Sabellicus, Georgius

An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920)

A magician who lived about the same time as Faustus of Wittenberg, about the end of the 15th century. His chief claims to fame as a sorcerer rest on his own wide and arrogant advertisement of his skill in necromancy. He styles himself, "The most accomplished Georgius Sabellicus, a second Faustus, the spring and centre of necromantic art, an astrologer, a magician, consummate in chiromancy, and in agromancy, pyromancy and hydromancy inferior to none that ever lived." Unfortunately, no proof is forthcoming that he ever substantiated these S Saint Germain became widely esteemed for his erudition, and for his personal piety; while his sermons and even his letters were passed from hand to hand, and perused with great admiration by many of his fellow clerics. But he was never found guilty of courting fame or publicity of any kind, and at the age of sixty he retired to Groenendale, not far from the battlefield of Waterloo, where he founded a monastery. There he lived until his death in 1381, devoting himself chiefly to the study of mysticism, yet showing himself anything but averse to those charitable actions befitting a monk. Ruysbroeck was known to his disciples as "the ecstatic teacher." As a thinker he was speculative and broadminded, and indeed he was one of those who prefigured the Reformation, the result being that, though he won the encomiums of many famous theologians in the age immediately succeeding his, an attempt to beatify him was sternly suppressed. He was a tolerably voluminous writer, and at Cologne, in 1552, one of his manuscripts found its way into book form with the title, De Naptu svel de Ornatu Nuptiarum Spiritualium; while since then a number of his further works have been published, notably De Vera Contemplatione and De Septem Gradivus Amoris (Hanover, 1848). central tenet of his teaching is that "the soul finds God in its own depths," but, in contradistinction to many other mystics, he did not teach the fusion of the self in God, but held that at the summit of the ascent towards righteousness the soul still preserves its identity. The Ruysbroeck and his teaching begot many voluminous commentaries throughout the middle ages , and he has attracted a number of great writers, the Abbé Bossuet, for example, and at a later date Maurice Maeterlinck. In 1891 the latter published L'Ornemant des Noces Spirituelles, de Ruysbroeck l'admirable, and an English translation of this by J. T. Stoddart was issued in 1904. The reader desirous of further information should consult Studies in Mystical Religion, by Rufus M. Jones, 1909. bombastic claims, or was ever regarded by anyone else as anything but a charlatan.