THE Elizabethans and Jacobeans, in company with all their European contemporaries, lived simultaneously in more than one world. The world of physical matter surrounded them and was the one of which they were continuously aware, but realms of super-fine matter inhabited by spirits, angels, demons, and the dead constantly intruded, irregularly and mostly without warning, bringing humans and non-human entities into disturbing and often terrifying contact. So too did the supernatural plane of being where God existed and from which He governed His multifarious creations; and so also did those curious kingdoms and regions so close to Earth, and yet not of it, in which lived fairies, trolls, elves, gnomes, and a great multiplicity of other strange beings—not spirit and yet not matter, either. Humans lived cheek by jowl with all these expressions of different existences, taking them for real, as real as humans themselves, and acutely sensible of their superior powers and abilities which humans bold or foolhardy enough might try to harness or manipulate for their own uses, beneficent or malicious. This is the spiritual, intellectual, psychological, and emotional context to all the occult sciences of the period; and while the geography of the world and of the heavens was changing round about them, people of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in many important instances, behaved as though these changes were irrelevant and did not impinge upon the realities of their interaction with circumambient Unseens and the entities which existed in them.
Just as the Protestant confessions’ rejection of Purgatory made no real difference to popular and indeed, much learned notion about the reality and non-reality, appearance and non-appearance of ghosts, so Galileo’s addition of moons to the map of the heavens and Copernicus’s earlier removal of Earth from the centre of the cosmos in favour of the sun had little immediate effect on either the techniques or the basic theory of astrology, in spite of the fact that astronomy and astrology were still, at this time, more or less a single science. ‘Astrology’, however, comprised a number of different, though related, disciplines. Natural astrology looked at the sky and weather-signs and drew conclusions therefrom, and also considered the diagnosis and treatment of a patient. Natal or genethliacal astrology constructed a chart (horoscope) of the heavens as they appeared at a person’s birth (or conception) and calculated his or her character and the likely course of that individual’s life. Katarchic astrology determined from a chart drawn to show the heavens at the moment of a client’s question, the best moment to begin a voyage or undertaking of some kind. Horary astrology was similar in that it answered a specific question asked of the astrologer and mundane astrology sought to answer queries about world events such as earthquakes, outbreaks of plague, or changes of regime. These categories overlapped, and the last four came severally under the general heading judicial astrology, and when we find objections to the science—as we do frequently in the literature of the period—it is to the judicial, rather than the natural category that they are directed.
Unease or hostility centred upon the exact functions of the planets and constellations. Were they merely signs, or did they exercise influence upon everything below them? If they influenced, what was the nature of that influence—one which inclined or one which ruled? Pendant upon these were questions about an individual’s personal responsibility for sin, and human intrusion upon God’s prerogative of complete foreknowledge. Hence Sir Walter Ralegh’s careful treading as he writes of ‘Fate, and that the Starres haue great influence, and that their operations may diuersly be preuented or furthered’.1
No one can doubt, he says, that the stars are more than mere lights in the sky; but when it comes to the extent and character of their influence ‘the middle course is to be followed, that as with the Heathen we doe not binde God to his creatures, in this supposed necessity of destinie, so on the contrary we doe not robbe those beautifull creatures of their powers and offices’. The stars and other celestial bodies, he goes on, ‘incline the will by mediation of the sensitiue appetite’, although they wholly direct minds without reason, meaning those of birds, beasts, and humans who allow themselves to be governed by their passions. But apart from these exceptions, ‘howsoeuer we are by the Starres inclined at our birth, yet there are many things both in nature and art, that encounter the same, and weaken their operation’. A good education and Christian upbringing, for example, do much to encourage a favourable planetary inclination and discourage an unfavourable one; and, of course, the immortal soul is quite untouched by any such influence, good or bad, for God ‘who hath threatned vnto us the sorrow and torment of offence, could not contrary to his mercifull nature, be so uniust, as to bind vs ineuitably to the destinies, or influences of the Starres, or subiect our soules to any imposed necessitie’.
