In The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment
(2020) Michael Hunter wrote that change came about gradually, ‘through a kind
of cultural osmosis’, dependent as much on long-available ideas of classical
antiquity as on any apparent breakthroughs in knowledge. And ads that ‘the
Enlightenment did not reject magic for good reasons but for bad ones’.
In fact, a growing amount of historical scholarship
today argues that magical beliefs and practices had an important influence on
the development of natural philosophy and that around the beginning of the
eighteenth century the educated classes chose to retain some elements of magical
systems while rejecting others.
As Michael Hunter details magical and occult
philosophies had long been central to how people studied the natural world.
Consider the hermetic and cabalistic influences on John Dee (whereby the Rosicrucian Chymical
Wedding featured a prominent image of Dee’s Hieroglyphic Monad), Paracelsus’s quest for nature’s hidden secrets, or
Isaac Newton’s
alchemical experiments. At the same time, the mechanical systems of Gassendi and Descartes, which were dependent on the unseen
motion of invisible pieces of matter, presented people in the seventeenth
century with occult or hidden explanations for natural phenomena that
functioned much like earlier systems that had depended on invisible sympathies
or magical forces.
Most Europeans believed that the natural world
represented an important means of understanding God as Creator; some even
referred to the physical universe as the Book of Nature, a metaphorical text
that contained crucial knowledge about the divine. Before the eighteenth
century, most people would have found it unthinkable to separate God Some of
these traditions, like hermeticism, were first encountered by Renaissance
scholars trying to recover traces of the “golden age” of ancient Greece and
Rome. Others, like the Judaic tradition of the Kabbalah, had already existed in
Europe for hundreds of years but received closer attention from Christian
writers and philosophers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as they
searched for new and more powerful ways of
understanding their universe. This means that “scientific” inquiry often
had religious implications.
Physicians and other medical practitioners commonly
resorted to astrology in order to diagnose and treat their patients, and the
fundamental idea of magic, the belief that the world contains hidden forces and
powers that can be harnessed to accomplish specific tasks, was seen as a
powerful tool in the arsenal of some medical practitioners. One such
practitioner was the infamous medical reformer Paracelsus born
Theophrastus von Hohenheim (1493–1541) who, in the early decades of the
sixteenth century, combined a respect for
nature’s secrets with a deep reverence for God in his efforts to create an
entirely new way of healing.
And while it seems clear that attitudes toward magic
did change in the seventeenth century and that, for much of the eighteenth
century, we find numerous people claiming that a belief in magic was
irrational, superstitious, and ignorant, there is evidence that magical beliefs
were not swept aside by scientific rigor and a commitment to rationality, as the
disenchantment theory would suggest.
The Enlightenment was not a blank slate on which
Europeans sketched a new world. It was more like a piece of old parchment
imperfectly scraped clean, still bearing traces of past ideas around which
modernity took shape.
The alleged secrets of the universe
To understand the above we best go back around 1460,
when the philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433–99)
received a message from his patron, Cosimo de’ Medici
(1389–1464), the most powerful man in the Italian city-state of Florence. Up to
this point, Ficino had been hard at work translating the works of the ancient
philosopher Plato (c. 424–c. 348 BCE) from their original Greek into Latin, but
his patron had other ideas. He wanted Ficino to begin translating a different
Greek manuscript, one that Cosimo had only recently
acquired. Obligingly, Ficino set Plato aside and turned his attention to this
new work. He soon realized that he had stumbled across something very
important.
The works that Ficino translated became known as the
Corpus Hermeticum, and they contained the recorded
wisdom of a mysterious figure known as Hermes Trismegistus or Hermes “the
Thrice-Powerful,” a contemporary of Moses and a sage of unparalleled learning
who had lived thousands of years earlier in ancient Egypt. His writings
promised to reveal the secrets of the universe to those willing to learn, and
this soon included Ficino, who became a passionate advocate for the ideas of
Hermes and was. instrumental in disseminating them throughout Renaissance
society. Ficino, along with many others, believed that the Hermetic writings
contained traces of ancient, uncorrupted wisdom that might restore human
understanding to the heights achieved by those, long ago, who had known God and
His creation in ways since lost to modern people.
The tradition disseminated by Ficino is known as
hermeticism, and it incorporated both philosophical lessons on the nature of
the divine as well as hands-on instructions for magical work. Both hermeticism
and the other tradition we explore in this chapter, cabalism, are examples of
learned magic – that is, magic studied and practiced by the educated elite.
