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MAGIC

MAGIC. Modern historians have reclaimed the term magic from anthropologists and social scientists who question its utility as a category and its existence as a phenomenon. Although an admittedly ambiguous and elastic term, magic was used by early modern Europeans to describe a complex of thought and practice involving the apparently disparate fields of religion, science, and language. Many of the most sophisticated intellectuals and theologians of the early modern period include magic in their discussions about the nature of physical reality, the causes of suffering and misfortune, the rationale of history, the foundations of political authority, the institutions of the church, and the basis of morality and ethics. Consequently, magic is a legitimate and important field of study, and understanding such pivotal events as the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism will remain incomplete until historians investigate the complex and varied attitudes toward magic that emerged between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.

CHARACTERISTICS OF MAGIC

Magic is best defined as a form of esotericism based on a view of the world as an integral whole composed of interacting spiritual and material forces that human beings can understand and manipulate for good or evil purposes. It encompassed a wide range of activities, such as astrology, alchemy, medicine, divination, necromancy, and conjuring. While this definition holds true for magic over the millennia, only during the early modern period was "black" magic equated with demonic witchcraft and made into a serious criminal offense. At the same time there was a growing interest in and respect for "natural," or "spiritual," magic that began in the twelfth century, reaching its apogee during the Renaissance and early modern period. Scholars agree that this type of elite magic contributed to developments in science, although they disagree about the nature and extent of these contributions. The traditional idea that magic disappeared with the triumph of science overlooks the fact that the decline in witchcraft prosecutions occurred in the mid-to-late seventeenth century, before Enlightenment thinkers embraced the new science and while a magical worldview was still valid for most people. Magistrates and judges, not philosophers and scientists, were the first to doubt the reality of demonic magic and to put a stop to witch prosecutions. While it is true that demonic magic lost its credibility among most European intellectuals and professionals, ordinary Europeans continued to explain misfortune in terms of the evil acts (maleficia) of evil individuals. Furthermore, alchemy and astrology appealed to many intellectuals throughout the eighteenth century, and new forms of occult and esoteric thought (mesmerism, phrenology, physiognomy) emerged to answer questions mechanical and atomic scientific theories could not.

Much of early modern magic represented a continuation of traditions and practices that developed in the medieval period from a synthesis of classical, Jewish, Islamic, and Christian concepts of magic with indigenous Celtic, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Slavic traditions as these groups were converted to Christianity. It is difficult—though in some cases possible—to separate these various strands because they were so thoroughly mixed with Christian elements. Although some scholars continue to distinguish magic from religion on the grounds that magic attempts to manipulate supernatural forces, while religion is directed at divine entities who can be supplicated but not controlled, this distinction is untenable. Saints' prayers often have coercive force, while magical charms and rituals have a supplicatory element. Furthermore, Christianity shared many assumptions that were basic to a magical worldview. Foremost among these was that of a vitalistic universe divided into three levels, the super-celestial, celestial, and terrestrial, each of which was intimately linked to the others through a series of correspondences, sympathies, and antipathies that might be hidden (occult) but that were regular, rational, and discoverable. Christianity and magic also agreed on the existence of invisible, spiritual entities (angels, demons, devils), who interacted with humans in many ways, including sexually. Christianity and magic both emphasized the power and efficacy of words, a belief that was intensified by the Christian reliance on the spoken and written word and by the notion of Christ as the incarnate word of God. Many magical prayers and formulas were simply adaptations of Christian formulations. A further link between Christianity and magic was the belief that hidden powers and virtues existed in natural objects (amulets, talismans, relics, holy water, the sign of the cross, the Eucharist, church bells), which could be tapped for human use. Given these similarities, one can conclude that "[a]cross Europe, throughout the centuries . . . magic often seems indistinguishable from religion" (Clark, p. 110).

VARIETIES OF MAGIC

On a popular level, magic was practiced extensively to deal with problematic events or situations from childbirth and childcare to animal husbandry, sickness, misfortune, lost or stolen objects, divination, business affairs, traveling, falling in or out of love, counteracting witchcraft, and even such mundane activities as shutting windows at night. Magical remedies, rituals, and formulas can be found in necromancer manuals, medical textbooks, scientific texts, the lives of saints, and courtly romances. Since magical practices were so varied, one way of categorizing them is by their intended results: healing, protection, divination, obtaining a desired object, the acquisition of occult knowledge, or simply entertainment. While astrology was a recognized part of academic medicine, magical healing was reserved primarily for diseases that were considered "unnatural" (madness, possession, nightmares) or whose causes were unknown (sudden strokes, heart attacks, seizures) and consequently attributed to the evil machinations of sorcerers, witches, demons, elves, or dwarfs. In these cases, magicians and healers patterned their actions after those of Jesus and the saints and conjured spiritual forces by ritual actions, prayers, blessings, exorcisms, and the use of amulets, talismans, relics, the sign of the cross, holy water, and nostrums made variously from herbs, animal parts, stones, or gems. Next to healing, the most popular form of magic was divination, a practice emphatically rejected by Christian authorities. Charts and manuals existed for reading signs about the future in the sky or in animals, plants, parts of the human body, and dreams. Love magic was used both to seduce and to cause impotency, a common theme in both courtly romances and inquisitor's manuals.

