The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Frank L. Borchardt *
The Magus as Renaissance
Man
Sixteenth Century Journal,
21 (1
Spring 1990, 57-76.
The facts of the history of magic in early modern Europe
are well known. Two observations
are, however, not commonly made and appear here to contribute to the discussion
of Renaissance magic: (1) the unusual instance of direct contacts which bind
French, German, and Italian intellectuals around the year 1500 into a tight
network and (2) the widespread, virtually universal disappointment in magic
expressed by the magicians themselves. This feature of the intellectual
biographies of the magi became a literary commonplace, for example, in
Shakespeare and Goethe, and should henceforth be understood as an intrinsic
feature of the myth of the magus.
THE AUTONOMOUS AND SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF MAGIC in the
Renaissance has a remarkably young history, the origin of which can be traced to
the turn of the century and Carl Kiesewetter’s Geschichte des neueren
Occultismus [1]
and Lynn Thorndike’s The Place of Magic in the
Intellectual History of
The iconologists of the Warburg school had already
detected the importance of magic for the interpretation of troublesome
story-telling and
*
Duke University
1. Carl Kiesewetter,
Geschichte des neneren Occultisnmus, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Wilhelm Fr,edrich, 1891-95), on Renaissance
magic esp. 1: 181; 2: 73-75, 319-20, 324-34, 401-3.
2. Lynn Thorndike, The Place of Magic in the
Intellectual History of Europe, Columbia University Studies in
History, Economics, and Public Law 24, 1 (New York: Columbia University Press,
1905), esp. 20-26.
3. Consider as representative of the vast occultist
literature of the nineteenth century, Mary Anne Atwood, Hermetic Philosophy
and Alchemy (originally
4. For example, Ludwig Geiger, Johann Reuchlin: sein
Leben und seine Werke (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1871), 165-202; Isidor
Silbernagl, Johannes Trithemius: Eine Monographic, 2d ed.
(Regensburg: G. J. Manz,
1885), 93-101, 125-60; Johann Grasse, Bibliotheca Magica et Pneumatica
(Leipzig: Englemann, 1843).
5. Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental
Science, 8 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1923-58).
moralizing paintings and graphics.
[6]
Historians and folklorists in
6. E.g., Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Durers
“Melencolia I”: Eine Quellen- und Typeugeschichtlich Untersuchuung, Studien
der Bibliothek Warburg, 2 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1923), see
37-44.
7. Chief among them Will-Erich Peuckert, whose
Pansophie: Ein Versuch zur Geschichte der weissen, und schwarzen Magie
(originally 1936; 2d ed. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1956) represented a
thoughtful, comprehensive, and, for the first time, factually rigorous history
of Renaissance magic in Germany. Beyond his many biographical and
editorial contributions to the field (a 1924 Boehme biography, an almost 700
page Sebastian Franck monograph, Boehme, Paracelsus, and Weigel editions),
Peuckert produced two further volumes in his pansophic history: Gabalia: Ein
Versuch zur Geschichte der magia naturalis im 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert
(Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1967) and the posthumous revision of his 1928 work
on the Rosicrucians, Das Rosenkreuz (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1973), in
which see the editorial introduction by Rolf Christian Zimmermann, who
recognizes and tries to explain the inexplicable neglect into which Peuckert’s
work has fallen (esp. ix-xii).
8. C. Grant Loomis, White Magic: An Introduction to
the Folklore of Christian Legend, Medieval Academy of America, Publication
No. 52 (Cambridge, Mass. Medieval Academy of America,
1948).
9. A.J. Festugiere, La Revelation d’Hermès
Trismegiste, 4 vols. (Paris: Lecoffre, 1949-52), and the Franco-American
collaboration, eds. and trans. A.D. Nock and A.-J. Festugiere, Corpus
Hermeticum, 4 vols. (first two vols., originally 1938-44,
10. Eugenio Garin, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Vita
e dottrina, Pubblicazioni della R. Università degli studi di
11. Joseph Leon Blau, The Christian Interpretation of
the Cabala in the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944).
Francois Secret, Le Zôhar chez les Kabbalistes chrétiens de la
Renaissance (Paris: Librairie Durlacher, 1958), followed up by Les
Kabbalistes chrétiens de Ia Renaissance, Collection Sigma, 5 (Paris:
Dunod, 1964), and a long succession of articles in Bibliotheque d’Humanisme
et Renaissance. More recently
Jerome Friedman, “Sixteenth-Century Christian-Hebraica: Scripture and the
Renaissance Myth of the Past,” Sixteenth Century Journal 11(1980):
67-85, esp. 79-85.
12. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic
(New York: Scribner’s, 1971).
13. This is particularly true of the discussion of magic
in relation to the origins of modern science; see Brian Vickers, ed., Occult
and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge: [Cambridge University Press, 1984). More or less current bibliography (with
now about a four years lag) can be found in the Bibliographic internationale
de l’Humanisnme et de la Renaissance, 18 vols. and proceeding (Geneva: Droz,
1961-1986ff.), s. v. “Sciences et Techniques” and otherwise under
author.]
HHC: [bracketed] displayed
on p. 59 of original
58
What follows depends heavily on this young tradition of
scholarship. Nonetheless, in
Renaissance fashion, it also represents a return to the sources where, dispersed
and varied as they are, they have been at hand. The focus concentrates on the relatively
intense flurry of magical speculation around the year 1500, chiefly because it
is the best documented, and it most transparently reveals the problems of
conscience faced by the Renaissance magi. In general, the facts presented here
come from the tradition of the scholarship on magic and are well understood.