This is very different from the magic worked by healers, midwives, and others
in small communities and rural areas across Europe, practices usually labeled
by historians as “folk magic.” Learned magic had its roots in the distant past,
and those who embraced it did so with the hope that they would uncover secrets
and mysteries that would transform European society forever. This idea was so
powerful and compelling that it fundamentally altered intellectual life in
Europe and continues to inspire people today.
This also concerned the Rosicrucian manifestos
(referred to widely by among others popular philosopher/occultists like Rudolf
Steiner founder
of today's Waldorf schools) presented the recovery of ancient esoteric
wisdom as the key to humanity’s spiritual “reformation,” and together they
demonstrate how traditions such as hermeticism and cabalism evolved during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, long after Ficino’s original translation
of the Corpus Hermeticum. There is little evidence
that the Rosicrucians
actually existed, however; their manifestos may have been part of a grand hoax,
or perhaps the idealistic imaginings of a single person. Even if this shadowy
society did not exist, however, the philosophy laid out in the Chymical Wedding and other works described a quest for
esoteric and occult knowledge inspired directly by the hermetic and cabalistic
traditions.
Hermes Trismegistus as the founder of “Natural Magic” depicted in a floor mosaic in the
Siena cathedral:
From a magical worldview to Science
The shift in how early modern people conceptualized
and used occult causes leads us to the work of the historian John
Henry, who in contrast to Keith Thomas Religion and the Decline of
Magic (1971) has suggested that, rather than 'disenchantment', we should understand
the fate of magic as one of fragmentation in which philosophers retained some
elements of magic and rejected others.1
Thus early modern chemistry included a wide range of
different practices and methodologies, including chrysopoeia, the pursuit of metallic transmutation.
When Herman Boerhaave (1668
–1738) called for a reformation of chemistry in 1718 he was concerned
about the respectability of the discipline, which he saw as endangered by the
fraud and trickery of quack alchemists. He knew very well, however, that chrysopoeia was only a small part of the larger practice of
chemistry, even in the heyday of alchemy in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and he also understood that the discipline of chemistry had already
integrated fundamental alchemical ideas and practices into its foundations. The
study and transformation of matter, which had been central to alchemical work
for hundreds of years, also defined the
discipline of chemistry as it emerged in the eighteenth century. Boerhaave’s deliberate attempts to draw a line between
“respectable” chemical work and the fraudulent practices of
transmutational alchemists were therefore not a wholescale rejection of
alchemy. Instead, it was a careful repudiation of particular alchemical
practices. He, and others like him, tried to establish chemistry as a
respectable discipline of academic study by breaking it apart into pieces. They
separated and then pruned away its most troublesome elements, leaving behind a
set of theories and practices with a deep (but unspoken) debt to alchemy.
Magical beliefs and occult systems were already part
of the natural philosophies that proliferated in the Enlightenment. And when
the educated classes of the eighteenth century for example adopted Newtonian
science with enthusiasm, they were unaware or uncaring that its foundations
were rooted firmly in religious and alchemical traditions.2
Whose Enlightenment?
Science, as we understand the word now, is a modern
invention. Its careful methodology, its well-defined disciplines, its culture
of white coats and laboratories full of sophisticated technology go back
perhaps 150 years; in fact, the word “scientist” was coined only in the late
nineteenth century by William Whewell. Before that, investigators of
nature called themselves "natural philosophers".
It is challenging to talk about the Enlightenment as
if it was a singular phenomenon because it looked very different in different
places. Some of the most important articulations of Enlightenment ideals
originated in France, but other countries experienced the Enlightenment in
different ways. Whereas many French thinkers attacked the dogmatic traditions
of the Catholic Church and its influence on French society, people living in
the German states were generally more interested in reforming the practice and
structure of government, and some historians remain uncertain whether the
Enlightenment actually took hold in Britain at all. There are enough common
elements across different nations, however, to suggest that we can identify
some universal beliefs and ideals that defined “the Enlightenment” for most
people.
It is widely accepted that this period in European
history defined much of what we in the West now understand as “modernity.” In
other words, the Enlightenment effectively created the idea of the modern West
as most of us experience it today. For example, the separation of church and
state enshrined in most modern democracies was articulated most forcefully by
Enlightenment thinkers, along with ideas about religious tolerance and the
importance of individual liberty. Most of these changes were rooted in
conscious and deliberate reactions against the status quo that had prevailed in
Europe for centuries.
