If the preternatural was a problem for early modern thinkers, the obvious solution was to create a new ontology, one in which the all-important lines between nature and God were clear and defensible. Those unusual and exotic phenomena that had cluttered the European imagination for centuries and defined a nebulous, ever-changing category found themselves subjected to intense scrutiny in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For the Jesuits, this scrutiny could and did serve a crucial purpose: the study of phenomena and objects long relegated to the realm of the preternatural became, in Jesuit hands, a means of redefining an ontology that had gone largely unquestioned for centuries.
In this chapter I examine two case studies that demonstrate how different members of the Society of Jesus tackled the problems posed by an outdated and ambiguous ontology. In the first, the Jesuit jurist Martín Antonio del Rio (1551–1608) attempted to define different kinds of magic with reference to the ontology of causes. For Del Rio and most of his contemporaries, “magic” was nothing more than the deliberate manipulation of natural but hidden virtues and forces. The task facing those with an interest in magic was determining whether a particular effect was caused by the ordinary workings of nature, by the preternatural manipulation of natural but inexplicable forces, or by divine intervention. This was not an idle concern; demons, witches, and the Devil himself were thought to manipulate those forces within nature that were most deeply hidden and largely unknown, as part of their efforts to seduce and punish the unwary.
Ontology was thus a central preoccupation of early modern demonology, as were the occult or hidden causes of magical effects. Del Rio was the most prominent member of the Society of Jesus to address the problem of magic in this period, and his Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex of 1599 reveals both his struggles with the ontology of occult causes and, ultimately, his failure to establish a reliable means of defining the boundaries between different kinds of magical effects. Because demonology had long been an important arena in which European thinkers considered how and by whom the secret forces of nature were made manifest, Del Rio’s failure is illustrative of the challenges facing those who sought to redefine the study of those natural secrets.
In the second case study, we examine how several Jesuits addressed the controversial phenomenon known as the weapon salve or the powder of sympathy, a medical remedy that was thought to heal wounds quickly and painlessly even over distances of many miles when applied only to traces of the patient’s blood. Discussed and debated for much of the seventeenth century, the weapon salve posed ontological problems of its own. Its proponents sought to naturalize and legitimize its mysterious power by emphasizing its similarity to the activity of the magnet and to other, natural examples of occult correspondence or sympathy—the ability of the heliotrope or sunflower to follow the sun across the sky, for example, or the mysterious and invisible connections that drew the vulture to distant carrion. Those Jesuits who addressed the weapon salve focused, too, on questions of ontology—was its action natural, or even supernatural?—and finally defined in strict terms which kinds of occult activity were “natural” and which were not. There was no room for ambiguity in their treatment of the salve, no ontological gray areas, and at least in the case of the weapon salve they managed to surmount the difficulties that had stymied Del Rio decades earlier.
Demonology was arguably the most widespread means of investigating the hidden forces of nature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Pointing to demons and devils as the cause for effects produced by secret and occult means assured demonologists that they at least knew what that cause was—not perfectly, perhaps, but it was better than not knowing at all.1 This focus on occult causes and on phenomena that were often difficult to explain meant that demonology was concerned primarily with the study of the preternatural, and like all such inquiry in this period it ran up against not only the ontological instability of the category itself but also the wider epistemological problems that accompanied the study of nature’s mysterious and hidden forces.2
Those problems were magnified in cases of suspected demonic or diabolical activity because the consequences of this activity were cultural and theological as well as academic. Demons, and even the Devil himself, could not violate natural laws—only God could supersede nature altogether—but while constrained by these laws demons were generally thought capable of manipulating nature with far greater ease and facility than any human, to the point that they could produce effects that seemed wondrous or even miraculous. Just as the ranks of “the vulgar,” ignorant as they were of nature’s operations, might confuse a natural-but-extraordinary event with a genuine miracle, so too might they be tricked into seeing miracles where there was, in fact, only the handiwork of the Devil. This was a serious problem, for venerating such diabolical works could lead the ignorant into heresy and thence to eternal damnation.
Instances that had no obvious explanation, such as the sudden sickening of livestock or people, hailstorms that destroyed crops and property, and a host of other afflictions suffered by early modern people, were suspect precisely because their causes were unknown. When demonologists, jurists, and philosophers attempted to explain these instances, however, they ran up against a seemingly insuperable problem. A destructive storm could be entirely natural and caused without any external intervention, but it could also be a divine punishment for sin, or the vengeful act of a witch whose meteorological tampering was guided by a demonic hand. In each case, the direct or proximate cause was natural; the same forces collaborated to produce the storm whether those forces were guided by divine will, an act of witchcraft, or a natural accident. If the proximate cause of the storm was always the same, however, how was a jurist or philosopher to know whether there was another, more primary cause operating in the background?
What faced those with an interest in demonology, then, was a series of epistemological problems that not only made systematic investigation extremely difficult, but also made simple agreement among early modern thinkers all but impossible. As but one example, consider the physician Albert Kyper (1614–1655), who assured readers of his Institutiones physicae that “many things are done in this world by the force of demons which we in our ignorance attribute to natural causes.”3 Some thirty years later, John Webster (1610–1682) inveighed against this sort of thinking in his Displaying of supposed witchcraft when he cautioned, “There is nothing that doth more clearly manifest our scanted knowledge in the secret operations of nature … than the late discoveries … brought dayly to light by the pains and labours of industrious persons.” He went on to argue, “Hitherto we have been ignorant of almost all the true causes of things, and therefore through blindness have usually attributed those things to the operations of Cacodemons that were truely wrought by nature.”4
Thus, uncertainty and confusion confronted Martín del Rio when he decided to write his Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex. After compiling it steadily for some time, Del Rio had it published in 1599; it remained in print for almost 150 years, going through at least 24 editions before its final reprinting appeared in Venice in 1747. Del Rio himself already had a career as a jurist before he entered the Society of Jesus in 1580, and he distinguished himself sufficiently to merit praise from the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) who called him “the miracle of the age.” After 1600, and for decades after his death, he was cited frequently as an authority on witchcraft, heresy, and magic.5
It makes sense to view the Disquisitionum magicarum as a weapon that Del Rio and others hoped would combat the forces of darkness that were thought to be spreading across Europe.6 The study of magic was necessary because magic itself was dangerous; the deliberate manipulation of secret virtues or forces could lead all too easily to seduction by demons or other evil spirits, and thence to heresy. Del Rio conceded in the first pages of the treatise that the “most powerful and wise” properly called the investigation and manipulation of nature’s secrets “magic,” but the vulgar substituted evil superstition for this kind of wisdom. “This disease, on account of the desire for knowledge inborn to men, in a short time has spread itself throughout the entire world,” he claimed,7 and later he argued that, just as the corruption of bodily humors produces disease, so does the perversion of scriptural readings and magical arts produce heresy.8 Del Rio pointed to a wide range of authorities to substantiate his claim that “heretics always hold extensive traffic with magic,” before reminding his readers that it was the duty of the Society of Jesus “[to] oppose strenuously these many heretics.”9 Thus, if superstition was the root of heresy, then magic, so little understood by the uninitiated, too often acted as the root of superstition.10
The social and theological threats posed by the practice of magic were not an idle concern for the inquisitors, confessors, and jurists on the front lines of the Catholic Church’s struggle against the forces of heresy and diabolism. Terrifyingly, they were fumbling in the dark, forced to work from the slightest of hints, the most tenuous of suppositions in their efforts to determine when and where the Devil was at work. This explains, at least in part, the lengths to which many of them were willing to go. Del Rio himself did not shy away from judicial torture when he deemed it warranted, though he advised readers of his Disquisitionum magicarum, when dealing with those younger than fourteen years, that “they are only to be frightened, although with real fright, that is, by being naked, bound, and led to the rack, but not however placed thereupon.”11
The stakes, then, were enormously high. Del Rio needed a means of identifying the hidden causes behind suspected acts of magic, but he ran up against the same epistemological problems confronted by other early modern thinkers with an interest in studying the occult or insensible causes of particular phenomena. The inquisitor had to begin with the available evidence—typically accounts of what witnesses had seen and experienced—while contending with the stark reality of sensual fallibility. Not only are our senses inherently limited, but it was also widely believed that a demon could trick and manipulate the senses of witnesses, making even probabilistic conclusions suspect.