Two observations on the basis of
these facts are not commonly made and are meant here to contribute to the
discussion of Renaissance magic. The first describes the unusual
coincidence of visits, correspondence, public lectures, and written exposition
both in manuscript and in print which binds these individuals into a tight
network - rather like what a humanist outsider imagines the international
network of modern subatomic physicists to be. The second observation points out another
coincidence, the widespread, virtually universal disappointment in magic
expressed, sooner or later, by the magicians themselves. This feature of the intellectual
biographies of the magj became a literary commonplace, for example, in
Shakespeare and Goethe, and should henceforth be understood as an intrinsic
feature of the myth of the magus . [14]
The title of this essay may seem to consign it to the
venerable “Renaissance Man” category, that is, to the tradition of those
biographical essays in which a diligent admirer seeks to cast this or that
jack-of-all-trades into the elusive role of an idealized overachiever of another
era. Actually the present title
comes from a somewhat different tradition. Harold Jantz, a polymathic scholar and
himself a Renaissance Man in one of the familiar senses of that term, once wrote
Goethe’s Faust as a Renaissance Man (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1951). He there laid out the
fifteenth - and sixteenth - century backgrounds of a major literary work of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He did so not by inventing an ideal
Renaissance Man and making poor Faust conform but rather by holding up to the
literary creation certain “parallels and prototypes” (Jantz’s subtitle) from the
writings of the Renaissance. The
parallels and prototypes caught or demanded
14. E. M. Butler’s book of that title, Time Myth of
the Magus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), points out that
Solomon burned his magic books before he died (152), and that Friar Bacon also
repudiated magic: “he alone repented because of the harm he had caused to
others. Cyprian, Theophilus,
Gerbert and Gilles de Rais did so for their own dear sakes” (159). The reasons for the repudiation are, I
believe, rationalizing afterthoughts and not really important in the outline of
the ideal mythical biography of the magus . What is important is the
consistency with which the motif of repudiation recurs, in all versions of the
myth of the magus, be they historical, semi-legendary, or fictitious.
Butler concluded her study in two
further volumes, Ritual Magic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1949) and The Fortunes of Faust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1952).
the attention of their era, had reputations which
managed to survive into later times, and seemed, then and now, representative of
their moment in history. The title
of this essay uses “Renaissance Man” in that sense.
The more general sense, the one that implies a
remarkable diversity of talent and accomplishment, also applies to the
personalities mentioned here. They
all employed their energies in more than one worthy enterprise, activist reform,
diplomacy, and statecraft, or contemplative theology, philology, and
historiography. In each case, one
of the many areas studied by these Renaissance men for a longer or shorter term
was the occult, the esoteric, a kind of knowledge they believed to be truly
new.
In the Renaissance, the “new” meant the “old,” the very
old, uncontaminated by intervening commentators, pedants, and vulgarians of
various sorts. And, in truth,
writings of considerable age, a few even of some antiquity, were being made
newly available, ultimately from Greek (Hermes), Hebrew (Cabala), and Arabic
(Picatrix). Such works actually did
have a medieval tradition - the latter two were of medieval origin - and had
variously reached the Latin West long before early modern times.
[15]
They were perceived as ancient on the one hand, and as
despised and suppressed by the Middle Ages on the other, so that they especially
attracted those who regarded themselves as innovators or discoverers of that
which was ancient and wonderful and had been forgotten in the deplorable
meantime. This sense of discovery
united all Renaissance intellectuals, magicians or not, regardless of their
native country and the manner in which they approached the “new” knowledge,
whether as a purely intellectual, psychological exercise or with the hope of
some practical application. [16]
There are those who argue (a) that occultists and the
occult we have always with us, [17] hence, it is exceedingly difficult to
distinguish Renaissance magic from any other kind, and (b) that the sole true
distinguishing feature of Renaissance magic is its idealism.
[18] The latter implies that a magus, the moment he
applied his knowledge to conjure spirits or predict the course of events or try
to influence them, forfeited his credentials as a
15. On medieval hermeticism, see Thorndike, 2: 214-28:
Konrad Burdach, Vom Mittelalter zur Reformation 3, no. 1 (Berlin:
Weidmann, 1917), 293-94; 325-27; On cabalistic penetration into practical magic
well before learned adoption of the tradition, see Johann Hartliebs Buch
aller verbotenen Kunst [1456}, Dora Ulm, ed. (Halle: Niemeyer, 1914), 16,
18-19, compare intro. pp. XLVII, LI-LIV; on the Picatrix, also 24 and
intro. pp. LIV-LVI, and especially “Picatrix” Das Ziel der Weisen von
Pseudo-Magriti, trans. Helmut Ritter and Martin Plessner, Studies of the
Warburg Institute 27 (London: Warburg Institute, 1962),
xx-xxii.
16. I borrow the distinction from the English
generation of the Warburg school: D. P Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic
from Ficino to Canmpanella, Studies of the Warburg Institute 22 (London:
Warburg Institute, 1958), 75-81: Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the
Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 104,
where Italian contemplative magic is distinguished from “crudely operative”
German magic.
17. Peuckert, Pansophie, 2d ed,
44.
18. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 85-86,
would have non-Ficinian applied magic to be “a continuation of the medieval
magic.”
60
Renaissance magician and became indistinguishable from
his predecessors in the Middle Ages and his competitors in the popular culture
of his time. [19] The facts of popular culture lend this
argument a certain plausibility. Every indication suggests that conjuring
and prognostication have always been a part of the European scene, as they are
of most cultures, that fortune-tellers and potion-brewers as a class have very
much more in common with their counterparts in other times and places than they
have unique and specifying characteristics. To be like fortune-tellers and
potion-brewers in the Renaissance means to be like them in the Middle
Ages.
This pervasive similarity indicates a profound
conservatism at the core of popular and applied magic. To be sure, practical magic might take
advantage of the latest fashions, such as the aerosol exorcism readily available
at any downtown sorcery supply store in any of America’s great cities, or the
calculator programmed to forecast biorhythms. No sooner had the Latin West taken
cognizance of Jewish Cabala than some fortune-teller was using Notarikon
and Gematria to inform a client of the outcome of tomorrow’s duel.
[20] But the
basic mechanisms remain the same: a certain disposition of matter, because of
hidden and powerful correspondence with the immaterial, reveals or influences
the course of events. [21]
Modern astrology is perhaps the best example of the core
conservatism of popular occult beliefs. Astrology has had to make room for the
discoveries of astronomy - at least as far as new planetary bodies are concerned
- but it retains all the essentials of the pre-modern picture of the physical
world; the quaternary organization of the elements, humors, and qualities, a
theory of powerful correspondences, such as between human and celestial bodies,
and a fundamentally geocentric universe. With the exception of a few new planets,
that is also the picture of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century astrology and, for
that matter, of twelfth- and thirteenth-century astrology as
well.
But this kind of conservatism certainly cannot be
claimed for the learned magicians of Italy, France, and Germany around the year
1500, who were moved especially by the novelty of the, paradoxically, “ancient”
sources. It was precisely the
general unavailability of the texts and their
19. Competition from below was widespread and genuinely
threatening to the respectability of the magical enterprise. Applied magic was not driven from the
marketplace by the newer, finer coin. It was, on the contrary, popular and
profitable enough to attract professors, physicians, and schoolmasters: Gerhard
Eis, ed. Wahrsagetexte des Spatmittelalters aus Handschriften und Inkmabeln,
Texte des spaten Mittelalters (since vol. 16 “und der fruhen Neuzeit”), 1
(Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1956), 17-18.
