A Witch Giving an Anal Kiss to Satan (detail), from Compendium Maleficarum (Compendium of Witches), 1626, by Francesco Maria Guazzo. Milan. Woodcut.
The maritime globalism of the seventeenth century resulted in contact with many foreign witches. Nahualism, the belief that humans have animal souls and can change into animals, was so persistent in Mexico and Mesoamerica that church officials there had to play down the traditional symbols of the evangelists, the lion (Mark), bull (Luke), and eagle (John), because their animal symbols were overshadowing their human forms in the popular imagination. Witchcraft was sufficiently alarming there that in the middle of the century a priest named Diego de Landa ordered the burning of all Mayan texts, which, he said, contained “lies of the devil.” So thorough was this auto-da-fe, which Landa said the Maya “regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction,” that only three Mayan codices are known to have survived out of what had been the richest written culture of the Americas. In Asia too strange new forms of witchcraft were encountered. When the Portuguese and Dutch first came to Indonesia they were mainly looking for valuable spices. Islands such as Bali, which were not prime spice areas, were raided for slaves. On these expeditions the Europeans are likely to have witnessed the traditional exorcistic dance drama called the Calonarang, which features the witch known as Rangda — a copy exists of a palm-leaf manuscript referring to the drama that contains a colophon dated to 1462.
The Europeans would have recognized in Rangda a figure seemingly consistent with their own concept of witches. Her name means “widow” — she is associated with a widowed eleventh-century queen who delved in magical arts. She is usually depicted as a hideous hag with matted hair, bulging eyes, sharp fangs, and a flaming tongue. She is the queen of the frightening creatures that haunt graveyards. In tourist performances today, in which she does battle with a protective lionlike creature called Barong, she appears the personification of evil. But in traditional Balinese culture her role was more complex.
In the Calonarang dance drama Rangda was portrayed as so feared for her black magic that no one was willing to marry her beautiful daughter. In anger, Rangda caused pestilence and crop failiures. In the end Barong defeats her, but he does not destroy her. For the Balinese good and evil could be defined only by reference to each other. And, similar to the Taoist conception of yin and yang, each contains elements of the other. Rangda — who was associated with Durga, the wrathful form of Siva’s consort, and who was assisted by demonic imps, called leyak, that may have evolved from Tantric rituals — was capable of benevolence as well as evil. Get on her good side and she could help you. She had her own shrines, and she appeared in festivals and processions. Although she was feared, she was also respected. In her person the Dutch had actually encountered a different sort of witch. She may have been a hag, but she embraced that role. Though an old widow woman, she did not bow down but stood proud and defiant. Though defeated, she returned to do battle again. Ultimately, in her role as witch, the widow Rangda represented not debasement but female empowerment, and triumph.
Rangda, approx. 1800–1900. Bali. Painted wood, 42 × 60 × 25 cm. Asian Art Museum, Gift of Thomas Murray in memory of his father Eugene T. Murray, 2000.37.
With her shaggy hair, bulging eyes, pendulous breasts, long fingernails, and fangs, the widow Rangda, who is associated with the warlike Hindu goddess Durga, appears the epitome of the witch. For more than five hundred years she has figured in a popular Indonesian dance drama.
In the drama Rangda does battle with a lionlike figure called Barong who attempts to protect people from Rangda’s black magic. Early Western visitors to Indonesia believed that there would ultimately be a day of final reckoning. They viewed stamping out witchcraft as one step toward the ultimate binding of Satan. The Balinese held a different view. Evil and good define each other; in a sense they require each other. Both Rangda and Barong possess power that can be called upon and used under the right conditions.
At the end of the drama Rangda is driven away, but she is not killed. She will be back to cause more trouble.
