Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, considered the
founding father of western esotericism (Frazer's Golden Bough called it
sympathetic magic and Brian Copenhaver 1990, more soberly `occultism') was
twenty-three years old when he first proposed his thesis centered on
a Christian Cabalah mistitled Oration on the
Dignity of Man (initially Oration in Praise of Philosophy) at Rome
in 1486. This was followed by the suspension of a proposed debate, by
Pope Innocent VIII; Pico's publication of his 900 thesis, the appointment
of a high-level papal commission to investigate Pico's orthodoxy; his flight
from Rome; his capture, excommunication, and imprisonment in France; the intervention
of the French court and Lorenzo de' Medici on his behalf; his provisional
release and escape to Florence; and so on. Parallels have been drawn to
Galileo's fate nearly a hundred and fifty years later, and the story fits in
nicely with old romantic images of the Renaissance.
One of the central
elements in Picos thesis was the traditional belief
that the deepest meanings of sacred texts transcended their outer sense and
indeed might extend to the isolated shapes of letters. Thus in Pico's first or
historical set of Cabalistic theses, we find that there is no letter or even
part of a letter in the Torah that does not conceal divine secrets; in his
second set, presented "according to his own opinion," Pico was
prepared to unveil the Christian truths that Moses hid in the Law in the order
of otherwise trivial words (like the Hebrew word for "then"), or even
in single strokes of single letters (as in the closed form of the letter mem).
Every stroke of every letter in the Torah contains Christian secrets-supplying
ammunition "against the rude slander of the Hebrews," "leaving
them no corner in which to hide."
Following the fact
that numbers were represented by letters in Semitic languages and Greek,
various techniques commonly known as gematria were developed in antiquity for
transforming words and texts through their numerical values. Thus the
numerical values of words or letters could be added up or operated on
arithmetically in other ways to hide or reveal secret messages in texts-this
was the method used in Revelation 13:18 to hide the secret name of the Beast-or
other messages could be concealed or uncovered by substituting one letter for
another using fixed numerical procedures.
Others like Edelman
in 1973 proposed that in fact Pico in his 900 thesis attempted to
harmonize texts building complex hierarchical and correlative
models reflected the nature of his own neurological processes. In
other words that there would be neurobiological grounds of imitative magic,
animistic religious thought, and other primitive correlative concepts including
the universal microcosm/macrocosm theme. Models of how these concepts
were successively transformed in literate traditions, would then be
a foundation for possible cross-cultural models of the
evolution of premodern religious and philosophical systems. To discuss this
further would go beyond a basic history of ideas this five
part Esoterica 2004 series (for the first time ever), presents.
Pico's magical
system, was closely tied to his mystical and eschatological thought,
and the esoteric side of his work was studied intensely for nearly two
hundred years after his death, with scores of writers from Johann Reuchlin and
Agrippa von Nettesheim to John Dee, Giovanni Della
Porta, Francesco Patrizi, Robert Fludd, and Athanasius
Kircher plagiarizing mercilessly from Pico's magical and Cabalistic theses or
from his discussions of natural magic and Cabala in the Oration.
And
as mentioned, the interpretation of Pico's magic in Frances Yates's,
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964 was deeply indebted to the
German work by Panofsky and Sax published by the Warburg Institute in
Leipzig 1923. Thus in Yates's formulation, Pico first adopted Ficino's
"natural magic" and then added to this his own "Cabalistic
magic," which completed the foundations of all later Renaissance magical
traditions. While other sides of Yates's reading of Renaissance magic have
been heavily criticized already in 1980s (especially the role she assigned in it to so called
Hermetism), her views of Pico's magic and its links
to Ficino's work however have not until Brian Copenhaver's 1997 study of
magic in Pico's Cabalistic theses, in Giovanni Pico della
Mirandola: Convegno internazionale di studi nel cinquecentesimo anniversario della morte (1494-1994). Vol. 1 pp. 213-36) to which I am
indebted, including the 1998, Syncretism in the West by S.A.Farmer and Michael Bentley, Companion to
Historiography, 1997.
Following Panofsky
and Sax published in 1923, Yates associated Renaissance magia naturalis rather narrowly
with the particular brand (or brands) of astrological magic found in Marsilio Ficino's De vita coelitus
comparanda (On Obtaining Life Celestially)-the last
of the three treatises in Ficino's medical compilation De vita Yates traced the
origins of the revival of magic she pictured in the Renaissance to Ficino's
translation in 1463 of the Corpus Hermeticum, whose
religious associations "rehabilitated" medieval magic, turning
"that old dirty magic" into the "learned" and
"religious" magic of the later De vita coelitus
comparanda.