20. Eis, Wahrsagetexte,
14-16.
21. The crucial word is “immaterial.” Using a certain disposition of matter to
influence material elsewhere in the universe was considered “natural.”
That was (and is) the basis of all
allowable therapeutic measures in professional medicine. Cf. Brian P Copenhaver,
“Scholastic Philosophy and Renaissance Magic in the Dc vita of Marsilio
Ficino,” Renaissance Quarterly 37 (1984): 523-54, esp.
528-33.
alien provenance which endowed them with so much
prestige and separated them radically from the familiar (and hence contemptible)
magical practice of living superstition. [22] What makes Renaissance magic a Renaissance phenomenon
is, at least in part, its share in the humanists’ compulsion to return to the
sources, the claim to have rediscovered, restored, and drunk at the lost and
forgotten spring of ancient wisdom.
This common compulsion may not have been enough to
overcome the barriers of geography and national origins which ought to have
separated the magicians from one another. But it was surely a factor in
establishing the altogether remarkable network of visits, letters, reciprocal
borrowings, and occasional recriminations which connected those interested in
magic around the year 1500.
In 1490, Johannes Reuchlin, Hebraist and Cabalist,
crossed the
22. 0n occasion, the distinction was officially
recognized: “The magistrates of still Catholic Amsterdam ordered in 1555 that
‘anyone who is ignorant and untaught, who has not been authorised by their
qualifications, rank, degree or other title from the liberal arts’ be forbidden
from ‘exercising the aforesaid unsuitable practices of divination and similar
foolishness.’” William Monter,
Ritual, Myth and Magic in Early Modern
23. Geiger, Reucimlin, 171.
24. 0n Pico and the name of Jesus see the last set, the
cabalistic set of Pico’s Conclusiones, No. 7 in his Opera Omnia,
Gian Francesco Pico, ed. (Basel, 1557; rpt. Hildesheim: Olms, 1969), 108;
cf. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 94. On Reuchlin see De Verbo
Mirificio (1495; rpt.
25. Eugene F. Rice, Jr., “The De Magia Naturali of
Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples,” Philosophy and Humanism: Renaissance Essays in
Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller; ed. Edward P. Mahoney (Leyden: Brill, 1976),
20.
62
time, probably by 1495, he composed, but did not have
printed, a treatise De Magia Naturali. The work is largely occupied with
celestial magic, “which studies the mutual attractions and repulsions that knit
together heavenly and terrestrial things.” [26] Cabalistic thought had also reached Lefèvre, and he,
too, concluded that the Tetragrammaton was a miracle-making word. [27]
Lefèvre dedicated this work to Germain de Ganay,
sometime bishop of Cahors, counsellor to the
In the same year that Lefevre published his Ficino
commentary and Reuchlin his De Verbo Mirifico, 1494, Reuchlin travelled
to the sleepy wine-growing village of Sponheim to visit his former pupil in
Greek and Hebrew, the learned abbot of the local Benedictine monastery, Johannes
Trithemius. Although Trithemius
proudly acknowledged Reuchlin as his teacher in the languages which made him a
true vir trilinguis, he claimed as his teacher in the occult another
person altogether. [29]
One Libanius Gallus is supposed to have visited
Trithemius in 1495. Of this
mysterious person we know only what we learn from Trithemius and a brief
correspondence of a decade later. Trithemius considered Libanius his “best
and extraordinary teacher,” one who was in possession of the special lore of the
Majorcan mystics. Through Libanius
his monastic pupil gained access to Pico’s nephew, Gianfrancesco Pico della
Mirandola, editor of his uncle’s works and, at one time, both purveyor and
skeptic of occult knowledge. [30] From the correspondence of 1505, one
gathers that Libanius spent time in Saint Quentin as a house guest of Charles de
Bovelles (Bovillus), Lefevre’s most famous and brilliant student. [31]
26. Rice, “The De Magia,”
22.
27. Rice, “The De Magia,” 27 and n. 28. Although there is no evidence that
Lefevre knew much or anything about Reuchlin this early, they did, later,
exchange friendly letters, when Reuchlin was in the midst of the controversy on
the Hebrew books (1514): James D. Jordan, “The Church Reform Principles in the
Biblical Works of Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Duke
University, 1966), 140.
28. Concerning whom see Eugene F Rice, Jr., “The Patrons
of French Humanism, 1490-1520,” Renaissance Studies in honor of Hans Baron,
ed Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi (Florence: Sansoni, 1971), 691-92;
also idem, The Prefatory Epistles of Jacqmmes Lefevre d’Etaples and Related
Texts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972),
20-21.
29. On the date of the visit see Klaus Arnold,
Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516), Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte des
Bistunis und Hochstifts Wurzburg, 22 (Wurzburg: Schoningh, 1971),
77-78.
30. Arnold,Johannes Trithemius, 80-81. On Gianfrancesco Pico see Eugenio Garin, Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance, trans. Peter Munz (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 133-35.
31. Marquard Freher, ed. Johannis Trithemii ...
Opera Historica, 2 vols. (1601; rpt. Frankfurt Minerva, 1966), 2: 474-75;
on Bovillus and Lefevre, see Rice, Prefatory Epistles, xi. On the connections between Trithemius
and both the Florentines and the French see Paola Zanibelli, “Agrippa von
Nettesheim in den neueren Studien und in den Handschriften,” Archiv fur
Kulturgeschichte 51(1969): 264-95, esp. 269-72, and nn. 20, 22.
In 1503, Bovillus had visited Trithemius in Sponheim for
two weeks, studied Trithemius’s four-year-old cryptographic exercise, the
Steganographia, and decided that Trithemius was the most dangerous kind
of demonic magician. [32] Bovillus did not publish this opinion of Trithemius
until somewhat later in a letter to Germain de Ganay, patron of Lefèvre. [33]
Trithemius
was apparently unaware of Bovillus’s hostility and innocently wrote him a
friendly letter in 1505. Two days
later, Trithemius wrote a long and important letter to Germain de Ganay
concerning the true nature of his magical speculations. [34]
We shall examine this letter in another context. Germain de Ganay remained one of the
major patrons of learning in
The troubles of Trithemius did not begin with Bovillus
but rather go back to a letter, filled with braggadocio, which Trithemius had
written in 1499 to Arnold Bostius, a Carmelite monk in Flanders. His correspondent had died before the
letter arrived. The Prior of the
Carmelite monastery in Gent opened it, permitted it to be copied, and very soon
the news was all over France and Germany that Trithemius could (or claimed he
could), among other remarkable tricks, communicate messages secretly without the
knowledge of the messenger, indeed without any messenger at all. [36]
Trithemius publicly denied that he had any such
abilities as to raise the dead, tell the future, or jinx thieves and scoundrels
with incantations. [37] Some who should have known better -
scholarly but suspicious counterparts of the Abbot, themselves vulnerable
because they dabbled in the mysteries - concluded that Trithemius could not
possibly achieve what he claimed (or admitted to) without demonic
aid.