This measured approach, in equally measured, clear, and sinewy prose, however, was far from being the norm. Even when it was allowed that astrology was not altogether beyond the pale, the allowance tended to be grudging or qualified. ‘I reject not the prognostications of astronomers [i.e. astrologers], nor the conjectures or forewarnings of physicians, nor yet the interpretations of [natural] philosophers’, wrote Reginald Scot in his Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), ‘although in respect of the divine prophesies conteined in holie scriptures, they are not to be weighed or regarded…. Whereas these contein onlie the word and will of God, with the other are mingled most horrible lies and cousenages. For although there may be many of them learned and godlie, yet lurke there in corners of the same profession, a great number of counterfeits and couseners.’2
Nearly forty years later, Francis Bacon was just as reserved, though less forthright in his expression: ‘As for astrology, it is so full of superstition, that scarce anything sound can be discovered in it. Notwithstanding, I would rather have it purified than altogether rejected…. For my part, I admit Astrology as a part of physic, and yet attribute to it nothing more than is allowed by reason and the evidence of things, all fictions and superstitions being set aside.’3
The intimate connection between astrology and medicine, to which Bacon refers, provided one of the strong points for anyone who wished to defend the science, and physicians could point to the universities as one of astrology’s most potent disseminators; for both Oxford and Cambridge, in company with universities elsewhere in Europe, produced scholars who were excellent astrologers—John Robins of All Souls, for example, and John Fletcher of Caius, among many others—although by the 1570s and 1580s astrology was beginning to fall out of intellectual favour. Nevertheless, as late as 1657 the Quaker Henry Clark could still complain that both universities were turning out large numbers of astrologers to cheat people, as he put it. Richard Forster (c. 1546–1616), however, gives us a good example of university-trained, non-cheating medical expertise. A graduate of Oxford, he became a Fellow and then President of the College of Physicians of London, famous not only as a medical practitioner, but also as a mathematician and astrologer. The lengthy title of one of Anthony Asham’s books indicates clearly how important the science was to medicine: A litle herball of the properties of herbes, newly amended & corrected, wyth certayn additions at the end of the boke, declaring what herbes hath influence of certain sterres and constellations, wherby maye be chosen the best and most lucky tymes and dayes of their ministracion, according to the moone beying in the signes of heaven, the which is daily appointed in the almanacke (1550); and when Leonard Digges dedicated his Prognostication Everlastinge of Righte Good Effecte to the Earl of Lincoln in 1576, he illustrated the title page with a version of Zodiac Man, a naked human figure surrounded by the signs of the zodiac, with arrows pointing from them to their areas of special influence in the body, and included, along with sections on natural astrology, such medical observations as, ‘The meetest time to take Purgacions etc., is neither in hotte nor colde dayes, that is, from the tenthe of Marche, to the twelfth of June. Further, by rules Astronomical, it must be perfourmed when the Moone is in cold, moist, and watry signes, as Cancer, Scorpius, and Pisces: comforted by Aspectes and radiations of Planets, fortifying the vertue of the body expulsiue’ (fol. 20r).
Forster, Ascham, and a host of others also used astrology as a means of predicting events, interpreting unexpected, but natural phenomena such as comets, and prophesying, although here, of course, they ran the risk of intruding upon religion and politics. In 1583, for example, there took place a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn at the end of the watery triplicity of Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces and the beginning of the fiery triplicity of Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius. Richard Harvey immediately published an Astrologicall Discourse upon the phenomenon, which set off one of those spats which quite frequently convulsed English astrologers. The question for them was, are we entering the Last Times and approaching the Judgement? ‘I am Astrologically induced to this coniecture’, wrote Harvey, ‘that we are most like to have a new world, by some sodaine, violent, & wonderful strange alteration, which even heretofore hath always hapned, at the ending of one Trigone, & beginning of another.’ Robert Tanner (Prognosticall Iudgement, 1583) supported him, but Thomas Heath did not and rushed out A Manifest and Apparent Confutation, which suggested that Harvey had miscalculated the conjunction and that therefore when it did occur, its effects would be other than Harvey predicted. Richard’s brother John then took up cudgels in support of his kinsman—Astrologicall Addition or Supplement—but when the brothers’ predictions turned out to be wrong, people hostile to astrology seized their chance and used it to condemn the science as a whole.
‘So manie as writ of the same’, observed the Puritan, Philip Stubbes in his Anatomie of Abuses (1583):
neither iumped togither in one truth, nor yet agreed togither, either of the day, houre, or moneth, when it should be: but in al things shewed themselves like themselves, that is, plaine contradictorie one to another. Insomuchas they writ in defence of their errors, and confutation of the contrarie, one against another, shamefully to behold. By which more than presumptuous audacitie, and rash boldnesse of these, they brought the world into a wonderfull perplexitie and cease, expecting either a woonderfull alteration of states and kingdoms (as these foolish starre tooters promised) or else a finall consummation and overthrowe of all things. Or if not so, yet the strangest things should happen, that ever were heard or seene since the beginning of the world. Wheras, God be thanked, at the verie houre and moment when (as some of them set downe) these woonders and portents should have happened, there was no alteration nor change of any thing seene or heard of, the element being as faire, as bright, as calme, and as pleasant, and everie thing as silent, and in as perfect order and forme, as ever they were since the beginning of the world. By all which apeereth the vanitie and uncerteintie of their curious science.