Del Rio turned to ontology as a means of distinguishing different kinds of causes from one another. He started by dividing magic into two kinds based on their causes, whether efficient or final—that is, based on either the means whereby magic worked, or the end or goal of the magical act. That which was determined by efficient causes “can be thought as divided [further] into Natural, Artificial, or Diabolical, all of the effects of which should be ascribed either to the innate things of nature, or to human industry, or to the wickedness of demons.”12 These three types of magic all involved the intentional manipulation of natural forces, but what was important was how those forces were manipulated. Purely natural magic, for example, might involve the harnessing of celestial or astrological correspondences to treat illnesses; as Del Rio described it, “Natural or legitimate magic was first given to Adam by God … [and] is nothing other than a more exact knowledge of the secrets of nature, of the course and flux of the heavens and the stars, and the observation of the sympathy and antipathy of things, and the application of these things in the proper time, place, and manner, and through this pact or joining or application is produced wondrous things, which, to those ignorant of causes, appears to be trickery or miracles.”13
In artificial magic, nature’s unseen forces and virtues were manipulated by artifice or technology, as in a machine powered by the mysterious natural power of the magnet, while in demonic or diabolical magic individuals called on demons or devils to manipulate these forces. Of the three kinds of magic, this last one did not necessarily demand that one be a learned or skilled practitioner; an illiterate witch could call on demonic aid in committing acts of maleficia without understanding the forces at work. In a sense, this made demonic magic even more dangerous, for the demon itself was preternaturally skilled at working magic and was not constrained by the limitations of conscience, knowledge, or ingenuity that may have limited the workings of other, human magicians.
Magic that was determined by its final causes touched on the question of intention, that is, whether the magic had good or maleficent intent. Good magic worked through licit means, either natural or artificial, while maleficent magic depended upon prohibited works such as idolatry, superstition, and commerce with demons. In the uncertain world of demonology, it was often intention that provided hints as to whether a particular act or effect was good or bad. The task of the inquisitor, then, often became sifting through contextual clues to determine the effect of the magical act and whether one could posit intention from those clues.
Attempts to establish the motivation behind particular acts of magic were important, because a reader of Del Rio’s Disquisitionum magicarum would soon understand that the philosophical study of causes themselves was all but useless in the investigation of suspected acts of magic. Consider, for example, the following inquiry posed by Del Rio: “By what signs can one distinguish the effects of magic which are dependent on a [demonic] pact, from effects that are physical, miraculous, and artificial?”14 It was a simple enough question, and a vital one for any investigator, yet Del Rio’s answer was murky at best. He told his readers that, if one cannot find evidence of a miracle, a purely natural act, or an example of artificial trickery—assuming that one could identify any of these things, itself enormously problematic—then a pact has occurred.15 Del Rio tried to clarify his position by advising his readers that other clues, such as whether the operator of the magical effect used certain words or signs or relied on superstitious practices, should arouse suspicion. If such clues were absent, one could conclude that the effect was natural, but Del Rio then soberly reminded his readers of both Satan’s power to deceive and our own ignorance of many things in nature.16
So in the end, answering as fundamental a question as “Is this particular effect the result of a demonic pact?” was fraught with tremendous difficulty. The inquisitor found himself relying on indirect clues rather than on any systematic or reasoned analysis of causes, and because these clues often emerged in accusations that were themselves part of complex social dynamics between individuals, they were far from the most reliable indicators of illicit magic.17 Thus, even in so high-stakes a study of occult causes as demonology, concrete answers were few and far between.
Given Del Rio’s struggles with basic ontology in the identification of causes, we might expect him to face similar struggles with the category of the preternatural. In fact, while he acknowledged its existence, Del Rio seemed eager to impose at least some measure of clarity on a work already beset by confusion and proposed an ontology that ultimately ignored the preternatural. He began by identifying what he called “the prodigious order” or the order of marvels, as distinct from ordo gratiae seu miraculosus, the order of grace or miracles, and noted that such marvels exist within the natural order but “are said to exceed by reason of the means [that is, the effect exceeds the ordinary means of the agent in question], so that either all men, or many of them, are ignorant of them” (dicitur excedere ratione modi, quem vel omnes homines vel plerique ignorant). He went on to assert that this “order of marvels” should more properly be called the ordo praeternaturalis and concerned “the many wondrous operations performed by good or evil angels by means of local motion, or by the unexpected application of natural agents.”18 This meant that such marvels were natural rather than supernatural, despite the inevitable fact that some interpreted such prodigies as miracles. Del Rio went further, however, in allowing his readers to dispense with this ordo praeternaturalis altogether: “Thus God established three orders: natural, miraculous, and prodigious, or, if you prefer, natural and supernatural.”19 Because prodigious or preternatural effects were, by definition, also natural effects, he saw no need for a separate category.
