Magic is often regarded as the opposite of science. In The Golden Bough, his iconic study of world mythologies, the anthropologist James Frazer proposed a more or less linear history of human culture, in which we progressed from magic to religion and, ultimately, on to science:
From the earliest times, man has been engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the order of natural phenomena to his own advantage, and in the long search he has scraped together a great hoard of such maxims, some of them golden and some of them mere dross. The true or golden rules constitute the body of applied science which we call the arts; the false are magic.
For Frazer, magic was a fundamentally primitive art that sought to harness spiritual powers to effect material change in the world; religion, in turn, grew out of magic, granting supernatural agency not to human beings themselves but to all-powerful deities. If the magician sought to control the world directly, the priest instead supplicated himself to a higher power, asking for divine intervention. Christian theologians, in particular, took pains to distinguish religious belief from the kinds of magical practice they saw as diabolical, degraded, and fraudulent.
To this day, magic continues to be thought of as childish and degenerate, less serious than religion, let alone science. And yet millions of people continue to practice and incorporate it into their daily life. Astrology alone is a $12.1-billion industry, a figure projected to rise by nearly 80 percent within 10 years. Anthropologists, meanwhile, have long since abandoned Frazer’s reductive, faulty schema that created a false binary between religion and magic: Stanley Tambiah, for one, has argued that this distinction was largely a Protestant notion that appealed to Victorian-era philosophers like Frazer. But the ubiquitous popular understanding (and misunderstanding) of these two terms has made discussing them fraught. In 1997 the religious-studies scholar John G. Gager Jr. put it bluntly: “In the long run,” he said in a panel discussion on Fritz Graf’s Magic in the Ancient World, “I am convinced that we need to abandon the loaded distinction between ‘magic’ and ‘religion’ altogether.”
The historian Anthony Grafton’s latest book, Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa, seeks to resolve this definitional dilemma by shifting the focus from the art to the practitioner, from magic to magicians. Rather than attempt to forge an ironclad definition of “magic” per se, Grafton instead offers a series of profiles of various figures who practiced what would have been known, in their time, as magic: the iconic Doctor Faustus, Giambattista della Porta, Marsilio Ficino, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, and others.
These figures have often been marginalized in the historiography of early modern Europe, relegated to the fringe along with charlatans and con men. But Grafton asks us to consider the practicing magician alongside polymaths like Leonardo and Michelangelo, all of whom incorporated a number of disparate traditions into a holistic practice that reflected a unified world view. “The magus is a less respectable figure than the artist or the scientist,” Grafton writes, but “his art resembled, in some ways — for example, in its fertile combination of ancient, medieval, and modern components — other arts and disciplines that took shape at the same time and that now seem more respectable, such as anatomy and natural history.”
Generally speaking, most of the figures profiled in Magus agreed on a basic theoretical definition of magic. “They saw the cosmos as a single being,” Grafton explains, “connected in all its parts by rays that emanated from the planets and shaped much of life on earth.” In this context, astrology was nothing more than a scientific attempt to understand this physical process; if these rays were correctly interpreted, human behavior and world events could be explained. Most agreed that magic, when used properly, channeled the powers of nature and was in harmony with God. Such powers could also be used incorrectly, of course, by invoking demonic assistance.
Grafton asks us to consider the practicing magician alongside polymaths like Leonardo and Michelangelo.
Each of the magicians discussed in Magus put the line separating good and bad magic at a different place. As Grafton explains, “no two magi taught or advertised exactly the same set of techniques. And no two contemporaries agreed on which of them were valid.” There was little consensus on what was licit and what was diabolical; each theologian and magus seemed to have different definitions. Some of the lines that were drawn might seem surprising to us today. The English philosopher Roger Bacon (c.1219-c.1292) was among those who saw no contradiction in incorporating astrology into Christian theology. “Only at the low level where magicians and old women chanted their spells, Bacon claimed, was astrology infected by magic,” in Grafton’s words. When practiced properly, it “provided both a precise, unshakable chronology and a single, coherent causal explanation for the apparent chaos of events as presented in medieval chronicles.” Understanding astrology was, in fact, a proactive means of protecting Christendom: Bacon worried, for example, that the Mongols’ advance into Europe was being aided by their magicians’ superior knowledge of the planets. Meanwhile, the German cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) disdained star gazing as a legitimate practice, referring to “astrologers with their imaginings” as fools. “Nothing corporeal,” he explained, “can act on something spiritual.”
As Grafton sifts through these myriad approaches, the thread that gradually emerges is the importance of scholarly pursuit. What set apart acceptable forms of magic from local folk healers — at least in these learned practitioners’ minds — was a grounding in classical and ancient texts. One of the few records of Faustus’s magical feats happened at a university in Erfurt, where he lectured on Homer while conjuring the mythic heroes and gods before his students. “Calling the ancient heroes back to life was humanist magic — magic with a flavor of learning distinctive to this period,” Grafton writes. “Magicians had been bringing the dead back to life for centuries. But only in the 15th and 16th centuries did they bring classical celebrities back to life.”