But if the main thrust of Stubbes’s criticism was the inaccuracy of astrological prediction, another puritan, William Perkins (1558–1602), expressed in the clearest and simplest terms one of the principal religious objections to astrology:
Wee must bee put in minde, not to observe the planetary houres: for men suppose that the houres of the day are ruled by the planets, and hereupon, that some houres are good, and lucky, (as they say) and some unlucky: that men are taken with planets, and borne under unlucky planets. But these are heathenish conceits … We are to feare God, and not to feare the stars … For no man can by learning know the operation of the Starres: because their lights and operations are all mixed together in all places upon earth: and therefore no observation can bee made of this or that starre, more than of this or that herbe, when all herbes are mixed or compounded together … It is a foolishnesse to ascribe the regiment of our affaires to the starres, they being matters contingent, which depend on the will & pleasure of man.4
Do the stars incline or rule, and what does one conclusion have to say about human free will and divine omniscience? Perkins was, again, quite clear:
That part of Astrology, which concerneth the alteration of the ayre, is almost all both false and frivolous; and therefore in a manner all predictions grounded upon that doctrine are meere toyes, by which the silly and ignorant people are notably deluded. As for that other part of Astrologie, concerning Natiuities, revolutions, progressions, and directions of Natiuities, as also that which concerneth election of times, and the finding againe of things lost, it is very wicked; and it is probable, that it is of the same brood with implicite and close Magique.5
Perkins was right to link astrology with magic. Many did, such as George Carleton, Bishop of Chichester, whose polemic Astrologomania (1623) called it the mate of witchcraft and described it as demonically inspired. ‘Mounting from degree to degree, upon the slippery and vncertaine scale of Curiositie’, he warned of astrologers, ‘they are at last inticed, that where lawfull Artes or Sciences fayles, to satisfie theyr restlesse mindes, euen to seeke to that blacke and vnlawfull Science of Magicke.’ A number of other critics also saw a link between medicine and magic. ‘There be innumerable charmes of conjurers, bad physicians, lewd surgians, melancholicke witches, and couseners, for all diseases and greefes’, grumbled Reginald Scot, ‘speciallie for such as bad physicians and surgions knowe not how to cure, and in truth are good stuffe to shadow their ignorance.’6 Of course, it was not simply inept physicians who supplemented their diagnoses and cures with magic. The skilled and popular, if maverick, Simon Forman not only cast horoscopes for his clients, but wrote (and typically did not finish) hundreds of pages of a manual of astrological physic on which he provided a running commentary to his pupil and fellow physician, Richard Napier, who in his turn wrote A Treatise touching the Defenc of Astrologie which, like Forman’s work, remained unprinted; and in the early seventeenth century, Nicholas Culpeper (1616–54), like Forman, a physician, astrologer, and fighter of the medical Establishment, produced The English Physitian, or An astrologo-physical discourse on the vulgar herbs of this nation (1652) and Opus astrologicum (1654), maintaining, however, that ‘the astrologer is, or ought to be, very well versed in every part of natural philosophy’ and so not entirely reliant upon astrology for his diagnoses.
If it was perhaps via medical consultation that people most frequently came into contact with astrology, almanacs certainly ran it a close second. These were pamphlets or broadsheets containing a variety of information—expected eclipses and conjunctions, the calendar, and a prognostication, that is, an astrological forecast for the coming year. The more elaborate almanacs also contained ephemeredes, tables showing the daily position of the planets and stars throughout the year, which would enable readers to draw up their own horoscopes, genethliacal or horary, so that they would be forewarned of good times or bad for themselves, the church, or the state. Diagrams of ‘astrological man’, such as Leonard Digges included in his Prognostication, also allowed readers to calculate the best times to take medicine or submit to bleeding. Circulating prognostications, however, had its potentially sinister side, as far as a number of English parliaments were concerned and although there was no legislation specifically aimed at astrology—apart, perhaps, from an Act of 1581 forbidding anyone to calculate Elizabeth’s nativity—the Tudors, from Henry VIII onwards, tended to treat as felony what they saw as politically motivated predictions, and proclamations, orders from the Privy Council, and bishops’ investigations were frequently directed against those who made and published them. Interestingly enough, however, when war broke out between King Charles and parliament in 1642, puritans in the government actually encouraged astrologers and almanac writers to be more open about their work and in 1643 appointed a well-known astrologer and almanac writer, John Booker, to oversee licensing of astrological works on the government’s behalf. So the radicalism of puritan MPs coincided with, and encouraged, a radicalization of prognostication which thereby became a potent tool in the hands of authority. William Lilly (1602–81), for example, the most prominent English astrologer in the country, prefaced his almanacs with short essays announcing the downfall of the monarchy and prophesying victory for Cromwell’s soldiers, and the title of his three-volume manual, Christian Astrology (1647), threw down a challenge to anyone who would argue the contrary.
Lilly, indeed, shows how far the almanac had come. To begin with, most English almanacs were translations of European originals, but as the sixteenth century wore on, more and more were domestic, swelling in numbers until the seventeenth century saw more than 2,000 separate publications appearing in a given year. The size of the market gives a notion of their popularity. Hence, Shakespeare could drop into astrological terminology and even make a joke—‘Taurus? That’s sides and heart/No, sir: it’s legs and thighs’7—and expect his audience to follow and appreciate. John Webster, more bold, provided details of a newborn child’s nativity—‘The lord of the first house, being combust in the ascendant, signifies short life: and Mars being in a human sign, joined to the tail of the Dragon, in the eighth house, doth threaten a violent death.’8 John Fletcher, bolder still, included in his Bloody Brother (Act 4, scene 2) a long passage of dialogue (80 verses) almost entirely devoted to technicalities of the science, so much so that one can reconstruct the horoscope being discussed.