Earlier, I suggested that Del Rio failed to impose ontological clarity on the subjects of the Disquisitionum magicarum. In an important sense, this was true: his attempts to define an ontology that could distinguish between the insensible causes of magical effects were stymied by the myriad uncertainties that characterized early modern demonology. At the same time, however, Del Rio’s willingness to leave the prodigious or preternatural to one side and contemplate instead a simple dualism—natural and supernatural—suggests that ontological clarity was precisely what he sought. The problems that pervaded this work were glaring, if straightforward: a fear that the uninitiated or ignorant might confuse natural for supernatural, or vice versa, and thereby expose themselves to heresy or other forms of diabolical interference. The solution to that was a means of clarifying and demonstrating the order of things.
The larger war on nature’s secrets waged by certain Jesuits was also a quest for ontological clarity, an attempt to reduce the rather cluttered ontology handed down from medieval scholasticism to the same kind of simple dualism proposed by Del Rio. If his Disquisitionum magicarum was indicative of how thinkers around 1600 tried to classify and understand occult causes, however, we can see why those who came after Del Rio moved their inquiries away from the fraught, confusing realm of demonology and into the world of early modern natural philosophy. There, at least, they could more easily build a new ontology of the unseen, and the mysterious healing power of the weapon salve offered them a chance to do exactly that.
When the English physician Walter Charleton (1619–1707) proclaimed in 1654 the “downright Inefficacy and Unsuccessfulness as well of the Armary Unguent, as the Sympathetick Powder,” he was forced to confess that “this Verdict, I presume, was little expected from Me, who have, not many years past, publickly declared my self to be of a Contrary judgment; written profestly in Defence of the cure of wounds, at distance, by the Magnetick, or Sympathetick Magick of the Weapon-Salve.”21 Indeed, his published defense of the weapon salve or “armary unguent” in his earlier Ternary of Paradoxes had been as vehement in its support for this marvelous medical remedy as was the repudiation that followed only four years later. In the Ternary, Charleton had devoted more than two dozen pages to a rousing and undoubtedly fictitious story in which he described converting a skeptical clergyman into an ardent supporter of the salve’s marvelous efficacy.22 Throughout, he composed paeans to the power of direct experience, which alone could uncover the light of Nature and which had convinced Charleton himself that the salve truly could heal wounds over distances, but as he admitted in 1654, it was only after undertaking a series of “frequent Experiments” that he had come to see the salve as fraudulent.
Charleton’s change of heart is not altogether easy to understand; why should we believe that he was convinced of the salve’s falsity by the power of experiment when it was yet another experiment that had been instrumental originally in convincing him of its efficacy? Perhaps he was simply easily swayed. His earlier Ternary of Paradoxes had been inspired by the work of the Flemish physician Jan Baptista van Helmont (1580–1644), who had published a controversial defense of the weapon salve decades earlier; Charleton’s Physiologia of 1654, on the other hand, was a loose translation of the work of the atomist and mechanical philosopher Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), an implacable enemy of occult qualities and of the philosophy of Aristotle, and someone who had already dismissed tales of the weapon salve’s supposed power. There is ample evidence of Charleton’s penchant for borrowing ideas from a range of sources, and it is possible that his exposure to French philosophy, particularly that of Descartes and Gassendi, may have altered Charleton’s ideas about occult phenomena in general and the weapon salve in particular between 1650 and 1654.23
Whatever Charleton’s motivations, it is clear that in the decades on either side of the turn of the seventeenth century, the weapon salve became a central character in the ever-shifting body of phenomena that worked by mysterious and insensible means, its efficacy debated endlessly by philosophers, theologians, and physicians. Reputed to heal distant wounds quickly and cleanly when applied to the weapon or instrument that had caused them, or to traces of blood from the wounded patient, the salve attracted as much censure as it did praise. These debates reveal many of the preoccupations and anxieties that drove the investigation of the unseen in this period, particularly how to distinguish different kinds of occult causes from one another. This was certainly true for those Jesuits who addressed the problem of the weapon salve: they used its reputed properties both to define the ontological boundaries between different examples of occult causation and to establish their own prerogative to make such definitions.
Before we examine the complex interplay between the Society of Jesus and the salve in the seventeenth century, we first need to understand both what the salve was and what role it played in the intellectual life of the period. In the most general terms, the salve enjoyed a long and contentious history as a topic of philosophical discussion, making its first appearance in the late sixteenth century but surviving, in one form or another, well into the eighteenth century. And yet, in spite of its long history and the fascination it engendered, the weapon salve has almost never been taken seriously in the modern era. The positivist thinkers of the late nineteenth century dismissed it as an intellectual aberration, a piece of overwrought superstition fomented by the seemingly infinite credulity of earlier times.24 Somewhat surprisingly, the more nuanced and contextualized sensibilities of today’s historians have been scarcely less dismissive. More often than not, the salve remains a curiosity, a marker of strange and curious early modern beliefs rather than a topic of serious philosophical disagreement. Because it inspired such controversy in its day, however, the salve was able—for a time, at least—to shape discussions about the insensible powers of nature in a way that was simultaneously more public and more powerful than almost any other example of occult causation.
The salve, or substances like it, carried many names. In Latin, it was the unguentum armarium (translated literally in some English texts, such as Charleton’s Physiologia, as “the armary unguent”); others called it the cura magnetica or the unguentum magneticum—the magnetic cure or unguent, pointing to the frequent comparisons drawn between the activity of the salve and that of the lodestone or magnet. From the early decades of the seventeenth century it was more often known as the “powder of sympathy” or, in French, the poudre sympathique. This lack of etymological consensus mirrored an almost total lack of agreement as to how the salve worked, and even what its ingredients were. Because everyone agreed that this substance—whatever it was called—was reputed to heal wounds quickly, cleanly, and painlessly even over distances of several miles when applied to a weapon or to traces of blood, I will simplify matters by gathering these disparate remedies beneath the convenient umbrella of a single term: namely, “the weapon salve.”
