In his preface Defoe lavishes a good deal of contempt on contemporary pretenders to the character of magician, who by sham magical practices imposed on a public ignorant, and therefore credulous. Magicians, he says, in the first ages were wise men; in the middle ages, madmen; in these latter ages, they are cunning men. In the earliest times they were honest; in the middle time, rogues; in these last times, fools. At first they dealt with nature; then with the devil; and now, not with the devil or with nature either. In the first ages the magicians were wiser than the people; in the second age wickeder than the people; and in this later age the people are both worse and wickeder than the magicians. Like many other generalizations, this one of Defoe’s is more pointed than true; and it is evident that the so-called magicians could not have flourished had there not been an ignorant class who readily accepted their pretensions.
Defoe’s account of the origin of magic is so vague as to suggest that he knew very little of the subject he was writing about. ‘I have traced it,’ he says, ‘as far back as antiquity gives us any clue to discover it by: it seems to have its beginning in the ignorance and curiosity of the darkest ages of the world, when miracle and something wonderful was expected to confirm every advanced notion; and when the wise men, having racked their invention to the utmost, called in the devil to their assistance for want of better help; and those that did not run into Satan’s measures, and give themselves up to the infernal, yet trod so near, and upon the very verge of Hell, that it was hard to distinguish between the magician and the devil, and thus they have gone on ever since: so that almost all the dispute between us and the magicians is that they say they converse with good spirits, and we say if they deal with any spirits, it is with the devil.’
Here the greatness of his theme stimulates Defoe into poetry, which differs very little, however, from his prose, so that a brief specimen will content everybody:
‘Hail! dangerous science, falsely called sublime,
Which treads upon the very brink of crime.
Hell’s mimic, Satan’s mountebank of state,
Deals with more devils than Heaven did e’er create.
The infernal juggling-box, by Heaven designed,
To put the grand parade upon mankind.
The devil’s first game which he in Eden played,
When he harangued to Eve in masquerade.’
Dividing his treatise into two parts, our author, in the introduction to Part I., discusses the meaning of the principal terms in magical lore; who, and what kind of people, the magicians were; and the meaning originally given to the words ‘magic’ and ‘magician.’ As a matter of course, he strays back to the old Chaldean days, when a magician, he says, was simply a mathematician, a man of science, who, stored with knowledge and learning, was a kind of walking dictionary to other people, instructing the rest of mankind on subjects of which they were ignorant; a wise man, in fact, who interpreted omens, ill signs, tokens, and dreams; understood the signs of the times, the face of the heavens, and the influences of the superior luminaries there. When all this wisdom became more common, and the magi had communicated much of their knowledge to the people at large, their successors, still aspiring to a position above, and apart from, the rest of the world, were compelled to push their studies further, to inquire into nature, to view the aspect of the heavens, to calculate the motions of the stars, and more particularly to dwell upon their influences in human affairs—thus creating the science of astrology. But these men neither had, nor pretended to have, any compact or correspondence with the devil or with any of his works. They were men of thought, or, if you please, men of deeper thinking than the ordinary sort; they studied the sciences, inquired into the works of nature and providence, studied the meaning and end of things, the causes and events, and consequently were able to see further into the ordinary course and causes both of things about them, and things above them, than other men.
Such were the world’s gray forefathers, the magicians of the elder time, in whom was found ‘an excellent spirit of wisdom.’ There were others—not less learned—whose studies took a different direction; who inquired into the structure and organization of the human body; who investigated the origin, the progress, and the causes of diseases and distempers, both in men and women; who sought out the physical or medicinal virtues of drugs and plants; and as by these means they made daily discoveries in nature, of which the world, until then, was ignorant, and by which they performed astonishing cures, they naturally gained the esteem and reverence of the people.
Sir Walter Raleigh contends that only the word ‘magic,’ and not the magical art, is derived from Simon Magus. He adds that Simon’s name was not Magus, a magician, but Gors, a person familiar with evil spirits; and that he usurped the title of Simon the Magician simply because it was then a good and honourable title. Defoe avails himself of Raleigh’s authority to sustain his own opinion, that there is a manifest difference between magic, which is wisdom and supernatural knowledge, and the witchcraft and conjuring which we now understand by the word.
In his second chapter Defoe classifies the magic of the ancients under three heads: i. Natural, which included the knowledge of the stars, of the motions of the planetary bodies, and their revolutions and influences; that is to say, the study of nature, of philosophy, and astronomy; ii. Artificial or Rational, in which was included the knowledge of all judicial astrology, the casting or calculating nativities, and the cure of diseases—(1) by particular charms and figures placed in this or that position; (2) by herbs gathered at this or that particular crisis of time; (3) by saying such and such words over the patient; (4) by such and such gestures; (5) by striking the flesh in such and such a manner, and innumerable such-like pieces of mimicry, working not upon the disease itself, but upon the imagination of the patient, and so affecting the cure by the power of nature, though that nature were set in operation by the weakest and simplest methods imaginable; and, iii. Diabolical, which was wrought by and with the concurrence of the devil, carried on by a correspondence with evil spirits—with their help, presence, and personal assistance—and practised chiefly by their priests. Defoe argues that the ancients at first were acquainted only with the purer form of magic, and that, therefore, sorcery and witchcraft were of much later development. The cause and motive of this development he traces in his third chapter (‘Of the Reason and Occasion which brought the ancient honest Magi, whose original study was philosophy, astronomy, and the works of nature, to turn sorcerers and wizards, and deal with the Devil, and how their Conversation began’). Egyptologists will find Defoe’s comments upon Egyptian magic refreshingly simple and unhistorical, and his identifications of the Pyramids with magical practices is wildly vague and hypothetical. Of the magic which was really taught and practised among the ancient people of Egypt, Defoe, of course, knows nothing. He tells us, however, that the Jews learned it from them. He goes on to speculate as to the time when that close intercourse began between the devil and his servants on earth which is the foundation of the later or diabolical magic, and concludes that his first visible appearance on this mundane stage was as the enemy of Job. Thence he is led to inquire, in his fourth chapter, what shapes the devil assumed on his first appearances to the magicians and others, in the dawn of the world’s history, and whether he is or has been allowed to assume a human shape or no. And he suggests that his earliest acquaintance with mankind was made through dreams, and that by this method he contrived to infuse into men’s minds an infinite variety of corrupt imaginations, wicked desires, and abhorrent conclusions and resolutions, with some ridiculous, foolish, and absurd things at the same time.
Defoe then proceeds to tell an Oriental story, which, doubtlessly, is his own invention:
Ali Albrahazen, a Persian wizard, had, it is said, this kind of intercourse with the devil. He was a Sabean by birth, and had obtained a wonderful reputation for his witchcraft, so that he was sent for by the King of Persia upon extraordinary occasions, such as the interpretation of a dream, or of an apparition, like that of Belshazzar’s handwriting, or of some meteor or eclipse, and he never failed to give the King satisfaction. For whether his utterances were true or false, he couched them always in such ambiguous terms that something of what he predicted might certainly be deduced from his words, and so seem to import that he had effectually revealed it, whether he had really done so or not.