The charges and his refutations had the predictable
consequence of lending glamor to the reputation of Trithemius, already known as
a scholarly and pious prelate. The
powerful and the obscure sought him out for his occult learning. Emperor Maximilian I cultivated
Trithemius and received from him a “Mystic Chronology,” a brief world history
according to the principles of planetary magic, with a little angelology and
demonology thrown in. [38] In 1510, a then little known adventurer, Henricus
Cor-
32. Joseph M. Victor, Charles de Bovelles, 1479-1553:
An intellectual biography, Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 161 (Geneva:
Droz, 1978), 14, 31-36.
33. 1509, or, as Noel L. Brann conjectures, 1506: “The
Shift from Mystical to Magical Theology in the Abbot Trithemius (1462-1516),” in
Studies in Medieval Culture, 11, ed. John R. Sonnenfeldt and Thomas H.
Seiler ([Kalamazoo]: Medieval Institute Western Michigan University, 1977),
147-59, esp. 147-48.
34. Freher, Opera Historica 2:
471-73.
35. Rice, Prefatory Epistles, 20; Walker,
Spiritual amid Demonic Magic, 35.
36. Arnold, Johannes Trithemius, 182-83.
37. Trithemius, letter to the Parisian mathematician,
Johannes Capellerius, 16 August 1507: Freher, Opera Historica 2:
556.
38. Freher, Opcm’a Historica, 1: sig.
**4r***2r.
64
nelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, looked up Trithemius in
As we began describing this network with the Italians,
let us conclude with them. The net
could have been cast wider to hook, at least at the edges, Colet in England,
Erasmus, and the early reformers, or extended in time to bring in Paracelsus,
Giordano Bruno, and John Dee, but that would move the argument a bit too far to
the peripheries and away from the remarkable concentration of magical
speculation in the decades around the year 1500. That concentration was clearly one of
time and not one of place. No
single country could claim a monopoly on high magic. But the three countries most involved -
Italy, France, and Germany - did each have a focal point to and from which the
supranational movement of magical ideas radiated: in Italy, the Florence of
Ficino and his disciples; in France, the person of Germain de Ganay in Paris or
wherever else his duties took him; in Germany, the person of Johannes Trithemius
first in Sponheim, later in Wurzburg, and on his travels in between. Much is known of Ficino and his powerful
influence, [44] and much
more needs to be known about Germain de Ganay. We shall take a closer look at Trithemius
not because he was any
39. Arnold, Johannes Trithemius, 185.
40. Josef Strelka, Der Burgundische Renaissancehof
Margarethes von Osterreich und seine literarhistorische Bedeutung (Vienna:
Sexl, 1957), 66; Charles G. Nauert, Jr., Agrippa and the Crisis of
Renaissance Thought, Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, 55 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1965), 25-26, 30. On Nauert see Lewis W. Spitz, “Occultism
amid Despair of Reason in Renaissance Thought, “Journal of the History of
Ideas, 27 (1966): 464-69.
41. See above n. 6 and, more recently, Erwin Panofsky,
The Life and Art of Albrecht Diirer (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1955), 157-71, esp. 169-70.
42. Nauert, Agrippa, 229.
43. D. P Walker, “The Prisca Theologia in France,”
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 17 (1954): 240 and nn. 1,
2; see also Walker, Demonic amid Spiritual Magic, 27,
91.
44. See below n. 64 and Copenhaver, “Scholastic
Philosophy and Renaissance Magic.”
more important in his time than the others, but because
he has been somewhat unfairly treated and his rightful place in this triad has
never been firmly enough established.
The facts presented here are well known. It is, however, not the custom to bring
them together into one context lest the inviolability of national traditions
somehow be threatened. [45] As valid and enlightening as it may be to approach
certain human activities from a national standpoint, the basic facts of the
history of magic disallow persistence in that standpoint after starting out.
Even linguistic barriers, which
ought to be the most formidable, are often insufficient to obstruct the free
flow of occult speculation. The
barriers between Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew on the one hand and Latin on the
other fell long before the humanists laid claim to that achievement. There is evidence to suggest that the
barriers between Hebrew and the German vernacular fell without any scholarly
intervention whatsoever. [46] The next great concentration of
occult speculation, around the year 1600 - uncomfortably allied with Lutheran
orthodoxy [47] - could even dispense with the mediation of Latin in
certain cases, as the esoteric passed directly from one European vernacular to
another. The attraction of occult
ideas is, apparently, so powerful as to overcome practically any obstacle.
[48]
In the concentration of magical speculation around the
year 1500, the universal mediation of Latin was still intact, [49] and vernacular magic was not an
important factor, except as a dangerous competitor to both the Church and the
magi. Although printing with
moveable type was already half a century old, the new technology did not play a
dominant role. At the source of
Renaissance magic was the discovery of manuscripts. To be sure, some printing took place
thereafter, but the network was formed more by means of the circulation of texts
and letters in manuscript. This
implies an unusual incidence of person-to-person contact, that the targeting
and
45. This is not, however, to suggest that national
sensitivities were in any way a negligible factor, even amidst the clearly
international network of magicians. Trithemius himself stands at the source
of the traditions of national biography. He extracted the German entries from his
more universal catalogue De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis (1494) and
thereby established the precedent for a patriotic “subtext” in what, on the
surface, appears to be merely a reference work: see, Borchardt, “Trithemius and
the Mask of Jesus,” Traditions and Transitions: Studies in Honor of Harold
Jantz, ed. Liselotte Kurth (Munich: Delp, 1972),
39-40.
46. See above n. 20.
47. Robin Bruce Barnes, Prophecy amid Gnosis:
Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1988), 184-87, 208.
48. See, for example, Allen G. Debus, The English
Paracelsians (New York: Watts, 1966), 63, 76; Serge Hutin, Les disciples
anglais de Jacob Boehme aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles
(Paris: Edition Denoël, 1960), 37-42.