Medical consultation, popular literature, and the theatre, then, combined to keep astrology a living and pertinent science in public awareness, even though scholars might wrangle over details and clergymen denounce it from pulpit and the printed page; and those controversies which had produced a spurt of books in the 1580s rose again in the early 1600s. John Chamber (1546–1604), a canon of Windsor, had lectured against astrology at Oxford during the 1570s and now gathered together his thoughts and objections in A Treatise against Iudicial Astrologie (1601). These were simple: (1) modern astrologers are embarrassed by their science and therefore confine themselves to writing almanacs; (2) astrology is full of technical flaws; (3) can astrologers solve certain problems such as drawing up a horoscope for eggs in a bird’s nest? (4) things happen because of human will or mere chance; (5) only stupid people consult astrologers; and (6) astrology is actually less reliable than other forms of divination. One may note that Chamber confines himself to the judicial forms of astrology—the natural, he leaves alone—and that his arguments vary considerably in force and cogency. They were, however, fun, which is more than can be said for the ponderous reply by Sir Christopher Heydon, A Defence of Judicial Astrologie (1603). Its tiresome weight may owe something to his determination to overwhelm Chamber with tidal waves of learning—and no one denied that his book was based on extensive acquaintance with both ancient and modern authorities—just as one of its principal aims, to show that astrology is compatible with Christianity, may owe much to Heydon’s collaborator, his chaplain, William Bredon, himself an astrologer.
Liveliness, however, returned in John Melton’s Astrologaster, or The Figure-Caster (1620), which blisteringly defined astrology as,
An Art, whereby Cunning Knaves cheat plaine honest Men, that teacheth both the Theory and Practicke of Cousenage, a Science instructing all the Students of it to lye as often as they speake, and to be beleeved no oftener then they hold their Tongues; that tells truth as often as Bawds goe to Church, Witches or Whores say their Prayers, or never but when the English Nones and Greeke Calends meet together [i.e. never]. (pp. 29–30)
When a clergyman, William Foster, charged Dr Robert Fludd, Censor of the College of Physicians, with being a magician, Fludd had no hesitation in coming to his own and astrology’s defence in round terms in spite of the fact, clear in his admission of it, that astrology was indeed used for some magical purposes:
I was, whilst I did sojourn in Rome, acquainted with a very learned and skilful personage, called Master Gruter, he was by birth of Switzerland; and for his excellency in the Mathematic, and in the Art of motions and inventions of Machines, he was much esteemed by the Cardinal Saint George. The Gentleman taught me the best of my skill in those practices, and amongst the rest, he delivered this magnetical experiment unto me, as a great secret, assuring me that it was tried in his Country, upon many with good success. When (said he) any one hath a withered and consumed member, as a dried arm, leg, foot, or such like, which Physicians call an Atrophy of the limbs, you must cut from that member, be it foot or arm, the nails, hair or some part of the skin, then you must pierce a willow tree with an Auger or wimble unto the pith, and afterward put into the hole the pared nails and skin, and with a peg made of the same wood, you must stop it closed, observing that in this action the Moon be increasing & the good Planets [be] in such a multiplying Sign as is Gemini, and fortunate and powerful over Saturn which is a great dryer. The selfsame affect (said he) you shall find in you, take the nails and hair, which is cut off the member, and close them in the root of an hazel tree, and shut up the hole, with the bark of the tree, and after cover it with the earth, and (said he) it hath been tried, that as the tree daily growth and flourisheth, so also by little and little will the patient recover his health. But you must with diligence observe the motion of the heavenly bodies, and especially the places of the Sun and Moon, when this is effected. And to this intent, he did disclose unto me the time and seasons when the preparation unto such a cure should be effected … I boldly affirm, therefore, that all Astrology is not forbidden for as much as there is an especial observation to be had by wise men, of the influence of the stars. And for that purpose, there are hours of election, duly to be observed according unto this or that influence, which is most proper and convenient for our work … [and] that there is no Cacomagical superstition in observing times, days or hours, in which this or that star hath dominion, for the collecting of ingrediences, or preparation and adaption of medicines, or other matters, proper for the cure of man.9
Fludd, of course, was a physician and therefore one might expect him to come to astrology’s defence. He also had pronounced opinions, defending Paracelsian medicine against the officially approved Galenic, and been well versed in the Christian–Neoplatonic–Hermetic philosophical viewpoint which attended his preferences. In addition to this, he was a practising alchemist; so his profession, his hobby, and his outlook will have combined to make him take astrology with the utmost seriousness.
The tone was thus set for the 1640s and 1650s, during which astrology both flourished under government approval, and yet suffered the usual attacks relating to religious heterodoxy and the charlatanism of its practitioners, arguments (if one may call them such) which echoed those of similar, earlier controversies elsewhere in Europe. English polemicists, in fact, seem to have been highly dependent on other European models to guide them in their hostilities and apologies, the distinguishing feature of their work being its use of the vernacular instead of the Latin which tended to be employed elsewhere. The result of both sides’ labours was simple stalemate. Astrology continued to be accepted in medicine, questioned and condemned by religion, and used by everyone. It was a situation familiar to the practitioners and clients of all the occult sciences.
