The Rune Magician

Johannes Bureus, the Renaissance Rune Magician

The National Library of Sweden has scans of Johannes Bureus Runa ABC boken

Ed comment: Everyone who is interested in people like John Dee and Francis Bacon should read more about Johannes Bureus, he is like a mix between the two. He was an advisor to King Gustav Adolf and just like Bacon, Bureus allegedly was involved in developing the Swedish language, like Bacon was involved in development of the English language.

When I read about Johannes Thomae Agrivillensis Bureus (latinisation of Johan Bure, 1568-1652), for the first time I realised that in Northern Europe during the Renaissance there actually hàs been a mix between pre-Christian religion/mythology and typical Renaissance magic (such as Hermetic, Kabbalah, Medieval magic, etc.). I started to look for information about this interesting character and his ideas and took up the idea to find out if there were more people in which these two interesting elements came together....

Other information is in Swedish, but I noticed that Bureus was spoken about at length in the book Rose Cross Over The Baltic by the Swedish investigator (who fortunately writes in English) Susana åkerman (Brill 1998, also reviewed*). Looking further it proved hard to find information about other people interested in Nordic mythology and Renaissance magic, but I kept running into åkerman. Since the works of Flowers and åkerman appear to be the only descent information about the Swede Bureus in English, but both are hard to get (a small publisher and a scholarly and very expensive publishing for universities) and there is also no proper information on the internet, I decided to write an article about Bureus as first introduction.

Investigating Bureus, Flowers claims that he first wrote about Bureus in 1986. The first thing I saw of him was the article in Tyr (2004) and later I got his booklet Johannes Bureus and Adalruna of 1998. Of the same year is åkerman's Rose Cross Over The Baltic, but this was not the first publication in which she speaks about Bureus. In the 1994 collection of articles under the title The Expulsion Of The Jews, 1492 and after (1994 Garlang publishing*) åkerman has an article called The Gothic Kabbalah: Johannes Bureus, Runic Theosophy and Northern Apocalypticism....

... åkerman names more famous and less famous Scandinavian Rosicrucians who sometimes got other interests as well. You can read about this in short in my previous article The Northern Tradition in the Renaissance. The article you are reading now will focus on Johannes Bureus. Helpfull to both åkerman and Flowers were Bureus diaries which were published in 1885 by the Royal library of Sweden in Stockholm.

Bureus.

Bureus was born in 1568 in åkerby near the famous city of Uppsala (where the largest and last of the pagan temples has been) in Sweden as a son of a Lutheran parish priest. He had a good education in Uppsala, Stockholm and later he studied in Germany and Italy. In 1595 he studies theology, in 1602 he is professor and from 1603 on Royal antiquarian. Bureus died a cripple in 1652. …….

READ MORE:
http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=207

Article from: http://www.monas.nl/think/bureus.htm