Though the salve eventually made its way into some aspects of seventeenth-century popular culture—for example, appearing in more than one play as a satirical device highlighting the ineptitude and astonishing credulity of the intellectual elite—its exact origins were a subject of mystery in early modern culture, and largely remain so today.25 Many people attributed it to the itinerant physician-mystic Paracelsus (1493–1541), and though some modern historians have found references to the salve in the writings of Paracelsus, others claim that this attribution is false and derived from pseudo-Paracelsian texts.26 Of course, Paracelsus was not the only possibility for early modern thinkers: witness the characteristically extravagant claim made by Kenelm Digby (1603–1665), who told friends and acquaintances that he had introduced the sympathetic treatment of wounds to Europe all by himself after learning its secrets from a Carmelite friar who himself had been taught by a wandering Oriental mystic in the Far East.27 Descriptions of the curing of wounds over distances had appeared decades before Digby himself, of course, but by the time Digby’s claims appeared in English this hardly seemed to matter to his contemporaries; their apparent fascination with the topic encouraged twenty-nine subsequent editions of his Discourse on the Sympathetick Powder, the last of which appeared in France in 1749.28
If we exclude the contested Paracelsian sources, one of the earliest references to the weapon salve appeared towards the end of the sixteenth century in a later edition of the influential Magia naturalis of Giambattista della Porta (1535?–1615). Placing the salve alongside remedies for toothache and a description of “the virtues of tobacco,” Della Porta briefly described its properties and attributed it to Paracelsus, who reportedly gave it to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian.29 Della Porta’s book was published several times in both Latin and vernacular editions, disseminating the idea of the weapon salve to a wide audience.30 Other influential publications soon began discussing the weapon salve as a topic of medical and natural philosophical interest. In 1608, the physician and chymical philosopher Oswald Croll (1560–1609) published a largely Paracelsian treatise, his Basilica chymica, in which he devoted several pages to the preparation and application of the weapon salve, again attributing it to Paracelsus and couching much of his discussion in astrological language.31 Croll also included an easy-to-follow recipe for preparation of the salve, recommending not only usnea (moss or lichen) scraped from a human skull and mumia (remnants, usually preserved, of human flesh and blood), but also bear or boar fat, dried boar’s brains, powdered maggots, and red sandalwood. Usnea and mumia (or, in English, “mummy”) were relatively common ingredients in medicinal preparations; boar’s brains and powdered maggots may have been more exotic.32
Thanks to widely-read authors like Della Porta and Croll, the weapon salve rapidly assumed greater visibility across Europe in the early years of the seventeenth century, a prominence that would persist for decades. Its increasingly controversial reputation reached its apex in 1660 with the publication in Nuremberg of the Theatrum sympatheticum, a collection of previously published works devoted to the salve. A pirated edition of the Theatrum appeared in 1661 and it was then much expanded in a second, licensed edition printed in 1662.33 Both of the licensed editions were the work of Sylvester Rattray (fl. 1650–1666), a relative unknown whose interest in sympathies and antipathies was obvious in his own treatise that he appended to the beginning of the Theatrum. At more than 700 pages in length, the Theatrum provides an excellent demonstration of both the volume and complexity of thought devoted to the weapon salve in this period. Moreover, the popularity of the weapon salve did not wane entirely after 1662; Dutch editions of the Theatrum continued to appear around the close of the seventeenth century, while several theses defended by students at Harvard College in the first two decades of the eighteenth century focused specifically on the powder of sympathy.34
At first, the salve’s supposed links to Paracelsus made it particularly controversial. The thoroughly anti-Paracelsian physician and chemist Andreas Libavius (1560–1616) argued specifically and vociferously against the weapon salve in his Tractatus duo physici (1594), claiming that the activity of the salve was unnatural and therefore diabolical in origin.35 It is significant, however, that Libavius did not deny that the weapon salve might actually cure distant wounds; in fact, what concerned him was not whether it worked, but the agency by which it operated. This pattern persisted throughout the seventeenth century, with commentators on all sides of the debate focusing less on whether the salve worked and more on how it operated, which was itself a more interesting and important question, philosophically speaking. That the salve functioned as a testing-ground for competing ideas about different kinds of occult activity was only made possible by this tacit decision to question its agency rather than its apparent efficacy. This in turn provides us with a means of exploring the real significance of the weapon salve in early modern natural philosophy.
For the modern observer, what is striking about early modern discussions of the salve is the profusion of competing theories and claims advanced by those who discussed it. In itself, this mirrors a similar profusion of thoughts and ideas that was typical of the rise of the “new philosophies” in this period, but with perhaps one or two exceptions, modern historians have been reluctant to connect the debates that swirled around the weapon salve with the wider natural philosophical debates that were on the rise at the same time. Instead, the salve has more often been connected to contemporary theological differences, or to the somewhat marginalized realm of magical theory, rather than to fundamental issues in natural philosophy.36 In fact, however, the salve evolved into a crucial locus for inquiry into distinctions between different kinds of insensible or invisible agency, transcending the more limited realms of theology or magic. That the salve functioned as such a locus, not just for the Jesuits but for others as well, provides the historian with a plausible explanation for the widespread and indisputable interest it stimulated in early modern thinkers of all philosophical camps.
During his examination by ecclesiastical authorities in 1627, the Flemish physician and medical reformer Jan Baptista van Helmont made a startling claim that would transform his trial from a standard investigation of suspected heresy into the juiciest of courtroom dramas. Insisting that he was a pious and orthodox Catholic, Van Helmont told his examiners that he had been embroiled in controversy by a series of deliberate machinations engineered by a Jesuit named Jean Roberti (1569–1651). These machinations purportedly revolved around a single work, the De magnetica vulnerum curatione, or “On the magnetic healing of wounds,”37 which Van Helmont claimed had been published without his permission after he sent a manuscript copy to Jean Roberti’s brother in Paris.38 The consequences for Van Helmont were disastrous. Thanks to an imprudent comparison between the weapon salve and the curative powers of holy relics, he found himself censured and repudiated by thinkers across Europe before being questioned by the Spanish Inquisition in 1627. His reputation in tatters, condemned by the Church for publishing heretical opinions, he was confined to his home near Vilvorde for a time, and though he continued to experiment and write up until his death in 1644, he did not discuss the weapon salve in detail again. He received a posthumous rehabilitation thanks to the efforts of his widow, and his medical works became truly influential, likewise, only after his death when they were published by his son.39
Why Jean Roberti should have involved himself in the publication of Van Helmont’s work—if, indeed, he did so—is not difficult to understand. Roberti had been publishing refutations of the weapon salve for many years by the time Van Helmont penned a response, and the latter was not shy about throwing the occasional rhetorical jab at his opponent; for example, in describing the essential ingredient of usnea or moss scraped from a skull, Van Helmont urged his readers not to be too picky about the cranium in question: “For if a Jesuit, being put to death by hanging or another kind of martyrdom, is left in a position to receive the influence and obedience of the stars, his head, like the skull of a thief, will yield a crop of moss equivalent in utility, equally ripe …”40 Van Helmont also mocked the Society of Jesus, which, with obvious insincerity, he characterized as “so helpful to the whole world.”41 These were dangerous things for a man to write while living in the Low Countries, then under Spanish (and thus Catholic) control, and they almost certainly would have attracted Roberti’s ire.