Magic, like astrology, was divided into different types. Natural magic included what we should call ‘conjuring tricks’, dependent largely on sleight of hand. Superstitious magic relied on the innate power of certain words, phrases, and gestures, usually traditional, to bring about a desired outcome. Ritual magic employed elaborate ceremonial and invoked non-human entities, its forms being frequently reminiscent of Catholic ritual and its practitioners of Catholic priests. These requirements, and the use of Latin as well as the vernacular to call up spirits, meant that this category of magic was largely in the hands of learned men. Regardless of which rituals were used, however, invocation followed by evocation remained the fundamental purpose of this type of magic. Demonic magic overtly depended on the assistance of an evil spirit to effect its results, whatever their intention, good or bad, and implied the existence of a pact, tacit or overt, between the operator and the demon. Witchcraft can be seen as falling into the categories of ‘superstitious’ or ‘demonic’ magic or both, and indeed, magic as a whole should be viewed as a continuum, along which the efforts of humans to manipulate the hidden, preternatural powers of Nature for their own purposes can slide between categories, partaking of the characteristics of any or either according to the nature and intention of the act being performed.10
Conjuring tricks tended to be the territory of the juggler. Originally, he was merely someone who amused, but by the sixteenth century we have evidence that he had become a person who used digital dexterity or mechanical devices to produce ‘magical’ effects and illusions.
‘The true art of juggling’, wrote Reginald Scot in his Discoverie of Witchcraft,
consisteth in legierdemaine; to wit, the nimble conveiance of the hand, which is especiallie performed three waies. The first and principall consisteth in hiding and conveieng of balles, the second in the alteration of monie, the third in the shuffeling of the cards. He that is expert in these may shew much pleasure, and manie feats, and hath more cunning than all other witches or magicians. All other parts of this art are taught when they are discovered: but this part cannot be taught by any description or instruction, without great exercise and expense of time. And for as much as I professe rather to discover than teach these mysteries, it shall suffice to signifie unto you, that the endevor and drift of jugglers is onelie to abuse mens eies and judgments. (13.22)
He also gives examples of the art of illusion, explains how some of them might be done, and includes diagrams of retractable bodkins to thrust ‘through’ the tongue, knives to ‘slice off’ half of one’s nose, and an elaborate device to enable the juggler to ‘cut off’ his head and lay it on a plate, a trick known as ‘the decollation of John Baptist’ (13.34):
[The juggler] will shew you a card, or anie other like thing: and will saie further unto you, ‘Behold and see what a marke it hath’, and then burneth it; and nevertheless fetcheth another like card so marked out of some bodies pocket, or out of some corner where he himselfe before had placed it; to the woonder and astonishment of simple beholders, which conceive not that kind of illusion, but expect miracles and strange works. What woondering and admiration was there at Brandon the juggler, who painted on a wall the picture of a dove, and seeing a pigeon sitting on the top of a house, said to the King, ‘Lo now your Grace shall see what a juggler can doo, if he be his craftes maister’, and then pricked the picture with a knife so hard and so often, and with so effectuall words, as the pigeon fell down from the top of the house stark dead. (13.13)
Some people, however, found it difficult to distinguish between this kind of thing and actual magic, as John Cotta wryly observed in The Triall of Witch-Craft (1616): ‘Hence as Witches doe strange and supernaturall workes, and truly vnto reason worthy of wonder; so the imposter doth things voide of accomptable reason, in shadow, shew, and seeming onely supernaturall, wondred and admired. And hence it commeth to passe, that with vndiscerning mindes, they are sometimes mistaken and confounded one for another.’ One of the major problems which had preoccupied both demonologists and strixologists since the fifteenth century had been how to determine whether a particular act—let us say, flying through the air on a broom to a witches’ Sabbat—happened in reality or merely in the individual’s imagination. It was a well-established theory, for example, that demons could so interfere with the processes of human sight that they could create an image so realistic that the person who saw it would take it to be genuine. Hence, it was perfectly possible that a witch might wholeheartedly believe she or he was indeed flying to a Sabbat, even though in fact she or he was at home asleep in bed. Therefore ‘conjuring tricks’ or ‘illusions’, especially if done with skill, could evoke suspicion either that they were real acts of magic (and so done with demonic help), or that the audience had been hoodwinked by demons into believing that what they were seeing was real and not a trick; and if learned men sometimes had difficulty in discerning truth from falsehood, how much more difficult (said Cotta and others) would it be for the unlettered to separate the genuine from the illusion, or the illusion from the trick?
