A History of Magic and Experimental Science, Volume 1 (of 2) / During the First Thirteen Centuries of Our Era

by Lynn Thorndike

Magic in Greek philosophy.

Moreover, in one sense the advocates of Greek magic have not gone far enough. They hold that magic lies back of the comedies of Aristophanes; what they might contend is that it was also contemporary with them.[94] They hold that classical Greek religion had its origins in magic; what they might argue is that Greek philosophy never freed itself from magic. “That Empedocles believed himself capable of magical powers is,” says Zeller, “proved by his own writings.” He himself “declares that he possesses the power to heal old age and sickness, to raise and calm the winds, to summon rain and drought, and to recall the dead to life.”[95] If the pre-Homeric fixed epithets of Zeus are redolent of magic, Plato’s Timaeus is equally redolent of occult science and astrology; and if we see the weather-making magician in the Olympian Zeus of Phidias, we cannot explain away the vagaries of the Timaeus as flights of poetic imagination or try to make out Aristotle a modern scientist by mutilating the text of the History of Animals.

Plato’s attitude toward magic and astrology.

Toward magic so-called Plato’s attitude in his Laws is cautious. He maintains that medical men and prophets and diviners can alone understand the nature of poisons (or spells) which work naturally, and of such things as incantations, magic knots, and wax images; and that since other men have no certain knowledge of such matters, they ought not to fear but to despise them. He admits nevertheless that there is no use in trying to convince most men of this and that it is necessary to legislate against sorcery.[96] Yet his own view of nature seems impregnated, if not actually with doctrines borrowed from the Magi of the east, at least with notions cognate to those of magic rather than of modern science and with doctrines favorable to astrology. He humanized material objects and confused material and spiritual characteristics. He also, like authors of whom we shall treat later, attempted to give a natural or rational explanation for magic, accounting, for example, for liver divination on the ground that the liver was a sort of mirror on which the thoughts of the mind fell and in which the images of the soul were reflected; but that they ceased after death.[97] He spoke of harmonious love between the elements as the source of health and plenty for vegetation, beasts, and men, and their “wanton love” as the cause of pestilence and disease. To understand both varieties of love “in relation to the revolutions of the heavenly bodies and the seasons of the year is termed astronomy,”[98] or, as we should say, astrology, whose fundamental law is the control of inferior creation by the motion of the stars. Plato spoke of the stars as “divine and eternal animals, ever abiding,”[99] an expression which we shall hear reiterated in the middle ages. “The lower gods,” whom he largely identified with the heavenly bodies, form men, who, if they live good lives, return after death each to a happy existence in his proper star.[100] Such a doctrine is not identical with that of nativities and the horoscope, but like it exalts the importance of the stars and suggests their control of human life. And when at the close of his Republic Plato speaks of the harmony or music of the spheres of the seven planets and the eighth sphere of the fixed stars, and of “the spindle of Necessity on which all the revolutions turn,” he suggests that when once the human soul has entered upon this life, its destiny is henceforth subject to the courses of the stars. When in the Timaeus he says, “There is no difficulty in seeing that the perfect number of time fulfills the perfect year when all the eight revolutions ... are accomplished together and attain their completion at the same time,”[101] he seems to suggest the astrological doctrine of the magnus annus, that history begins to repeat itself in every detail when the heavenly bodies have all regained their original positions.

Aristotle on stars and spirits.

For Aristotle, too, the stars were “beings of superhuman intelligence, incorporate deities. They appeared to him as the purer forms, those more like the deity, and from them a purposive rational influence upon the lower life of the earth seemed to proceed,—a thought which became the root of medieval astrology.”[102] Moreover, “his theory of the subordinate gods of the spheres of the planets ... provided for a later demonology.”[103]

Folk-lore in the History of Animals.

Aside from bits of physiognomy and of Pythagorean superstition, or mysticism, Aristotle’s History of Animals contains much on the influence of the stars on animal life, the medicines employed by animals, and their friendships and enmities, and other folk-lore and pseudo-science.[104] But the oldest extant manuscript of that work dates only from the twelfth or thirteenth century and lacks the tenth book. Editors of the text have also rejected books seven and nine, the latter part of book eight, and have questioned various other passages. However, these expurgations save the face of Aristotle rather than of Hellenic science or philosophy generally, as the spurious seventh book is held to be drawn largely from Hippocratic writings and the ninth from Theophrastus.[105]

Differing modes of transmission of ancient oriental and Greek literature.

There is another point to be kept in mind in any comparison of Egypt and Babylon or Assyria with Greece in the matter of magic. Our evidence proving the great part played by magic in the ancient oriental civilizations comes directly from them to us without intervening tampering or alteration except in the case of the early periods. But classical literature and philosophy come to us as edited by Alexandrian librarians[106] and philologers, as censored and selected by Christian and Byzantine readers, as copied or translated by medieval monks and Italian humanists. And the question is not merely, what have they added? but also, what have they altered? what have they rejected? Instead of questioning superstitious passages in extant works on the ground that they are later interpolations, it would very likely be more to the point to insert a goodly number on the ground that they have been omitted as pagan or idolatrous superstitions.