Another important factor in Van Helmont’s public censure was the particularly thorny claim that the weapon salve could heal over distances without direct contact. This inspired a persistent correlation between the activity of the salve and that of the magnet, a correlation that Van Helmont himself supported. To talk about one phenomenon around the turn of the seventeenth century often meant to talk about the other. As a result, Jesuit discussions of the weapon salve came to focus on questions of definition and discrimination: how one could tell the difference between two things that seemed the same, but probably were not.
The frequent comparisons drawn between the magnet and salve throughout the early decades of the seventeenth century allowed the Jesuits to employ both phenomena as boundary-markers between a legitimate and natural example of invisible activity on the one hand, and a non-natural, illegitimate example of such activity on the other. Roberti and others pointed out that the properties of the magnet restricted its efficacy to a defined and limited distance while the efficacy of the salve was reputed to extend over virtually unlimited distances. Claims for this sort of unlimited agency endangered the ontological distinctions between the natural and the supernatural, between objects limited by the constraints of their materiality and those that were free to operate beyond those same constraints.
The Jesuits thus framed their repudiation of the weapon salve around a predominant interest in questions of ontology. In their hands, the salve became a means of defining what it meant for something to be “natural” and, by contrast, what it meant to be “not natural.” From Roberti’s reasoned and logical refutation of the physics behind the salve’s reputed activity to Athanasius Kircher’s blistering condemnation of the radical supernaturalism eventually used to explain the salve’s operation, these members of the Society sought to reinforce the primacy of the supernatural and its crucial separation from the natural order. By focusing on so controversial a phenomenon, however, the Jesuits who discussed the salve also demonstrated to a growing audience their collective ability to recognize and proclaim different kinds of insensible agency in the world.
Roberti’s published criticisms of Van Helmont’s heterodox opinions focused precisely on the distinction between the magnet and the salve.42 Van Helmont and other proponents of the salve such as Rudolph Goclenius the Younger (1572–1621) sought to legitimize the salve by casting it as a natural analogue to the magnet, while at the same time marveling at the salve’s wondrous ability to operate over vast distances and to ignore physical impediments to its efficacy. In this case, comparisons with magnetism could lend credibility to a controversial phenomenon; to be like the magnet was, by definition, to be natural. By contrast, Roberti and another contemporary within the Society, Gaspar Wenckh (1589–1634), argued that the salve’s agency could not be unlimited by concerns of distance or force, because no natural object—including the magnet—could produce an unlimited physical effect.43 This, indeed, is a critical point: all of the Jesuit attacks on the weapon salve discussed here were based, first and foremost, in physics. In magnetism, or in related physical operations such as the propagation of light or heat, the strength of the effect was known to wane as distance from the source increased: a magnet could affect a piece of iron only very weakly if one was moved away from the other, and likewise, light dimmed and heat decreased the further one moved from the source. The salve, however, operated under no such constraints, at least according to most of its proponents, and the Jesuits took pains to frame their repudiation of this phenomenon as one rooted in Aristotelian physics.
Unsurprisingly, the exclusion of the salve from the realm of the natural was argued most forcefully by the two Jesuit experts on magnetism, Niccolò Cabeo and Athanasius Kircher. Roberti and Wenckh had already dismissed the idea that the salve could operate over vast distances while also being a properly natural substance, and had provided evidence confirming this as an impossibility. It fell to Cabeo and Kircher to reinforce the salve’s difference from the magnet, to exclude it from the category of the natural and thereby to consign it to the ontological hinterlands. Once exiled there, the salve would cease to be a problem; it would no longer possess the ability to blur and disrupt that primary ontological distinction between the natural and the supernatural. It would remain a mystery, perhaps, but no longer a troublesome one.
Niccolò Cabeo has received relatively little attention from historians, though he was a well-known and respected philosopher in his own day. Born in Ferrara in 1586, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1602 at the age of sixteen, and eventually died in Genoa in 1650. He taught philosophy, theology, and mathematics in the Society’s schools, and Galileo once credited him with exciting his interest in the physics of falling bodies.44 During Cabeo’s lifetime he was known primarily as an expert on magnetism, and in the fourth book of his Philosophia magnetica (1629) he devoted some five pages to a chapter entitled, “It is fictitious, that two men should be able almost to speak to one another from most remote and secret places, by means of the shared direction of two compasses.”45 What followed this somewhat mystifying statement, however, was an extended disquisition on sympathy and antipathy in which he questioned, among other things, the nature and activity de unguento illo Armario, “of that armary unguent”—the weapon salve.46
Cabeo described a fictitious experiment in which two individuals communicated with one another by means of simple devices, both made from iron mined from the same vein, inscribed with the letters of the alphabet, and fitted with an iron needle in the style of a compass. By applying a magnet to one device, an individual could supposedly induce an identical and sympathetic effect in the corresponding device even if it was many miles away, permitting communication over vast distances as the needle swung from one letter to the next. Cabeo argued that such a feat was impossible, pointing out that “all physical agents delimit for themselves a sphere of activity, beyond which they cannot act.”47 He then expanded this thinking to the weapon salve and to the “imaginary sympathy” proposed by supporters of the salve to explain its wondrous efficacy, noting that if he were to hold a compass in Italy, it would not be affected by a magnet in Spain, but that proponents of the salve’s efficacy were willing to believe that it could and did act over such vast distances all the time.48
Thus, Cabeo articulated a careful comparison between the behavior of the magnet, which he demonstrated himself using experimental trials, and the reputed behavior of the weapon salve. His conclusion was simple: whatever the salve was, it did not behave like a natural agent such as the magnet, and so could not be natural. Unlike Jean Roberti, however, Cabeo did not argue for the single possibility of diabolical or demonic intervention. He suggested instead that the wound might be healed by “nature alone,” particularly if it were bathed often in wine because “the tartar in wine heals best.”49 Therefore, the salve was not the agent responsible for curing the wound, or, if it was involved at all, it cured merely accidentally. For example, if an individual followed the directions for using the salve as described in Oswald Croll’s Basilica chymica, which counseled daily changing of the patient’s bandages and washing the wound in urine or wine, then the use of the salve, according to Cabeo, only accidentally aided in the natural healing of the wound. In either case, the salve itself was not the direct cause of the curative effect, and was thereby deprived of any real agency.50
The other Jesuit to articulate an argument repudiating the weapon salve was Cabeo’s younger contemporary Athanasius Kircher, who has achieved more notoriety among historians than Cabeo himself. We know, for example, that Kircher’s life before he reached Rome was marked by a series of near-disasters; as a child he was almost crushed by a water mill—more than once—and, as an adult, he was captured and beaten by Protestant mercenaries before finding himself floating downriver on an ice floe.51 Entering the Society of Jesus in 1618 at the age of sixteen, the constant warfare then plaguing Germany displaced him repeatedly over the next several years, and he later decided that his improbable survival, after enduring the hostile attentions of the Protestants who had captured him while he fled their advancing army, was a clear case of divine providence. After he settled in Rome, Kircher made repeated requests that he be allowed to leave and travel abroad, all of which were denied by his superiors. Instead, he remained in Rome for the rest of his life, founding his famed museum at the Collegio Romano, producing more than thirty published works, and establishing an extensive network of correspondents both within and beyond the Society of Jesus.