Amulets, of course, were one of the most frequent evidences of popular recourse to magic. People wore them to ward off evil spirits, disease, and misfortune, either ‘consecrating’ the amulet themselves or having it done for them by someone who professed skill in magic. William Lilly recalled in his autobiography that when he was secretary and servant to one Gilbert Wright, Wright’s wife died in 1624 after a long and painful illness and it was discovered that
she had under her arm-hole a small scarlet bag full of many things, which, one that was there delivered unto me. There was in this bag several sigils, some of Jupiter in Trine, others of the nature of Venus some of iron, and one of gold, of pure angel-gold, of the bigness of a thirty-three shilling piece of King James’s coin. In the circumference on one side was engraven, Vicit Leo de tribu Judae Tetragrammaton [symbol: cross], within the middle there was engraven a holy lamb. In the other circumference, there was Amraphel and three [symbol: cross]. In the middle, Sanctus Petrus, Alpha and Omega.11
Scot, too, is another useful source for our knowledge of those popular magical practices known as ‘superstitions’:
Against the toothache: scarifie the gums in the greefe, with the tooth of one that hath beene slaine; a charme for the headach: tie a halter about your head, wherewith one hath beene hanged; a charme to drive awaie spirits that haunt anie house: hang in everie of the foure corners of your house this sentence written upon virgine parchment, ‘Omnis spiritus laudet Dominum, Mosen habent et prophetas, exurgat Deus et dissipentur inimici eius’.12
Now, it is true that Scot’s work is in part a diatribe against Catholicism, which he sees as a repository of magic and superstitious practices, and anti-Catholicism is a prevailing note, perhaps the prevailing note, in Protestant observations on the role played by the Devil in everyday English life. Thomas Cooper lamented in his The Mystery of Witch-Craft (1617) that people continued to seek help from blessers and healers and witches, all of whom he called ‘the fitches and onions, yea the garbidge and very deepenesse of Antichrist’, since they were nothing less than harbours and hiding-places of secret Catholicism; and likewise, though in cooler terms, Francis Bacon linked superstition with the Catholic church (and aspects of the Anglican establishment) in his essay on the subject: ‘The causes of superstition are pleasing and sensual titles and ceremonies; excess of outward and pharisaical holiness; over-great reverence of traditions, which cannot but load the Church; the stratagems of prelates for their own ambition and lucre’. William Ames, however, took a different line in his Conscience, with the power and cases thereof (1639), noting the common practice of people to resort to ‘Figures, Images, Characters, Charmes, or Writings’ to cure diseases, along with ‘Herbes and other Medicines, not as they are applyed in a naturall way, but as they be charmed, or as they bee used in some certaine forme and no other’. In such cases, he said, ‘the Devill is the author both of the operations, and significations which doe depend on such meanes’. Here he strikes the other dominant note in works on ‘popular’ magic—that there is, in effect, no difference between superstitions and demonic magic, an opinion with which many other writers concurred. ‘By Witches’, said William Perkins in 1610, ‘we understand not those onely which kill and torment: but all Diviners, Charmers, Juglers, all Wizzards, commonly called wise men and wise women … and in the same number we reckon all good Witches, which doe no hurt, but good, which doe not spoile and destroy, but save and deliver’.13
Ritual magic, on the other hand, did not, at least in practice, attract so much vituperation, partly perhaps because it was the provenance of the learned and therefore supposedly almost respectable, partly because those same learned often had influential clients or protectors, and partly because it was much more an affair private to the practitioner. John Dee (1527–1608), for example, conducted his conversations with evoked spirits through a series of mediums over several years, but always in the confines of his study; and although he made detailed notes of these scrying sessions, they remained in manuscript and were not made public until after his death. Even so, the very fact that he was a mathematician, alchemist, and astrologer was sufficient to call down troubles upon his head and while his published works deal mainly with mathematics, political geography, and astrology, there was sufficient occult speculation in some of them to rouse suspicions that he might indeed be a magician. His astrology, for example, could serve as an instrument of magic. ‘If you were skilled in catoptrics’, he wrote in his Propaedeumata Aphoristica (1558), ‘you would be able, by means of a practical technique, to imprint the rays of any star much more strongly upon any substance exposed to them than Nature does by herself’.14 This is scarcely different from the astral magic employed by amulet-makers and although Dee regarded it as natural magic, rather than magic of any other kind, to an outside eye the differences might seem to be minimal.
Hence, as early as 1570 he was complaining in his Preface to Euclid that he was being called a conjuror, that is, an invoker of spirits, and as late as 1598 he returned to Mortlake from an extended sojourn abroad to find that he had lost much of his library to a mob which, inspired by fear of his ‘magical’ books and instruments, had broken in and looted them during his absence. Nor did Shakespeare do his reputation much good when he created the figure of Prospero, a ritual magician, since many would have been reminded of Dee whose remarkably wide and diverse learning would thus have been reduced in popular estimation to a single, dubious practice.
The fourth general category of magic was that known as ‘demonic’, and for some time before the sixteenth century witchcraft—the knowledge and skill of those who possessed insights into and control over the hidden powers of Nature and non-human entities—had been assimilated to those forms of magic which were said to rely upon the aid of spirits to achieve their effects. Since these spirits were assumed to be evil, even that exercise of magic which sought to help, rather than hurt, was included in both ecclesiastical and secular condemnation, while divination of any kind, too, was likely to be labelled witchcraft on the grounds that foresight, and hence prediction, was almost bound to be acquired through demonic, rather than divine assistance, and so was equally condemnable.
