source
How could magic happen? In the pre-Christian era as in the Christian
one, the primary idea was to summon an entity with astounding power – an
angel, or a demon, or a god. These beings behaved more like Marvel
superheroes than magicians; they could travel incredibly fast, or they had
astonishing strength. But with Christianity came the problem – what did the
entities themselves want? First to try to find a workaround from the idea
that all magic is demonic was Albert the Great, who tried to make the
astrological influence of the planets systematic. Medieval thinkers already
knew that the sun’s rays could turn common soil into gold. It followed that
alchemists might hope to do the same by using the rays of the planets
intelligently; it also followed that “as above, so below”. Since the heavens
affected life on Earth, the bite of a scorpion – for instance – might be
cured by pressing the image of a scorpion into incense while the moon is
correctly aligned with Scorpio. Worryingly, Scorpio itself and its many
faces are, Brian Copenhaver thinks, gods and demons, but these can be used
innocently because of the “as above, so below” rule; they are not working for
the magician, but simply working in the way they always do.
This kind of question preoccupies most of those writers summoned by Copenhaver
in The Book of Magic, an impressive and well-edited anthology. Those
writers also pondered and indeed fretted over the relation between powerful
entities and the laws governing matter; they raised scruples about how far
the alien energy of summonable beings is connected with their usual
function, or is pulled from that norm by the action of the magician. When
Shakespeare’s Puck speaks of putting a girdle round the Earth in forty
minutes, he is offering an explanation of what he can achieve and of how he
achieves it.
To say complications ensue is putting it mildly. Schemas are confounded by
efforts to find a legitimacy for magic. The English word comes ultimately
from Greek magike (in which the original Persian word is spliced with tekhne,
“art”), while the Persian magos “one of the members of
the learned and priestly class” ultimately derives from magush,
“to be able, to have power”, from which we may also derive the word
“machine”. So my social hierarchy is your magic, and my magic might be your
craft – or even your machinery. My religion is your magic. Your religion is
my fairy lore. Or your religions might be a mass of fakery and trickery and
foolery. Hence in making magic into an intellectual discipline, I theorize
based on my observations, which might not be mine but those of others,
heritable observations. But because what I do looks very like empiricism, as
I examine materials for the tricks or fooleries, or for the real
alterations, checking my results against descriptions of previous
experiments, what I do feels like science, feels like the template for
Baconian empiricism and its great instauration.
What fascinates Copenhaver is the overlap between magic and science. His
anthology probes the moment when “the author of a scientific encyclopedia
wrote that the skin of a hyena will ward off the evil eye”. Drawing on Max
Weber’s idea of a “disenchanted world”, Copenhaver uses the unusual form of
the anthology to trace the arc of disenchantment. Magic, Weber thought, was
ritual while religion is ethical; magic coerces, but religion supplicates.
Yet, by Weber’s standards, Moses and Jesus were magicians (as Christopher
Marlowe also noted, allegedly saying that “Moses was but a juggler, and one
Harriot, Wat Ralegh’s man, can do more than he”). Copenhaver seems unaware
of other recent responses to Weberian thinking, notably Morris Berman’s The
Re-enchantment of the World (1981), which takes a hard and critical look
at Cartesian rationality and materialism.
Yet Copenhaver’s choice of texts does little to unsettle the assumption that
Protestants are sceptical. While Protestant polemicists went to inordinate
lengths to portray their Catholic opponents as either jugglers or as actual
Satan-worshippers, these endeavours did not make them appear rational, but
simply fearful. Later, the idea of Catholic demon-worshippers was turned
into the equally fictive idea of Catholic witch-hunters, even though many of
the worst witch-hunts took place in Protestant-dominated places. For Whigs,
magic eventually collapses into science, and alchemy into economics and
mercantilism, while household theurgies are displaced by insurance policies
and the welfare state. But what about all the people for whom this doesn’t
appear to have happened?
All anthologies aim at being representative, even when they are not. With
Copenhaver in hand, few of the most diligent would look for more; the volume
is 643 pages long. And yet there is more, much more, and on that “more” may
hinge the big shifts in magical thinking choreographed – but not explained –
in these pages. He has evidently decided to omit Northern European magic,
the magics of the Gaelic-speaking lands and also the seiðr and trolldomr
of the Scandinavians. Admittedly, these magics are less easy to manage in
the framework of the history of ideas; they are messier than Graeco-Roman
magic, involving the intrusive and the invasive rather than the control and
management of subordinate nature. Yet, a comparison of the transformative
becoming-animal magics of British Insular myths and sagas with the alchemy
derived from a symbiosis of Hellenic and Egyptian cultures might have been
fruitful, allowing readers to think about the ways in which one idea of
magic necessarily excludes another. Nor is Copenhaver especially interested
in magical narratives, so we do not venture into German lands, except
as post- Roman subjects. The result is to leave the cultural divisions of
Europe very much where they were, with anywhere north and east of Paris not
only marginal but absent. The rationale might be that all Western ideas of
magic in high culture derive from the classical world on one hand, and the
Near Eastern world on the other.