Like Cabeo, Kircher articulated his own refutation of the salve in his best-known work on the magnet, the Magnes; sive, De arte magnetica (1641). More specifically, he chose to do so in opposition to the radical supernaturalism of the English physician and occult philosopher Robert Fludd (1574–1637). That Fludd had died some four years before the Magnes appeared in print and was thus unlikely to pen a response presumably made Kircher’s task rather easier. His refutation of the salve operated simultaneously on two distinct but related levels, philosophical and theological, perhaps as a counter to Fludd’s avowed creation of a “theophilosophy” that combined Neoplatonic and hermetic philosophy with scriptural exegesis.52 Kircher focused on two main points in his refutation of Fludd’s defense of the salve: the first echoed Cabeo’s earlier physical objections and highlighted the seeming impossibility that a substance could effect material changes over vast distances and through intervening objects, while the second addressed Fludd’s supernaturalism. Kircher’s treatment of the salve in these few pages of his Magnes explicitly excluded this phenomenon from both the direct and supernatural agency of God and the natural agency of objects like the magnet. He sought, in other words, to repudiate a controversial phenomenon that threatened to obscure basic and widely accepted ontological boundaries.
In a direct attack on Fludd’s “theophilosophy,” the first thing that Kircher stated in his third and final book of the Magnes was that “the will of God is not the immediate cause of an occult force.”53 Moreover, he went on to add that “God does not desire us to be ignorant of the powers of things,” suggesting that the Creator actively encouraged the search for occult forces in nature and their causes, or more importantly, made the manifestations of those forces obvious so we might better study them.54 When Kircher reached his direct repudiation of the salve, he identified the focus of his attack only as au[c]tor Philosophiae Mosaicae, “author of the Mosaicall Philosophy”; this was Fludd, whose Philosophia Moysaica first appeared in 1638 and was later translated as the Mosaicall Philosophy in 1659. Kircher began by noting that the salve reputedly operated over “a distance of indeterminate length.” He then summarized Fludd’s thoughts on activity in the world: “There is no effect that proceeds from a natural agent, but [it rather proceeds from] that most central Divine Spirit, which, as [stated] in Genesis … works all things in all things.”55 Kircher also presented Fludd’s claim that “all meteorological effects are not produced by the collusion of the elements, but by the immediate action of God, through angels,” before stating emphatically that this idea was both impious and blasphemous.56
Fludd’s reason for attributing ostensibly natural actions to the direct intervention of God, according to Kircher, was that he could then describe such actions without worrying about the existence of “their ends” or physical limits (termina), nor about the possibility of a “determinate sphere” possessed by physical agents because this divine spirit could act over an indeterminate distance. The consequences of this notion, Kircher emphasized, would threaten not only long-standing ideas about nature, but the entirety of philosophy itself, which would be unable to explain anything in nature by recourse to intelligible, natural effects.57 Indeed, as Kircher pointed out, if Fludd’s literal interpretation of divine omnipresence as evinced in his dictum Deus operatur omnia in omnibus (“it is God who works all things in all things”) were true, that would make every single operation of nature a miraculous event, a view that Kircher characterized as an absurdity.58
To resolve the question of whether the salve operated naturally, Kircher posed what he saw as the critical question: “Whether this unguent operates within a determined space, or an indeterminate one.”59 His concern could not be more explicit: the determination of the salve as a natural thing was dependent upon whether its agency could be shown to be limited, to act within a defined and determined space, or not. He also argued that “[t]he active force of all created agents is circumscribed by certain limits or ends.”60 Were it not so, were natural things able to act over an indeterminate distance, he argued that the world itself would come to an end, as the lethal stare of the Libyan basilisk or the poisonous breath of the African dragon would kill as far away as Germany, France, or England, for there would be no limits on how far such effects could reach.61
Kircher concluded that the salve “does not act naturally,” in part because its activity changed depending on the direction in which it was applied to the sword and whether it was kept hot or cold. The magnet, held up by Kircher as exemplifying a natural if occult agency, worked the same way regardless of such concerns. He then emphasized that the salve “does not act magnetically” either, reiterating the same concerns already articulated by Cabeo. This fact rendered claims about the salve’s efficacy “fallacious and suspect,” because it could not operate as Fludd contended without violating the order of nature.62 If the salve did actually heal distant wounds, its action could not be natural, and thus Kircher suggested that it must operate through some other, non-natural means, either accidental or demonic—accidental if the cure was actually wrought by the sanative effects of wine or the patient’s urine, or demonic if the practitioner entered into a communion with demons, wittingly or unwittingly.63 These possibilities were the only ones Kircher was willing to consider in explaining the activity of the weapon salve, which he claimed was merely “pseudomagnetical” and did not operate by means of the occult magnetic forces he discussed throughout the Magnes.64
Ten years after Kircher used the weapon salve to repudiate Robert Fludd’s radical supernaturalism, the Society of Jesus produced the Ordinatio pro studiis superioribus, which outlined the doctrines and ideas that members of the Society were forbidden to teach. Most prominent were doctrines that complicated physical explanations for the transubstantiation of the Eucharist, particularly atomism and Cartesian extension, but listed there as well was the weapon salve.65 By this point, the salve had already started its slow decline as a topic of interest among early modern thinkers, but its inclusion in the Ordinatio is telling. Like a host of objects that worked by insensible or occult means, it had the potential to skew radically the fundamentals of physical activity as understood by early modern thinkers, even as it raised philosophical problems that transcended physics altogether.
