To the modern mind, Dee's interests seem contradictory: a mass of superstitious pseudoscience mixed up with some good, solid science and mathematics. But Dee didn't have a modern mind, and he saw no particular contradiction in the combination. In his day, many mathematicians made their living by casting horoscopes. They could do the sums that foretold in which of the twelve 'houses' -the regions of the sky determined by the constellations corresponding to the signs of the Zodiac - a planet would be.
Dee stands at the threshold of modern ways of thinking about causality in the world. We call his time The Renaissance, and the reference is to the rebirth of the philosophy and politics of ancient Athens. But perhaps this view of his times is mistaken, both because Greek society was not then as 'scientific' or 'intellectual' as we've been led to believe, and because there were other cultural currents that attributed to the culture of his times. Our ideas of narrativium may derive from the melding of these ideas into later philosophies, such as of Baruch Spinoza.
Stories encouraged the growth of occultism and mysticism. But they also helped to ease the European world out of medieval superstition into a more rational view of the universe.
Belief in the occult -magic, astrology, divination, witchcraft, alchemy -is common to most human societies. The European tradition occultism, to which Dee belonged, is based on an ancient, secret philosophy; it derives from two main sources, ancient Greek alchemy magic, and Jewish mysticism. Among the Greek sources is the Emeri Tablet, a collection of writings associated with Hermes Trismegist ('thrice master'), which was particularly revered by later alchemists; the Jewish source is the Kabbala, a secret, mystical interpretation of a sacred book, the Torah.
Astrology, of course, is a form of divination based on the stars and the visible planets. It may, perhaps, have contributed to the development of science by supporting people who wanted to observe and understand the heavens. Johannes Kepler, who discovered that planetary orbits are ellipses, made his living as an astrologer. Astrology survives in watered-down form in the horoscope columns of tabloid newspapers. Ronald Reagan consulted an astrologer during his time as American President. That stuff certainly hangs around.
Alchemy is more interesting. It is often said to be an early forerunner of chemistry, although the principles underlying chemistry largely derive from other sources. The alchemists played around with apparatus that led to useful chemists' gadgets like retorts and flasks and they discovered that interesting things happen when you heat certain substances or combine them together. The alchemists' big discoveries were salt ammoniac (ammonium chloride), which can be made to react with metals, and the mineral acids - nitric, sulphuric and hydrochloric.
The big goal of alchemy would have been much bigger if they ever achieved it: the Elixir of Life, the source of immortality. The Chinese alchemists described this long-sought substance as
'liquid gold'. The narrative thread here is clear: gold is the noble metal, incorruptible, ageless. So anyone who could somehow incorporate gold into his body would also become incorruptible and ageless. The nobility shows up differently: the noble metal is reserved for the 'noble' humans: emperors, royalty, the people on top of the heap. Much good did this do them. According to the Chinese scholar Joseph Needham, several Chinese emperors probably died of elixir poisoning.
Since arsenic and mercury were common constituents of supposed elixirs, this is hardly a surprise. And it is all too plausible that a mystic quest for immortality would shorten life, not prolong it.
In Europe, from about 1300 onwards, alchemy had three main objectives. The Elixir of Life was still one, and a second was finding cures for various diseases. The alchemical search for medicines eventually led somewhere useful. The key figure here is Phillipus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus[19] von Hohenheim, mercifully known as 'Paracelsus', who lived from
1493 to 1541.
Paracelsus was a Swiss physician whose interest in alchemy led him to invent chemotherapy. He placed great store in the occult. As a student aged 14 he wandered from one European university to another, in search of great teachers, but we can deduce from what he wrote about the experience, somewhat later, that he was disappointed. He wondered why 'the high colleges managed to produce so many high asses', and clearly wasn't the kind of student to endear himself to his teachers. 'The universities,' he wrote, 'do not teach all things. So a doctor must seek out old wives, gypsies, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them.' He would have had a high old time on Discworld, but would have learned a lot.