As Ficino's disciple,
Pico "imbibed from Ficino his enthusiasm for magia
naturalis which he accepted and recommended much
more forcibly and openly than did Ficino," adding to this his own
"Cabalistic magic," which tapped forces "beyond the natural
powers of the universe," invoking "angels, archangels, the ten
sephiroth which are names or powers of God, God himself, by means some of which
are similar to other magical procedures, but more particularly through the
power of the sacred Hebrew language." By fusing Ficino's natural magic
with his own Cabalistic magic, in Yates's eyes, Pico completed the basic
arsenal of the Renaissance magician. Pico's Oration-his preface to his Roman
debate-was, in fact, "the great charter of Renaissance Magic, of the new
type of magic introduced by Ficino and completed by Pico."
Yates attempted to
tie Pico's magic to the growth of modern technological attitudes. Behind this
side of her thesis lay another version of the romantic theme that "Renaissance
man" developed a powerful "philosophy of will":
It was now dignified
and important for man to operate; it was also religious and not contrary to
the will of God that man, the great miracle, should exert his powers. It was
this basic psychological reorientation towards a direction of the will which
was neither Greek nor mediaeval in spirit, which made all the difference.
According to Yates,
Pico thus brought mankind to a critical turning point in history:
between Pico's
earlier magical writings and Ficino's later ones. In the same place, they also
endorse the view that following his troubles with the, church "Pico soon
renounced magic and such astrology as he had ever believed in."
To show how Yates
thesis was riddled with problems, let us look at even a
small part like the above a bit closer:
A. Pico wrote his
magical works before Ficino wrote his. The first problem involves an
unfortunate chronological oversight. The fact that no one has made much of it
in the thirty years of debates over Yates's work underscores the power of the
traditional view that Pico was Ficino's disciple: The De vita coelitus comparandaFicino's only
magical treatise, and our sole source of information concerning his magia naturalis-was not written
until some two-and`-a-half years after Pico introduced his own magical thought
in the nine hundred theses, Oration, and Apology-" One might argue that
Pico learned his magia naturalis
from Ficino through their personal contacts in Florence. But in the period in
which Pico composed his three magical texts, in the fall and winter of
1486-1487, he was not near Florence, nor had he spent more than a month there
at the most since mid-1485.(1)
Ficino and Pico did
keep in touch part of this time through letters and intermediaries. But
relations between them in this period were at their lowest point ever, as we
find from their letters and from the criticism that Pico aimed at Ficino in the
Commento, Oration, and nine hundred theses, which
were all written in the fall and winter of 1486-1487.
If Pico did learn his
natural magic from Ficino, then, he must have done so at a minimum some four
years before Ficino wrote his only magical work. Assuming that Ficino's views
on magic were the same in 1485 as in 1489-a doubtful assumption, given his
well-known vacillations on the subject-from what we know of relations between
the two writers, the last thing we would expect in 1486 would be to find Pico
endorsing those views. Support for this interpretation shows up in the nine
hundred theses, where Pico brags of the magic that he "first
discovered" in the Orphic Hymns-another apparent slap at Ficino, who had
composed an earlier, nonmagical, commentary on the Hymns of which Pico
certainly had knowledge." Further evidence on this point shows up in the Heptaplus, where Pico rejects magic using astrological
talismans, whose use Ficino endorsed a few months later in the De vita coelitus comparanda.ss Ficino in
fact alludes to the Heptaplus in that text, and hence
was aware of Pico's attack, which came in a period in which the two
philosophers were in regular contact.' If Pico and Ficino triggered a magical
revival in this period-a claim that we will look at shortly-then it must have
been Pico and not Ficino who started it. Pico himself, in fact, pointedly
suggests something like this more than once in the nine hundred theses and
Apology.
B. Pico's did not
view Mercury (Hermes) Trismegistus as a magician. Another problem in Yates's
model (one by now widely recognized) involved what she pictured as the Hermetic
sources of that revival. We can leave aside the question here, which has been
discussed by other scholars, of how far Ficino's own magic was Hermetic, except
to note the large number of non-Hermetic magical sources cited in the De vita coelitus comparanda (Galen, al-Kindi, Albumasar, Thabit, Haly, Avicenna, Albert the Great, Arnald
of Villanova, Peter of Abano, etc.) or to recall that
Ficino claimed that his work was part of his commentary-in-progress on
Plotinus- a work that Ficino tells us was begun at Pico's urging.
