The period of time from the 11th and even up to the 18th century of this millenia was one of the darkest ones ever seen since the fall of Atlantis and Lemuria with regards to enlightenment and the liberation of the human spirit.  Humanity had become enslaved to the systems it had wrought, going around and around like a tethered goat thinking it was going places, and stamping out any visible sign of progress in its path as having proceeded from "the devil," who, by this time, had materialize in tangible form as a reddish satyr.  It was during this time that, hounded by the powers that be, that many of the wizards sought refuge off the physical plane; exiled from their home plane, terrified to reincarnate in the carnage that had become the European arena.  In the East, the situation was not much better.  The fierce raiders from Mongolia and Manchuria rode over the land, wiping out ancient centers of learning and culture.  Eastern wizards fell under the sword of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, and it was not until the reign of the enlightened Kublai Khan that wizardry in the east could once again flourish.  Even so, much of the ancient knowledge of the East was lost, held only in remote centers of learning such as in Kathmandu and Thibet among the high lamas there. 

This demise upon the wizard population was not without its toll upon society.  Without wizards to maintain the knowledge base and instigate progress, the church was able to impose utter ignorance over the majority of the European population.  Very few people could read or write their native language, and fear kept anyone from challenging the power of the church.  Disease, famine, and war wiped out huge percentages of the populace; the Great Plague alone took out between 25-33 percent of Europe.  Add to that the carnage wrought by the Crusades, the massacre of the Templar Knights by Phillipe Le Bel in 1307, and the many souls that fell to the bloody hand of the Inquisition, and one may see that the situation was very grim indeed.  Even after the Protestant Reformation, Calvinist and Puritanical doctrines quickly developed and squelched any form of knowledge or creative action, branding it as witchcraft and burning at the stake those who dared to challenge those doctrines, even in the New World. 

 It is with much gratitude that we as a race of people owe much to the efforts of the wizards who did manage to survive and continue to instigate culture, knowledge, wisdom, and creative action, albeit underground, during this bloody era of terror.  It was during this time that Astrology grew and flourished as a science, geomantic systems were developed, science accepted the accurate system of a heliocentric (sun-centered) solar system, and the ancient Qaballah was studied as a model of magical science.  Because of the efforts of the few who tried and succeeded, we are no longer imprisoned in an era in which those in power can imprison us in ignorance.  Although this is not true in some parts of the world today, generally as a race of people, we are free to make our own conscious choices and have at least some say over how we choose to serve and create.   

Henry Cornelius Agrippa  

Born in Nettesheim, Germany, 1486, Agrippa was one of the most powerful wizards in existence during the Inquisition.  Hounded by the Inquisition himself, he conducted much of his research in secrecy and in hiding by his friends who aided him in his cause.  Much of his so-called "heresy" was in proclaiming that the potential for Godhead existed in every man, speaking of course of our ability to co-create our own realities with Spirit.  Among other things, Agrippa authored a set of books entitled "De Occulta Philosophia" which is one of the most important and comprehensive works on magic ever written.  It is to Agrippa that we owe the first methodical and clear description of the whole qabalistic system.  His book was practically the only starting point of qabalistic knowledge among European scholars at the time, and it is because it had such an immense repute that it was greatly feared by the church.  Agrippa was considered to be an alchemist, astrologer, qabalist, and numerologer, and by some he was thought to be a demonologist and a sorceror.  He died inconspicuously in late 1535. 

Theoprastus Paracelsus

Johannes Kepler

Nicholas Copernicus  

Copernicus (1473-1543) was a surprisingly long-lived wizard who dared to stand up to the church's edict that the Earth was the center of the solar system and, therefore, the universe.  Copernicus postulated a system in which the sun was at the center of the solar system, and all the planets revolved around it instead of around the Earth.  This viewpoint had Galileo thrown into prison by the church; yet, the proofs offered by Copernicus, including the resolution of the seemingly insolvable problem of retrograde planetary motion, helped to sway the powers and Copernicus' theory eventually became "fact" in the eyes of the church and state, although it took many years for this to be fully accepted by all of academia.  In addition, Copernicus was an inventor and experimenter in timepieces and pendulum science. 

Galileo Galilei

The rebellion-exile of the wizard souls lasted for a good 4 or 5 centuries. It was not until the late Renaissance (also known as the High Renaissance or the age of Reason) that wizards started feeling comfortable enough to return to the Earth Plane.  Even so, most of them continued to practice in secrecy, fearful of the dim view the church, state, and common society had upon them and their activities.  The world would not see overt wizard activity until the late 18th and early 19th centuries, with the birth of the United States (Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin), and the Transcendental movement of the early American 19th century (Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes).  Even so, 70 or more years would pass before wizards would begin to resume their rightful role in the timestream.