49. Bovillus asserts that Trithemius, whose surviving
writings contain no mnore than a dozen words in the German vernacular, seriously
suggested that German replace Latin as the ideal international scholarly
language: Victor, Charles de Bovelles, 30.
66
targeted individuals met face to face or had to find
trusted couriers for their risky communications. Trithemius’s cryptographies were attempts
to get around that very problem, but he succeeded only in making matters worse
for himself by enciphering his messages in codes that would appear to the
messenger to be demonic incantations in the first place. [50] Quite apart from the likelihood that a
“crisis” in the intellectual life of Europe lured some thinkers toward the
occult and thus toward one another, it was, at least in part, the very
considerable risk involved in their magical speculations that led the would-be
wizards to seek out the like-minded.
The risks associated with the study of magic in the
context of a theocratic culture are obvious and were even more obvious to those
who daily had to face possible sanctions from the Church. This resulted in vigorous assertions of
one’s own orthodoxy coupled with repudiations of other people’s charlatanism (or
worse). [51] Curiously, this “my magic is white, yours isn’t”
attitude, pointed out by D. P Walker, survives in his own study of the
Renaissance magicians. His attempt
to segregate Florentine and early French magical speculation from the more
long-lived and, frankly, more influential German version (Agrippa, Paracelsus)
rests precisely on this attitude. The former is idealistic and pure; the
latter is contaminated by the threat of practical application. Walker raises Trithemius as a case in
point. [52] Now, Trithemius may possibly have composed incantations
for the conjuring of planetary spirits, but it is far from certain. No authentic work of his dedicated
unequivocally to practical magic has come down to us; and we do have a major
opus denouncing heterodox (other people’s) magic. [53] Furthermore his defenses of magic (white, “natural,” his
own kind of magic) share the idealism of his Italian precursors. Consider the famous letter of 24 August
1505 which Trithemius wrote to Germain de Ganay.
Trithemius had written a cryptographic letter to one
Johannes Steinmod which Ganay had caught sight of. [54] Suspecting a profound meaning behind the arcane symbols,
he wrote Trithemius for a decipherment or interpretation. The good Abbot tried to explain as best
he could how the basis of occult knowledge rests in the mystery’ of the Trinity.
[55]
He de-
50. On Trithemius’s cryptography see Wayne Shumaker,
Renaissammce Curiosa, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 8
(Binghamton: State University of New York, 1982), 91-131.
51. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic,
54-55.
52. Ibid 86-89.
53. Antipalus maleficiorum, completed in 1508 and
never published in full. Books 1 to
4 in Paralipomena obsculorum . . . Joannis Trithemii, ed. Johannes
Busaeus (Mainz: Lippius, 1605), 273-426.
54. Germain’s letter of 3 August 1505: Freher, Opera
Historica, 2: 471.
55. Letter of 24 August 1505 to Germain: Freher, Opera
Historica, 2: 471-73. On this
letter see Silbernagl, Johannes
Trithemius, 2d ed., 128-31; Thorndike, History of Magic, 6:
438-39.
nounced the alchemists for promising what they could not
possibly deliver: “They err and
deceive themselves and all those who pay them any mind… Do not rest content with
the idiotic alchemists for they are stupid, pupils of the apes, enemies of
nature, and despisers of heavenly things... [by way of contrast] our philosophy
is heavenly and not earthly.” By
faith, the Abbot’s heavenly philosophy aspired toward the Trinity. The means he employed was the study of
number, order, and measure, which led in the direction of an understanding of
the three and the one. [56] “Do you want to hear more? Study conceives knowledge, but knowledge
gives birth to love, love to likeness, likeness to community, community to
strength, strength to worthiness, worthiness to power, and power makes miracle.
This is the sole route to the goal
of magical accomplishment, both divine and natural.” [57]
Although Trithemius employed biological imagery in this
description of the spiritual process of his kind of magic (generat …
parit, “conceives”
“gives birth to”), his underlying metaphor is gradual in the etymological sense
and hierarchical in the applied sense. One rises from study within the lowest
spheres of the terrestrial, by stages, upward across the seven planetary spheres
to the sphere of the stars. But
even that is not far and high enough. “It is necessary to step beyond this, so
that the ascent may be prepared by the Trinity, the ascent to that harmony that
is supercelestial, where nothing is material and everything is spiritual.”
[58]
The course up and beyond this ladder of spiritual
advancement duplicates a nine-step process which Trithemius had proposed to his
monks some twenty years before (1486), there, however, employing a formula
wholly consistent with Saint Bonaventure and the conventions of medieval piety.
[59]
56. Freher, Opera Historica, 2: 472, [HHC
– Latin quotation omitted] In this argument Trithemius echoes the famous words
of Wisdom (11:21) which provided the theological justification for mathematical
study in the Christian West well into the Renaissance and beyond.
57. Ibid. [HHC – Latin quotation omitted]
58. [HHC – Latin quotation omitted]
59. Sermo VII, “De novem ascensionis gradibus,” of
his often printed two books of sermons or Exhortationes ad monachos. I
used Johannes Busaeus ed.,Joannis Trithemii... Opera Pia et
Spiritualia (Mainz, 1605), 557-61; cf. Bonaventura, Joannis mentis ad
Deum, ed. and trans. Julian Kaup (Munich: Kosel, 1961), 27-33, and Brann,
“The Shift from Mystical to Magical Theology,” 152, employing, however,
Trithenmius’s De operatione divinii amoris as the model.
68
Every surviving clue indicates that Trithemius was not a
mystic in the religious sense of the word. He had, in 1486, used the language of
mysticism to inspire his monks. Twenty years later, he was experimenting
with another spiritual language. The two were closely akin and had at
least one common ancestor in the Neoplatonic traditions of late antiquity,
especially in the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius and, of those, especially “On the
Celestial Hierarchies.” Trithemius
owned a manuscript containing the complete surviving works of Pseudo-Dionysius,
and around 1496 went to the trouble of translating two of them from Greek into
Latin. [60] For his earlier mystical writings, Trithemius did not
need any first-hand knowledge of Pseudo-Dionysius. The notion of spiritual ascent in general
and, in particular, ascent by stages could and probably did reach Trithemius
indirectly by way of the long Latin Pseudodionysian tradition of the Middle Ages.