Attempts to identify
Pico's magia naturalis with
Hermetism-a tradition that Pico closely associated
with Ficino-rest on even less solid grounds. In the Oration and Apology Pico
provides us with a long list of maocians who might be
reasonably viewed as the sources of this side of his thought. In this class
"among the moderns" Pico singles out three writers who had
"scented out" magia naturalisal-Kindi
in the ninth century and William of Paris (William of Auvergne) and Roger Bacon
in the thirteenth." The Apology also mentions one of Pico's contemporaries-not
Ficino, but a mutual friend, Antonius Chronicus
(Antonio Vinciguerra)-as someone who had mastered
natural magic in Pico's own day .'9 The Apology elsewhere associates magic with
still another "modem," Albert the Great 6° Pico further lists as
ancient magicians-drawing this time from Pliny, Apuleius, Porphyry, and similar
late-ancient sources-Homer, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, Plato, Zalmosis, Zoroaster, Eudoxus, Hermippus, Apollonius of Tyana,
Plotinus, and several minor Pythagoreans.61 He also makes much in the nine
hundred theses, Oration, and Apology of his "discovery" of magic in
the Orphic Hymns and Cabala.
What is remarkable in
these lists is that virtually the only prominent priscus
theologus who is not listed as a magician is Hermes
Trismegistus! The one clear reference to Hermetic magic in Pico's early works-a
negative one---shows up in the Apology, where Pico repeats a complaint from
William of Auvergne's De universo concerning the
Egyptians' use of illegal magic invoking demons. Going to Pico's source, we
find that William's target was a famous passage on enticing demons into idols
found in the Hermetic Asclepius-a text that Yates viewed as a central catalyst
in the Renaissance magical revival. Significantly, none of the ten conclusions
that Pico attributes in his theses to Mercury Trismegistus contains any of the
astrological magic that Ficino associated with that figure .6' Finally, in
Pico's posthumously published Disputations against Divinatory Astrology,
magical works attributed "by some" to Hermes are treated with scom.
Given the wide range
of magical texts already available in the Middle Agesincluding
the long list of Greek, Arabic, and Latin authors provided by Pico and the
ancient and medieval medical, astrological, and philosophical sources cited by
Ficino-it is not clear in what way a magical revival was needed in the
Renaissance. If as evidence for such a revival we point to the expanded magical
syntheses of the later Renaissance that included Cabala, then again it was Pico
and not Ficino who must be credited with having started it." Obviously,
fresh Renaissance translations of Greek magical and theurgic treatises already
indirectly underlying medieval magic, the most important translated by Ficino
after Pico's proposed debate, added fuel to the enthusiasm for the occult in
the later Renaissance. This was especially true as the printing press made
wide distribution of these sources and their broader syntheses in magical
handbooks like Agrippa von Nettesheim's possible for
the first time. But this phenomenon was not dependent on the recovery of any
privileged set of Hermetic (or non-Hermetic) texts. This interpretation is
confirmed by the enormous popularity in the later Renaissance of the same
medieval Arabic and Latin magical treatises that lay at the foundations of much
of Pico's and Ficino's magical systems-works attributed to al-Kindi, William of Paris, Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, and
so on-which apart from the absence in them of Cabala are virtually
indistinguishable from Renaissance magical texts. A number of these medieval
treatises were, in fact, first printed in the sixteenth century and gained
unprecedented circulation in an appendix to Agrippa von Nettesheim's
popular magical handbook.(4)
C. The mechanisms of
Pico's natural magic differed from Ficino's. Another part of Yates's model
involves the mechanisms that she associated with natural magicabove
all, given the stress she put on Ficino's text, mechanisms of a celestial
sort. Yates pointed to the spiritus mundi or "world spirit" as
the medium by which celestial powers flowed into the terrestrial realm. (5)
Part of Western magic
was indeed "spiritual magic" of this sort , t especially the
medical-magical traditions adopted in Ficino's medical compilation, in which
the spiritus mundi provided a handy link between the celestial world and the
quasi-physical spirits binding body and soul in Greek, Arabic, and Latin
medicine. But the spiritus mundi was only one of a large number of mechanisms
used to explain these interactions. Numerous ancient, medieval, and Renaissance
magical tracts refer vaguely to stellar rays (radii) or influences (influxus) without mentioning the spiritus mundi at all.
Others ignore the problem of transmission completely, considering the mere
existence of cosmic correspondences as a sufficient explanation for the
magical powers found in the world. In other texts, interactions between the
celestial and terrestrial worlds are depicted in a quasi-mechanical fashion,
with direct contact between the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic spheres, ending in the
derived motion of the lunar orb, "churning" the four sublunary
elements and hence transmitting celestial effects into the material world.
