Histories of thought, and especially histories of science, do well to remind us of two matters that subsequent progress makes us forget. One is the role of scientific instruments, sometimes originating in fairground attractions and novelties. Without them the seventeenth century’s forward leaps would not have been possible. The examples of both the microscope and telescope are especially pertinent. Magnification was known in antiquity; Seneca wrote in the first century CE of how tiny objects could be enlarged by looking at them through a glass globe filled with water. But enquirers then and before, and for centuries afterwards, had none of the fuller knowledge, the skill or the technology to produce and improve lenses to a point where they could be applied in either practical or scientifically informative ways.
By the thirteenth century CE the principles of refraction of light (again: first estimated by Claudius Ptolemy in the second century CE, but not applied to lenses), and the way to grind lenses to produce corrective effects, were sufficiently well understood for spectacles to make their appearance. The English Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, who taught at the universities of Oxford and Paris in the second half of the thirteenth century, is often cited as the inventor of these useful devices.1 In the sixteenth century a father and son team of spectacle manufacturers in the Netherlands, Hans and Zacharias Janssen, discovered the magnifying properties achieved by juxtaposing two lenses; and the true history of microscopes began.2
The story of instruments and their powerful effect on the progress of science is a rich tale in itself.3 It needs to be told alongside other enabling developments, such as the adoption of Arabic numerals, advances in mathematics and the availability of mathematical tables, accounting systems, cheap paper, printing and more accurate and more uniform systems of weights and measures. When one wonders why the ancients did not develop means of magnification for studying nature, and failed to apply Claudius Ptolemy’s insights about refraction of light by water and glass, the answer becomes apparent: a discovery of these kinds makes a practical difference to understanding and application only when there is a confluence of other factors to make that happen.
The second matter that histories of thought do well to remind us of – and this is the theme of the present chapter – is the fact that science emerged from a period in which many enquirers were deeply involved in magic and occult practices and beliefs. Whether the ‘occult sciences’ were the precursors of what we now think of as genuine science, or something quite separate from science, or a sometimes helpful and sometimes unhelpful admixture in the early development of science – in short: quite what the relationship is – is a matter of controversy. Scholars of Renaissance thought take sides on the question. For Frances Yates, Deborah Harkness and others, occultism was one of the progenitors of science proper, and an important one. For them science was the achievement of men who were at the same time dabbling in Cabala and magic, in Hermeticism, astrology and angelology. Yet for others – Brian Vickers, Paolo Rossi and more – occultism and science were distinct, and indeed distinct in the minds of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers themselves; and their argument is that those who practised science rather than the occult arts won the day.4
Whichever view is right – and what follows in recounting this story is in fact consistent with either, though inclines to the former view – the effort to extricate science from the entanglements of occultism, whether by some thinkers from other thinkers or within the selfsame thinker engaged in both, took a great deal of work by people whom we now remember for their achievements in this respect. By contrast, almost all of those who remained keen on the occult route to knowledge are now remembered, if they are remembered at all, only as dead-ends in the story.5
The words ‘almost all’ are particularly appropriate in that last sentence, however, because among those keenest on the occult route were some of the period’s greatest scientists, including Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle. Newton’s seminal contributions to proper science occupied far less of his time than his studies in alchemy and biblical interpretation. He thought the Bible was written in a secret code which, if cracked, would explain all nature. The Book of Revelation especially interested him because he believed its prophecies were genuine windows into the future. And like all alchemists before him he wished to find the Philosopher’s Stone, the magic mineral which would transmute base metals into gold and give us eternal youth.6
John Maynard Keynes bought Newton’s papers in 1936, and found to his astonishment that by far the greatest number of them concerned alchemical and magical speculations. In an address written for the Royal Society’s celebration of the 1942 tercentenary of Newton’s birth, Keynes said that the discovery did not make him think less of Newton and his achievements in genuine science, for he was certainly a genius; but it did make him realise that Newton was very different from the picture history had drawn of him.7 ‘In the eighteenth century and since,’ Keynes wrote,
Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason. I do not see him in this light. I do not think that anyone who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.
This characterisation of Newton rather overstates the case; Copernicus and Galileo lay between Newton and the Babylonians, and of course made it impossible for him to see the universe or observable nature in quite the same way as those archaic watchers of the skies. But there is enough right in Keynes’ view – for as he put it, Newton indeed ‘regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty’ – to make us see him with a more ambiguous eye.