[61]
For his turn to magic, however, first-hand experience of
Pseudo-Dionysius almost certainly provided connections he had previously missed,
specifically those between the ascending order of the choirs of angels and the
spheres of the astronomical universe.
What distinguished the magical from the mystical in
these borrowings from Pseudo-Dionysius is what Trithemius left out when he was
writing about magic. His magical
writings wholly exclude the “negative theology” of Pseudo-Dionysius. They leave no trace of the denial of the
limiting characteristics of the deity nor of the system of abnegations which
may, depending on divine favor, result in a mystical experience for the
searcher. Trithemius had to have
been aware of what he was doing (or not doing) when he omitted this crucial
element of Pseudodionysian thought. The “Mystical Theology,” one of the works
which Trithemius translated around 1496, explains in terms as clear as
Pseudo-Dionysius ever used how central the negations are and how, at the end of
the process of meditations on the deity, negations and affirmations are both
negated in a transcendence. [62]
The magical system, even at most idealistic among the
Italians before Trithemius and certainly at its most hazardously practical in
the writings of Agrippa after him, proceeds “positively,” “affirmatively.” Study leads to knowledge and, by stages,
to power and miracle. The process neglects the doctrine of grace and presumes
that the order of the universe is such that
60. Lehniann,
Merkwurdigkeiten des Abtes Johannes Trithemius, Bayerische Akademie der
Wissenschaften, philosophisch-historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte, 1961, Heft 2
(Munich: Beck, 1961), 9, 25, 59. Lehniann is almost certainly in error (9) when lie
assumes that these MSS were in Latin to begin with. See Arnold, Johannes Trithemius,
78.
61. Martin Grabmann, Mittelalterliches Geistesleben
(Munich: M. Hueber, 1926), 449-68; and more recently, Edward P Mahoney,
“Metaphysical Foundations of the Hierarchy of Being,” Philosophies of
Existence, ed. Parviz Moreweg (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982),
165-257.
62. Dionysiaca, ed. P Chevalier, 2 vols. (Paris
and Bruges: Brouwer, 1937-50), 1: 597-602.
one can rise to supernatural power (the making of
miracles, which, by definition, defies the natural order) and can do so by
natural means (study). The
“negative theology” alone rescues any such process from the blasphemous
conclusion that man can coerce spirit by virtue of his own activities. However pious the intentions of the
magi, their system usurped divine prerogative. In Christian Europe the exclusive
authority that could assure a spiritual result from a physical activity was the
Church, and then only in the sacraments, which presumed a divine covenant and
hence the consent of the deity. [63] As vigorously as the magi attacked other people’s
black magic, their own white magic had to collide with the same
uncircumnavigable theological obstacle: the freedom and omnipotence of
God.
It is no secret that Pico della Mirandola, toward the
end of his short life, feel under the influence of Savonarola and experienced a
conversion. [64] Pico repudiated his erotic poetry, dismissed his
fascination with the supposed wisdom of the ancient Egyptians (Hermes) and
Chaldeans as an error of his youth, and turned all his energies to a massive
defense of Christian orthodoxy. He
lived only to complete the first installment, a comprehensive attack on
astrology broad enough to include the sum of magic speculation. [65]
Lefèvre d’Etaples likewise reversed himself soon after
he completed his work on natural magic: “It is nonsense to believe that any
magic is natural or good, for natural magic is a wicked deception practiced by
men who seek to hide their crimes under a respectable name.” [66] As early as 1508, Trithemius himself tried to explain to
Emperor Maximilian how all of his speculations contained nothing but what the
Catholic Church taught as matters of faith, and that he, Trithemius, rejected
all other doctrines as vain, false, and superstitious. [67]
This may have been a preemptive defense, given the
ambiguous character of the work he was dedicating to the Emperor. Trithemius defended himself once again
in another letter to Germain de Ganay (
63. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 181, and
Monter, Ritual, Myth amid Magic, 32.
64. Eugenio Gamin, Portraits from the Quattrocento,
trans. V. A. and E. Velen (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 206-7; idem,
Italian Humanism, 108-13; Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller John
Herman Randall, eds. The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: Phoenix
Books, 1956), 216; Paul Oskar Kristeller, Eight Philosophers of the Italian
Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964),
68-69.
65. Thorndike, History of Magic, 4:
508-9.
66. Rice, “The De Magia Naturali,” 28; idem,
The Prefatory Epistles, 118.
67. Freher, Opera Historica, 1: sig. ***2r. Cf. Ficino’s similar profession at the
conclusion of the De vita: Copenhaver, “Scholastic Philosophy and
Renaissance Magic,” 544.
68. “que leges nature christianeque fidei normas nec
excedunt nec offendunt”: Klaus Arnold “Erganzungen zum Briefwechsel des Johannes
Trithemius,” Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktiner-Ordens
83 (1972): 203.
70
the letter indicated aggrieved disappointment in
Bovillus and in Bovillus’s wrong-headed interpretation of the esoteric works of
the Abbot. As a monk, a priest, an
abbot, and, most importantly, as a Catholic Christian, Ttithemius felt he should
not be subjected to such slander. He clearly decided before his death that
the notoriety which his flirtations with magic had brought him was not worth the
grief that accompanied it. He
withdrew behind the protection of orthodoxy and his ecclesiastical
position.
Bovillus had once been given to mystical mathematical
speculations that are hard to distinguish from magic (correspondences between
number and nature which reveal “influences”) and that explicitly point toward
alchemy. [69] These speculations reached into the mystical numerology
of later times, where Bovillus is cited along with Agnippa as an authority. [70]
Since
these activities of Bovillus coincided with his attack on Tnithemius, indeed,
were directed to the identical audience, Germain de Ganay, the attack cannot be
considered a repudiation of magic altogether. It is, rather, an example of the “my
magic is white, yours isn’t” preemptive polemic. Bovillus did not, however long malinger
in this uncomfortable proximity to magic. His biographer traces a clear course of
intellectual development that took Bovillus decisively away from magic and in
the direction of orthodox mysticism, replete with the “negative theology” of
Pseudo-Dionysius. [71]
The case of Agrippa is at once clearer and more confused
than that of his former mentor or his mentor’s critic. As early as 1525 and again as late as
1533 (two years before his death) Agrippa clearly and unequivocally rejected
magic in its totality, from its sources in imagined antiquity to contemporary
practice. [72] Even before his great invective De incertitudine et
vanitate scientiarum (written in 1526 but not printed until 1531), Agrippa
had denounced the study of Hermes (and all pagan sources) as a sin against the
Holy Spirit. His Dehortatio
gentilis theologiae argued that the inspired word of God in the scriptures
embraced all wisdom, hence, it was blasphemy to seek in “pagan theology” any
wisdom not more immediately accessible in the Gospel.