Still other works, tied less directly to astrological models, invoke the
Neo-Platonic "vehicle" (or "body of the soul") as a magical
bond between man and the Platonic "world soul" (anima mundi), which
penetrated the whole of the created realm." Other treatises, which are
strikingly similar in a wide range of Eurasian cultures, develop elaborate
theories of musical-magical resonances that link heaven and the earth.
This list of
mechanisms could be greatly expanded. In a typical syncretic fashion,
Renaissance magical treatises commonly collected conflicting or partially
conflicting accounts of magical transmission from older sources and combined
them with varying degrees of systematic consistency. Much evidence shows that
Pico's nine hundred theses and Ficino's De vita coelitus
comparanda, despite their many other differences,
both fall squarely in this category.
Given its extreme
syncretic nature, the text of the nine hundred theses predictably invokes a
large number of magical mechanisms: the Neo-Platonic "vehicle" or
body of the soul, cosmic or stellar "influxes," and many others.
Curiously, however, one mechanism that does not show up in Pico's text is the
spiritus mundi, which according to Yates lay at the center of Ficino's magia naturalis..(7)
Pico believed that
music-which he associated with one at least one kind of magic-operated on the
soul through its quasi-physical "spirits," another idea that has been
claimed as original to Ficino's later magical work. This minor point aside, however,
these theses do not suggest that the spiritus mundi played any role in Pico's
magical thought. In his posthumously published Disputations against Divinatory
Astrology, it is true, Pico does speak of a "celestial spirit" (caelestis spiritus)-if not a spiritus mundi-that transmits
forces of some sort into the lower world. Yates, claims that the Disputations
repeats "what is practically Ficino's theory of astral influences borne on
a `celestial spirit'," and based on that claim proposes a sweeping
reinterpretation of the Disputations-which explicitly, at least, attacks
magic--as a hidden defense of "Ficinian `astral
magic" and "a vindication of Magia naturalis." D.P.Walker
Spiritual and Demonic Magic From Ficino to Campanella(1958), whom Yates miscites on this point, noted a
critical distinction between Pico's caelestis
spiritus and Ficino's spiritus mundi-a distinction that in Walker's eyes, at
least, rendered Pico's version of that concept useless in magic. Due to the
infirmity of the lower world, Pico's "celestial spirit" could affect
sublunary objects in only a general way; all individual properties arose from
unpredictable material differences in nature. Walker writes:
One could not,
therefore, on [Pico's] view, say that any particular herb, sound or food was
more solarian or venereal than any other, nor use [Pico's caelestis
spiritus] to transform one's own spirit, as Ficino proposed:
nor could one
consider oneself as specially subject to the influence of any one planet.(p.25)
Walker rather overstates
the case, however, at least in respect to Pico's early thought, although this
is not to claim that Pico repudiated all forms of celestial magic, as Farmer
points out in Syncretism in the West he did not-however Farmers
translation also shows that Pico‘s concept of magia
naturalis was significantly different from the magia naturalis discussed in
Ficino's later work.
4. Yates misread Pico's
views of magic and Cabala. Yates oversimplified other important parts of Pico's
magical thought, including his views of "practical Cabala," or what
Yates labeled "Cabalistic magic" (a phrase not used by Pico himscjlf Starting from the assumption that Pico's magia naturalis was celestial
magic like Ficino's, Yates argued that his practical Cabala "attempted to
tap the higher spiritual powers, beyond the natural powers of the
universe," invoking for magical ends angels, archangels, and the powers of
"God himself."
Pico did distinguish
the powers of Cabala from those of natural magic, but that distinction did not
involve a simple identification of magia naturalis with astrological powers or Cabala with higher
ones. Instead, as we would expect from his syncretic system, Pico acknowledged
many different types of natural magic and Cabala that possessed complex and
overlapping roles. Thus while Pico hints that one kind of Cabala invoked
intellectual or angelic powers,82 as Yates tells us, he also discusses at
length another part "that concerns the powers of celestial bodies."
He also tells us that one side of his magia naturalis involved "the powers and activities of
natural agents"-that is, sublunary forces-suggesting again that his
natural magic did not deal solely with the celestial or astral realm."
Moreover, Pico went to extraordinary lengths-for obvious reasons, given the
location of his planned debate at the Vatican-to deny that the magus had direct
access to God's power, except in the general sense that God was the ultimate
source of all magic.
Yates tells usfurther that "what exactly he meant by this amazing
statement is nowhere fully explained," although she speculates that the
thesis might be tied to a concept "of the Eucharist as a kind of Magia." If Yates were right, this would have been a
particularly hard sell for Pico at Rome. In fact, however, Pico explained his
views on this issue in detail in Pico’s Apology.