After ten years' wandering, he returned home in 1524 and became lecturer in medicine at the university of Basel. In 1527 he publicly burned the classic books of earlier physicians, the Arab Avicenna and the Greek Galen. Paracelsus cared not a whit for authority. Indeed his assumed name, 'para-Celsus', means 'above Celsus', and Celsus was a leading Roman doctor of the first century.
He was arrogant and mystical. His saving grace was that he was also very bright. He placed great importance on using nature's own powers of healing. For example, letting wounds drain instead of padding them with moss or dried dung. He discovered that mercury was an effective treatment for syphilis, and his clinical description of that sexually transmitted disease was the best available.
The main objective for most alchemists was far more selfish, sights were set on just one thing: transmuting base metals like lead into gold. Again, their belief that this was possible rested on a story. They knew from their experiments that sal ammoniac and other substances could change the colour of metals, so the story 'Metals can be transmuted' gained ground. Why, then, should it not be possible to start with lead, add the right substance, and end up with gold? The story seemed compelling; all that they lacked was the right substance. They called it the Philosopher's Stone.
The search for the Philosopher's Stone, or rumours that it had been found, got several alchemists into trouble. Noble gold was the prerogative of the nobility. While the various kings and princes wouldn't have minded getting their hands on an inexhaustible supply of gold, they didn't want their rivals to beat them to it. Even searching for the Philosopher's Stone could be considered subversive, just as searching for a cheap source of renewable energy now is apparently considered subversive by oil corporations and nuclear energy companies. In 1595 Dee’s companion Edward Kelley was imprisoned by Rudolf II and died trying to escape, and in 1603
Christian II of Saxony imprisoned and tortured the Scottish alchemist Alexander Seton. A dangerous thing, a clever man.
The story of the Philosopher's Stone never reached its climax, alchemists never did turn lead into gold. But the story took a long time to die. Even around 1700, Isaac Newton still thought it was worth having a go, and the idea of turning lead into gold by chemical means was finally killed off only in the nineteenth century. Nuclear reactions, mind you, are another matter: the transmutation can be done, but is wildly uneconomic. And unless you're very careful, the gold is radioactive (although, of course, this will keep the money circulating quickly, and we might see a sudden upsurge of philanthropy). How did we get from alchemy to radioactivity? The pivotal period of Western history was the Renaissance, roughly spanning the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when ideas imported from the Arab world collided with Greek philosophy and mathematics, and Roman artisanship and engineering, leading to a sudden flowering of the arts and the birth of what we now call science. During the Renaissance, we learned to tell new stories about ourselves and the world. And those stories changed both.
In order to understand how this happened, we must come to grips with the real Renaissance mentality, not the popular view of a 'Renaissance man'. By that phrase, we mean a person with expertise in many areas -like Roundworld's Leonardo da Vinci, who bears a suspicious resemblance to the Disc's Leonard of Quirm. We use this phrase because we contrast such people with what we call a 'well-educated' person today.
In medieval Europe, and indeed long after that, the aristocracy considered 'education' to
mean classical knowledge -the culture of the Greeks -plus a lot of religion, and not much else. The king was expected to be well informed about poetry, drama and philosophy, but he wasn't expected to know about plumbing or brickwork. Some kings did in fact get rather interested in astronomy and science, either out of intellectual interest or the realisation that technology is power, but that wasn't part of the normal royal curriculum.
This view of education implied that the classics were all the validated knowledge that an 'educated' person needed, a view not far from that of many English 'public' schools until quite recently, and of the politicians they have produced. This view of what was needed by the rulers contrasted with what was needed by the children of the peasantry (artisan skills and, lately, the 'three Rs'[20]).
Neither the classics nor the three Rs formed the basis for the genuine Renaissance man, who sought a fusion of those two worlds. Pointing to the artisan as a source of worldly experience, of knowledge of the material world and its tools such as an alchemist might use, led to a new rapprochement between the classical and the empirical, between intellect and experience. The actions of such men as Dee, even those of the occultist Paracelsus in his medical prescriptions emphasised this distinction, and started the fusion of reason and empiricism that so impresses us today.
