History of magic.
Isidore’s chapter on the Magi or magicians, which occurs in his eighth book on the church and divers sects, is a notable one, of whose great future influence we shall presently speak. His own borrowing here is only in small part from Pliny’s famous passage on the same theme. On such a subject Isidore naturally has recourse mainly to Christian writers: Augustine, Jerome, Lactantius, Tertullian. From the occasional similarity of his wording to these authors it seems fairly certain that his account is a patchwork from their works, and the context is too Christian to have been drawn in toto from some Roman encyclopedist now lost to us. Perhaps the most noteworthy point about Isidore’s chapter is that he has made magic and magicians the general and inclusive head under which he presently lists various other minor occult arts and their practitioners for separate definition. But first we have a longer discussion, though long only by comparison, of magic in general. Its history is sketched; Zoroaster and Democritus, as in Pliny, are mentioned as its founders, but it is not forgotten that the bad angels were really responsible for its dissemination. From the first Isidore identifies magic and divination; after stating that the magic arts abounded among the Assyrians, he quotes a passage from Lucan which speaks of the prevalence of liver divination, augury, divination from thunder, and astrology in Assyria. Also the magic arts are said to have prevailed over the whole world for many centuries through their prediction of the future and invocation of the dead. Brief allusion is further made to Moses and Pharaoh’s magicians, to the invocation of Samuel by the witch of Endor, to Circe and the comrades of Ulysses, and to several other passages in classical literature anent magic.
Definition of magic.
Next comes a formal definition of the Magi. They are “those who are popularly called malefici or sorcerers on account of the magnitude (a characteristic bit of derivation) of their crimes. They agitate the elements, disturb men’s minds, and slay merely by force of incantation without any poisoned draught. Hence Lucan writes, ‘The mind, though polluted by no venom of poisoned draught, perishes by enchantment.’[2562] For, summoning demons, they dare to work their magic so that anyone may kill his enemies by evil arts. They also use blood and victims and sometimes corpses.“ After this very unfavorable, although sufficiently credulous, definition of magic, which is represented as seeking the worst ends by the worst means, Isidore goes on to list and briefly define a number of subordinate or kindred occult arts. First come necromancers; then hydromancy, geomancy, aeromancy, and pyromancy; next diviners, those employing incantations, arioli, aruspices, augurs, auspices, pythones, astrologers and their cognates, the genethliaci and mathematici, who as Isidore notes are spoken of in the Gospel as Magi, and horoscopi. ”Sortilegi are those who profess the science of divination under the pretended guise of religion through certain devices called sortes sanctorum and predict by inspection of certain scriptures.” Salisatores are those who predict from the jerks of their limbs. To this list of magic arts Isidore adds in the words of Augustine all ligatures and suspensions, incantations and characters, which the art of medicine condemns and which are simply the work of the devil. With mention of the origin of augury among the Phrygians, the discovery of praestigium which deceives the eye by Mercury, and the revelation of aruspicina by Tagus to the Etruscans, Isidore closes the chapter. Some of its items will be found again in his De differentiis verborum,[2563] listed under the appropriate letters of the alphabet. It may also be noted that he briefly treats of transformations worked by magic in the fourth chapter of the eleventh book of the Etymologies.
Future influence of Isidore’s account of magic.
We turn to the future influence of this account of magic which seems to have been first patched together by Isidore. Juiceless as it is, it seems to have become a sort of stock or stereotyped treatment of the subject with succeeding Christian writers down into the twelfth century. Somewhat altered by omission of poetical quotations or the insertion of transitional sentences, it was otherwise copied almost word for word by Rabanus Maurus (about 784 to 856), in his De consanguineorum nuptiis et de magorum praestigiis falsisque divinationibus tractatus, and by Burchard of Worms and Ivo of Chartres (died 1115) in their respective collections of Decreta, while Hincmar of Rheims in his De divortio Lotharii et Tetbergae copied it with more omissions.[2564] It was also in substance retained in the Decretum of Gratian in the twelfth century, when, too, Hugh of St. Victor probably made use of it and John of Salisbury made it the basis of his fuller discussion of the subject. Isidore’s account of magic, like his discussion of many other topics, sounds as if he had ceased thinking on the subject, and it must have meant still less to those who copied it. John of Salisbury is the first of them to put any life into the subject and give us any assurance that such arts were still practiced in his day. We have, however, other evidence that magic continued to be practiced in the interval. And such practices as the sortes sanctorum, though included in Isidore’s stock definition of magic, were probably not generally regarded as reprehensible.[2565]
Attitude to astrology.
Isidore’s repetition of the views of the fathers concerning demons is so brief and trite[2566] that we need not further notice it, but turn to his attitude toward astrology. We have just heard him associate astrologers with practitioners of the magic arts, but in his third book in discussing the quadrivium he states that astrology is only partly superstitious and partly a natural science. The superstitious variety is that pursued by the mathematici who augur the future from the stars, assign the parts of the soul and body to the signs of the zodiac, and try to predict the nativities and characters of men from the course of the stars. Such superstitions “are without doubt contrary to our faith; Christians should so ignore them that they shall not even appear to have been written.” Mathesis, or the attempt to predict future events from the stars, is denounced, according to Isidore, “not only by doctors of the Christian religion but also of the Gentiles,—Plato, Aristotle, and others.” Isidore also states that there is a distinction between astronomy and astrology, but what it is, especially between astronomy and natural astrology, he fails to elucidate.[2567]
In the De natura rerum.
In the preface to his De natura rerum, which deals chiefly with astronomical and meteorological phenomena, Isidore asserts that “it is not superstitious science to know the nature of these things, if only they are considered from the standpoint of sane and sober doctrine.” He also states that his treatise is a brief sketch of what has been written by the men of old and especially in the works of Catholics. In it some of the stock questions which gave difficulty to Christian scientists are briefly discussed, for instance, “Concerning the waters which are above the heavens,” and “Whether the stars have souls?”[2568] Isidore rejects as “absurd fictions” imagined by the stupidity of the Gentiles their naming the days of the week from the planets, “because by the same they thought that some effect was produced in themselves, saying that from the sun they received the spirit, from the moon the body, from Mercury speech and wisdom, from Venus pleasure, from Mars ardor, from Jupiter temperance, from Saturn slowness.”[2569] Yet later in the same treatise we find him saying that everything in nature grows and increases according to the waxing and waning of the moon.[2570] Moreover, he calls Saturn a cold star and explains that the planets are called errantia, not because they wander themselves but because they cause men to err.[2571] He also describes man as a microcosm.[2572] Like most ecclesiastical writers, no matter how hostile they may be to astrologers, he is ready to assert that comets signify political revolutions, wars, and pestilences.[2573] In the Etymologies he not only attributes racial and temperamental differences among the peoples of different regions to “force of the star”[2574] and “diversity of the sky,”[2575] phrases which seem to imply astrological influence rather than the mere influence of climate in our sense. He also encourages astrological medicine when he says that the doctor should know astronomy, since human bodies change with the qualities of the stars and the change of times.[2576] Isidore might as well have taken the planets as signs in the astrological sense as have ascribed to them the absurd allegorical significance in passages of Scripture that he did. He states that the moon is sometimes to be taken as a symbol of this world, sometimes as the church, which is illuminated by Christ as the moon receives its light from the sun, and which has seven meritorious graces corresponding to the seven forms of the moon.[2577]