For example, on the basis of his ‘interpretation’ of Revelation – that apocalyptic last book of the Bible with its terrifying vision of final things – Newton calculated that the world would not end before 2060:
So then the time times & half a time [sic] are 42 months or 1260 days or three years & an half, recconing twelve months to a yeare & 30 days to a month as was done in the Calendar of the primitive year. And the days of short lived Beasts being put for the years of [long-]lived kingdoms, the period of 1260 days, if dated from the complete conquest of the three kings A.C. 800, will end A.C. 2060. It may end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner.8
Newton thus offers an interesting example of how enquirers even of his great gifts could fail to distinguish genuine from spurious knowledge as we now understand this distinction. His interest in nature and its constituents was not divided, as it would so clearly be now, into physics and chemistry, and chemistry was still sufficiently entangled with alchemy that it makes it impossible even now to allocate, definitively into one or other of these categories, many of the experiments then being made and theories offered.
Surprisingly perhaps, this applies also to Newton’s contemporary Robert Boyle, discoverer of Boyle’s Law on the inverse relationship between the pressure and volume of gases. Boyle’s work falls clearly into the field of chemistry, and his book The Sceptical Chymist, published in 1661, is a foundational text in that science. His researches into sound waves in air, the expansion of water when it freezes, electricity, colour and much besides, was firmly based on experimentation, making him a paradigm of an early leader of genuine science. But Boyle was also interested in the possibility of transforming metals, to the extent that he helped to campaign for the repeal of a centuries-old law against ‘proliferating gold and silver’ that in effect criminalised alchemical efforts to get gold from base metals. He was critical of the kind of alchemists whom he called ‘vulgar Spagyrists’ – a term first coined by Paracelsus to denote those who separate and purify the elements in substances – and he was therefore careful to distinguish the concept of ‘mixtures’ from that of ‘compounds’ and to insist on their proper analysis. In contrast to the Spagyrists who claimed that ‘Salt, Sulphur and Mercury’ are the ‘Principles of Things’, Boyle took a corpuscularian view, which is that matter is composed of ultimately irreducible particles or ‘corpuscles’ (which means ‘little bodies’ – the Greek-derived word we now use is ‘atom’, from atomos ‘indivisible’).
But this did not make Boyle an enemy of alchemy. On the contrary, like Newton he hoped that alchemy would provide a means to understand the nature of the physical world, and to achieve the great desiderata of wealth, health and even immortality. The Enlightenment and subsequent histories of science have concealed or at least deliberately understated this part of Boyle’s story, just as they did with Newton’s story.9 We now know, as a result of extensive biographical investigation into the work and interests of both men, that the picture is more complicated. Just how complicated can be seen from the fact that Boyle allowed himself to be duped by a conman claiming that if he would send a large sum of money to Turkey he would receive in return a number of alchemical secrets. Boyle sent the money, but of course received no secrets. And he was even duped into thinking he had witnessed – actually witnessed with his own eyes – a case of transmutation of lead into gold: in a letter to Gilbert Burnet he wrote, ‘The man had a crucible in which was contained some lead. He put in a bright powder and put the crucible on the fire to heat. He removed it and when it was cold I was surprised to find not lead but gold, which, after testing, turned out to be true gold.’10
Yet despite these interests and aberrations, Boyle’s own work was scrupulously empirical and experimental, and he laid the foundations of modern chemistry as a result. Newton made little use of Boyle’s work, but devoted himself to his own alchemical researches with a single-minded and exclusive passion that resulted in a nervous breakdown. Just how much alchemical work he did cannot now be known, because – famously (or allegedly) – a fire in his laboratory, caused by his dog Diamond knocking over a candle, destroyed an unknown quantity of his writings. It has been speculated that the illness he experienced might have resulted from the lead and mercury he used in efforts to find the Philosopher’s Stone.11 But what remains of his work, more than a million words of it, sufficiently attests to his devotion – no lesser word will do – to the occult and mystical. He wrote a book about Solomon’s Temple interpreting it as a source of mathematical knowledge and information about the size of the universe and the place of mankind in it. In an annotation of an alchemical treatise he wrote, ‘This philosophy, both speculative and active, is not only to be found in the volume of nature, but also in the sacred scriptures, as in Genesis, Job, Psalms, Isaiah and others. In the knowledge of this philosophy, God has made Solomon the greatest philosopher in the world.’12
Even Greek mythology suggested to Newton a secret code for explaining the world. In the story of the adultery of Aphrodite there was, he thought, an alchemical message: Helios the sun saw Ares the god of war sneaking into the chamber of Aphrodite, goddess of love, while her husband Hephaestus, god of the forge, was out at work. Helios told the divine but lame blacksmith that he was being cuckolded, so Hephaestus made a net and strung it above the bed he shared with Aphrodite, with which to catch her and her lover in the act. They were indeed caught in the act, and the angry Hephaestus summoned his fellow Olympians to witness his betrayal. We are told by Homer that the gods laughed uproariously at the sight – thus ‘Homeric laughter’, the ‘unquenchable laughter of the gods’ as recounted in Book I of the Iliad (the goddesses, however, all turned away their faces in embarrassment). For Newton there was a deep secret here. Each of the players in this divinely domestic drama is associated either with a metal – Helios with gold, Ares with iron, Aphrodite with copper – or with the power that transforms them, namely fire, as used by Hephaestus in his work. Apparently Newton thought that iron + copper + fire yields the lead-like metal antimony, with its appearance when oxidised of a net-like trigonal lattice pattern. Amateur researches into alloys of copper and iron do not bear this out, though a sulphide of antimony with copper and iron constitutes tetrahedrite, a substance Newton would not have known.13
Subsequent history has ignored these extravagances of imagination and concentrated instead not only on the amazing achievement of Newton’s serious scientific work, but also on the methodological rules he laid down for scientific enquiry in the Principia (remember that ‘philosophy’ then meant every kind of careful systematic enquiry and therefore also what we now call ‘natural science’):
RULE I.
