As one might surmise from Bacon’s belief in the potent effect of sidereal emanations, he makes much of the theory that every agent sends forth its own virtue and species into external matter. This leads him to accept fascination as a fact. Just as Aristotle tells that in some localities mares become pregnant by the mere odor of the stallions, and as Pliny relates that the basilisk kills by a glance, so the witch by the vapor from her bleary eye draws her victims on to destruction. In short, “Man can project virtue and species outside himself, the more since he is nobler than all corporeal things, and especially because of the virtue of the rational soul.”[[32]] Hence the great effects possible from spoken words or written characters; although one must beware of falling into the absurdities and abominations of the magicians. Bacon, moreover, was like Scot a believer in the doctrine of signatures.[[33]]
Other men of the same period prominent in science who held similar beliefs we can scarcely stop to mention. There was Vincent de Beauvais, the great encyclopedist, and Bernard Gordon, a physician of Montpellier and a medical writer of considerable note, who nevertheless recommended the use of a magic formula for the treatment of epilepsy.[[34]] There was Albertus Magnus with his trust in such wonderful powers of stones as to cure ulcers, counteract potions, conciliate human hearts, and win battles; and his theory that ligatures and suspensions, and gems carved with proper images possess similar strange virtues.[[35]] There was Arnald of Villanova who propounded such admirable doctrines as that a physician ought first of all to understand the chief functions of life and chief organs of the body and that the science of particular things is the foundation of all knowledge, and yet who believed in astrological medicine, wrote on oneiromancy and interpreted dreams, translated treatises on incantations, ligatures and other magic devices, and composed a book on the Tetragrammaton or ineffable name of Jehovah.[[36]]
That marvelous power of words—especially of the divine names of angels and of the Supreme Deity—which we may suppose Arnald to have touched upon in his Tetragrammaton, was discussed at length by a series of scholars at the close of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century whose names are most familiar to the student of those times. These men pushed the practice of allegorical interpretation of sacred writings, which had been in constant vogue among religious and theological writers from the days of the early Christian Fathers, to the extreme of discovering sublime secrets not only by regarding every incident and object in Scripture as a parable, but by treating the text itself as a cryptogram. Not only, like Isidore, did they see in every numerical measurement in the Bible mystic meaning, but in the very letters they doubted not there was hidden that knowledge by which one might gain control of all the processes of the universe; nay, penetrate through the ten sephiroth to the unspeakable and infinite source of all. For our visible universe is but the reflected image of an invisible, and each has subtle and practically unlimited power over the other. The key to that power is words. Such were the doctrines held by Pico Della Mirandola (1463–1494) who asserted that no science gave surer proof of Christ’s divinity than magical and cabalistic science;[[37]] such were the doctrines of the renowned humanist, John Reuchlin, who connected letters in the sacred text with individual angels;[[38]] of Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) who, inspired by Reuchlin’s De verbo mirifico and De arte cabalistica, declared that whoever knew the true pronunciation of the name Jehovah had “the world in his mouth;”[[39]] of Trithemius from whom Paracelsus is said to have acquired the “Cabala of the spiritual, astral and material worlds.”[[40]]
Moreover, the writings of men primarily devoted to science continued through the sixteenth and on into the seventeenth century to contain much the same occult theories that Michael Scot, Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus had accepted and discussed. Jerome Cardan, one of the most prominent men of his time in mathematics and medicine—indeed, the discoverer of new processes in the former science—nevertheless believed in a strong attraction and sympathy between the heavenly bodies and our own, cast horoscopes and wrote on judicial astrology. In his Arithmetic he treated of the marvelous properties of certain numbers; in other writings he credulously discussed demons, ghosts, incantations, divination and chiromancy. His thirteen books on metoposcopy explain how to tell a person’s character, ability and destiny by a minute examination of the lines on different portions of the body and by warts. He owned a selenite which he believed prevented sleep and a jacinth to which he attributed an opposite influence.[[41]]
The vagaries of Paracelsus are notorious, and yet he was far more than a mere quack. Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) was a faithful follower of experimental method. He saw that the science of the stars could amount to little unless based on a mass of correct observations, and was one of the first to devote his life to that foundation of patient and systematic drudgery on which the great structure of modern science is being reared. His painstaking endeavor to have accurate instruments and his care to make allowance for possible error were the marks, rare enough in those days, of the true scientist. Yet he made many an astrological prognostication, and was, as his biographer puts it, “a perfect son of the sixteenth century, believing the universe to be woven together by mysterious connecting threads which the contemplation of the stars or of the elements of nature might unravel, and thereby lift the veil of the future.”[[42]] He also dabbled in alchemy, believed in relations of occult sympathy between “the ethereal and elementary worlds,” and filled his mind with the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, Geber, Arnald of Villanova, Raymond Lullius, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus.