And the fact that
Christ performed miracles, and did so supernaturally, is known to us
exclusively through the testimony of Scripture. If, however, any human sciences
can help us confirm Christ's divinity, these are natural magic and that part of
Cabala that is not a revealed science. The rest of Pico's defense distinguishes
sharply between the powers of natural magic and God's divine powers-presumably
why Yates chose not to cite this passage in her study:
For [to know] this,
that Christ's miracles test to us his divinity, it is first necessary to
recognize that they were not accomplished through any natural power but only
through the power of God. Second, it is necessary to know that Christ had that
power from himself and not from anything else. In [regard to] the first
[point], no human science can help us more than that which understands the
powers and activities of natural agents, and their mutual applications and
proportions, and their natural strengths, and recognizes what they can and
cannot do through their own power. And among the human sciences, the science
that knows the most about this is the one that I call "natural
magic"-on which my conclusions were posited-and that part of the Cabala
that concerns the powers of celestial bodies. Because through these it is known
that those works that Christ performed could not be done by means of natural
powers.
The fact that Pico
originally planned to defend his thesis on Christ's divinity in this pedestrian
fashion-and was not backtracking in the Apology to save his skinis
confirmed by the wording of the two theses that immediately precede it in his
magical conclusions. The second of these (the orthodoxy of the first was never
questioned) was reluctantly admitted by the papal commission to be "true
and tolerable," although it complained that the thesis could easily
"be taken to a bad sense, since it is connected with magical things".
Pico believed that
one part of Cabala drew down not only celestial powers but powers in the
intellectual or angelic nature as well; evidence also shows that Pico thought
that part of natural magic tapped celestial as well as sublunary forces.
Recognition of hierarchical distinctions of power in both natural magic and
Cabala was a predictable feature of Pico's syncretic system and is repeatedly
suggested in the theses themselves. With this granted, the evidence shows that
the two central claims in Yates's reading of Pico's magic-her identification of
his magia naturalis with
Ficino's celestial magic and her association of his "practical
Cabala" exclusively with powers "beyond the stars"are
both fundamentally in error.
5. Pico's magic was
not operative in any simple sense. Yates's interpretation of Pico's magic lies
in her picture of its goals and historical significance. Like Walker before
her, Yates admitted that much of Pico's magic was more concerned with
regenerating the soul than with material manipulation of the world. But she
also claimed that Pico "formulated a new position for European man"
in his magic, endorsing operational views of nature that paved the way for
modern science.
One problem in this
interpretation arises from its assumptions about what Pico and other
Renaissance magi meant by magical "works." One side of Renaissance
magic-although this was equally true of ancient and medieval magic-could be
plausibly linked to modem science insofar as it aimed in some way at improving
the conditions of human life. We only need to think here of the medical magic
in the ancient and medieval medical works drawn on by both Pico and Ficino.89
Outside of this clearly operative side of magic; however, Renaissance writers
also used the term magical "works" to describe different ways of
acquiring occultknowledge, sought for contemplative
or prophetic reasons more often than for material ends.
One such type of
"magic" involved esoteric means of textual exegesis; thus Pico's
theses on the Orphic hymns are entitled "Thirty-one conclusions according
to my own opinion on understanding the Orphic hymns according to magic, that
is, the secret wisdom of divine and natural things first discovered in them by
me".
The magical
"work" in these theses-which apparently involved gematria or other
word-number translations to calculate the seven ages of the world (one
symbolized by each "god")-refers to prophetic exegesis and not to
material operations of any quasi-technological sort. Much of Pico's magic was
clearly of this variety and can be included in the "practical part of
natural science" that he identified with magia naturails only in the sense that it involved an esoteric
means of reading texts. Indeed, Pico apparently viewed any exegetical method
that yielded secret wisdom as just as magical as the celestial magic discussed
by Yates.
In his attack on
Pico's theses, Petruss Garcias
(1489:) adopted a succinct definition of magic that balanced the prophetic and
material sides of magic-and which probably could have been accepted by Pico
himself "Magia secundum communiter
loquentes est ars cognoscendi et divinandi occulta faciendique
magna et mirifica in natura" [Magic according to
the common way of speaking is the art of knowing and divining hidden things and
of making great and wonderous things in nature].