We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.
To this purpose the philosophers say that Nature does nothing in vain, and more is in vain when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity, and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.
RULE II.
Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes.
As to respiration in a man and in a beast; the descent of stones in Europe and in America; the light of our culinary fire and of the sun; the reflection of light in the earth, and in the planets.
RULE III.
The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intension nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever.
RULE IV.
In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions collected by general induction from phaenomena as accurately or very nearly true, notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses that may be imagined, till such time as other phaenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions.
This rule we must follow, that the argument of induction may not be evaded by hypotheses. For since the qualities of bodies are only known to us by experiments, we are to hold for universal all such as universally agree with experiments; and such as are not liable to diminution can never be quite taken away. We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which uses to be simple, and always consonant to itself.14
These rules have been part of the backbone of science – ‘real science’ we can say – ever since. It is a matter of controversy how Newton could regard them as consistent with biblical interpretation and alchemy, but evidently he did; to him these were somehow not ‘dreams and vain fictions’ – and he thus exemplifies the entanglement of science and the putative occult routes to ultimate knowledge that so fascinated many in the period before and up to his time.
The interest in alchemy and mystical fantasies displayed by Newton and to a lesser extent Boyle comes at the tail-end of these distractions. The soon-following Enlightenment did both men the kindness of ignoring this aspect of their interests, concentrating instead on their outstanding contributions to real science. But the fact that they were still dabbling with alchemy – and in Newton’s case with other even less plausible occult matters – at the end of the seventeenth century, means that it is no surprise to find that a century before them it was even more difficult for people to make the right discriminations between science and nonsense. Just how muddy the waters were is illustrated by the case of many sixteenth-century thinkers, illustratively among them the Elizabethan magus Dr Dee, the man to whom is imputed responsibility for Europe’s last truly great spasm of magia, alchymia, cabala at the beginning of the seventeenth century. I turn to him below.
Let us first clarify magia, alchymia, cabala, the concepts of magic, alchemy and Cabala (sometimes ‘Kabbalah’).
‘Cabala’ denotes one of several related systems of mysticism, almost all of which have roots in Jewish mysticism and practices of meditation and divination. It contains substantial elements of Neoplatonist philosophy as well as earlier Jewish thought about the supposed hidden meanings of the Torah and Rabbinic teachings.15 The elaborate doctrines of the Cabala were developed to a high point of sophistication by the Sephardic Jews of Spain in the medieval period. In the last quarter of the thirteenth century CE there emerged from among them the Zohar, a collection of texts on Torah interpretation, the origins of the universe, mystical topics, salvation, prayer, the nature of the soul and of God, and much besides. It was published by one Moses de León, who claimed that the texts were written by a second-century CE rabbi called Shimon bar Yochai, who had hidden from the Romans in a cave during the period of persecutions. There he had received a visit from the prophet Elijah who directed him to write down Judaism’s tradition of esoteric teachings which had hitherto been transmitted in oral form only.16 ‘Zohar’ means ‘Radiance’ or ‘Light’, and the work bearing that name draws richly and widely on many earlier commentaries and mystical texts, as well as on the Talmud and the commentaries on the Tanakh (the Jewish bible) known as Midrash.
A key aspect of the Cabala is the concept of the Sephirot or Sefirot, and its teachings about the mystical significance of the Hebrew alphabet. The Sephirot are the ten chief names of God; the word literally means ‘emanations’ so they are viewed as manifestations or attributes of the Infinite through which it both reveals itself and creates all things. As attributes they include glory, wisdom, will, goodness, splendour, eternity and virtue – the nature of the manifestations and their ordering in relation to the Infinite depends on which school of Cabala one is studying.
The twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet contain many further names of God. One Sephardi in thirteenth-century Spain, Abraham Abulafia, created a meditation routine of great complexity based on permutations of the Hebrew letters, and they and the alphabet’s associated number system (for the letters also stand for numbers) provided the materials for a great elaboration of mystical notions. For example: a feature of the Hebrew language is that individual letters are meaningless on their own, and require always to stand at least in pairs to form a significant linguistic unit. The pairs are known as ‘gates’, sha’arim, and in the Cabala are said to number 231, and are integral to the three-letter roots, shorashim, of Hebrew words. Using the same factorial calculation as yields 231, the number of these three-letter roots is 1,540. Here is an example of how these are interpreted Cabalistically: one reading of the word ‘Ysrael’ is yesh-rala, which means ‘there are 231 gates’. A second reading of ‘Ysrael’ – using the fact that Hebrew letters stand for numbers and that alef (‘a’) is similar to elef which is the number 1,000 and sometimes substitutes for the numerical value of alef which is 1 – yields the result that ‘Ysrael’ stands for the number 1,540. With time on one’s hands one can find many other amazing and significant coincidences and suggestiveness by manipulation of the Hebrew letters and these two numbers, ranging from geometry to the nature of the universe and its deity.17
Even before the Jews were expelled from Spain by the joint monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand in 1492, taking their Sephardic traditions with them into their new diasporas, Cabalistic ideas had begun to influence some of the more imaginative Christian minds in Europe. In the thirteenth century the Spanish mystic and Franciscan friar Ramón Lull knew of the Jewish Cabala, and his ideas contain several striking parallels with it. But the individual most credited with introducing Cabalistic notions into a version of Christian thought, marrying them to Hermeticism and laying the foundations of a full-blown Occultism and dignification of ‘good’ magic, was Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), the brilliant, aristocratic, short-lived protégé of Marsilio Ficino and Cosimo de’ Medici.
Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man is often cited as a Renaissance blueprint for the humanistic turn, this being the new insistence – or rather, an insistence renewed from its classical sources – on seeing humankind and its experience as the important focus for humanity’s own attention, in contrast to medieval Christianity’s denigration of this life as merely a woeful exordium to death, with a correlative fixation on the soul’s destiny after death. But in fact Pico’s essay is a startlingly clear manifesto of a hotch-potch Cabalistic–Platonist–Neoplatonist–Hermetic–eclectic project, favouring not just the self-creating freedom of man but the legitimacy of magic and a new way of knowing, which he claimed would transform our understanding of the universe.
The Oration was written as a preface to a set of 900 theses that Pico wished to debate before the Pope and cardinals in Rome. It begins with the words, ‘Most esteemed Fathers, I have read in the ancient writings of the Arabians that Abdala the Saracen on being asked what, on this stage, so to say, of the world, seemed to him most evocative of wonder, replied that there was nothing to be seen more marvellous than man. And that celebrated exclamation of Hermes Trismegistus, “What a great miracle is man, Asclepius!” confirms this opinion.’ The humanist tradition takes this eloquent exclamation by Pico, and his subsequent account of God’s award to man of self-creating and self-governing powers, as its manifesto; Pico has God tell Adam, ‘Whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgment and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature.’ And Pico breaks out in joy at the thought: ‘Oh unsurpassed generosity of God the Father, Oh wondrous and unsurpassable felicity of man, to whom it is granted to have what he chooses, to be what he wills to be!’ There is scarcely a clearer expression of the Renaissance humanist attitude. It might be summed up in the same words used by Jean-Paul Sartre centuries later: our existence precedes our essence: we are self-creators because we are radically and ultimately free.
But a more attentive reading reveals that Pico is, by this characterisation of God’s licence to man and his long dithyramb on the quest for knowledge by former saints and sages, astutely trying to wrest from Church orthodoxy the freedom to explore and apply Cabalistic and Hermetic wisdom. ‘I have not been content to repeat well-worn doctrines,’ he says,
but have proposed for disputation many points of the early theology of Hermes Trismegistus, many theses drawn from the teachings of the Chaldeans and the Pythagoreans, from the occult mysteries of the Hebrews and, finally, a considerable number of propositions concerning both nature and God which we ourselves have discovered and worked out . . . I have, in addition, introduced a new method of philosophizing on the basis of numbers. This method is, in fact, very old, for it was cultivated by the ancient theologians, by Pythagoras, in the first place, but also by Aglaophamos, Philolaus and Plato, as well as by the earliest Platonists; however, like other illustrious achievements of the past, it has through lack of interest on the part of succeeding generations, fallen into such desuetude, that hardly any vestiges of it are to be found. Plato writes in Epinomis that among all the liberal arts and contemplative sciences, the science of number is supreme and most divine. And in another place, asking why man is the wisest of animals, he replies, because he knows how to count. Similarly, Aristotle, in his Problems, repeats this opinion. Abumasar writes that it was a favourite saying of Avenzoar of Babylon that the man who knows how to count, knows everything else as well . . . I have also proposed certain theses concerning magic, in which I have indicated that magic has two forms. One consists wholly in the operations and powers of demons, and consequently this appears to me, as God is my witness, an execrable and monstrous thing. The other proves, when thoroughly investigated, to be nothing else but the highest realization of natural philosophy. The Greeks noted both these forms. However, because they considered the first form wholly undeserving the name magic they called it goeteia, reserving the term mageia to the second, and understanding by it the highest and most perfect wisdom. The term ‘magus’ in the Persian tongue, according to Porphyry, means the same as ‘interpreter’ and ‘worshipper of the divine’ in our language.