As we've said, the word 'Renaissance' refers not just to rebirth, but to a specific rebirth, that of ancient Greek culture. This, however, is a modern view, based on a mistaken view of the Greeks, and of the Renaissance itself. In 'classical' education, no attention is paid to engineering. Of course not. Greek culture ran on pure intellect, poetry an philosophy. They didn't have engineers.
Oh, but they did. Archimedes constructed great cranes that could lift enemy ships out of the water, and we still don't know exactly how he did it. Hero of Alexandria (roughly contemporary with Jesus) wrote many texts about engines and machines of various kinds of the previous three hundred years, many of which show that prototypes may have been made. His coin-operated machines were not too different from those that could be found on any city street in 1930s London or New York, and would probably have been more reliable when it came to disgorging the chocolate, if the Greeks had known about chocolate. The Greeks had elevators, too.
The problem here is that information about the technical aspects of Greek society has been transmitted to us through a bunch of theologians. They liked Hero's steam engine, and indeed many of them have a little glass one on their desk, a sort of Theologians' Toy that they could spin with a candle flame. But the mechanical ideas behind such toys just passed them by. And, just as Greek engineering has not been transmitted to us by theologians, the spiritual attitude of the Renaissance has not come down to us through our 'rational' school teachers. Much of the attempted spirituality within the alchemical position was basically a religious stance, marvelling at the Works of the Lord as they were exposed by the marvels of changes of state an form, when materials were subjected to heat, to 'percussion', and to solution and crystallisation.
This stance has been taken over by today's innocents of rigorous thinking, the New Agers, who find spiritual inspiration in crystals and anodised metals, spherical spark-machines and Newton's pendulums, but do not ask the deeper questions that lie behind these toys. We find the very real awe inspired by science's quest for understanding to be considerably more spiritual than New Age attitudes.
Today there are mystic massage-therapists, aromatherapists, iridologists, people who believe that you can 'holistically' tell what's wrong with someone by examining their irises or the balls of their feet -only -and who root their beliefs in the writings of Renaissance eccentrics like Paracelsus and Dee. But those men would have been horrified to be cited as authorities, especially by such closed-minded descendants.
Prominent among those who refer back to Paracelsus for authority are homeopathists. A basic belief of homeopathy is that medicines become more powerful the more they are diluted. This stance lets them promote their medicine as being totally harmless (it's just water) but also extraordinarily effective (as water isn't). They notice no contradiction here. And homeopathic headache tablets say 'Take one if mild, three if painful'. Shouldn't it be the other way round?
Such people see no need to think about what they are doing, because they base their beliefs on authority. If a question is not raised by that authority, then it's not a question they want to ask.
So, in support of their theories, homeopaths quote Paracelsus: 'That which makes disease is also the cure.' But Paracelsus built his entire career on not respecting authority. Moreover, he never said that a disease is always its own cure.
Contrast this modern spectrum of silliness with the robust, critical attitude of most Renaissance scholars to the idea that arcane practices can lay bare the bones of the world. People such as Dee, indeed Isaac Newton, took that critical position very seriously. To a great extent, so did Paracelsus: for example he repudiated the idea that the stars and planets control various parts of the human body. The Renaissance view was that God's creation has mysterious elements, but those elements are hidden[21], implicit in the nature of the universe, rather than arcane.
This view is very close to Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's marvelling at the animalcules in dirty water, or semen: the astonishing discovery that the Wonders of Creation extended down into the microscopic realm. Nature, God's Creation, was much more subtle. It provided hidden wonders to marvel at as well as the overt artistic vision. Newton was taken with the implicit mathematics of the planets in just this way: there was more to God's invention than was apparent to the unaided eye, and that resonated with his Hermetic beliefs (a philosophy derived from the ideas of Hermes Trismegistos). The crisis of atomism at time was the crisis of pre-formation: if Eve had within her all daughters, each having within her her daughters like a set of Russian dolls, then matter must be infinitely divisible. Or, if not, we could work out the future date of Judgement Day by discovering how many generations there were until we got to the last, empty daughter.