It was evidently this
kind that Pico had in mind when, drawing on Porphyry, he tells us that in the
Persian language magus means "interpreter and worshipper of divine things."This natural magic seeks out "the hid
Taken together it is
a mistake to think that such operations have much in common with modem science
as Yates next proceeds to suggest. Later Renaissance magi living on the edge of
the scientific revolution, like Giovanni Della Porta, might have considered
magic as a way for man "to control his destiny through science," to
recall Yates's words. But we have seen too much of Pico to expect to find him
supporting this view. Why should "divine" man, who was capable of
union with God, become involved in the material realm?
The answer to this
question underlines a profound difference between typical premodern and modem
attitudes towards nature. The magus, as Pico pictured him, was not a
transformer of nature but its "minister." Following the principle
that "every inferior nature is governed by whatever is immediately
superior to itself," mankind, according to Pico, is ruled by the lowest
order of angels and in turn is entrusted with governing the material world. Once
the soul has been elevated by philosophical studies to the contemplative seat
of the Cherubim, it is prepared to rise to God like the Serafim and descend to
the world like angelic Thrones, "well instructed and prepared, to the
duties of action."
The operative side of
Pico's magic thus is best interpreted in terms of the traditional concepts of
cosmic fall and redemption, which are discussed in a Christological context in
the Heptaplus.96 Just as the whole universe was corrupted by the fall of man-a
result of the cosmic correspondences in the "man the microcosm" concept-so
following his mystical purification homo magus receives the power to raise
fallen nature with himself, to "actuate" and "unite" the
cosmos, "to marry the world" just as Christ "marries" the
soul prepared by philosophy for the mystical ascent. The suggestion is that the
operative side of Pico's magic was linked to a general plan for cosmic
salvation-a view fitting in perfectly with the eschatological goals of his
Vatican debate.
As I explained,
Pico's magical writings antedated Ficino's by several years, developed a view
of "natural magic" that was significantly different from Ficino's,
and from the start included a wider range of magical traditions (including
Cabala) than that found in Ficino's later magical works. And Yates's claim that
Pico's magic prepared the way for scientific attitudes towards the world-simply
a new twist on an old Burckhardtian theme-is difficult to reconcile with the
views that Pico advances of the magus as cosmic priest.
In fact Brian Vickers
in his Scientific
Mentalities in the Renaissance(1984),
already stressed that the distinction between occult and nonoccult
science was clear even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and he
rejects any historical model in which modern science might be seen as emerging
out of an occult or magical view of nature or in which the occult work of
various early modern scientists (most notably Newton) might be harmonized with
their non-occult science. It is erroneous, he asserts, either to seek any
connection between these two distinct systems of thought or to claim that
Renaissance occultism had any kind of positive role in the production of
scientific ideas or techniques. Vickers proceeds to offer a catalog of what he
sees as the fundamental distinctions that must be drawn between science and
magical occultism.
The first important
difference between science and occultism is that occult science is marked by
resistance to change. In Vickers's view, the scientific mentality depends on an
ability to reflect and to abstract and, in turn, to assimilate the results of
this reflection and abstraction (leading ultimately to an awareness of the very
process of theorizing itself). In this regard, he quotes Robin Horton on the
key difference between traditional African thought and Western science:
"In traditional cultures there is no developed awareness of alternatives
to the established body of theoretical tenets; whereas in scientifically
oriented cultures, such a awareness is highly
developed. It is this difference we refer to when we say that traditional
cultures are `closed' and scientifically oriented cultures `open."' In
Vickers's view, the closed system of the occult is "self-contained, a
homogeneity that has synthesized its various elements into a mutually
supporting relationship from which no part can be removed. Thus, the occult
system (like "African" and all other "traditional" systems)
is fundamentally conservative, blind to alternatives, and improperly holistic
in the synthetic sweep of its worldview.
Next Vickers asserts
that magical thought fails to acknowledge the proper boundaries between
language and reality, between human minds and materiality, between humanity
and the nonhuman world. While the scientific worldview clearly differentiates
literal and metaphorical meanings, in the occult tradition metaphors are
mistaken for realities, "words are equated with things, abstract ideas are
given concrete attributes." Magical occultism thus demonstrates a
tendency to think in nebulous and self-referential images rather than
appropriate forms of abstraction. Far from constituting "a disinterested
study of nature," the magical system is built on "a self-centered
concern" for human welfare. As Vickers states:
Much of occult
science, if I may sum up the conclusions of my own researches, is built out of
purely mental operations, the arrangement of items into hierarchies, the
construction of categories that become matrices for the production of further
categories. Far from being a science of nature, or even of man, it comes to
seem more and more like a classification system, self-contained and
self-referring.
Science maintains
clear differentiation between words and things and between literal and
metaphorical meanings, but occultism fails to acknowledge these boundaries.