Johannes Kepler’s quest to uncover the secret of celestial harmony — the music of the spheres — was but the latest in a long tradition that sought to unveil the mathematical and musical secrets of the universe. It would not be the last: in the twentieth century it would bear fruit in a verse by Leonard Cohen. In his “Hallelujah” he sings of a “secret chord” that “pleased the Lord.” According to a reviewer in London’s Sunday Times, the song succeeds “through some mysterious alchemy,” and to judge from the number of times it has been covered — 1818, according to one database of musical covers — it is among the most popular of the songwriter’s works. In an interview, Cohen explained that “‘Hallelujah’ is a Hebrew word which means ‘Glory to the Lord.’ The song explains that many kinds of Hallelujahs do exist. I say: ‘All the perfect and broken Hallelujahs have an equal value.’”
According to Cohen’s lyrics, the secret chord was made up of a particular mixture of fourths and fifths and of major and minor keys. Kepler, calculating proportions among the varying velocities at which the planets orbit the sun, thought that he had discovered just such a secret chord: it was made up of intervals of a fourth, an octave, a major third, a minor third, and a fourth. For example:
The secret chord was also being sought, in 1616, by the former physician and counsellor to the Habsburg emperor Rudolf II. The physician, whose name was Michael Maier, must have been planning his Atalanta Fugiens: That Is, New Chemical Emblems of the Secrets of Nature, a remarkable Rosicrucian-inspired multimedia book published in 1617 that combined musical scores, poetry, and evocative imagery. The book was, its title page announced, “adapted partly for the eyes and intellect in figures engraved on copper, with legends, Epigrams and notes attached, partly for the ears and the soul’s recreation with about 50 musical fugues in three voices, of which two are set to a simple melody suitable for singing the couplets, to be looked at, read, meditated, understood, weighed, sung and listened to, not without a certain pleasure.”
The twentieth-century psychologist Carl Jung, who was greatly influenced by the alchemical tradition, considered himself a modern representative of the lineage Maier embodied. “I feel strongly,” he said, “that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors.” Among these ancestors he particularly counted two who were likewise named Carl Jung: his grandfather, who was a Grand Master of the Swiss Lodge of Freemasons, and a distant ancestor who, Jung says, was a follower of Michael Maier and one of the “founders” of Rosicrucianism.
In his “Preface to the Reader,” Maier hailed the power of music and placed himself squarely in the Pythagorean tradition:
Socrates was educated in Music, and Plato, too, who stated that one is not put together harmoniously who does not rejoice in Music’s harmony. Most celebrated in the same was Pythagoras, who is said to have used musical symphonies morning and evening to compose the spirits of his disciples….
Three engravings, 1617, probably by Matthieu Merian, from Atalanta Fugiens by Michael Maier. The Philosopher’s Egg, Alchemy and Geometry, and Following the Footprints of Nature.
In the wake of the publication of the Rosicrucian manifestos, two authors, Robert Fludd and Michael Maier, were influential in promoting the Rosicrucian philosophy in a number of publications.
Fludd was an English physican, astrologer, and mathematician. His Apologia Compendiaria of 1616 helped win Rosicrucianism a favorable reception in England.
Maier was the physician to Emperor Rudolf II; after Rudolf’s death he lived in England until 1616. His alchemy-inspired Atalanta Fugiens is notable for its evocative illustrations, suggestive of esoteric wisdom; called the first multimedia work, it combined illustrations with poetry and musical scores.
For the ancient Greek and Romans, Harmonia was a goddess — the Romans called her Concordia — who was the daughter
of Ares and Aphrodite, of war and love; it is harmony that reconciles differences and resolves opposites. By some accounts she was also the mother of the muses. As early as Homer’s Odyssey the word harmonia also meant joining or fitting together. Harmony, in sum, concerns the relations among different things, and this was the focus of the Pythagorean tradition that culminated in the work not only of Maier but of Kepler and many others.
