9-1/2" x 13". Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
What is perhaps remarkable, from the modern point of view, is that magic could actually have served as a matrix for the Scientific Revolution. As explained in Chapter 2, technology had no theoretical or ideological basis, at least not until Francis Bacon. Even down to the time of Leonardo da Vinci, machines tended to be seen as toys, whereas the concept of force was linked to the Hermetic theme of universal animation.43 Technology, in short, could not be a rival to Aristotelianism because it was not a philosophy about how the universe worked. Magic was. Of course, there were many types of magic and many magical philosophies, but all of them, in sharp contrast to church Aristotelianism, urged the practitioner to operate on nature, to alter it, not to remain passive. In this sense, then, the ascendancy of magical doctrines and techniques in the sixteenth century was fully congruent with the early phases of capitalism, and Keith Thomas has recorded (for England, at least) how extensive and intense occult activity was during this time.44 The idea of dominating nature arose from the magical tradition, perhaps the first explicit statement of the notion occurring in a work by Francesco Giorgio in 1525 ("De Harmonia Mundi"), which is not about technology, but -- of all things -- numerology. This art, he says, will confer upon man as regards his environment 'vis operandi et dominandi,' "the power of operating and dominating." We should not be surprised that, in the sixteenth century, this concept was easily extended from numerology to accounting and engineering.
Numerology provides a very instructive example, in fact, of the split between the esoteric and exoteric traditions of the occult sciences. At the heart of the cabala, for example, lay the notion of a "dialing code." In the Hebrew alphabet, letters are also numbers, and hence an equivalence can be established between totally unrelated words based on the fact that they "add up" to the same amount. The right combination, it was believed, would put the adept in contact with God. Pico della Mirandola, for example, was fascinated by the mystical ecstasy brought on by number meditation, a trance in which communication with the Divinity was said to occur (the meditation could, of course, produce such ecstasy if the activity narrowed one's attention in a yogic fashion).45 At the same time, similar techniques formed the basis of a practical cabala that the adept might use to obtain love, wealth, influence, and so on.
Plate 9. The Ptolemaic universe according to Robert Fludd, 1619. Courtesy,
The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Under the pressure of the technical and economic changes of the sixteenth century, pursuit of God or world harmony began to seem increasingly quaint, and emphasis on the practical or exoteric tradition resulted in a purely representational use of the Hebrew alphabet. We can see this shift in books published only a decade apart by Robert Fludd and Joseph Solomon Delmedigo. In Plate 9, Fludd's illustration of the Ptolemaic universe (1619), the Hebrew letters signify the "spiritual intelligences" that rule each of the twenty-two spheres, from the World Mind, ("Mens") down to the sphere of the earth. (This same type of labeling also occurs in cabalistic illustrations of the human body, where Hebrew letters serve to identify the spiritual intelligences that govern each particular part.) Fludd was a major proponent of the view that the Hebrew letters in the diagram corresponded to something real: they concretely identified the ruling archetypes of each region, and this information could be plugged into certain types of cabalistic "equations" to generate significant results for the practitioner. It was hardly a problem that the letters did not correspond to anything material or substantial in in nature.
Plate 10. Engineering illustration from "Elim," by Joseph Solomon
Delmedigo, 1629.