Indeed, what seemed to matter most was that the source of magical knowledge came from a tradition that learned men of the period could make sense of. Magi like Ficino and Pico were treated as legitimate because they “replaced the older, disreputable magic of medieval sorcerers” with a kind of magic focused on new encounters “with ancient books.” It was, Grafton argues, “a revolution that faced backward, seeking to transform modern society by reviving ancient wisdom, and that helped in its turn to inspire the new science of the 16th and 17th centuries.” For the German occultist and polymath Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516), ancient books offered hidden clues that could be unleashed if one learned to read them properly. He believed that the “philosophers and kings of ancient times, perfectly imbued with the knowledge of natural magic, hid their secrets to prevent them from being profaned.” Reading them literally would accomplish nothing; only “by returning to the ancients and reading their texts as they were meant to be read could one learn to carry out magical operations.”
Magic, Grafton argues, was “a revolution that faced backward, seeking to transform modern society by reviving ancient wisdom.”
Magic had no official canon or course of study, and the arc of Magus charts various attempts to professionalize it by creating one. By crafting a viable curriculum and corpus, these men sought to bring magic into the same sphere as theology. This meant that valid magic was available only to scholarly men of privilege. “Pico and Ficino made clear in many ways that they saw their magic as a rare and incredibly valuable body of knowledge — one that was, and had to be, the property of the tiny group who had the intellectual and financial resources to master it,” Grafton writes.
As the centuries passed, what men of erudition had once considered “magic” increasingly began to look like “technology.” As early as the 13th century, Roger Bacon had been speaking of human ingenuity in terms that seemed nearly magical: “Instruments of navigation can be made without men to row, so that very great ships, in river and ocean alike, are moved by the power of one man, and faster than if they had a full crew.” Within a few hundred years, those who wanted to legitimize the study of magic began equating it more and more with scientific and technological achievement. Brunelleschi’s dome for the Florence cathedral, for example, was such an ingenious solution that commentators spoke about it in almost magical terms: Who, Leon Battista Alberti marveled, could fail to stand in awe at “such an enormous construction towering above the skies, vast enough to cover the entire Tuscan population with its shadow, and done without the aid of beams or elaborate wooden supports?” Such wonders were increasingly taken as evidence of the human mind exerting power over the natural laws of the universe.
In the 15th century, Giovanni Fontana published his Bellicorum instrumentorum liber, a treatise that explained a number of supposed magical creations in terms of mechanics and trickery. By explaining the “the apparent preternatural or supernatural” as mechanical, Fontana “made clear that his devices could create the same psychologically effective illusions as magical spells without invoking demonic power, and he denounced the fools who thought he conjured demons to achieve his effects.” Increasingly, magicians agreed that the fashioning of machines, rather than the conjuring of spirits, represented the height of the creative powers of the human mind. By the time of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s 1533 De occulta philosophia, mathematics was the “solid foundation on which much of the edifice of learned magic now rested.” Questions of what did and didn’t constitute licit uses of magic were gradually rendered obsolete, as magic became seen as “not only unlawful but unnecessary.”
Magus ends rather abruptly, without an epilogue, conclusion, or any real attempt to synthesize what’s come before. On top of that, the introduction seems rushed, filled with a bizarre sentences that don’t seem to have been adequately copy-edited. In his opening paragraph, Grafton writes, “Like other German Protestant professors, Melanchthon was married and had four children,” implying that having exactly four children was a prerequisite for a German professorship. Elsewhere he writes, “In 1506, a Benedictine abbot, Johannes Trithemius, interrupted a journey at an inn in Gelnhausen,” a baffling way to say “stopped for the night.” The very first mention of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa uses solely his last name without any identifying introduction, which led me to assume I’d missed an earlier reference to him and forced me to fruitlessly scour the opening pages over and over again. Mysteriously, these errors seem to plague only the introduction; the body chapters are all lucid and coherent.
For those able to press on through its clunky opening pages, however, Magus offers a rich set of observations on an oft-neglected intellectual tradition during a turning point in Western thought. Grafton’s central concern — how magicians attempted to professionalize their discipline and incorporate it into a history of Western scholarship and hermeneutics — may even end up being quite timely. It’s not just that the astrology business is booming these days; magic is once again beginning to merit serious study in the academy. In October, the University of Exeter announced a new M.A. in magic and occult science; a degree that will, in the words of the course leader, Emily Selove, “allow people to re-examine the assumption that the West is the place of rationalism and science, while the rest of the world is a place of magic and superstition.” Once again, the veils separating the realm of magic from the rest of the scholarly world are growing thin.
