Chris Plaisance's Home Page



"Sed in primis ad fontes ipsos properandum..."

About

Philologia.io is my personal home page, where I share written works and code projects related to two of my primary areas of interest: the Humanities, and Cybersecurity Technology.

Vocationally, I work in the field of information security as a cyber threat hunter, combining data scientific and digital forensic methodologies to deveop technologies which facilitate the detection and investigation of cyber threats.

Avocationally, I am an independant humanities scholar, primarily researching topics within the fields of the histories of philosophy, religion, and Western esotericism from the methodological perspectives of classical philology and discursive archaeology.

I received an MA with distinction in Western Esotericism at the University of Exeter's Centre for the Study of Esotericism (EXESESO), with a classical philological thesis exploring divine evocation within the Graeco-Egyptian magical papyri. I also earned an MBA in Information Technology from the American Military University (AMU). Additionally, I hold a BA in Philosophy from AMU, and an AA in Mandarin Chinese from the Defense Language Institute. I currently hold the following industry certifications:

Contact

Humanities Works

This section contains a current record of all of my published academic works within the humanities. The domains within which the research for these papers was conducted spans a variety of methodological disciplines, including:

The respective foci of the works in question similarly span an array of academic fields within the broader humanities umbrella, including:

For each article and chapter, there is a full bibliographic record, abstract, listing of keywords, and a link to the original publication source. And, for most works, there is also a downloadable PDF copy, as well as a current record of secondary references in which the work in question has been cited. For each book review, there is a full bibliographic record, a link to the original publication, and a link to the reviewed book. Additionally, for most reviews, there is also a downloadable PDF copy.

Monographs

This section contains academic monographs of which I am the sole author.

Evocating the Gods: Divine Evocation in the Graeco-Egyptian Magical Papyri. London: Avalonia, 2019.

Peer-Reviewed Articles

This secition contains articles published in peer-reviewed academic journals. The journals in which the papers are found are broadly representative of the topics with which the articles deal.

"Textual Realities: An Aristotelian Realist Ontology of Textual Entities." Variants: Journal of the European Society for Textual Scholarship 14 (2019): 23–40.
"Methods of Web Philology: Computer Metadata and Web Archiving in the Primary Source Documents of Contemporary Esotericism." International Journal for the Study of New Religions 7, no. 1 (2016): 43–68.
"Occult Spheres, Planes, and Dimensions: Geometric Terminology and Analogy in Modern Esoteric Discourse." Journal of Religious History 40, no. 3 (2016): 385–404.
"Israel Regardie and the Psychologization of Esoteric Discourse." Correspondences: Online Journal for the Academic Study of Western Esotericism 3: 5–54.
"Magic Made Modern? Re-evaluating the Novelty of the Golden Dawn's Magic." Correspondences: Online Journal for the Academic Study of Western Esotericism 2, no. 2 (2014): 159–87.
"The Transvaluation of 'Soul' and 'Spirit': Platonism and Paulism in H.P. Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled." Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies 15, no. 1 (2013): 250–72.

Chapters in Edited Collections

This secition contains chapters published in collections of topically related articles. Oversight for these volumes is editorial discretion, rather than peer-review. The books within which these articles appear are explicitly focused on topics and themes within the academic study of Western esotericism.

"Of Cosmocrators and Cosmic Gods: The Place of the Archons in De mysteriis." In Daimonic Imagination: Uncanny Intelligence, 64–85, ed. Angela Voss and William Rowlandson. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.
"Turris Philosophorum: On the Alchemical Iconography of the Tower." In Alchemical Traditions: From Antiquity to the Avente-Garde, 325–354, ed. Aaron Cheak. Melbourne: Numen Books, 2013.
"From Conjuror to Philosopher: A Comparative Analysis of Medieval and Renaissance Angel Magic." In Occult Traditions, 140–154, ed. Damon Zacharias Lycourinos. Melbourne: Numen Books, 2012.
"The Hierarchical Cosmos: Occult Theology as a Direct Continuation of Neoplatonism." In Occult Traditions, 79–92, ed. Damon Zacharias Lycourinos. Melbourne: Numen Books, 2012.

Book Reviews

This section contains reviews of books published in peer-reviewed academic journals. The books under review deal with two primary foci: Western esotericism, and new religious movements. And, the journals within which the reviews appear are broadly representative of the respective disciplines.