‘Some learned men’, says Theophilus in chapter 2 of Henry Holland’s dialogue, A Treatise Against Witchcraft (1590),
have distinguished these satanical covenants into their sorts, for some have an open, express and evident league and confederacy with Satan; some a more hid and secret; some a mixed and mean between both. Unto the open and express confederacy belong all manifest conjurations and practices of Pythonists [diviners]. Unto the secret kind, all close and secret operations by Satan in divining astrology, palmistry, and the like. Unto the third kind appertain all practices of superstitious magic in all sorceries whatsoever …
Mysodemon: I pray you then, unto which league belong the common sort of our witches, which seem indeed to work by the devil, (so wicked are their lives, so devilish are their inventions, and such dreadful events follow them) and yet have no manifest operation by Satan to their own knowledge, as most of them say in the very hour of their death.
Theophilus: They do belong therefore no doubt to the second and third kind of confederacy, and they work secretly by the devil. (p. 32)
This kind of learned discussion, based on the Bible’s various terms for occult practitioners, relied on the rise of Hebrew studies in England during the sixteenth century. Reginald Scot’s treatise on witchcraft, published in 1584, had included much the same kind of disquisition at greater length, and on the Continent the Jesuit Martín del Rio would devote similar attention to the Hebrew vocabulary in his Investigations Into Magic (1599–1600). By ‘the second and third kind’ to which Theophilus assigns contemporary English witches, he means diviners and those who work with the help of evil spirits (‘familiars’). Here he appears to link two separate types of occult practitioner, the likely reason being that he has in mind the most famous diviner-witch, the so-called ‘Witch of Endor’ who appears in 1 Samuel 28:7 as ba’alath ‘obh, a woman with a spirit. The Geneva Bible (and later the King James version) translates this as ‘a woman with a familiar spirit’, and thus the connection is made between divining and calling up a ghost by the help of a servant-demon and the common English notion of a witch as someone with just such a familiar at her command.
This assumption that most occult sciences were performed only with the help of a demon was both common and widespread. ‘Let there be not so few in London as three score women’, observed Francis Valleriolus in 1562, ‘that occupieth the arte of Phisicke and Chirurgerie. These women, some of them be called Witches, and useth to call upon certaine spirits.’15 Dr Burcot, if we are to believe Reginald Scot, was introduced to a ‘juggler’ called Feats, ‘who sold maister Doctor a familiar, wherby he thought to have wroughte miracles, or rather to have gained good store of monie’; and even so eminent a man as Adam Squier, Master of Balliol in the 1570s, was accused by Robert Parsons, a Jesuit, of selling some gamblers a familiar spirit to guarantee them success at dice. There were indeed those, of course, as Parsons suggests of Squier, who took advantage of people’s credulity and pretended to have a familiar spirit, though they did not. Thus, John Hall exposed a magician called Valentine who ‘made the people beleeve, that he could tel all thinges, present, past, and to come: And the very Thoughtes of men, and theyr diseases, by onlye lokinge in theyr faces…. and otherwhile made them beleve, that he went to aske councel of the devel, by going a little aside, and mumbling to him selfe, and then coming agayne, and would tell them all and more to’.16
Nevertheless, the idea that magical operators had power over spirits, whom they used as servants and instruments, had a strong hold over most people’s imaginations and convictions, and English witches, in particular, were well known to have spirits attendant upon them to carry out their wishes in return for a drink of their blood, as is famously illustrated in the woodcut which accompanies Matthew Hopkins’s Discovery of Witchcraft (1647). Therefore, regardless of good intentions—‘cunning men, or good witches’, said Thomas Ady, ‘will undertake to shew the face of a thief in the glass, or of any other that hath done his neighbour wrong privily’17—a witch or cunning man or cunning woman or magician, conjuror, diviner, chiromancer, or any other dealing in hidden knowledge and legally forbidden practices was certain to draw down censure from official quarters and condemnation from learned commentators and controversialists.
Interestingly enough, however, the sixteenth century saw relatively few such commentators in England, in comparison with a large number elsewhere in Europe. England preferred, for the edification and entertainment of the crowd, to publish pamphlets purporting to describe the heinous crimes of a witch recently tried and executed. But commentators there were, the best known being Reginald Scot (died 1599), scion of a landed family in Kent, who spent his life as a engineer, collector of subsidies, soldier, and MP for New Romney. His Discoverie of Witchcraft seems to have been written partly in reaction to his attendance at witch trials, partly as an English answer to Jean Bodin, a vociferous supporter of the validity of witchcraft, whose dramatic and alarming Démonomanie des sorciers had appeared in 1580. Scot makes clear his intentions in the prefatory Epistle to Readers (p. xxiii):
God that knoweth my heart is witnes, and you that read my booke shall see, that my drift and purpose in this enterprise tendeth onelie to these respects. First, that the glorie and power of God be not so abridged and abased, as to be thrust into the hand or lip of a lewd old woman: whereby the worke of the Creator should be attributed to the power of a creature. Secondlie, that the religion of the gospell may be seene to stand without such peevish trumperie. Thirdlie, that lawfull favour and Christian compassion be rather used towards these poore soules, than rigor and extremitie. Bicause they, which are commonlie accused of witchcraft, are the least sufficient of all other persons to speake for themselves; as having the most base and simple education of all others; the extremitie of their age giving them leave to dote, their povertie to beg, their wrongs to chide and threaten (as being void of anie other waie of revenge) their humour melancholicall to be full of imaginations, from whence cheefelie proceedeth the vanitie of their confessions; as that they can transforme themselves and others into apes, owles, asses, dogs, cats, etc: that they can flie in the aire, kill children with charmes, hinder the coming of butter, etc.