As we generally understand it today, to be enlightened
is to be modern and open-minded. This is no accident; the individuals at the
forefront of the Enlightenment modeled in their own lives a progressive ideal
that equated rationality and tolerance with modernity. Of course, this ideal
had limits. Notions of tolerance and liberty generally were applied only to
white men and existed in clear opposition to the practice of slavery which still existed in some European colonies during
the eighteenth century. Similarly, the famous cry of “Fraternity!” or
brotherhood that defined the spirit of the French Revolution at the end of the
eighteenth century excluded women and the poor. If the Enlightenment gave us
modernity, it also left us with some of the most enduring social problems of
the modern era, including racism, sexism, and a persistent lack of respect for
the working classes.
Though many people living in the Enlightenment applied
its ideals imperfectly, however, those same ideals still represent a profound
change in how Europeans understood their own society as well as the wider
universe. This was in part a culmination of some of the trends described in
previous chapters: for example, the slow but steady rejection of ancient
authority and its replacement by innovative methods of inquiry and
experimentation. At the same time, the strong connections between natural
philosophy, religion, and magic that had persisted for hundreds of years became
deeply and irrevocably strained in the eighteenth century. Some of the most
outspoken Enlightenment thinkers dismissed both organized religion and magical
beliefs as ignorant superstition, even as they quietly integrated elements of
earlier magical philosophies and practices into the new and powerful natural
philosophy that came to dominate the eighteenth century.
The emphasis on reason in the Enlightenment tended to
privilege particular ways of thinking about the world and, in turn, created new
institutions and priorities for European society. If someone wanted to argue
that the application of reason was crucial to the development of a new and
enlightened nation-state, then public education would need to change in order
to cultivate a properly rational mindset in that nation’s citizens. Disciplines
that had already embraced the exercise of reason, such as the physical and
mathematical sciences, could now act as important exemplars for other
disciplines, meaning that educated people began to emphasize quantitative
methods and approaches in fields like biology, chemistry, and anthropology. At
the same time, anything that might endanger the exercise of reason,
particularly the irrational belief in religious dogma or the divine basis for
the monarchy, needed to be minimized or suppressed. To varying degrees, all of
these changes happened in different places during the Enlightenment.
While self-consciously removed obvious traces of
religion and magic from the wider study of nature, they denigrated ideas that
they found objectionable or incompatible with their “age of reason,” calling
them ignorant or superstitious. Nevertheless, the world inhabited by these
enlightened thinkers was as filled with enchantment as it had been for people
living in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. What people had once called
“magic,” the Enlightenment called “science.” The triumphal narrative of the
Enlightenment, written first by “the enlightened” themselves and then taken up
by those who came after them, depicted a glorious
new world ruled by reason and liberty, free from the tyranny of ignorance,
superstition, and mindless tradition. This rhetoric, all but overflowing with a
shining kind of idealism, is compelling even now, it seems familiar to many of
us today, perhaps because we still find traces of these ideals in many of the
institutions of the modern West. Ultimately, though, the Enlightenment was more
complicated and contradictory than this narrative suggests. Its proponents and
supporters tried to make a new world, and in some ways, they succeeded. In
other ways, however, they did not. Not unlike the natural philosophers who
tried to overthrow Aristotle in the seventeenth century but whose worldviews
were shaped irrevocably by the very thing they wanted to dismantle, the great
thinkers and reformers of the Enlightenment never quite escaped the society
they wanted to transform. True liberty and freedom were still reserved for the
elite few, while the pursuit of “reason” justified ideas that were decidedly
irrational.
And whatever the successes and failures of the great
project that was the Enlightenment, it is worth looking back over the preceding
centuries to remind ourselves how radically the world changed for European
people. Whereby the influence of classical antiquity was where the European
gaze was fixed on the distant past, by the middle of the eighteenth century,
Europe was in the midst of another cultural movement defined instead by a gaze
directed to the horizon ahead. Nevertheless, the ancient world has never lost its
hold on the Western imagination, at least not entirely. From the eighteenth
century, there have been periodic revivals of classical themes in architecture,
art, philosophy, and literature, and to this day millions of people admire
pieces of classical statuary in museums and galleries or visit sites like the
Acropolis of Athens and the Roman Colosseum.
