ABSTRACT
In 1433-99 periods, Eastern and Oriental work became available in the West, particularly Islamic Sufism, the Muslim mystical tradition, and even some knowledge of Hindu and Buddhist thought. All the streams of belief so far discussed came together in the Renaissance, particularly in Italy where the sense of transformation was strongest, and most particularly in Florence. The preoccupations of Plato and Plotinus, together with the alchemical attempts to activate and control the basic energy of the universe, come flooding into the origins of their modern period. A sense of experience being knowledge was present in the early nineteenth century Romantic poets and the whole movement of Romanticism in art and in philosophy. This German Romantic movement also rediscovered Giordano Bruno, as well as drawing on the vision of the mystic Boehme. William Blake was the great eighteenth century mystical poet, expressing a sense of the correspondences and the relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm.