A characteristic of Renaissance thinking, then, was a degree of humility. It was critical about its own explanations. This attitude contrasts favourably with such modern religions as homeopathy, Scientology, creeds that arrogantly claim to offer a 'complete' explanation of the Universe in human terms.
Some scientists are equally arrogant, but good scientists are always aware that science has limitations, and are willing to explain what they are. 'I don't know' is one of the great, though admittedly under-utilised scientific principles. Admitting ignorance clears away so much pointless nonsense. It lets us cope with stage magicians performing the beautiful, and very convincing, illusions -convincing, that is, while we keep our brains out of gear. We know they have to be tricks, and admitting ignorance lets us avoid the trap of believing the illusion to be real merely because we don't know how the trick works. Why should we? We're not members of the Magic Circle. Admitting ignorance similarly protects us against mystic credulity when we encounter natural events that have not yet caught the eye of a competent scientist (and his grant- awarding body), and that still seem to be ... magic. We say 'The magic of nature' ... more the Wonder of Nature, or the Miracle of Life.
This is a stance that nearly all of us share, but it's important to understand the historical tradition it is grounded in. It isn't simply a case of admiring the complexity of God's works. It implies the attitudes of Newton, van Leeuwenhoek and earlier; indeed, right back to Dee. And, doubtless, to some Greek, or several. It involves the Renaissance belief that if we investigate the wonder, the marvel, the miracle, then we'll find even more wonders, marvels and miracles: gravity, say, or spermatozoa.
So what do we, and what did they, mean by 'magic? Dee spoke of the arcane arts, and Newton was committed to many explanations that were 'magickal', especially his commitment to action at a distance, 'gravity', which derived from the mystical attraction/repulsion basics of his Hermetic philosophy.
So 'magic' means three things, all apparently quite diffe
rent. Meaning one is: 'something to be wondered at', and this ranges from card tricks to amoebas to the rings of Saturn. Meaning two is turning a verbal instruction, a spell, into material action, by occult or arcane means ... turning a person into a frog, or vice versa, or a djinn building a castle for his master. The third meaning is the one we use: the technical magic of turning a light switch on, and getting light, without even having to say 'fiat lux'.
Granny Weatherwax's recalcitrant broomstick is type two magic, but her 'headology' is largely a very, very good grasp of psychology (type three magic carefully disguised as type two). It brings to mind Arthur C. Clarke's phrase 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic', which we quoted and discussed in The Science of Discworld. Discworld exemplifies magic by spells, and indeed is maintained as an unlikely creation by being immersed in a strong magical field (type two). Adults of Earthly cultures, like Roundworld, pretend to have lost intellectual belief in magic of the Discworld kind, while their culture is turning more and more of their technology into magic (third kind). And the development of Hex throughout the books is turning Sir Arthur on his head: Discworld's sufficiently advanced magic is now practically indistinguishable from technology.
We can see, as (fairly) rational adults, where the first kind of magic comes from. We see something wonderful and feel tremendously happy that the universe is a place that can include ammonites, say, or kingfishers. But where did we get our belief in the second, irrational kind of magic? How does it come about that all cultures have children that begin their intellectual lives by believing in magic, instead of the real causality that surrounds them?
A plausible explanation is that human beings are initially programmed through fairy stories and nursery tales. All human cultures tell stories to their children; part of the development of our specific humanity is the interaction that we get with early language.
All cultures use animal icons for this nursery tuition, so we in the West have sly foxes, wise owls and frightened chickens. They seem to come out of a human dreamtime, where all animals seem to be types of human being in a different skin, and talk as a matter of course. We learn what the subtle adjectives mean from the actions -and words -of the creatures in the stories. Inuit children don't have a 'sly' fox icon; their fox is 'brave' and 'fast', while the Norwegian iconic fox is secretive and wise, full of good advice for respectful children. The causality in these stories is always verbal: 'So the fox said ... and they did it!' or 'I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down.' The earliest communicated causality that the child meets is verbal instructions that cause material events. That is, spells.
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