A very different use of the Hebrew alphabet is depicted in Plate 10, an engineering sketch from Joseph Solomon Delmedigo's book "Elim" (1629). Here, the letters are used to label a set of gears in a diagram illustrating how power can be multiplied so that, in Archimedean fashion, an individual with a place to stand can move a large section of the earth. It is no accident that Rabbi Delmedigo had been a student of Galileo at Padua, that he was an ardent Copernican, the first Jewish scholar to employ logarithms, and ultimately a leading popularizer of scientific knowledge. Yet the labels have a still more complex significance. "Elim" means "powers" or "forces," and its implication can be both sacred and secular. Thus Jehovah is addressed as "El" in Hebrew liturgy; and more generally, an "el" can be a power that carries the essence ("spiritual intelligence") of God. But "el" can signify a purely material force as well, such as the power developed by a gear train. This ambiguity is reflected in the book itself, which deals with both religious and scientific matters, and in the authors attitude toward the cabala -- an attitude that was so ambiguous that present-day Jewish scholars remain uncertain whether Delmedigo was a critic or a proponent. For a time, then, disparate concepts of number could exist side by side, even within a single mind, but ultimately, the esoteric tradition was unable to sustain itself. Under the pressures of a new economy, the spiritual aspect of the cabala, along with the evocative power of the spoken Hebrew word, became increasingly irrelevant. It was not that the cabala was "wrong," but that technology and mercantile capital had little use for religious mathematics.46
A similar transition occurred in all of the occult sciences during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, with the possible exception of witchcraft, which was (to my knowledge) purely transitive and without a subjective, or self-transforming, aspect. What science accomplished (or rather, what became science) was the adoption of the epistemological framework, indeed the whole ideology, of the exoteric tradition. All of the "natural magicians" of the sixteenth century, such as Agrippa, Della Porta, Campanella, John Dee, and Paracelsus, right down to Francis Bacon, drew on both the technological and Hermetic traditions for the phrase "evoking the powers of nature." Both traditions began to fuse at this time and form the basis of modern scientific experimentation. Both were active ways of addressing reality, constituting a sharp contrast to the static nature of Greek science and the frozen verbalism of medieval Scholastic disputation. The identity of knowledge and construction which we discussed in Chapter 2, the "making that is itself a knowledge," which received its clearest expression in the work of Bacon, was derived from the numerous writings on magic and alchemy which appeared in Europe during the sixteenth century.47 Della Porta candidly termed magic the "practical part of natural science," and such men as Dee, Campanella, and Agrippa tended to blur (from our point of view) control of the environment by means of the art of navigation with control of the environment by means of astrology.48 Prior to and during the English Civil War, remarked John Aubrey in "Brief Lives," "astrologer, mathematician, and conjurer were accounted the same things."49 It was only after magic had provided technology with a methodological program that the latter was in a position to reject the former. But it was more in the fusion of the two, than in their subsequent separation, that the esoteric tradition was lost.
Examples of this sort can easily be multiplied. The esoteric tradition in astrology, for example, as represented by the Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), who translated the entire Hermetic corpus for Cosimo de Medici between 1462 and 1484, sought to condition the body and spirit through music or incantation in order to alter the personality ("receive the celestial influence"). Bacon himself approved of this aspect of the art, calling it "astrologia sana," and D.P. Walker has in effect said the same thing when he calls Ficino's system "astrological psychotherapy."50 But the ultimate legacy of the tradition, even among present-day astrologers who consider themselves serious students, is for the most part manipulative and this-worldly, and the horoscope column in the daily newspapers represents the pathetic outcome of what was once a magnificent edifice of dialectical thought.
In the case of alchemy, the causes of the exoteric-esoteric split were once again technological, particularly because of alchemy's age-old relationship to mining, metallurgy, and numerous crafts and manufacturers. The sixte
enth century saw the emergence of a coterie of artisans who denounced the alchemists, this attitude being most clearly expressed in works such as Biringuccio's "Pirotechnia" and Agricola's "De Re Metallica."51 The split is at the same time a response to changing economic relationships, in particular, the collapse of the guilds. An increasingly laissez-faire economy challenged both the feudal notion of maintaining secrecy about a craft's techniques and the oral tradition that had been the basis of initiation into these "mysteries." Pressure to reveal these secrets, to make them accessible to all by way of Gutenberg's movable type, led to the publication of craft handbooks (like those of Biringuccio and Agricola) which provided detailed accounts of processes and illustrations of guild practices (see Plate 11). These works, the appearance of which would have been viewed with horror in the Middle Ages, now served the interests of a large and amorphous social class. Craft processes themselves had become commodities; and secrecy, revealed knowledge, and microcosm/macrocosm analogies were seen as superfluous and even inimical by an artisanry that was increasingly caught up in a market economy. Thus, when the surgeon Ambroise Paré (1510-90) was accused of having betrayed guild secrets, he felt confident in replying that he was not of those men who "make a cabala of art."52 Indeed, the whole notion of scientific organization which was trumpeted by Bacon in the "New Atlantis" was completely incompatible with the medieval ideal of deliberate secretiveness.