Finally, even Francis Bacon, famed as the draughtsman of the chart which henceforth guided explorers in the domain of science, thought that there was considerable value in physiognomy and the interpretation of natural dreams, though the superstition and phantasies of later ages had debased those subjects;[[43]] and in divination if not “conducted by blind authority.”[[44]] He said that by a reformed astrology one might predict plagues, famines, wars, seditions, sects, great human migrations and “all great disturbances or innovations in both natural and civil affairs.”[[45]]
Such are the beliefs which for a long time pervaded the thought and learning of Europe; beliefs of the widespread acceptance of which we have noted but a few striking illustrations. They constitute a varied and formidable class of convictions. There was the notion that from such things as the marks upon one’s body, or from one’s dreams, or from peals of thunder, flight of birds, entrails of sacrificial victims and the movements of the stars, we can foretell the future. There was the assumption that certain precious stones, certain plants and trees and fountains, certain animals or parts of animals have strange and wonderful virtues. There was the idea that man, too, possesses marvelous powers to the extent that he can fascinate and bewitch his fellows. Nor should we forget the attribution to the heavenly bodies of an enormous influence over minerals and vegetation, over human health and character, over national constitutions and customs, even over religious movements. We find this notion of occult virtue extended to things without physical reality: to words, to numbers, to written characters and formulæ. It is applied to certain actions and ways of doing things: to “ligatures and suspensions,” for instance. Then there was the belief that wonders may be wrought by the aid of demons, and that incantations, suffumigations, and the like are of great value in invoking spirits. Finally, there was a vague general notion that not only are the ethereal and elementary worlds joined by occult sympathy, but that all parts of the universe are somehow mystically connected, and that perhaps a single magic key may be discovered by which we may become masters of the entire universe.
How shall we classify these beliefs? What shall we call them? What is their meaning, what their origin and cause? As for classification, it is easy to suggest names which partially apply to some of these notions, or adequately characterize them individually. The art of signatures, oneiromancy, augury, divination, astrology, alchemy, the Cabala, sorcery, and necromancy are some designations which at once come to mind. But no one of them is at all adequate as a class name for all these beliefs and the practices which they involve, taken together. Are not these notions, nevertheless, closely allied; is there not an intimate relation between them all? And is not “magic” a term which will include them all and denote the general subject, the philosophy and the art, of which they all are branches?
True, many of the holders of the beliefs above enumerated declaimed against “magic.”[[46]] But sometimes fear of being accused of magic was their very reason for so doing. Bede had such a fear when he treated of divination by thunder. Roger Bacon took suspicious care to insist that his theories had nothing to do with magic, which he declared was for the most part a mere pretense and could bring marvels to pass only by diabolical assistance.[[47]] The writer of the Speculum Astronomiae—probably Albertus Magnus—found it necessary to write a treatise to distinguish books of necromancy from works on “astronomy,” i. e., astrology.[[48]] Coming to a later age, we find Agrippa frankly owning his trust in magic, and including under it, in his three books of Occult Philosophy, practically all the beliefs that we have mentioned. For him magic embraced the fields of nature, mathematics and theology. Indeed, men of his day and of the century following displayed a tendency to stretch the term to include true science. He himself called magic “the acme of all philosophy.” Giovanni Battista della Porta (1540–1615), not it is true without considerable justification, called his encyclopedic work on nature Natural Magic.[[49]] Lord Bacon chose to understand magic “in its ancient and honorable significance” among the Persians as “a sublimer wisdom or a knowledge of universal nature.” He said that as physics, investigating efficient and material causes, produced mechanics, so metaphysics, studying into forms, produced magic.[[50]]
Apparently, then, magic has a broad significance and a long history. The word itself takes us back to the Magi of ancient Persia; the thing it represents is older yet. It will form the theme of our next chapter, where we shall discuss its history and its meaning, and then the particular significance of those beliefs accepted by men of learning which have been enumerated in the present chapter.