Where the influence of antiquity has waned is in our
collective understanding of the natural world. The preeminence of Aristotle,
Ptolemy, and Galen lasted for almost 2,000 years, there increasingly where
individuals who sought to understand the cosmos in ways that were different
from the philosophies of antiquity. In histories of the “Scientific
Revolution,” men like Copernicus, Paracelsus, Descartes, and Francis Bacon are
hailed as reformers and innovators who carved modernity from the solid, weighty
philosophies of the past in the same way that the artist Michelangelo
(1475–1564) described freeing a sculpture hidden within a block of marble with
chisel and mallet. These attempts to abandon the teachings of the ancients were
often imperfect or limited, but taken together they represent a crucial shift
in the European mindset that paved the way for new ways of studying and
understanding the world.
An informed and educated citizenry
The Enlightenment vision of an informed and educated
citizenry drove a series of developments in the eighteenth century that opened
up the methods and discoveries of science to larger and larger audiences. A
member of the middle classes living in 1750 would have been exposed to
mainstream scientific ideas in a way that hardly existed a century earlier.
Information was now conveyed in the vernacular rather than in Latin, and
natural philosophers recognized an opportunity both to educate the public and
to secure sources of financial support and social prestige by staging
demonstrations and exhibitions open to everyone, including women and children.
More than at any previous point in European history, the average person living
in the eighteenth century had opportunities to see and understand the new world
described by mathematicians, taxonomists, and geologists.
Some classical philosophies, like Aristotelianism, had
virtually no room whatsoever for a deity, while others, like Epicureanism, had
as their goal the diminution or rejection of divine causation in the universe.
With the widespread acceptance of Christianity in the early centuries of the
Common Era, however, large numbers of people started to consider the role of an
omnipotent, omniscient God in the natural world. Some ancient philosophies of
nature, like that of Plato and his Neoplatonist followers, lent themselves
relatively easily to the Christian conception of a singular and all-powerful
deity, but European philosophers and theologians in the Middle Ages struggled
to reconcile the teachings of pagans such as Aristotle with the foundations of
Christian belief and doctrine. The intellectual flourishing of the Renaissance,
sparked by the recovery of ideas and texts new to Western Europe, included a
deep fascination with the prisca sapientia,
the ancient wisdom of Creation. Philosophers as disparate as Marsilio Ficino, John Dee, Francesco Patrizi, and Robert Fludd sought to bypass centuries of degeneration and touch
the mind of God by reading the Book of Nature in new and powerful ways, guided
by those with an older and more perfect understanding.
The chaos of the Reformation and the splintering of
Christendom made that task more difficult as there was now widespread and
acrimonious disagreement about the very nature of faith. Thus, from the
sixteenth century onward we see a shift in how people understood the
relationship between God and His creation. Philosophers and naturalists
remained as pious as before; consider Johannes Kepler “thinking God’s thoughts
after Him,” or Paracelsus wandering the world in search of the divine secrets
hidden in nature. Yet, the religious anxieties that led Dee to converse with
angels, that landed Galileo in front of the Inquisition, and that drove both Descartes
and Gassendi to demonstrate the presence of God in
their mechanical philosophies all suggest that the relationship between God and
nature, once assured, was now the subject of question and doubt. When Newton
suggested that comets were sent periodically by God to correct imbalances in
the vast cosmic machine, yet another attempt to demonstrate God’s presence, the
German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) accused Newton of making God
seem like an inferior mechanic forced to tinker with an imperfect universe. In
Leibniz’s outrage, we catch a glimpse of profound anxiety that existed around
the turn of the eighteenth century, one motivated by depictions of God as mere
caretaker, winding up the cosmic watch and then walking away.
Newton, however, was committed absolutely to the idea
that the Creator remained present in His creation, proposing at one point that
universal gravitation was the invisible hand of God at work in the cosmos.
There is a deep irony, then, in the fact that many philosophers in the
eighteenth century interpreted the Newtonian universe as one ruled not by God,
but by mathematics and reason. The rise of deism and its distant, unknowable
God went hand-in-hand with the proliferation of Newtonian science, thanks in
part to efforts by leading Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and Diderot to
separate organized religion from secular institutions. In response, some
theologians and philosophers proposed new evidence for the presence of God. For
example, the English clergyman William Paley (1743–1805) published his Natural
Theology: or, Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity in 1802 and
argued that the presence of design in nature was clear evidence for the
existence of God. Paley is known today for his “watchmaker analogy,” which
claims that the intricate complexity found in many living things must be the
result of deliberate design rather than chance or accident, and which remains a
central idea held by present-day proponents of creationism and “intelligent
design.”