Plate 11. Separating gold from silver, from De Re Metallica (1556).
Courtesy, The Bancroft Library, Unversity of California, Berkeley.
The ideology of this attack was heavily linguistic in nature. Once the idea of an inner psychic landscape (in our terms), or original participation, was partly lost, technology was able to judge the alchemical tradition from the point of view of technical clarity and precision and, of course, find it sorely lacking. As we have seen, the language of alchemy is dreamlike, symbolic, imagistic, but this world of resemblance was disintegrating. Carrots were not bottles, lions no longer devoured the sun, androgynes were inventions in the same category as unicorns. Cryptic phrases such as "the sun and his shadow complete the work" did not glaze pots or extract tin, and names for substances such as "butter of antimony" or "flowers of arsenic" (which, however, lasted down to the late eighteenth century) were now seen as cumbersome and inefficient. The whole alchemical imagery of things being themselves and their opposites, or possessing inherent ambiguity, was now regarded as stupid, incomprehensible, an obstacle to be rooted out. Biringuccio, Bacon, Agricola, Lazarus Ercker, and many others deliberately set themselves against the tradition of wonder at nature, of credulity about fabulous beasts and plants and stones -- a tradition that had characterized medieval literature from Pliny to Agrippa. The notion of 'satsang' still present in esoteric disciplines like Zen and yoga, that the truth is miraculously communicable through a relationship with a teacher, was an anathema to these men, who correctly saw that the attempted domination of nature depended on cognitive clarity. The collapse of an ecological, or holistic, orientation toward nature went hand in hand with the rejection of dialectical reason.53
The second factor contributing to the split between the esoteric and exoteric traditions was organized religion, both Catholic and Protestant. It was the very intimacy between magic and Catholicism which led to an exaggerated emphasis on alchemy's esoteric aspects (indeed, prior to this, alchemy was not seen as having "aspects"), an emphasis that served to sharpen the distinction between the esoteric tradition and the growing body of technological studies which were rejecting that tradition in the first place. This same intimacy also left magic extremely vulnerable to Protestant rationalism, both during and after the Reformation.
According to Keith Thomas, the church was quite heavily involved in magical practices on the local level during the Middle Ages. Indeed, without the network of rituals and sacraments it is doubtful that the church could have had the leverage that it did. The liturgy of the time included rituals for blessing houses, tools, crops, and people setting out on journeys; rituals to insure fertility; and rituals of exorcism. In the popular mind, the priest had special powers, and a whole range of beliefs, or superstitions, had grown up around the ceremony of the Mass. Thus the wafer was seen as having the power to cure the blind, and it could also be crushed and sprinkled in the garden to discourage caterpillars. At the same time, the church deliberately blurred the distinction between prayers, which were appeals for supernatural help, and the tools of magic, such as charms or spells, which were supposed to work automatically. The church recommended the use of prayers when gathering medidnal herbs; and the repetition of 'ave marias' or 'pater nosters' fostered the notion that these Latin "incantations" had a mechanical efficacy. All in all, despite the church's opposition to magic on the official level, it appeared to the populace "as a vast reservoir of magical power, capable of being deployed for a variety of secular purposes."54
As for alchemy, its relationship to the church, at least during the Middle Ages, was practically heretical, for it occasionally claimed to provide the inner content of Christianity which it felt no organized religion could supply.55 Thus it argued, every so often, for an analogy between Christ and the alchemical work itself, the so-called lapis-Christ parallel. This analogy and the claim of material transformation resulted in several encyclicals and papal bulls against the art, but as the social structure of the church began to crumble in the fifteenth century, alchemy and religion became intertwined in a most unusual way. In particular, the soteriological (salvationist) aspect of the art began to receive more attention even as the "puffers" and charlatans were subject to increasing attack. This development was, in fact, another facet of the esoteric-exoteric split. Sir George Ripley (1415-90), canon of Bridlington and an alchemist as well, frankly stated that the purpose of alchemy was the union of the soul with the body. By the sixteenth century, the church had drawn up a document establishing correspondences between the various alchemical processes and church sacraments. Hence putrefaction was extreme unction; distillation, ordination; calcination, repentance; coagulation, marriage; solution, baptism; sublimation, confirmation; and of course, transmutation, the Mass.56 We might infer from these correspondences that the collapse of church magic under the pressure of heretical sects, and later, the Protestant Reformation, led to an overemphasis on the religious dimension of alchemy. This, in addition to the attack being mounted by the growing technological literature, ultimately served to split it off from the exoteric tradition.
