If one wishes to take a glimpse of western secular humanism's magical/theological origins, this document should be required reading. A translation of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man.
There is a heredity line which connects the invocation of a value such as Crimes against Humanity or an institution like the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and this document, an express plea to the angels, made at a time when it is literal fact that Muslims, Jews and Christians share the same God.
Heretical, tortuously syncretic, preposterously optimistic, nevertheless, this is an inspired and bamboozling text in which Renaissance Humanism gradually, urbanely, quixotically takes the symbolic upper hand in the struggle with religion and myth.
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