There were serious consequences for the Aristotelian worldview raised by a confusion between different kinds of insensible agencies. Motivated by the Thomism at the core of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits strove to eliminate this blurring of boundaries by excluding the salve from the two ontological categories it threatened. In itself, however, the act of exclusion—or, to put it somewhat differently, the exercise of deontology—reinforced those boundaries by demonstrating that they were, in fact, inviolable, whatever some thinkers mistakenly argued. The salve’s reputed efficacy might appear to blur the lines between the natural and other categories, but every one of these Jesuits demonstrated clearly that this was an illusion, and a dangerous one at that, as Van Helmont discovered in full.
The weapon salve was not a problem merely for Aristotelian philosophers such as the Jesuits. There was hardly a thinker in the seventeenth century who did not address, at some point, the troublesome question of the salve’s reputed efficacy.66 This was certainly due in part to the fact that the salve’s very identity as a natural object was open to debate. But it was also due to the serious questions that its existence raised: how might one study the effects of this phenomenon? Could they be established reliably? Were those effects comparable to those exhibited by other phenomena, like the magnet? If not, why? These questions were not limited to the weapon salve; eventually, they were asked of everything.
1 Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 160.
2 Clark, Thinking with Demons, p. 171.
3 Clark, Thinking with Demons, p. 233.
4 John Webster, The displaying of supposed witchcraft (London, 1677), pp. 267–8.
5 For more on Del Rio and his relationship to skepticism, see Jan Machielsen, “Thinking with Montaigne: Evidence, Scepticism, and Meaning in Early Modern Demonology,” French History, vol. 25, no. 4 (2011), pp. 427–52. For contemporary views on Del Rio and the Disquisitionum, see the brief biography produced shortly after his death by the Dutch Jesuit Heribert Rosweyde (1569–1629): Martini Antonii Del Rio Brevi Commentariolo Expressa (Antwerp, 1609).
6 Martín del Rio, Investigations into Magic, ed. and trans. by P.G. Maxwell-Stuart (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
7 Martín Antonio del Rio, Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex, in tres tomos partiti (Louvain, 1599–1600), Epistola, p. ii.
8 Del Rio, Proloquium, pp. 6–7.
9 Del Rio, pp. 4, 5.
10 Many of these concerns overlapped with contemporary ideas about witchcraft; for more, see Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe (1994); J.A. Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts, eds., Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Charles Zika, Exorcising Our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2003).
11 Del Rio, vol. III, p. 65: “Puto si sint minores annis XIIII tantum esse terrendos, etiam terrore reali; ut nudando, ligando, & ad eculeum adducendo, non tamen imponendo.”
12 Del Rio, vol. I, p. 3: “Tam latè sumptae Magicae, divisio petenda ex causis, finali & efficiente. Ab efficiente ducitur divisio in Naturalem, Artificiosam & Diabolicam, quia cuncta effectus eius ascribendi sunt vel insitae rebus naturae, vel humane industrie, vel cacodaemonis malitiae.”
13 Del Rio, vol. I, p. 7: “Naturalem vero legitimamque Magicen [Magicam?] cum ceteris scientiis Adamo Deus largitus, a quo posteritas docta, per manus & orbem eam propagavit. Ea nihil est aliud quam exactior quaedam arcanorum naturae cognitio, qua caelorum ac siderem cursu & influxu, & sympathiis atque antipathiis rerum singularum observatis, suo tempore, loco ac modo res rebus applicantur, & mirifica quaedam hoc pacto perficiuntur, quae causarum ignaris praestigiosa vel miraculosa videntur.”
14 Del Rio, vol. I, p. 79: “Quibus indiciis discernendi effectus magiae ex pacto [convenio?], ab effectus Physicis, & miraculosis, & artificiosis?”
15 As but one example, consider the problems faced by those who tried to prove seventeenth-century miracles as discussed in Peter Dear, “Miracles, Experiments, and the Ordinary Course of Nature,” Isis, vol. 81 (1990), pp. 663–83.
16 Del Rio, vol. I, pp. 79–80.
17 There are many studies of the social contexts of early modern witchcraft; one of the most illuminating continues to be Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (New York: Routledge, 1970; 2nd edn 2008).
18 Del Rio, vol. I, p. 76: “ordo praeternaturalis, ad quem referuntur multae mirificae operationes factae per bonos vel malos angelos motu locali, vel subita naturalium agentium applicatione.”
19 Del Rio, vol. I, p. 76: “Tres ergo Deus ordines statuit, naturalem, miraculosum, & prodigiosum; seu, si duos malis, naturalem & supernaturalem.”
20 Portions of this section appeared previously in Mark A. Waddell, “The Perversion of Nature: Johannes Baptista van Helmont, the Society of Jesus, and the Magnetic Cure of Wounds,” Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire, vol. 38 (2003), pp. 179–97, and are reproduced with permission.
21 Walter Charleton, Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana (London, 1654), pp. 381–2.
22 Walter Charleton, A Ternary of Paradoxes: The Magnetick Cure of Wounds; Nativity of Tartar in Wine; Image of God in Man (London, 1650).
23 Eric Lewis, “Walter Charleton and Early Modern Eclecticism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001), pp. 651–64; L. Sharp, “Walter Charleton’s Early Life 1620–1659, and Relationship to Natural Philosophy in Mid-Seventeenth Century England,” Annals of Science 30 (1973), pp. 311–40.
24 One interesting example is the unfinished work by the prominent nineteenth-century physician Sir William Osler: Sir Kenelm Digby’s Powder of Sympathy: An Unfinished Essay (Los Angeles: Plantin Press, 1972).
25 William Bynum, “The Weapon Salve in Seventeenth-Century English Drama,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 21 (1966), pp. 8–23; Paul G. Brewster, “Physician and Surgeon as Depicted in 16th and 17th Century English Literature,” Osiris, vol. 14 (1962), pp. 13–32.
26 For examples of those who claim to have located the salve in the Paracelsian literature, see Carlos Ziller Camenietzki, “Jesuits and Alchemy in the Early Seventeenth Century: Father Johannes Roberti and the Weapon-Salve Controversy,” Ambix, vol. 48, no. 2 (2001), pp. 83–4, and Daniel Stolzenberg, “The Sympathetic Cure of Wounds: A Study of Magic, Nature and Experience in Seventeenth-Century Science,” M.A. Thesis, Indiana University (1998), p. 3. For the pseudo-Paracelsian interpretation, see Walter Pagel, Joan Baptista van Helmont: Reformer of Science and Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 9. For a comprehensive history of the salve, see Roberto Poma, Magie et guérison: La rationalité de la medicine magique, XVIe—XVIIe (Paris: Orizons, 2009).