It was during the Renaissance that the soteriological aspect of alchemy was pushed to its extreme, becoming, says Jung, "an undercurrent of the Christianity that ruled on the surface." In addition to the lapis-Christ parallel, some texts referred to mercury as the Virgin Mary, and the spirit of mercury as the Holy Ghost. Sir George Ripley constantly intermingled Christian and alchemical symbols in a way that turned into an unwitting parody of Catholicism. In one of his sketches, for example, the green lion lies bleeding in the lap of the virgin, an obvious caricature of the Pieta.57 The Christian attitude toward alchemy at this time is also revealed in the choice of animals used as metaphors for Hermes, which were the same as had been used for Christ in patristic literature: dragon, fish, unicorn, eagle, lion, and snake. Transubstantiation was seen as, in essence, an alchemical process. Ripley and others praised the making of the stone as the Second Coming which, Jung notes, "sound[s] very queer indeed in the mouth of a medieval ecclesiastic." Indeed, what we see is an unwitting distortion of Christianity, an apotheosis that was at the same time a melting down. The medieval Christian synthesis was thus recast in alchemical terms, and this tendency reached its climax at the end of the sixteenth century with the rise of the Rosicrucians, a semisecret, occult brotherhood that still exists today.
By the end of the sixteenth century, the intimate relationship between magic and the church had become such an obvious target for the Reformation that magical practices of all kinds began to draw fire from Catholic as well as Protestant quarters. The stor
y is rather complicated, because Catholic-Protestant relations themselves were very complex, and the attack on magic was part of an internecine cross fire that is not easily unraveled. Catholic opposition to magic was facilitated by a Protestant commitment to the Hermetic tradition on the part of those who, suggests Jung, saw that tradition (perhaps unconsciously) as a way of remaining Catholic. Thus toward the end of the sixteenth century in Germany, a group of occult practitioners began to argue openly for Hermeticism as being the path to divine illumination, explicitly stating the lapis-Christ parallel.58 This group began to have an impact on Lutheran circles, and to rally behind those Protestant forces that could offer it protection from the long arm of the Inquisition. The movement thus acquired a political tinge, which emerged in anonymous manifestoes of 1614-15 defending Rosicrucianism and the occult sciences.
Europe soon found itself swept up in a frenzy over Rosicrucianism and its heretical implications. Orthodox religion, was convinced of the existence of, something approaching a world-wide conspiracy, a charge explicitly denied by the alchemist Michael Maier in his "Laws of the Fraternity of the Rosie Cross" (Latin edition 1618) -- a book that nevertheless affirmed the existence of a secret brotherhood of enlightened mystics dedicated to the improvement of mankind. Two years prior to this, the English physidan and alchemist Robert Fludd published his own defense of the brotherhood ("Apologia Compendaria Fraternitatem de Rosea Cruce") which he followed with a series of volumes from 1617 to 1621. Fludd argued for the inner content of the occult sciences, an alchemical interpretation of the Bible (e.g., seeing the creation as a divine chemical separation), and the view of nature as one vast alchemical process.
The Reenchantment of the World Page 11