Professor in the History of Hermetic philosophy and related currents at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). He has published extensively on the history of modern Western esotericism, especially in relation to magic, art, and politics. Among other things, he is the author of Aleister Crowley and the Temptation of Politics (Acumen, 2013) and has edited Peintures Inconnues d’Aleister Crowley: La collection de Palerme (Archè, 2008).