Pythagoras, who lived in sixth-century BCE Greece, was more or less a contemporary of the historical Buddha, Confucius, Laozi, and other teachers whose followers have multiplied manifold since their lifetimes. But the Pythagoreans were a secretive, cultlike group who did not promulgate their knowledge widely: Pythagorean teachings were passed in private from adept to aspirant, and knowledge of its tradition relies largely on secondhand reports. Its fundamental teaching was that there was order to the universe, and that order was made of numbers. All things, the Pythagoreans held, had number, without which nothing could be thought or known.
Music was essential to their philosophy, and to the Pythagoreans is owed the first mathematically formulated scientific discovery, that musical pitch was a function of the length of a vibrating harp string. A Pythagorean philosopher named Archytas proposed that sounds existed that cannot be heard by humans, “some because of the weakness of their force, some because of their great distance from us, and some because their magnitude exceeds what can fit into our hearing, as when one pours too much into narrow-mouthed vessels and nothing goes in.” This led to the notion of the Music of the Spheres, the idea that proportions in the movements of celestial bodies compose a divine music that is inaudible to humans. Pythagoreans thought that this music radiated outward from the center of the universe. The secret of this divine music was the ultimate truth that Kepler, who called Pythagoras “the grandfather of all Copernicans,” was seeking.
Kepler’s first interest was theology. He was deeply disappointed when the University of Tübingen, where had studied, would not find him a post as a professor of divinity but instead shunted him off into the backwater position of teacher of mathematics at Gratz. Mathematics and theology were inextricably bound for him. “Geometry,” he insisted, “existed before the Creation, is co-eternal with the mind of God, is God himself.” He explores this theme most fully in the work that he considered his magnum opus, the one he was working on even as he was defending his mother against the witch hunters, his Harmony of the World.
In times of disorienting and disturbing change, of turmoil and strife, there are people who are driven to search for the opposite: for signs of harmony in the world. So it was for Kepler. Harmony was published in 1618, while Kepler was defending his mother. He had recently been excommunicated. The daughter he had named after his mother had died. At his moment of triumph Kepler had been cut adrift — to support himself he had been forced to resume publishing and selling yearly astrological calendars after having abandoned the practice for more than a decade; the first of these had come out in 1616. Now war was breaking out.
Yet Kepler’s Harmony unveils the hidden beauty of creation. Astronomical considerations take up only a part of the work (buried among its hundreds of pages is the revelation of the Third Law of Planetary Motion). The book’s main impulse, the culmination of the inspiration that had driven him to write his early Cosmic Mystery, was the desire to reveal that geometrical patterns and harmonies govern all things: “Geometrical things,” he wrote, “have provided the Creator with the model for decorating the whole world.” The harmonies that we perceive with our human senses are echoes of the larger harmony that we are unable to hear. By attuning oneself to the correspondences among things, one’s soul resonates with the cosmic harmony. In the tradition of Pythagoras, Kepler saw mathematics as the key to universal harmony, the unheard music of the universe. “The more anyone falls in love with mathematics,” he said,
the more fervent will be his dedication to God, and the more he himself will make every effort to practice gratitude, the crown of virtues, so that he will join me in prayer to the merciful God that much more sincerely: let him crush the warlike confusion, eliminate devastation, sniff out hatred, and venture forth to discover that golden harmony once again.
Kepler completed his book the same week that the Defenestration of Prague occurred — the incident that triggered the long war that would eventually suck in all the major nations of Europe, leaving central Europe a wasteland. “I cast the die and write a book for the present time,” he wrote, “or for posterity. It is all the same to me. It may wait a hundred years for its readers, as God also waited six thousand years for an onlooker.”
The Wolf Coming from the East and the Dog Coming from the West Have Bitten Each Other, 1617, probably by Matthieu Merian. Engraving from Atalanta Fugiens by Michael Maier.
Maier’s remarkable multimedia book included music, pictures, prose, and poetry. Maier’s emphasis on music derives from the esoteric Paracelsian tradition, which also influenced Kepler, that considered the mysteries of the universe to be revealed by music and mathematics.