Science and magical
occultism also differ in their responses to the failure of their predictions,
and here Vickers quotes Robin Horton: "In the theoretical thought of the
traditional cultures, there is a notable reluctance to register repeated
failures of prediction and to act by attacking the beliefs involved. Instead,
other current beliefs are utilized in such a way to `excuse' each failure as it
occurs, and hence to protect the major theoretical assumptions on which
prediction is based."
The progressivism of
science stands in sharp contrast to the stasis of the occult, and the two modes
of thought thus demonstrate radically divergent attitudes toward the past.
While traditional and occult thought holds the past in relatively high regard
(with the past often seen as a golden age of pure knowledge or simplicity), the
scientific view is dramatically different:
Vickers next turns to
anthropologist Ernest Gellner's "The Savage and the Modern Mind"
(1972) to trace a further set of differences between occult and scientific
thought. The occult system, Vickers explains, lacks abstraction; it relies too
much on the concrete properties of the objects rather than a more general,
second-order focus on the properties of explanation itself. Further, the occult
is by its nature secretive or hidden, cultivating obscurity. While scientific
thought is designed to be public and repeatable, the occult seeks to restrict
knowledge to adepts or initiates, and the knowledge it generates is personal
and idiosyncratic. And again, while the occult persists in using "anthropomorphic,
socio religious, or ethical categories" and characterizations, modern
science is "socially neutral" and "ill suited
for the underpinning of moral expectations, of a status- and value-system."
Science is superior to magical occultism because science disclaims parochial
social interests.
Further, in its
effort to account for the world in "homocentric, symbolic, and religious
terms," the occult seeks to form "totalities in which everything
mutually coheres." Science, on the other hand, "depends on a
classification of knowledge and language into various types" and into
separate components, and then applies different criteria of validity to these
respective domains. Thus, Vickers explains, "Primitive thought systems are
able to tolerate logical contradictions that would be unthinkable to a modern
European. 1179 Europeans avoid these contradictions, it appears, by segmenting
the world and various forms of knowledge into differentiated components and by
keeping these differences firmly in place.
As he concludes,
Vickers cites Gellner for two last distinctions between Vickers uses this
bifurcation of two antithetical modes of thought not only to consolidate the
identity of the modern scientist but also to consolidate a single form of
proper scientific thought. (Note, of course, that even as the differences among
various forms of magic collapse, the differences among various forms of science
also disappear.) The singular nature of scientific thought can then be used to
bolster the claim that modern science is ontologically distinct from all
preceding forms of "traditional" thought. Through this process, the
conclusions of Vickers's argument are largely determined by his reification of
a singular mode of scientific thought.
Yet this rigid
contrast between science and magic serves even more significant functions in
Vickers's argument. This abstract notion of science has little definition or
content until it is brought into contrast with its magical foil. It is actually
by means of his extended account of magic that Vickers is able to demarcate the
precise contours of science and to explain its nature. He here provides a vivid
example of the use of magic for the purpose of giving shape to a concept of
science.
Echoing innumerable
earlier theories of magic in philosophy and the social sciences, Vickers explains
to us that magic (of whatever cultural provenance) demonstrates a uniform and
consistent set of features (it is resistant to change, closed, unresponsive to
failure, traditionalist, inflexible, obscure, arrogant, morally biased). In
fact, magic epitomizes everything that science is not-or should not be.
This leads to a
further aspect of Vickers's argument that is worth underlining. While he has
explained that modern science is "socially neutral" and ill suited to serve as a tool in ethical or moral debates,
the same cannot be said of Vickers's own account. In fact, his catalog of the
contrasts between science and magic is characterized by a strident, and often
moralizing, tone. Science, he tells us, should relativize the content of its
theories (recognizing that this content is always contingent), but science's
own relativizing method appears to be beyond question. Vickers uses the
discussion of magical occultism as an opportunity to formulate and promote a
distinctive set of scientific values and ideals, and he spells out those ideals
and gives them rhetorical force through the deployment of magic as a foil. His
account of magical thought demonstrates an overriding concern with policing
human relations toward nature and technology. He offers a broad array of
normative declarations concerning the proper mode of scientific inquiry, the
appropriate shape of human engagement with the material world, and important
limits on human efforts to manipulate nature.
In The Scientific
Revolution (1994) then, Floris Cohen argues that one of the principal reasons
that scholars have been so exercised by questions surrounding hermetic magic is
that this topic opens onto broader questions concerning the role of science in
shaping the modern world. Should the Scientific Revolution be seen as
"the beneficial triumph of rational thought about nature" or as
"the agent chiefly responsible for the destructive handling of
nature".