[73]
In the more comprehensive De incertitudine
Agrippa reserved fully a third of his denunciations of human learning for
magic and all its permutations. The
grandiose, sweeping, and often very funny denunciation of the totality of the
human enterprise leads some readers (and did so even in
the
69. Particularly his De XII numeris (1510),
dedicated to Germain de Ganay: Victor, Charles de Bovelles, 39-41;
Thorndike, 6: 442-3; Peuckert, Pansophia, 2d ed.,
103-4.
70. Victor, Charles de Bovelles,
42.
71. Ibid., 174-75.
72. Nauert, Agrippa, 208-11.
73. Ibid., 209.
sixteenth century) to think that the entire work is to
be taken as an elaborate joke, a feigned skepticism, and elegant and insincere
rhetorical construct. [74] Indeed, Agrippa may have been carried
away by the flood of his own considerable eloquence, but the 1525 Dehortatio
on pagan theology suggests something other than
insincerity.
Agrippa oversaw the 1533 publication of his three books
on occult philosophy. To them he
appended in the form of a Censura sive Retractio those chapters from the
De incertitudine… which denounced magic. [75] He repeatedly disclaimed his earlier magical works and
then proceeded to publish them. Whatever moved Agrippa, it was not likely
to have been insincerity. It was,
first of all, a need for funds, but beyond that also a thorough ambivalence
about the world: “Agrippa’s mind drifted uncertainly between intellectual
despair on the one hand and a sort of omnivorous, generalized credulity on the
other.” [76] Like most of the magi before him, Agrippa turned
to magic for enlightenment. He, as
well as those who flocked to his lectures in Dole and
The threat of ecclesiastical displeasure and the high
cost attached to it may have been sufficient to cause the practically universal
repudiation of magic by the magicians. There may also have been some other
mechanisms at work, mechanisms which the poets of later times recognized
instinctively and preserved in the great literature of the West. The obvious ambivalence in the
personality of Agrippa - his biographer calls it “flex-
74. Agrippa von
Nettesheim, Die Eitelkeit und Unsicherheit der Wissenscliaften, ed Fritz
Mauthner, 2 vols. (Munich: Georg Muller, 1913), 2: 196-97.
75. Reprinted in Henricus Cornelius Agrippa ab
Nettesheim, De Occulta Pimilosophia, ed. Karl Anton Nowotny, (Graz:
Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1967), 364-74 (original of 1533 paginated
CCCLII—CCCLXLM). This fascinating
collection contains photocopies of the 1510 manuscript and numerous related
documents. It does not, however
qualify as a substitute for a critical edition; that is promised from Professor
Paola Zambelli’s seminar at the
76. Nauert, Agrippa, 262.
77. 0n their equivocal stance see Paola Zambelli,
“Corneille Agrippe, Erasme et la Theologie Humaniste,” Colloquia Erasmiana
Turonensia (Paris: Vrin, 1972) 1: 113-59.
72
ibility,” [78]
but it was
surely more binary than that -makes him representative. Ambivalence in general and particularly
toward magic characterizes all but the most genuinely mystical of the
Renaissance magi, and this ambivalence in the magi almost
certainly corresponds to an ambiguity in the magic they
studied.
There is little evidence to suggest that outright
demonolatry ever existed outside the fantasies of witch hunters. In the Christian West, indeed, wherever
the monotheistic religions held sway, magic did not function in opposition to
the deity, though it may have opposed the clergy and certainly circumvented
orthodoxy. Magic represented an
alternative to the generally accepted religion, whatever that may have been.
This position was not merely
political but also theological. Orthodoxies, by definition, occupy the
totality of the relationship between man and God, between the natural and the
supernatural. Magic, though it may
have shared many of the same premises, challenged that totality.
[79]
Among the magi around the year 1500, magic was an
act of piety, even of intense piety. It assumed the existence of God and the
orderliness of the universe God created. That order allowed for nothing arbitrary
or accidental. The system was
magical insofar as the material universe in every detail, minute and
macroscopic, was a revelation ultimately of divine activity, and the
relationship between the material signs and the greater spiritual realities was
intrinsic, necessary, and knowable. [80]
It is chiefly in this last feature, the
knowability of all the secrets of the universe, that magic begins to diverge
from orthodoxy. In orthodoxy,
correct knowledge of the supernatural emerged exclusively from revelation, and
revelation could be rightly understood only by divine favor. In magic, all of creation, not only the
inspired word, was a revelation, and access to its meaning was available
virtually to anyone who made a positive effort, by study or contemplation (and,
for some, by experiment) to crack the code.
Whereas the presuppositions were pious enough,
acknowledging God’s power and the magnificence of his creation, the activity of
magic itself imposed on God a set of limitations defined by the universe. If one
78. Nauert, Agrippa, 217. But consider Michael H. Keefer “Agrippa’s
Dilemma, Hermetic ‘Rebirth’ and the Ambivalences of De vanitate and De
occultaphilosophia,” Renaissance Quarterly 41, no. 4 (Winter 1988): 614-53,
esp. 650: “On th[e] surface level the question which his [Agrippa’s]
equivocations on the subject of magic pose for us is insoluble: his violent
oscillations back and forth, his praise and condemnation of magic, his boasts,
his threats, amid his recantations, are quite simply
unintelligible.”
79. For an even-handed assessment of the relationships in
popular practice between “folkorized” and “magical” ritual behavior see R. W.
Scribner, “Ritual and Popular Religion in Catholic Germany at the time of the
Reformation,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 37 no. 4 (1984): 523-54,
esp. 53, 66.
80. Nowotny, Occulta Philosophia, 13 (= sig. a[i]r, p.
[1]).
properly plants this seed, that tree will of necessity
spring from it. If one knows the
true name and character of this planetary spirit, that influence can be turned,
by force, to one’s advantage. [81] If one learns all the principles of the ordering of
nature, one can reach God who dwells beyond but contiguous to creation. Creation rigidly bridges the abyss
between humanity and God. The order
and necessity which govern nature in particular and creation in general are made
to govern the supernatural and the creator. At that moment, magic is no longer so
pious, for it implies a coercive power in the hands of humanity that can finally
be imposed on God. And that impiety
retroactively demolishes the entire system.