In the end Kepler’s Harmony, though it contains scientific discoveries of the highest order, was a work in the prophetic tradition. In his own way, a rabbi in the Jewish ghetto in Venice, struggling like Kepler with family tragedies and personal finances, was also working in that tradition. In December 1616 he had a disturbing dream. In his dream he saw a man surrounded by a crowd of people. That man was a prophet, they said. “The spirit of God is in him.” The rabbi boldly stepped forward to ask the prophet how long he had left to live. “Four years, seven months,” came the answer.
The rabbi, whose name was Leon Modena, was a son of the Renaissance. An accomplished musican, he had long been a cantor in his synagogue. He was also a poet and playwright. He was well known as an interpreter of Judaism, and the number of Christians who consulted him shows the interest in Jewish wisdom at this time. He was the official translator of Hebrew to the government of Venice. Between 1614 and 1615 he wrote a treatise on Jewish rites and beliefs at the request of a nobleman who intended to give it to King James of England; this was the first book in a vernacular language that described Jewish rituals for a gentile audience. Following James’s ascension to the throne, England and Venice resumed diplomatic relations after a gap of forty-five years, and English scholars working on the bible King James commissioned in 1604 visited Modena for Hebrew instruction. His most lucrative poem, written in both Hebrew and Italian versions, celebrated the birth of a son to Henry IV of France and Marie de Medici (the boy, delivered by the midwife Louise Bourgeois, would become Louis XIII). The brother of the French king would attend one of his sermons, as would the leader of the French Huguenots.
A Jewish Woman Gives Birth to Two Piglets, ca. 1574, by Bernhard Jobin. Woodcut. Probably Strassburg, Germany.
As the woman who has delivered the piglets rests in bed, a caricature Jewish man stands over the newborn piglets. The same sorts of demonic and unnatural acts that were attributed to women accused of witchcraft were also applied to others whose beliefs and practices seemed outside the mainstream. A rapidly changing society and increased cross-cultural encounters vied with the segregation of groups by ethnicity and religion to create tensions that would explode in an age of religious warfare.
On waking, Modena decided to test the prophecy against his horoscope. He did not doubt the prophetic power of dreams. Later, during a plague year, prophets would appear to him in another dream to teach him a prayer based on a divine name. He had the prayer made into amulets, which he sold to augment his modest salary. No house on which he had placed the amulet, he maintained, had been visited by the plague.
Rabbi Modena consulted four astrologers, two of whom were Jewish and two Christian. “From my youth I had had a passionate desire to learn from astrologers,” he would write in his autobiography. All of the astrologers agreed that he would live to be fifty-two, which was close to the prediction in the dream (in fact he would live to be seventy-seven). Unhappy with the result of his
horoscope, Modena regretted having it made, “for man’s only proper way is to be pure before God, and he should not make such inquiries. So here I am today, pained on account of the past and anxious about the future…. Ever since I was born I have had no joy, that I should worry about lacking it; neither have I seen any good in this world, that I should have difficulty leaving it.”
The year 1616 was indeed a difficult one for Modena. His favorite son, Mordecai, his eldest, was seriously ill, on the verge of death. The trouble had begun in 1614, when Mordecai had set up an alchemical laboratory, working in collaboration with a priest named Joseph Grillo. By 1615 they had succeeded in creating ten ounces of pure silver from nine ounces of lead and one ounce of silver — at least, that is what Modena thought. “This I saw done by him twice, “the rabbi wrote, adding that he “examined it and sold the silver myself for six and a half lire per ounce.”
What Mordecai had actually created was copper arsenate, through a process that involved the use of arsenic: the result was a compound that, though not actually much like real silver, had a silverish patina. This was a fumious process, and one that took two and a half months to complete. After his son had been working in this manner over many months, on October 15, 1615, Modena sadly informs us, “much blood from Mordecai’s head started flowing out of his mouth.” Despite consultation with numerous healers and the application of every conceivable remedy, Mordecai failed to improve, and within two years he was dead.
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