Download PDF | Paola Zambelli - White Magic, Black Magic in the European Renaissance (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions) (2007).
293 Pages
INTRODUCTION
MUST WE REALLY RE-APPROPRIATE MAGIC?
During the Renaissance the whole idea of nature changed—of its in nity and its limits, of man’s dominion over the physical world both vegetables and animals, of the regularity of physical and biological phenomena. In short, what changed was man’s idea of nature’s laws. But it was the time of the demonology of those inquisitors who organized large-scale burnings of witches and who, after the Council of Trent, put on spectacular shows of exorcism of those considered possessed by demons; nor did they fail to keep a strict watch on everything written or said on these matters by philosophers. This book will explore certain philosophical theories which provided an interpretation of these ideas of nature, of its laws and exceptions and, lastly, of man’s capacity to dominate the cosmos.
It is usual for studies of this sort to concentrate on the Hermetic and Neoplatonic philosophers, or on the relationship between magic and the scienti c revolution—all with good reason. I shall not, however, concentrate on these aspects but rather upon the interference of astrology and magic with alternative rites and also with witchcraft, which in the Renaissance period was an important question for social and religious history. Above all I shall concentrate on the de nitions of magic provided and discussed by certain heretics and “wandering scholastics”.1 At the beginning of the fteenth century teaching the philosophy of nature was a matter of presenting and interpreting the Physics and other natural-philosophical works of Aristotle; at the end of the sixteenth century one of the professors of philosophy appointed at Rome’s university, La Sapienza, was the Neoplatonist, Francesco Patrizi da Cherso.
There had been some antecedents early in the century: Leonico Tomeo in Padua and Francesco Cattani da Diacceto in Pisa, both of whom were disciples of Ficino. In their of cial teaching they were obliged to read out the works of Aristotle, but in their personal writings they discussed Neoplatonic and Hermetic problems just as their master and model had done. In the course of these two centuries—when Ficino’s translations made it possible to read the whole of Plato, Corpus Hermeticum, Plotinus, Porphyry, Jamblichus, Proclus, Psellus and others—much had changed in philosophy, particularly in natural philosophy. Nor was this all, for the period saw many other fundamental changes. The philological method elaborated by Lorenzo Valla, Politian and Erasmus made it possible to date and compare rediscovered texts and thus to read them in a new light. Agricola and Ramus devised a new inventive method; followers of Lull developed the art of classi cation and combination as well as the encyclopedia; Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler and Galileo proposed new methods for measuring the movements of celestial bodies; Vesalius reformed anatomy; Servetus, Realdus Columbus, Caesalpinus and Harvey discovered the double circulation of the blood; Lucretius’ work discovered in the fteenth century suggested an atomistic conception of matter and corroborated the idea of the in nity of worlds.
Thanks to Ficino’s De amore and De vita coelitus comparanda and to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Apologia for his Conclusiones nongentae (Nine hundred theses), by the end of the fteenth century the theory of “natural magic” had become much discussed in high-cultural circles. Working on a basis of Neoplatonism, Orphism and Hermetism, the two philosophers had reintroduced the traditional astrological theory of the correspondences between celestial bodies and “elementated” bodies, combining this with Avicenna’s theory of the power of the imagination and the Stoic-Neoplatonic idea of “spiritus”—thus Ficino, Pico and many others maintained that the power of magic was independent of the invocation of spirits. Ficino and Pico had brought to light a number of ideas that were already to be found in patristic and scholastic times, but had received limited attention from professional philosophers. From the end of the fteenth century these had become dominant among the elites and soon spread abroad among academic and literary circles.
The Neoplatonic and Hermetic theories of the two Florentines on the cosmos, the “spirit” and the forces of nature had given rise to a new idea of magic. In those same years, between the fteenth and the sixteenth centuries, another who failed to believe this was Lefèvre d’Etaples, the great Parisian editor of humanist translations of the ancient philosophers of every school, who later joined the evangelical church and whose attitude anticipated that of the Nicodemites. Unlike Trithemius, Lefèvre denied that magic could be natural and totally rejected it.
His Magia naturalis, written in a brief moment of infatuation with Ficino, is the only one of his works which he did not print and which he refused to distribute in manuscript, as would still have been normal in those early decades of printing. But there were very few who acted in this way. Ficino and his followers admitted the existence of spiritual beings (demons, angels and devils, anthropomorphic movers of astral bodies etc.) to whom it was possible to address prayers, hymns or innocent spells, thus making their in uence bene cial; the Benedictine abbot Trithemius was an extreme example of the use of these spells, the formulas of which he left in manuscript for a small number of initiates.