Similarly, Copenhaver is much more at home with swashbuckling intellectuals
like Pico della Mirandola than he is with the average village cunning folk.
Yet he does discuss the idea of fascinatores, the natural evil-eyed
persons, and both he and Cornelius Agrippa struggle with intentionality: is
the eye a natural phenomenon, or an intended will to harm? He cites the
sceptics Burchard of Worms and Reginald Scot, both amusedly reporting
folkloric practices which may have been as rational as alchemy, as well
supported as astrological mineralogy. In the case of the female votaries of
Diana and the English cunning folk, belief may have been underpinned by a
complex web of mythological story and ideas of the liminal, the environment
and a more fuzzily bounded concept of personhood which allowed people to
influence one another in the manner believed to be possible for the planets
and constellations.
It is telling and dispiriting that the elimination of the folkloric also turns
out to eliminate women, who do not appear in the anthology at all as authors
or compilers. It is wrong to imagine that nothing survives; Jayne Archer’s
work has shown that many housewives had a solid working knowledge of
alchemy, while the average peasant – male and female – knew all about the
alleged effect of the waxing moon on growth. But in this volume, women and
the lower orders feature mainly as blockages in the progress of knowledge,
though only a very little more delving might have brought to light a female
magic of household charms that outlived the theological speculations on
which the anthology is firmly centred. While clearly lauding Scot’s braying
scepticism, Copenhaver does not seem fully aware of his reception. The
Bodleian Library copy of Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft
(Bodley MS. Add B1) was used by a cunning magician, who evidently took
Scot’s meticulous reportage of popular magic as a sourcebook for his own
practice of it. Scot himself drew on a manuscript called Secretum
secretorum, itself the grimoire of a pair of cunning men. The weaving in
and out of the learned and the popular illustrates that only naivety would
seek to separate them from one another.
Another problem with Copenhaver’s scope is a mild tendency to round up some
rather usual suspects. Three of the eleven subsections of this anthology are
made up of texts which its likely readership probably already owns,
including the Old and New Testaments in modern translations, and the
literary works of well-known poets and dramatists such as Marlowe, Spenser,
Jonson, Shakespeare and Molière. Copenhaver could have chosen far less
well-known dramas by Peele, Middleton, Dekker, Rowley and Ford, with far
more illuminating results for the general reader. A good deal of the
demonology here is well known, too, with the Malleus Maleficarum
hiked into an unduly prominent position; we leap into that intellectual
catastrophe suddenly, rather than working our way to it via the Formicarius
and the heresy trials and the particularities of Alpine folklore. The result
is that the witch trials spring out as an unpredictable mass of unreason
rather than as a development from reason itself in general and scholasticism
in particular.
Where the collection really shines is its compilation of mage thinking, the
posh university-educated magic deriving ultimately from texts like The
Emerald Tablet and On the Mysteries of Egypt; texts which in turn
took their prestige from misunderstood hieroglyphics and mistranscribed or
misunderstood top slices of Zoroastrianism. Yet mages hoped for true
hearing. When Marcilio Ficino imagined magic as the act of singing to the
stars, he also imagined the spirit imitating their movements, and that
imitation could then move through warm breath to the ear of a listener,
inspiring further imitation. But was this really magic at all, or did it
simply feel magical? The same kind of question might be asked of
Pietro Pomponazzi, who spoke of magnetism as real but argued that it was
caused not by demons, but by the planets. After reason, the anti-magicians
used satire, in rather the manner of Richard Dawkins duping the tarot card
reader in his documentary film Slaves to Superstition; nobody wanted
to be like the dupe, the victim of the cold reading. “I want to take on the
enemies of reason” is a ringing call, but the awkward fact that emerges here
is that the religious impetus to define magic led to a number of important
scientific discoveries and breakthroughs. Magic, science and religion are
entangled, and reading this rich collection allows each of us to cut our own
path through the dense snarls of the history of a body of ideas which
ultimately came to carry a heavy body count.
Diane Purkiss is Professor of English at Keble College, Oxford.
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