27 Sir Kenelm Digby, Of the Sympathetick Powder: A Discourse in a Solemn Assembly at Montpellier, Made in French … 1657 (London: John Williams, 1669).
28 On Digby’s mendacity, see Elizabeth Hedrick, “Romancing the Salve: Sir Kenelm Digby and the Powder of Sympathy,” The British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 41 (2008), pp. 161–85. On the many editions of Digby’s work, see Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons, p. 270; Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923), vol. VII, p. 507.
29 Giovanni Battista della Porta, Magia naturalis libri XX (Naples: Horatium Salvianum, 1589). In the English translation, Natural Magick (London: Thomas Young & Samuel Speed, 1658), the description of the weapon salve can be found in Book 8, pp. 228–9.
30 Camenietzki, p. 84.
31 Oswald Croll, Basilica chymica philosophicam propriam laborum experientiam … (Frankfurt: Godefirdi Tampachii, 1608). Croll’s Basilica chymica was later translated into English by an anonymous “Lover of Chymistry” with the title, Basilica chymica, & Praxis chymiatricae, or Royal and Practical Chymistry (London: John Starkey, 1670).
32 The section devoted to the weapon salve in the English edition of Croll’s Basilica is entitled, “The Sympathetick Oyntment, or Stellate of Paracelsus,” and can be found on pp. 173–8.
33 The two licensed editions were both printed by Johann Endter: Theatrum sympatheticum, in quo sympathiae actiones variae, singulares & admirandae tam Macro quam Microcosmicae exhibe[n]tur … (Nuremberg, 1660) and Theatrum sympatheticum auctum, exhibens varios authores, de pulvere sympathetico … (Nuremberg, 1662). The unlicensed edition was Theatrum sympatheticum, in quo sympathiae actiones variae … exhibentur … Amstelaedami, Impensis Thomae Fontani (Amsterdam, 1661).
34 These Dutch editions were probably variations of the large 1662 edition, and included Theatrum sympateticum, Ofte Wonder-Tooneel des Natuurs Verborgentheden (Amsterdam: Jacob van Royen en Timotheus ten Hoorn, 1681), and an edition of the same title that was published by Johannes ten Hoorn in Amsterdam, 1697. For references to the Harvard defenses, see William Newman, Gehennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2003), p. 35.
35 Andreas Libavius, Tractatus duo physici: prior de impostoria vulnerum per unguentum armarium sanatione Paracelsicis usitata commendataque (Frankfurt: Joannes Saur, 1594). More information about Libavius can be found in Bruce T. Moran, Andreas Libavius and the Transformation of Alchemy: Separating Chemical Cultures with Polemical Fires (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2007); Owen Hannaway, The Chemists and the Word: The Didactic Origins of Chemistry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).
36 See, for example, Camenietzki, p. 83; Stolzenberg, “The Sympathetic Cure of Wounds,” p. 28.
37 Jan Baptista van Helmont, De magnetica vulnerum curatione: Disputatio contra opinionem D. Joan. Roberti, presbyteri de Societate Jesu, Doctoris Theologi, in breve sua anatome sub censurae specie exaratam (Paris: Le Roy, 1621).
38 For more detail on the Van Helmont affair, see the collection of documents assembled by Corneille Broeckx in his Interrogatoires du docteur J.B. van Helmont, sur le magnétisme animal, publiés pour la première fois par C. Broeckx … Extrait des Annales de l’Académie d’Archéologie de Belgique (Anvers, 1856).
39 Further details about Van Helmont’s life can be found in Pagel, Joan Baptista van Helmont, as well as in Pagel’s entry for Van Helmont in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 6 (New York Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), pp. 253–9.
40 As republished in the posthumous Ortus medicinae (Amsterdam, 1648), p. 756.
41 Van Helmont, Ortus medicinae, p. 759.
42 Johannes Roberti, S.J., Curationis magneticae, & unguenti armarii magica impostura, clarè demonstrata …. Modesta responsio ad perniciosam disputationem Io. Baptistae ab Helmont Bruxellensis Medici Pyrotechnici … (Luxemberg: Hubertus Reuland, 1621).
43 Gaspar Wenckh, S.J., Notae unguenti magnetici et eiusdem actionis (Dilinger, 1626).
44 For biographical information on Cabeo, see the Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, Carlos Sommervogel, S.J., ed., volume II (1991), p. 483; also, Attilio Frajese’s entry, “Cabeo, Niccolo,” in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1980), p. 3.
45 Niccolò Cabeo, S.J., Philosophia magnetica (Cologne, 1629), p. 301: “Fabulosum est, quod duo Homines possint quasi se alloqui è remotissimis, & clausis locis, per duorum versoriorum mutuam directionem.”
46 Cabeo, p. 304.
47 Cabeo, p. 303: “omnia autem agentia physica determinant sibi sphaeram activitatis, ultra quam agere non possunt …”
48 Cabeo, p. 305.
49 Cabeo, p. 304. His suggestion here echoes the advice proffered in a tract attributed (perhaps erroneously) to the physician Daniel Sennert (1572–1637), The weapon-salves maladie, or, A declaration of its insufficiencie to performe what is attributed to it.
50 The English translation of Oswald Croll’s Basilica chymica, the Royal and Practical Chymistry (1670), notes on p. 178 that cleaning and binding the wound will aid in the “consolidation” or healing of the injury, but that the effects of doing so are limited, and could not produce the speedy recovery witnessed in cases where the salve was employed.
51 Ingrid Rowland, The Ecstatic Journey: Athanasius Kircher in Baroque Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2000), p. 3.
52 For more on Fludd and his ideas, see William Huffman, Robert Fludd and the End of the Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 1988).
53 Athanasius Kircher, S.J., Magnes; sive, De arte magnetica, 1st ed. (Rome, 1641), p. 528.
54 Kircher, Magnes (1641), p. 530.
55 Kircher, Magnes (1641), p. 778.
56 Kircher, Magnes (1641), pp. 778, 779.
57 Kircher, Magnes (1641), pp. 778–9.
58 Kircher, Magnes (1641), p. 781.
59 Kircher, Magnes (1641), p. 780.
60 Kircher, Magnes (1641), p. 780.
61 Kircher, Magnes (1641), p. 780.
62 Kircher, Magnes (1641), p. 782.
63 Kircher, Magnes (1641), p. 783.
64 Kircher, Magnes (1641), p. 784.
65 Ordinatio pro studiis superioribus (1651), p. 29: “Possunt fieri curationes vulnerum vel morborum per medicamenta applicata in distantia, seu per unguentum quod vocatur armarium.”
66 This point is made with encyclopedic vigor by Poma’s Magie et guérison.