He pursues these aims in sixteen Books, each one of which acts as a brick in a very carefully designed structure—Scot was, after all, an engineer—and is designed to further his basic argument, which is not, as many modern writers suggest, a ‘rationalist’ debunking of the very notion of witchcraft, but a plea that misfortunes should be accepted as divine judgements and decisions of Providence, to be borne with patience and prayer and fasting instead of being seen as the result of demonic activity to be answered by counter-magic which, in his frequently reiterated view, Scot saw as a Catholic and therefore superstitious way of behaving. Most witchcraft accusations, he maintained, were based on dubious theology and mistranslations of scripture. Hence, we find that Books 6–13 of the Discoverie are actually extended commentaries on Hebrew words for various kinds of magical operator, filled with illustrative anecdotes drawn from Scot’s considerable reading of previous authorities—he cites 200 non-English and 38 English works—these discussions being prefaced by Books on the supposed power of witches and their pact with Satan and followed by others on ritual magic. Scot concludes the whole work by admitting that some forms of natural magic may perhaps have some validity and appends a final section, ‘Discourse upon Divels and Spirits’, which appears to accept their reality, but, in effect, comes very near to denying it.
No wonder, then, that his book provoked a storm. Henry Holland, William Perkins, and Richard Bernard all criticized it adversely. So too did King James, whose own essay on the subject, Daemonologie, appeared in 1597, following his personal brush with treasonous conspiracies on his life, formulated by a near-lethal combination of witches and politicians. But it may be significant that after its first publication, the Discoverie remained out of print until 1651, when renewed interest in and fear of witchcraft had been stimulated by the English Civil War and its aftermath. Less controversial were George Gifford’s A Discourse of the Subtill Practices of Devilles by Witches and Sorcerers (1587) and A Dialogue of Witches and Witchcraftes (1593), which see witchcraft as a practical problem for the clergy, rather than a theological exercise for the learned. In them, Gifford warns juries to be on their guard against Satan’s trickery and to beware of cunning folk who are just as bad as witches. Whether his work influenced Shakespeare’s portrayals of witches, as has been suggested, is, however, open to debate.
Scot and Gifford apart, it is not really until the first two decades of the seventeenth century that we find serious commentary on witchcraft burgeoning in England. There was the usual flurry of pamphlet literature in response to particular events—the demonic possession of fourteen-year-old Mary Glover (1602), for example, and that of Anne Gunter (1605), shown to be a fraud, and the trial of the Pendle Hill witches (1612), written up in a tract by Thomas Potts at the instance of the presiding judges—but with William Perkins, A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (posthumously published in 1608, six years after his death), Alexander Roberts, A Treatise of Witchcraft (1616), John Cotta, The Triall of Witch-Craft (1616), and Thomas Cooper, The Mystery of Witch-Craft (1617), we have a succession of clergymen (with the exception of Cotta, a physician) vigorously condemning all forms of magic as witchcraft. It may be no coincidence that in 1615–16 London was enthralled by the trial of Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset, who was popularly supposed to have used magic to snare her first husband, the Earl of Essex, and a later lover, Robert Carr, the King’s intimate. An anonymous verse-libel likened her to the Classical witch, Canidia:
She that by spells could make a frozen stone
Melt and dissolve with soft affection:
And in an instant strike the factours dead
That should pay duties to the marriage-bedd:
Canidia now draws on …
Whose waxen pictures fram’d by incantation,
Whose Philters, Potions for loves propagation
Count Circe but a novice in the trade,
And scorne all Drugs that Colchos ever made;
Canidia now draws on.18
Between them, then, Perkins, Roberts, and Cooper explored and summarized what were by now the arguments both for accepting the reality of witchcraft, regardless of reservations, and prosecuting anyone whose activities might warrant his or her being called a witch. Cotta, too, while expressing some doubts about some of the methods used to investigate witches, nevertheless maintained that witchcraft was sufficiently real to justify its being probed and investigated by those learned enough to distinguish truth from falsehood; and then in 1627, Richard Bernard, another clergyman, produced his Guide to Grand-Iury Men, which one might almost call a summary of these summaries, since, while it continued the strain of caution evident in many earlier English commentaries, it still offered, in the words of its extended title, to advise juries ‘what to doe, before they bring in a billa vera in cases of witchcraft’, and offered its readers a fairly full discussion ‘touching witches good and bad, how they may be knowne, evicted [and] condemned’. The book proved popular and was reprinted two years later, a final, conventional flourish before the uneasy lull which preceded another outbreak of similar literature during the English Civil War—like many of its predecessors, sceptical, but not as sceptical as all that.
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