One notes the telling remark, ‘The other [form of magic, mageia] proves, when thoroughly investigated, to be nothing else but the highest realization of natural philosophy.’ This claim was firmly and sincerely believed by many subsequent thinkers in the period up to and into the seventeenth century.
Pico’s sponsor and admirer Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) was the translator of the recently recovered complete works of Plato into Latin, and an enthusiastic astrologer (here Pico disagreed; he was critical of astrology);18 but Ficino’s chief relevance for present purposes is that he was also the translator of the classic of Hermeticism, the Corpus Hermeticum. His translation was made from a Greek text which had been given to Ficino’s patron, Cosimo de’ Medici, by a monk called Leonardo of Pistoia, who had been sent by Cosimo to search monastery libraries for ancient texts. Pico combined what he learned of Hermeticism with Platonism and the Cabala into a syncretist mélange, which encouraged others to adopt Cabbalistic ideas and to associate them with Hermeticism, by that means evolving their own versions of Christian mysticism.
Hermeticism is a congeries of beliefs based on a body of texts said to contain the secrets of all things and supposed to have been produced by a great and wise person or god called Hermes Trismegistus, who either lived in remote pre-antiquity or was a contemporary of Moses. This corpus consists of 9,000 texts, some say; others – aiming at something more modest and precise – say forty-two.19 Some scholars think that Hermes Trismegistus is a combination of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth, a blending that might have occurred in the Hellenistic period of Greek influence in Egypt following the Alexandrine conquest in the fourth century BCE. The blending of the two gods would have been a natural one, given that both were the nominated patrons of writing and magic in their respective cultural settings. They were also both ‘psychopomps’, that is, deities who guide the souls of the dead into the afterlife.
Scholars also suggest that the belief held by some that Hermes Trismegistus was an historical figure might have resulted from association with the Egyptian priest and philosopher Imhotep (lived about 2650–2600 BCE), who was deified after death and mentioned in many inscriptions. Identifying Imhotep and Hermes Trismegistus makes the latter both human and divine, shades of Jesus Christ. Or perhaps the connection is with a much later figure often linked in tradition with Imhotep, namely the celebrated scribe Amenhotep son of Hapu (lived about 1390–1330 BCE), not to be identified with any pharoah of that name. This Amenhotep was as greatly praised as Imhotep for deep knowledge of medicine and nature.
In inscriptions to Thoth the formula ‘Thoth the great, the great, the great’ occurs frequently, hence Trismegistus or ‘thrice-great’; but many other legends and traditions surround the supposed origin of the name and the being thus named. References to Hermes Trismegistus diminished after late antiquity, only to be revived in the high medieval and Renaissance period, when he came to be thought of as an inspired individual contemporary with Moses and author of the mystical texts translated by Ficino.
Whatever the obscure and convoluted origins and character of Hermes Trismegistus, by the time that the Renaissance was in full flow Hermeticism had become a major cultural force, inspiring alchemists and mystics, making magic and astrology credible, and attracting the attention and following of some of the leading minds of the time, ranging from Pico at the end of the fifteenth century to Giordano Bruno at the end of the sixteenth century.20 A shared view was that the Hermetic writings preserved a so-called prisca theologia or pure and primitive theology, given to mankind by God in the remotest of ancient times. The prisca theologia therefore underlies all religious beliefs everywhere, but particular cultures had diversified and modified that original truth, corrupting and obscuring it. Newton held this view too.