On one hand, as Cohen
explains, we find historians holding the traditional, Enlightenment-inspired
view of early modern science as surmounting a premodern fear of nature with
"the quiet certainty that we know, and can predict, nature's
operations." Scholars in this tradition not only see science as a profoundly
liberating force but also view it as decisively distinct from earlier forms of
inquiry. Such scholars are eager to construct sharp boundaries between science
and magic. A rigid separation of these categories bolsters the distinctive and
singular nature of modern science.
Cohen argues, that
historians such as Frances Yates emphasize the links between early modern
science and magical thought because this very relation underscores that the new
technical insights of science came only through the suppression of alternative
perspectives on human identity and the human relation to nature.
As Cohen explains:
The persistence of
Hermetic patterns of thought throughout much of the 17th-century adventure in
science betrays an acute awareness, among many though not all of the pioneers
of the Scientific Revolution, that their new science, however irresistible in
its intellectual sweep, causes an attendant loss of insight into the endlessly
complex makeup of the human personality-not without consequences for man's
future handling of nature.... Throughout the history of western European
culture a dual attitude toward science can be discerned: the enthusiastic
embrace of science as the embodiment of our triumph over nature, accompanied by
bitter denunciations of science for its dehumanizing reductionism.
Of course at the
center of the Frances A. Yates claim over the role of hermetic magic in the
emergence of early modern science are competing visions of the nature and
effects of science in the modern world. One of the long-standing strategies for
delineating the nature of modern rationality is to juxtapose rationality with
magical thought. even magic aims at the reordering of a totality.
Having cleared this,
we shall next move on to a description of Picos
Christian Cabalism, that in contrast to the claim of Yates, predates that of
Ficino.
1)
Pico left Florence for the University of Paris in the summer of 1485, returning
to Italy in late March or early April 1486. After a brief stop in Florence, he
was in Arezzo by 10 May 1486, where he became involved in a famous scandal-the
so-called rape of Margherita-that ended with the death of a number of Pico's
retainers, with Pico's brief imprisonment in Arezzo, and with his temporary
retirement to Perugia and nearby Fratta, where he
composed the Commento, the Oration, and nine hundred
theses. Pico had no faceto-face contact again with
Ficino until 1488 (Farmer p. 118).
2)
At the end of June 1489, we find them together at the scholastic debate at
Lorenzo de' Medici's house, and by September of that year, Ficino, like Pico
two-and-a-half years earlier, was writing his own ecclesiastical Apology for
his magicprinted at the end of the De vita-which
concludes in part with a mock plea for help from his "Phoebus" Pico,
who he knew could slay this "poisonous Python" (Ficino's ecclesiastical
opponents) rising from the swamp "with a single shlh".
Given Pico's ongoing troubles with the church-Innocent VIII made it clear in
that year that he viewed the Heptaplus as no less
heretical than the nine hundred theses-it is impossible to miss the irony in
Ficino's words. (Farmer p.120)
3)
Pico was not prepared to acknowledge Hermes Trismegistus, whom Pico closely
linked with Ficino, as a real magician (Farmer p.122).
4)
Vol. 1 of Agrippa's Opera (repr. 1970), which corrlains the De ouulta
philosophia, is bound with a dozen or so other medieval and Renaissance magical
tracts including a commentary on book 30 of Pliny's Historia naturalis which (like so many other Renaissance magical
texts) plagiarizes heavily from Pico's Oration or Apology. The work also
includes other magical treatises attributed to medieval and Renaissance figures
including Gerhard of Cremona, Peter of Abano, and
Abbot Trithemius.
5)
Those terms are a bit misleading, since in Renaissance magical texts the words
"spiritual magic" or "spiritual science" generally
referred to magic involving angels and demons and not to magic transmitted
through the spiritus mundi.
6)
The spiritus mundi and closely related concepts (spiritus sanctus,
etc.) originated in primitive concepts of divine breath inherited from
preliterate animistic traditions. In their abstract manifestations in literate
times, these concepts became useful devices to rationalize the transmission of
magical forces in the cosmos; invocation of such devices was neither necessary
nor universal, however; interactions in imitative magic could be pictured as
being transmitted through any number of cosmic media-or through no medium at
all.
7) Given the
central role that historians have assigned to the spiritus rnundi
in Renaissance magic, however, it is noteworthy that the concept played no
role in the three earliest magical texts-Pico's nine hundred theses, Oration,
and Apology-that we have from any major Renaissance figure (Farmer p.124).
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