For all of these developments, however, the typical
European person in the eighteenth century had a religious outlook that was
largely unchanged from that held by previous generations. Most Christians went
to church each week, followed the teachings of the Bible, and shared an
understanding of God that would not have been out of place in the seventeenth
century. Popular religious movements such as Pietism or the revivalist fervor
of the Great Awakenings were grassroots affairs, inspired not by sophisticated theologies
but by broad social trends and attitudes. In some cases, however, changes to
religious attitudes and practices had their roots in the ideas of the educated
elite, as in the increasing emphasis on religious tolerance that was encouraged
and mandated by Enlightened monarchs and governments.
For most people, then, the unseen hand of God remained
present in the universe. They were untroubled by the problem of occult or
hidden causes that had preoccupied generations of philosophers and theologians.
Even in antiquity, Aristotle and Plato had struggled to define not just the
role of hidden causes in the universe but also the question of how to study
phenomena that could be known only by their effects. The universe bequeathed to
the eighteenth century by Isaac Newton solved this problem not by banishing or
revealing occult causes, however; on the contrary, he made occult causation
central to his philosophy. When Leibniz criticized Newton’s explanation for
universal gravitation as lacking a clear description of its causes, the latter
agreed that his work described “general Laws of Nature” whose “Causes be not
yet discovered.” In fact, Newton seemed unconcerned that the causes for
gravitation were hidden. His natural philosophy described the effects of gravity
on the matter, what he called “manifest Qualities”, while conceding that “their
Causes…are occult.”3 Thus, Newton resolved the problem of occult or hidden
causes by suggesting that it was not a problem at all. Someone could use
Newtonian methods to measure and understand gravity’s behavior without needing
to know anything at all about what caused it.
That Newton was able to sideline or ignore the problem
of occult causation owes a significant debt to the mechanical philosophies that
had appeared some decades earlier. The tiny atoms of Gassendi
or the invisible corpuscles of Descartes were no less occult than the
sympathies and correspondences of the hermeticists or
the hidden properties of the Aristotelians; none of these things were visible
to ordinary perception. Yet, there had been relatively little concern from
contemporaries that these mechanical causes for natural phenomena were hidden
from sight – even if Cartesian corpuscles remained invisible, someone still
could infer their motions and behaviors by reference to natural laws and
geometrical principles. The widespread acceptance of mechanical explanations
for natural phenomena meant that, by the latter decades of the seventeenth
century, mainstream philosophies of nature had already embraced occult causes.
It was hardly more problematic for Newton to describe the action of an
invisible force such as gravity on similarly invisible pieces of matter.
Thus, the Newtonian universe was one in which occult
causation was the rule and not the exception.2 By 1750, most of the European
middle classes understood the universe to be a vast expanse in which the Earth
was merely one planet among many. What a difference from the small contained
cosmos known to the educated elite of the Middle Ages, which ended just beyond
Saturn’s orbit at the sphere of the fixed stars. In such a realm, where
humanity was both the literal and figurative center of everything, the
interconnectedness of the premodern world made a deep and intuitive sense to
many people. The relationship between microcosm and macrocosm, the practice of
sympathetic magic, the influence of the heavens on human health, personalities,
and events, all sprang from an understanding of the universe in which
everything had its proper and natural place within a complex web of
correspondences and associations. By and large, however, Enlightenment
philosophers rejected the mystical and spiritual elements of the Renaissance
worldview in which humanity, Nature, and God all existed as part of an
interconnected whole. What persisted into the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries was a desire to understand humanity’s place in the wider universe.
Attempts by the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) to
understand all life in the context of evolutionary change, by Carl Linnaeus to
integrate humans into biological taxonomies, and by Georges Cuvier to reconcile
human history with geological and paleontological discoveries all suggest that
this theme of interconnectedness was transmuted rather than dismantled. Humanity
had been displaced from the center of the physical universe by the ideas of
Copernicus and Galileo, but metaphorically we humans remained the polestar
around which all of Nature revolved.
1.“The Fragmentation of Renaissance Occultism and the
Decline of Magic,” in History of Science 46 (2008): 1–48.
2. Sir David Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writings
and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (Edinburgh, 1855), vol. 2, pp.
374–5.
3. Isaac Newton, Opticks,
Based on the Fourth Edition London, 1730 (New York: Dover Publications, 1952),
Book III, Part I, Query 31, p. 401.
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