As with the Cabala among certain sects of Jews today, credulous interest in the Hermetic tradition also continues among some who think that the forty-two key writings still exist, hidden somewhere in Egypt perhaps, with all the universe’s secrets contained in them. But the overwhelming Renaissance interest in Hermeticism rapidly dwindled (Newton apart) after the scholar and philologist Isaac Casaubon (1550–1614) showed at the beginning of the seventeenth century that the Greek in which the Corpus Hermeticum was written could not be earlier than the first and probably the second century CE. Casaubon’s demolition of the Corpus’s pretensions to great antiquity occurred in the course of his criticism of the Annales Ecclesiastici by Cesare Baronio, a Catholic history of the Church which the Huguenot Casaubon criticised for its fraudulent attempt to bolster papal claims to authority not just in the spiritual but in the temporal spheres.21 Casaubon was acknowledged by his contemporaries to be their age’s foremost scholar of Greek and the antiquities of the Christian religion. He was formidably equipped to identify the least tincture of fakery in texts, as in his edition of an entire collection of fakes, the Scriptores Historiae Augustae: ‘He revealed some of their many inconsistencies and improbable statements,’ Anthony Grafton writes. ‘He used considerations of style and content alike to argue that the works ascribed in the manuscripts to Aelius Spartianus, Aelius Lampridius, and Iulius Capitolinus could more plausibly be ascribed to a single author. He showed that the collection had been edited and revised, though the job had been done by an incompetent.’22 The figure of Casaubon might have provided George Eliot with her model of a bloodless scholar, but that scholarship exploded the Hermes myth, and put an effective end to Hermeticisim.
Casaubon did this not just by showing that the Greek of the Corpus Hermeticum could not be earlier than the first or second century of the common era, but that the doctrines were borrowed from familiar Greek philosophy in the period between Plato and the date of composition. It was in short merely an anthology of views from sources as various as Plato’s Timaeus and Hippocrates’ On Regimen. ‘I would have to copy the whole book here,’ Casaubon wrote, ‘if I wanted to go through one by one the heads of doctrine that the fake Mercury has turned to his own use from the Greek philosophers. For except for the points derived from Scripture, everything that he has is from them.’23 The clincher was that ‘Hermes’ mentions such things as the sculptures of Phidias, which were made centuries after the supposed date of the Corpus’s composition. And Casaubon was scathing about the claim that the text was a translation from ancient Egyptian, which he showed to be of a piece with a fashion in the early centuries of the common era to attribute everything to mysterious sources in ancient Egyptian or Eastern traditions, ‘the pullulating mass of pseudo-ancient, pseudo-Eastern literature’ as Grafton puts it. Quoting Casaubon again: ‘We should not then be surprised that in the first centuries of Christianity, when books with false titles were invented every day with complete license, someone barely acquainted with our religion should attempt the same in the science of theology.’24
If the story of Cabalistic and Hermetic ideas and their influence were told in full, it would require an account of the writings of Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522) and Francesco Giorgi (1467–1540) who promoted Christian versions of Cabala, and a much longer story about Hermeticism reaching back to Plutarch, Tertullian, Iamblichus and Porphyry in later antiquity, all of whom mention it – though Casaubon’s analysis of the Corpus proved that its production was contemporary with them rather than earlier. But it is chiefly because of Ficino’s translation of the Corpus that Hermeticism’s life was renewed and became of relevance to the just-pre-scientific ebullition of magical thinking.
For magical thinking itself, however, perhaps the most resonant name of the time is that of Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535). In histories of occult thinking Agrippa invariably features not many pages away from another luminary of the age, Paracelsus (1493–1541), whose real name was Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. But whereas Agrippa was avowedly a magus or magician – he calls himself exactly this in the opening of his chief work De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres (The Occult Philosophy in Three Books); even though a good magician who thinks that magic is merely the manipulation of nature as it genuinely is – Paracelsus was a different man and mind altogether, as arguably the founder of modern medicine and certainly a great contributor to its progress. This is not to say that he did not have interests in alchemy and, in his own modified view of it, astrology; but there was a real scientist at work in his head, and he makes an interesting contrast with his contemporaries in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
Agrippa was born in Cologne and became a teacher at Dole University in Burgundy. For a short time he studied with Johannes Trithemius (the by-name of Johann Heidenburg), a Benedictine monk then and for a century afterwards celebrated as an authority on magic. Trithemius’ book Steganographia was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Vatican which believed it to be about its ostensible subject – long-distance communication by the medium of spirits and astrology – but actually it is a work of cryptography.25 To the intoxicated minds of the time, a work in code seemingly about magic was as nectar to the bee. In any case Trithemius is said to have believed that it was possible to communicate with heaven by magical means, so those who studied with him besides Agrippa – Paracelsus was another – might be forgiven for thinking they were in the presence of a master of occult thought. For this reason Agrippa gave his De Occulta Philosophia to Trithemius to approve, which circumspectly Trithemius did, advising him not to put it into print too hastily.
