Dr Angela Voss

Teaches:
The Imaginal Cosmos
Marsilio Ficino and Renaissance Astrology

I am currently a lecturer in Religious Studies in the School of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent, where I am the Director of the MA in the Cultural Study of Cosmology and Divination.

I completed my first degree in Combined Arts at the University of Leicester, followed by a Diploma in Early Music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. After working for several years as both a professional musician and administrator (for Anthony Rooley and the Consort of Musicke), I studied for an MA in Music Performance Studies at the City University, London. By this time I had been introduced to the writing of the Renaissance philosopher and astrologer, Marsilio Ficino, and had become immersed in the world of 15th century music and magic. I therefore decided to embark on a Ph.D. to explore the generally misunderstood astrological practice of Ficino. This was completed in 1992 as ‘Music, Astrology and Magic: the astrological music therapy of Marsilio Ficino and his role as a Renaissance Magus’.

As a practising astrologer and musician myself, I have always felt it is vital to understand the phenomenology of practice as a basis for study, and this has continued to inform my research and teaching. A highpoint of my career was the devising and making of a CD, Secrets of the Heavens, an imaginative reconstruction of Ficino’s magical Orphic Singing. The live performance in a medieval church in London, complete with the appropriate incense for each deity, was an event in which pagan and Christian spirituality merged in true Renaissance spirit and I regard it as the impetus for all my work on the relationship between the imagination and religious experience.

Since 2000 I have been teaching at the University of Kent, at first for the MA in the Study of Mysticism and Religious Experience, out of which emerged the MA in the Cultural Study of Cosmology and Divination in 2006. The MA was established due to the generous sponsorship of the Sophia Trust, and has focussed on divinatory theory and practice, symbolic interpretation, the function of the imagination as a mode of knowledge and traditional cosmology. I have published numerous papers on Ficino, as well as an edited collection of his astrological writings for North Atlantic Books, Western Esoteric Masters series. I am now moving into the territory of symbolism and the imaginal, exploring the erotic life of statues, Life between lives and past-life therapy, ancient Greek mysteries and the metaphysics of divination. For the MA programme at Kent I have been offering modules on The Imaginal Cosmos and Cosmology and the Arts, which investigate the Platonic cosmos, neoplatonic theurgy, Renaissance astrology and magic, the nature of the symbol, Corbin and the mundus imaginalis, mystery initiation and the cosmic dimensions of music and literature.

I live with my two teenage sons and when not occupied with my work am learning to be a jazz and rock drummer.

Publications

• ‘ Ficino and Astrology’ in Astrology: the Astrologers’ Quarterly vol.60 (1986) no. 3, :126-38; no. 4, 191-99
• ‘The Renaissance Musician: Speculations on the Performing Style of Marsilio Ficino’ in Temenos 11 (1990), 31-52
• Review of Performance: Revealing the Orpheus Within by Anthony Rooley (Shaftesbury 1990) in Early Music vol. XIX no.3 (1991), 451-3
• ‘The Natural Magic of Marsilio Ficino’ in Historical Dance vol. 3 no.1 (1991) 25-30
• Review of Ficino, Three Books on Life eds. C. Kaske & J. Clark in Aries vols. 12-13 (1992), 68-73
• ‘On the Knowledge of Divine Things: Ficino’s concept of notio; Divinatory versus ‘Scientific’ Astrology’ in Sphinx: A Journal for Archetypal Psychology and the Arts vol.6 (1994), 149-72
• Review of Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic in ‘Music and Letters’ vol. 75 no 4 (nov. 1994) 592-94
• ‘The Book of the Sun’ by Marsilio Ficino, translated by G. Cornelius, D. Costello, G. Tobyn, A. Voss and V. Wells in Sphinx vol. 6, 124-48
• ‘The Music of the Spheres; Marsilio Ficino and Renaissance Harmonia’ in Culture and Cosmos vol.2 no.2 (1998), 16-38
• ‘Marsilio Ficino, the Second Orpheus’ in Music as Medicine, The History of Music Therapy since Antiquity ed. P. Horden (Ashgate, 2000), 154-72
• ‘The Astrology of Marsilio Ficino, Divination or Science? ’ in Culture and Cosmos vol. 4 no.2 (2000), 29-45
• ‘Orpheus redivivus: The Musical Magic of Marsilio Ficino’ in Marsilio Ficino, his Theology, his Philosophy, his Legacy (Leiden: Brill, 2002) 227-41
• ‘Father Time and Orpheus’ (Oxford: Abzu Press, 2003)
• ‘From Allegory to Anagoge; the question of symbolic perception in a literal world’ in Astrology and the Academy eds. N. Campion & P. Curry (Bristol: Cinnabar Books 2004)
• ‘The Secret Life of Statues’ in Sky and Psyche eds. N. Campion & P. Curry (Edinburgh: Floris Books 2006)
• Marsilio Ficino ‘Esoteric Masters’ series, ed. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2006)
• The Imaginal Cosmos, Astrology, Divination and the Sacred editor, with Jean Hinson Lall (Canterbury: University of Kent, 2007)
• ‘Eros’, Kosmos Osterreich no. 23 (Berlin, 2007)
• ‘Father Time and Orpheus’ in The Imaginal Cosmos (see above)
• Seeing with Different Eyes: Essays in Astrology and Divination editor, with Patrick Curry (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008)
• ‘Divination and Divine Tears: the Power of a Melancholy Humour’ in Seeing with Different Eyes (see above)
• ‘ A Methodology of the Imagination’Eye of the Heart Journal , vol.3, (La Trobe University, 2009)
• ‘The Descent of Orpheus: Life between Life Dialogue, Divination or Therapy?’  in Divination: Perspectives for the New Millenium ed. Patrick Curry (forthcoming, Ashgate, 2010)

Recordings

• Thomas Lupo, Consort Music, The English Fantasy Consort of Viols, (ASV, 1996)
• Secrets of the Heavens with Mark Rylance, Mark Tucker, Catherine King and the Marini Consort (Riverrun Records 2001)
• Images of Melancholy with John Line, Lynda Sayce, Andrew Wilson-Dickson and the Marini Consort (Riverrun Records 2003)