Olav Hammer and Mikael Rothstein, eds. Handbook of the Theosophical Current. Brill Handbooks on Contemporary Religion. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Review in Correspondences: Online Journal of Western Esotericism 4 (2016): 1–4.
Christopher Partridge, ed. The Occult World. Routledge Worlds. Oxon: Routledge, 2015. Review in Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 20, no. 2 (2016): 147–49.
Egil Asprem. The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900–1939. Numen Book Series. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Review in Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 20, no. 1 (2016): 141–43.
April D. DeConick and Grant Adamson, eds. Histories of the Hidden God: Concealment and Revelation in Western, Gnostic, Esoteric, and Mystical Traditions. Gnostica: Texts & Interpretations. Durham: Acumen Publishing Limited, 2013. Review in Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16, no. 2 (2016): 246–48.
Jennifer Snook. American Heathens: The Politics of Identity in a Pagan Religious Movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015. Review in Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 19, no. 2 (2015): 128–31.
Carole M. Musack and Alex Norman. Handbook of New Religions and Cultural Production. Brill Handbooks on Contemporary Religion. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Review in Religious Studies Review 41, no. 4 (2015): 175.
Kennet Granholm. Dark Enlightenment: The Historical, Sociological, and Discursive Contexts of Contemporary Esoteric Magic. Aries Book Series. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Reviewed in Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 19, no. 2 (2015): 110–11.
Christopher McIntosh. Return of the Tetrad. Oxford: Mandrake of Oxford, 2013. Reviewed in Beyond Borderlands 2 (2015): 8–10.

Other Articles

This section contains articles which do not fit into any of the above categories. The are mixed, both in terms of content, and the organs within which they were published.

"Venus in Spenser's An Hymne in Honovr of Beavtie." Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition 26, no. 3 (2014).
"The Ubiquity of Prehension: Panpsychism as a Solution to the Mind-Body Problem." KannenBright: Concordia University's Undergraduate Journal of Theology 2 (2011): 78–89.

Interviews

This section contains interviews and podcasts involving discussions of topics related by my humanities research.

"Evocating the Gods." The Magician and the Fool. Episode 34. Podcast audio, 14 November 2020.

Technical Works

This section contains a current record of all my published technical works within the computer and information science fields, both articles as well as code repositories. The domains within which the research for these works was conducted principally relates to cybersecurity, with special foci on:

For each article, there is a full bibliographic record, abstract, listing of keywords, a link to the original publication source, and in most cases a downloadable PDF copy. For code repositories, there is a description of the repository's content, and a link to the Gitlab repository hosting the code.

White Papers

This section contains techical white papers on cybersecurity related topics, published by professional organizations within the field.

"PDF Metadata Extraction with Python." Forensics Reading Room. SANS Institute, 5 February 2019.

Other Articles

This section contains technical articles on a variety of computer science topics which are solely published to this website. These articles are not, strictly speaking, professional publications, but are typically "how to" guides documenting solutions to technical challenges for which I was not able to find sufficient documentation.

"Web 1.0 in the Cloud: S3 Hosted Static Websites Without Using Route 53 DNS." First published 22 July 2018.

Code Repositories

This section contains links to and descriptions of my publicly available code repositories hosted on Gitlab. The primary languages within which the repository code is written include:

All code is free and open source software (FOSS), released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 3.0.

pdf-metadata: PDF Metadata is an automated utility that extracts metadata from PDF file. The utility is used by passing arguments to the script from the command line. As this utility is intended for digital forensics use case, in distinction from PDF parsing libraries (e.g. PyPDF2), which extract only a structured subset of available metadata, PDF Forensics aims to extract all relevant file system and application metadata in their native format. These extracted data are then collected into a structured HTML-formatted report.
igg: In the spirit of the classic UNIX utility dig, igg (the IP geolocation groper) is a command line utility for geolocating IP addresses and host names. Written in Python 3, and limited to modules from the standard library, igg's core functionality is to either retrieve either (1) a complete geolocation record for a given IPv4 address (or each IPv4 address to which a given host name resolves), or (2) specific data elements from that IP address's (or a host's IPs) records.
cb-convert: CB Convert utility is an automated utility that converts ZIP and RAR files into their respective comic book reader formats, CBZ and CBR, for use with comic book readers (e.g. MComix).
cprime: CPrime a command line utility that is designed to test arbitrarily large number, to determine if they are or are not prime. The ability to handle extremely large numbers is done via the C gmp.h library.