The De Occulta was written by Agrippa in his early twenties, and following Trithemius’ advice he allowed it to circulate in manuscript copies only. Two decades later he revised and expanded it for print publication.26 The aim of the work was to restore the fortunes of magic, the understanding and practice of which Agrippa believed had greatly declined since antiquity. Among the various familiar and less familiar sources he drew upon – Neoplatonist writings, the Hermetic texts, Pliny, pseudo-Albertus Magnus, Pico, Reuchlin – he also used The Aim of the Sage (Ghayat al-Hakim fi’l-sih), better known as the Picatrix, attributed to the celebrated mathematician al-Madjriti who lived in Andalusia in the eleventh century CE. The Picatrix is one of the largest and most extensive grimoires or treatises of magic known. It became influential in Europe after its translation into Latin in the early thirteenth century CE, at the court of King Alphonso ‘the Wise’ of Castile, who was interested in its contents for practical as well as intellectual reasons. In a disorganised and meandering way the Picatrix covers talismans, astrology, magical theory, nostrums and more, but its very manner and scope recommended itself to eager would-be magicians, and it had a substantial influence on Ficino, whose ‘spiritual magic’ draws from it.
Agrippa opens his De Occulta with a letter to Trithemius in which he writes:
When I was of late (most reverend Father) for a while conversant with you in your Monastery of Herbipolis, we conferred together of divers things concerning Chymistry, Magick, and Cabalie, and of other things, which as yet lye hid in Secret Sciences, and Arts; and then there was one great question amongst the rest, why Magick, whereas it was accounted by all ancient Philosophers the chiefest Science, & by the ancient wise men, & Priests was always held in great veneration, came at last after the beginning of the Catholike Church to be alwaies odious to, and suspected by the holy Fathers, and then exploded by Divines, and condemned by sacred Canons, and moreover by all laws, and ordinances forbidden.
And the reason, Agrippa argued, was the appropriation of the name and some of the practice of magic by wrong-headed or wicked people, thus giving ‘magic’ an undeservedly bad connotation:
by a certain fatall depravation of times, and men, many false Philosophers crept in, and these under the name of Magicians, heaping together through various sorts of errors and factions of false Religions, many cursed superstitions and dangerous Rites, and many wicked Sacrileges, out of Orthodox Religion, even to the perfection of nature, and destruction of men, and injury of God, set forth very many wicked, and unlawfull books, such as we see carryed about in these dayes, to which they have by stealth prefixed the most honest name, and title of Magick.
It is instructive how Agrippa states the rationale for a magical approach to the world, because it shows how the approach he takes – and in this he is representative of those who shared his interests – differs from and yet occasionally has an echo of the proper scientific attitude yet to come:
Seeing that there is a three-fold World, Elementary, Celestiall, and Intellectual, and every inferior is governed by its superior, and receiveth the influence of the vertues thereof, so that the very original, and chief Worker of all doth by Angels, the Heavens, Stars, Elements, Animals, Plants, Metals, and Stones convey from himself the vertues of his Omnipotency upon us, for whose service he made and created all these things: Wise men conceive it no way irrationall that it should be possible for us to ascend by the same degrees through each World, to the same very originall World it self, the Maker of all things, and first Cause, from whence all things are, and proceed; and also to enjoy not only these vertues which are already in the more excellent kind of things, but also besides these, to draw new vertues from above. Hence it is that they seek after the vertues of the Elementary world, through the help of Physick and Naturall Philosophy in the various mixtions of Naturall things; then of the Celestiall world in the Rayes and influences thereof, according to the rules of Astrologers, and the doctrines of Mathematicians, joyning the Celestiall vertues to the former: Moreover, they ratifie and confirm all these with the powers of divers Intelligencies, through the sacred Ceremonies of Religions. The order and process of all these I shall endeavor to deliver in these three Books: Whereof the first contains naturall Magick, the second Celestiall, and the third Ceremoniall.27
This work – though of course not alone: there were other significant texts of the period which added to the excitement and interest, such as the Arbatel de Magia Veterum (Arbatel: On the Magic of the Ancients) by an unknown author – proved immensely influential. Agrippa’s most significant reader was undoubtedly John Dee, who took from him the idea that the universe is tripartitioned into natural, celestial and heavenly spheres, and that the key to understanding the nature of each and their relationships is number. Agrippa had lectured on Reuchlin when a young academic in Dole, and his theme had been Reuchlin’s linking of Pythagorean and Cabalistic themes. Dee, who was a brilliant mathematician, found these ideas irresistible.
