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Prelude. Diana, the huntsman and the stag -- Eroticism and magic from the ancient world to the Renaissance -- High tide in the Sea of Pneuma. Animal magnetism and hypnosis -- Eros in the era of the multitudes. Le Bon, Trotter, Freud and the libido of the masses -- From the Land of Oz to the Banana Republic -- Wilhelm Reich's Modern Heresy. Pneuma in fascism and the natural sciences -- Economy, neurosis, and spectacle. Capitalism and magic -- Communalism, cybernetics, and the digital economy -- Marketing, war, and demiurgy -- The digital tide. From real to virtual pneuma -- The polymorphous demon. Magic in the post-Soviet era -- Epilogue. Hounds of hunt, hounds of hell. "In this innovative study, Colombian technology writer Mauricio Loza pursues an intriguing thesis on the origin of psychology and modern media, namely that they arise from the magical arts of the Renaissance, and it is there that we must seek what Ioan Culianu called "the prototype of the impersonal systems of the media, of indirect censorship, of global manipulation and of the trusts that exercise their occult control over the Western masses." The Hounds of Actaeon takes up Culianu's thesis to trace a history that unites such Renaissance luminaries as Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno with modern thinkers, including Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, and Guy Debord. It covers a broad historical and intellectual terrain ranging from the Renaissance magic, through eighteenth-century medicine and nineteenth-century psychology, to the propaganda and media warfare of the twentieth century, proving that the modern era, secular in appearance, continues to be profoundly influenced by pre-modern ways of thinking. The importance of this study is twofold: on the one hand it elaborates a fresh perspective on certain themes of Renaissance erotic magic and its relation to mass psychology and psychoanalysis, while, on the other, it offers an alternative for the study of the media strategies that determine Western worldviews and behaviors"--
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