The magi did not, as a rule, pursue this logic to
its conclusion, even though it was available to them implicitly in their faith
as Catholic Christians and explicitly in the doctrinal utterances of various
ecclesiastical authorities. [82] Trithemius often expressed his submission to the
authority of the Church, but he never dropped a hint that either the word magic
or the planetary magic to which he was given necessarily concluded in a
limitation of the godhead. Agrippa
often appealed to the doctrine of grace, in part to justify his fideistic
skepticism about the validity of human knowledge, in part to disguise his
teachings on magic. [83] His insistence on God’s free favor, by which he
concludes his three books on occult philosophy, lies athwart the entire thrust
of the rest of the work. Throughout
he presents in detail what humans can do positively, by study and the
manipulation of matter, to enter into and advance in the magical
universe.
But no professions of orthodoxy or assent to the
doctrine of grace succeeded in transforming the magical system from what it was
to what the pious magi wished it to be. From a theologically orthodox viewpoint
all magic was black magic, as Lefèvre was able to recognize early. The desire at one and the same time to
remain a right believing Christian and to “tempt God” forced the magicians into
a choice. And they all chose
orthodoxy. This might not have been
the case if high magic had been able to deliver what it promised in the way of
enlightenment. [84] In certain rare cases - Ficino, Reuchlin, and, somewhat
later, Bruno - magic seems to have “worked,” that is, it provided a gratifying
symbolic language which the
81. The fallacy rests in the displacement of material
causality from the realm of nature (matter on matter seed to tree) to the
supernatural (matter on spirit, talisman or incantation to some superior
intelligence). Cf. above, n. 21.
82. John F Wippel, “The Condemnations of 1270 and 1277 at
Paris, “Journal of Medieval amid Renaissance Studies 7 (1977): 169-201,
esp. 175, where such propositions are condemned as “restrict God’s immediate and
causal activity to one unique, eternal, and necessary effect” or maintain that
“from this [primordial] intelligence emanate the other intelligences, the
heavenly spheres, and the sublunary world, all according to eternal necessity.”
See also 187 for the condemnation
of mantic writings and propositions on the knowability of
God.
83. Nauert, Agrippa, 220-21.
84. Keefer, “Agrippa’s Dilemma,” 651: “His [Agrippa’s]
knowledge rested upon unfulfilled promises, and the expected illuminations
persistently did not arrive.”
74
magi perceived
as consonant with orthodoxy or as a wholly adequate substitute for orthodoxy
(Bruno). For the others, magic
sooner or later failed in that function. It may even have failed for Agrippa.
[85]
High magic was esoteric, that is, meant only for the
few, and it stood in constant danger of vulgar misuse. The great magical works of the past,
rediscovered by the Renaissance magi, were routinely replete with dire
warnings to the reader, indeed, threats if the secrets of the book were to be
betrayed to the uninitiated. [86] There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of the
writers, who probably believed that a mistaken incantation or a flawed talisman
would not just produce disappointing results but might actually summon the wrong
force, a horrible demon instead of a benevolent sprite.
[87]
But quite apart from such fears, the esoteric nature of
high magic flattered the would-be magician, appealed to a certain vanity, not to
say, fostered the sin of intellectual pride among the searchers. Even if they could escape this
temptation, they had to distinguish themselves radically from the popular
manifestation of magic in potion-brewing, prognostication, and jinxing;
[88] so, high
magic had to remain esoteric and could never be released for general
consumption. [89
This inability reveals another fundamental flaw in high
magic. Religious mysticism, however
uncomfortable ecclesiastical orthodoxy found it, could and did spread to a
larger public. What began as a
stunning and direct experience of the divine by a handful of extraordinary
individuals came to rest in large-scale popular piety, a process which repeated
itself throughout the Middle Ages and was in full force in the time of the
magi here discussed. [90] By
contrast, magic descending to the popular level could only result in
superstition or worse. As opposed
to the symbolic language of mysticism, the symbolic language of magic - as rich
and evocative as it may have been for a very few highly literate and learned
searchers - was completely untranslatable for broader, popular understanding.
Worse yet, every attempt at
translation or successful plagiarism resulted in precisely
85..Keefer, “Agrippa’s Dilemma,” 640: “the [De
vanitate] represents ... a recoil (surrounded by ironies, but a recoil
nonetheless) from all but the most central of Agrippa’s beliefs”; 641: “an
explicit, if disingenuous recantation of De occulta philosophia”; and
643: “The final passage of those chapters from De vanitate which Agrippa
appended to De occulta philosophia as a form of recantation leaves the
reader with the impression that magic is wholly damnable.”
86. E.g. “Picatrix,” Ritter and Plessner, p. xxxv
and references there to the Hermetica.
87. Copenhaver, “Scholastic Philosophy and Renaissance
Magic,” 531.
88. The Catholic world, before and after the Reformation,
clearly distinguished popular practices of “illicit magic” from popular piety.
A confusion between them arose
chiefly from the Protestant critique: cf. Monter, Ritual Myth and Magic,
6-12, 33, 68. table 4.2; Scribner, “Ritual and Popular Religion,” 71 on
“certain practices explicitly forbidden.”
89. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic,
228.
90. Among many others, the following of “Bruder Claus,”
Nicholas von der Fluhe, which left a deep and lasting impression on Bovillus:
Victor, Charles de Bovelles, 13 and n. 16.
75
the kind of misuse the initiate dreaded. Even at its most pious, magic had to
remain esoteric.
The great poets recognized this separation from the rest
of humanity as a fatal deficiency of magic, one which led the magi of
poetry and perhaps their historical prototypes as well to sooner or later turn
their backs on the occult. This
repudiation is as much a part of the story of the magician as any other moment
in the magical journey. When
Marlowe’s Faustus declares, “Ile burne my bookes,” he repents his magic,
apparently too late. [91] When Shakespeare’s Prospero lays down his staff and
buries his book, he is returning from his exile in the occult.
[92]
When Goethe’s again aged Faust refuses to use
extraordinary means to ban the spirit of Care, he is affirming the superiority
of the ordinary, of “nature,” of life in the complex, imperfect world of
realities. [93]
91 The tragicall History of Doctor Faustus, 1476:
The Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. C. F Tucker, (Oxford: Clarendon,
1969), 194.
92. Tempest, V: 50-56: ed Frank Kerniode (London:
Methuen, 1977), 115-16.
93. Goethe, Faust, lines 11,423-52: ed Erich Trunz
(Munich: Beck, 1976), 344-45.
76