He openly refused to believe in the theory of Ficino and his followers that magic could be “purely natural”. In conformity with this idea and with the requirement of the times, Trithemius refused however to publish magical writings in print: in view of the fact that Trithemius’ other writings were printed in bulky incunabula we can only suppose that this political-cultural choice was not without signi cance and was not to be explained merely by the playful and instrumental idea of magic which he occasionally displayed. There was an aspect of magic which could be cultivated only “in amazement and in silence”.
For twenty years Trithemius’ disciple Agrippa observed the order he had given him not to print the encyclopedia De occulta philosophia, which was already nished in 1510; but before he died Agrippa could resist no longer his desire to publish. Did he succumb to the temptation because he was by then a radical reformer, one who conversed in secret with evangelicals and thus became convinced that it was impossible to hide his light under a bushel? In order to differ from the popular methods of sorcerers, in 1486 Ficino and Pico had claimed the possibility of a purely natural magic, with no invocation of demons: a few years later (in 1499 and around 1509) Trithemius crossed swords with them over this very question. Shortly after, Paracelsus was to base his magical works on ideas somewhat similar to those of Trithemius; they expressed in the vernacular and left in manuscript their writings recording popular beliefs. These works were disseminated again, translated and printed with great enthusiasm in the second half of the sixteenth century.
In the same period, in a group of initiates the most famous of whom was John Dee, having read the rst of Paracelsus’ texts to be available in print as well as secret (indeed initiatory) manuscripts by Trithemius, Giordano Bruno reverted to these ideas: this may have contributed to his being brought to the stake. Figures such as the ambiguous magicians Ficino, Pico and Della Porta were highly successful and in uential (even if under the Inquisition people at times took care to avoid mentioning their names): in the case of later texts it is still more dif cult to recognize implicit but important quotations from Trithemius, Agrippa, Paracelsus and Cardano. But these compromising sources are clearly recognizable in the magical works of Giordano Bruno, who more than all the others deserves to be called a “wandering scholastic”—as Konrad Gesner had described Paracelsus. The Renaissance philosophy of magic, which was both complex and elegant, enjoyed much success and was associated not so much with the “scienti c revolution” as with the religious ferment caused by the Reformation, particularly the Radical Reformation (examples such as Agrippa, Paracelsus and Servetus).
These ideas were to survive into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in literary documents and in the hobbies of important scientists (the most quoted example being that of Newton, with his secret passion for alchemy); but this is not the subject of this book. A great deal, too much perhaps, has already been said about it; interest (and sometimes belief ) in the theory of “natural magic”—in itself ambiguous—which Ficino and Pico had enunciated and many had embraced, has to some extent revived and led to a reassessment of this important trend in Renaissance philosophy, which had been derided by historians during the Enlightenment and by rationalists in the nineteenth century. The eight-volume History of Magic and Experimental Science (1923–1958), to this day essential reading for anyone studying these subjects, is full of derisive comments: on the other hand, as in the case of this monumental work by Lynn Thorndike, assenting to the idea of a purely natural magic makes it possible to link it up once more with science. Unlike Thorndike, more recent historians no longer look upon the magical, astrological and alchemical research (that was so widely practised during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance) as an accumulation of data which was then discarded thanks to the scienti c revolution, or rather to positivist science. Instead they have pondered deeply and debated over the connection between this research or occult thinking in general and the scienti c revolution, or at least over the ideology of the new sciences. In a few cases exclusive insistence on natural magic on the part of recent historians is a sign of nostalgia or even of apologetic intentions.
Presenting it either as an accumulation of empirical data which interpreted anew would lead to modern science (Thorndike) or as an anticipation of the scienti c revolution (Rossi 1957, Garin, Yates) or at least of its ideology (Elkana)—in the long run means making it more acceptable, and thus more desirable, as the positive response among the general public in recent decades has shown. That some of these historians (Rossi 1977, Elkana, Vickers) have strongly disputed the positive value attributed by others to magic, does not alter the fact that they too have only been considering natural magic. It is interesting that efforts have been made to de ne magic from a sociological and linguistic point of view, but what is still seriously lacking is a historical de nition of this discipline in its various forms.
We need to identify and estimate the different components for the last decades of the fteenth and the early sixteenth centuries, a period which was immediately before and at the beginning of the scienti c revolution and also—above all—of the Reformation. In recent decades historians have been considering “natural magic” in isolation, thus accepting its utopian view that it was a fruitful and respectable scheme, albeit not highly realistic; it was (as Elkana maintained) an ideology, but it was not impossible to consider it exhaustively in all its contents. The result of all this has been a lame controversy that stood on only one leg without realizing that the other leg was missing. The whole campaign against the so-called “Yates theory” would have been far less resounding or would have appeared in a completely different light if the contenders had borne in mind that at the time of the Renaissance magic meant also ceremonial magic. A highly ragarded academic gure, when inaugurating an international congress held recently in an important center, suggested that we should “resume magic”.2 This surprising invitation would have been unthinkable if an important part of this historical phenomenon had not remained neglected and unknown
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