Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788), also known by his nickname Magus of the North, was born in Königsberg, where he studied Law, Philosophy, Philology, Theology and Literature at university. After a brief period, during which he was a tutor in Livonia, he was admitted to the business house of his friend Johann Christoph Berens, for whom he carried out commissions in various European cities. In the English capital, due to the failure of a delicate mission of a political nature, he underwent a conversion that led him to write two autobiographical texts: Biblical Considerations of a Christian and Thoughts on my life. Back in Königsberg, he resisted the attempts of his friend Berens and the philosopher Kant to reconvert to enlightened ideals, and decided to write what would be his first printed work: Socratic Memories. In it he undertakes a critique of the unlimited trust in reason, which, in his opinion, the enlightened trend was showing. After suffering a phase of economic uncertainty, he managed to occupy a civil servant position, with little pay, with which he combined his intellectual activity. His studies gave him an extraordinary command of Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Chaldean, which, together with his profound literary, philosophical and theological knowledge, attracted and fascinated many intellectuals of his time, including Herder. , Goethe and Hegel. In books such as Crusades of a philologist, Hierophant letters or Metacritics on the purism of reason, he will deal, with a cryptic and ironic style, with controversial issues at the time such as the origin of language, rationalism, the essence of history or the esthetic. In 1787 he obtained a pension and, already ill, undertook a trip to Westphalia to visit his friends F. H. Jacobi, Buchholtz and Princess Galitzin. He passed away on June 21, 1788, on his return journey, before passing through Weimar, where he planned to visit Goethe.