Paracelsus is famous among historians of medicine, and medical practitioners interested in their history, for his seminal remark that ‘all things are poison and not without poison; only the dose makes the thing not poison’. It is a remarkable testimony to his influence on the development of medicine that his successors regard what they do as unthinkable without the shaping influence he had on their field of endeavour. He has of course been claimed by the outlying fields of care and cure too: by naturists, homeopaths, herbalists and others in the alternative-medicine field, and with good reason, because it was in these arenas that the only pharmacopoeia available to him was found. But as the ‘father of toxicology’, the originator of sensible approaches to treatment – for example in advising that wounds not be packed but allowed to drain – the first describer of syphilis and discoverer that mercury can cure it, the reputed recogniser of opium (in the form of laudanum) as a medical analgesic, the teacher of sensible views about antisepsis, his equally sensible view that silicosis (‘miners’ lung’) is caused by breathing dust and not by angry mountain spirits, his innovations in surgery: with all this, his place in the history of medicine is secure. Like too many very clever and innovative people he was not a great conciliator of traditional opinion. As professor in Basle he burned the books of Galen and Avicenna at the University gates by way of statement that they were no longer relevant to the study of medicine. He invited the public to his lectures, contrary to University rules, and at them wore an alchemist’s apron instead of an academic gown, at length so irritating the doyens of the University and city that they dismissed him. The last straw may have been an incident in which, having announced that he was going to reveal to the whole city the greatest of secrets about medicine, he produced in a crowded lecture theatre a bowl of faeces. As the audience left in disgust he shouted after them, ‘If you will not hear the mysteries of putrefactive fermentation, you are unworthy of the name of physicians!’28 His iconoclastic, challenging, perhaps arrogant nature is summed up in the by-name he chose for himself: ‘Paracelsus’ means ‘beyond Celsus’, the original Celsus being Aulus Cornelius Celsus, a Roman of the second century CE who wrote an encyclopaedia of which the medical part – De Medicina, on diet, herbs’ surgery and more – is still extant.
A significant fact about Paracelsus is the breadth of empirical background that underlies his thinking. He was born in Switzerland but brought up in a mining town in Austria where his father was a physician and chemist. He had the double benefit of this. He received his earliest medical training in practice at his father’s side, helping him also in his compounding and refining chemical substances. At the same time he observed the mining and smelting of minerals in the extraction operations in which, because students of the local school were required to work part-time at the mine, he participated. He thus became familiar with the properties and behaviour of many minerals.
After a period of study at Basle he went to a number of other universities seeking instruction, among them Tübingen, Vienna, Wittenberg, Leipzig, Heidelberg and Cologne, commenting in characteristic fashion, ‘how is it that the high colleges only produce so many high asses’. He travelled extensively, as far as India and Turkey according to some accounts, all the while learning, observing, seeking out physicians, chemists and alchemists. What he saw and learned led him to write, ‘The universities do not teach all things, so a doctor must seek out old wives, gypsies, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws, and take lessons from them. A doctor must be a traveller.’ And he concluded with what could be another mantra for science, ‘Knowledge is experience.’
Paracelsus’ attitude to alchemy and astrology was typically pragmatic. His interest in both was explicitly a matter of what they could do to help in understanding how to deal with nature, not least diseased human nature. He rejected the earth–air–fire–water theory of the elements inherited from antiquity, and adopted the alchemical-derived idea of a tria prima – three primary substances – which he identified as needing to be thus: one fluid and mutable, one solid and enduring, and one combustible and capable by its nature of influencing the relationship of all three. Respectively the three substances are mercury, salt and sulphur – mercury the mutable, salt the solid, and sulphur the combustible. Each is a toxin, and diseases are the result of the toxic effects of one or other of them. But small doses of each can be the opposite: a small dose can be a remedy, as witness the effect of mercury on syphilis.
From Hermeticism he took the idea that man the microcosm has to be in harmony with the universe – the universe being the macrocosm – to be well in body and mind. These harmonies were mediated by the relationships between the seven planets, the seven metals and the seven major organs of the human body, for example ‘sun–gold–heart’, ‘moon–silver–brain’ and so on. Without knowing as we now know that heavy elements can be forged only at the temperatures found in stars, Paracelsus claimed that poisons come from the stars. However it was not ‘forensic astrology’ that interested him, but as with alchemy he was interested only in the practical utility of the ideas. ‘Many have said of Alchemy that it is for the making of gold and silver. For me such is not the aim, but to consider only what virtue and power may lie in medicines.’29
Paracelsus died just a few years after being dismissed from his post at Basle – some say, murdered; the matter is beyond investigation now. It is equally likely that his death was natural, or that he poisoned himself by mistake while experimenting. But murder is not an unlikely explanation, given the opposition he roused among the traditionally minded. He was a difficult and oppositional character, and his very success as a physician was held against him because it smacked of dubitable practices. It was rumoured that he had raised a corpse or two to life, and after his death there were further rumours that he himself had come back to life. His command of the sometimes near-miraculous possibilities of medicine was enough to leave behind him the reputation of a magus. Accordingly the legends accumulated: that Satan had given him a white horse, that he owned a Philosopher’s Stone and regularly changed lead into gold. As a result his reputation in the period after his death lent force to the belief that magic, alchemy and the rest were genuine routes to the grails that their aficionados sought: wealth, health, life, knowledge.