The Studio Esoterico Cornelio and love myths

«Love and Myth» is one of the educational websites curated by the Studio Esoterico Cornelio, active online since 2014 and devoted to esotericism and the esoteric tradition. Alongside its official website, the Studio curates a network of themed sites on history, symbols and traditions: each one deals with a single subject, with the space and attention that subject requires. This one is devoted to love, as myths, poets and popular customs have told it.

Why love belongs in an esoteric network

In the history of Western thought love has not been merely a private feeling. In Plato's Symposium Eros is an intermediate being between humans and gods, a force that leads the soul from the beauty of bodies to the beauty of ideas. In the 15th century Marsilio Ficino, commenting on that dialogue, went so far as to call love a magician, because the whole of nature seemed to him held together by attractions and sympathies. This idea passed into the occult philosophy of the Renaissance and has accompanied the esoteric tradition ever since. The Studio's very name recalls, as a cultural tribute, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), author of De occulta philosophia, who took from Ficino the vision of a cosmos bound together by correspondences.

That is why a site about love sits naturally beside those devoted to oracles, the Moon or amulets: the goddesses of love, wedding symbols and the great couples of myth are chapters of the same story, the story of how human beings have given shape and meaning to their bonds.

How the texts are written

The articles always start from the sources: Hesiod and Homer for Aphrodite, Apuleius for Cupid and Psyche, Ovid for Pyramus and Thisbe, Andreas Capellanus for courtly love, the Persian poets for Layla and Majnun. When a story is a myth, it is presented as a myth; when a tradition is recent, like the love locks hung on bridges, this is stated clearly; when an origin is uncertain, like that of the stylised heart, the hypotheses are set out without choosing one for convenience. Quotations are short and taken only from ancient works.

The love potions and magical practices recorded by Greek and Latin authors are described for what they are: historical evidence, useful for understanding a mentality, not instructions to follow. The site offers neither romantic advice nor recipes.

Getting to know the Studio

The name and trademark of the Studio Esoterico Cornelio are registered. Anyone who wishes to learn more about the Studio, its history and the other projects in the network can visit the official website, studioesotericocornelio.com. These pages, instead, offer an invitation to read: to follow a myth from one century to the next, to recognise a symbol in a painting, to discover that an everyday gesture such as slipping on a ring has two thousand years of history behind it.