Like popular magic, "spiritual" and "natural" magic were concerned with issues of healing, protection, and divination, but there was a greater emphasis on the acquisition of occult knowledge as a prerequisite to successful magical practices. Broadly, one can say that "spiritual" magic was a form of religiosity whose goal was to attract beneficial divine and spiritual forces into the soul of the operator. Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) was the most famous Renaissance practitioner of this kind of magic. Language was an important element in Ficino's magic because he believed words had intrinsic powers. A similar emphasis on the power of words appears in the work of Jewish Cabbalists like Abraham Abulafia (1240–after 1291) and Joseph Gikatilla (1248–after 1305) and their Christian counterparts, Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) and Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522), who believed that Hebrew was a repository of secret wisdom. In his De Verbo Mirifico (1494), Reuchlin claimed that Jesus' name in Hebrew had the power to revive the dead, cure the sick, exorcise demons, turn rivers into wine, feed the hungry, repulse pirates, and tame camels. A similar kind of magical power was attributed to Egyptian hieroglyphs by Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680). It is not always easy to distinguish between "spiritual" and "natural" magic, nor between "spiritual" and "demonic" magic, for all three were concerned with the spiritual state of the practitioner and were thought to have transitive effects. Necromancy and black magic were an established part of medieval magic and continued throughout the early modern period. The Picatrix, derived from an Arabic source, mixed spiritual and demonic magic with astrology and was widely influential. This kind of synthesis comes out clearly in the work of Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), whose De Occulta Philosophia (enlarged edition 1533) discusses astrology, mathematics, mechanical marvels, numerology, universal harmony, the power of music and incantations, images for talismans, and the occult virtues in natural things. Agrippa claims that whoever wishes to be proficient in magic must study natural philosophy, mathematics, astrology, and theology. Only when he has mastered these disciplines will he attain the highest level of understanding through an act of mystical illumination and become a true magus. A characteristic feature of this kind of magic is its "intense religiosity and sense of piety" (Clark, p. 150). Giambattista Della Porta's Magia Naturalis (1588) was another popular work on natural magic that described procedures for such diverse things as transmuting metals; producing exotic plants and animals through grafting and cross-breeding; cutting, conserving, and cooking meat; staving off baldness; eliminating wrinkles; and engendering beautiful children.

CHANGING ATTITUDES

Around 1400 there was a radical change in attitudes toward magic on the part of religious and secular authorities. No longer seen as a body of superstitious and largely illusory practices that could be eradicated through a combination of missionary activity and the counter-use of Christian ritual—a view characteristic of the Middle Ages—magic and magicians came to be viewed as a demonic fifth column threatening the very existence of Christian civilization. This negative view of magic was reinforced by the Protestant attack on Catholic sacraments, rituals, and miracles as demonic. For the most part, however, Catholic and Protestant authorities distinguished between "popular" magic, whose practitioners were prosecuted as witches and sorcerers in league with the devil, and "learned" or "spiritual" magic, which was generally tolerated and widely practiced at European courts because of its promise of wealth and prestige and its sheer entertainment value. But even when tolerated, magicians inspired ambivalent attitudes, for beneficent "white" magic might easily be perverted into "black" magic. For this reason, two of the foremost demonologists of the sixteenth century, Jean Bodin (1530–1596) and Martin Del Rio (1551–1608), condemned all magic as demonic.

The increased concern with demonology and witchcraft in the early modern period has been attributed to the religious conflicts stirred up by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Recent research has shown, however, that it was not religious conflict per se that encouraged witch hunts but the new age of "confessionalism" that accompanied reform movements, heightening religious fervor and the concern with eradicating religious deviance. In more general terms, the increased fear of magic and sorcery was a response to increasing political and religious insecurity and social unrest. The Black Death, the Great Schism, the proliferation of heretical movements in the high Middle Ages, the discovery and dissemination of new texts, printing, trade, travel, and the discovery of the New World all undermined established truths and called into question the idea of divine providence and God's omniscience and benevolence. Misfortune, uncertainty, and insecurity called for a new theodicy, and this was supplied by demonologists and witch theorists. Neither irrational nor unscientific, they deployed all the resources available from natural philosophy and theology to vindicate the goodness of God and the truth of the Bible. Witchcraft theory was a kind of "theological damage control" (Stephens, p. 366) that let God off the hook for seeming injustice by attributing evil and misfortune to the activities of men and women in league with the devil.

The fact that the fear of sorcerers and witches was most intense during the period of the so-called scientific revolution (1570 to 1680) undermines the idea proposed by Enlightenment thinkers (Comte, Condorcet) and nineteenth- and twentieth-century social anthropologists (Edward Tylor, James Frazer, Bronislaw Malinowski) that magic represented an early stage of human development superceded first by religion and finally by science. Modern scholars reject this progressive view in favor of a conceptual history of magic that emphasizes it as an inextricable element in the religious, political, and scientific discourse of various time periods. In the early modern period, attitudes toward magic and witchcraft have been shown to correlate with political and religious views. For example, those committed to the divine right of kings and Tridentine Catholicism had a greater tendency to support the persecution of magicians and witches than humanists, libertines, and skeptics, who took the Machiavellian position that the magic and witchcraft were delusions manipulated for the benefit of those in power.

SKEPTICISM ABOUT MAGIC

There was also a correlation between magic and science. The argument that magic was a substitute for real science and technology is simply wrong. The widespread practice of magic suggests that it was considered effective, and the lively debate about the efficacy of magic is now recognized as a contributing factor to the development of science. Lynn Thorndike described magicians as the first experimental scientists. Frances Yates emphasized the role played by "occult" philosophy in stimulating science. Although her claims have been modified, it is clear that the natural magic tradition influenced important scientific figures such as Paracelsus (1493–1541), Daniel Sennert, Jean Baptiste van Helmont (1579–1644), Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), John Dee (1527–1608), and members of England's Royal Society. The paradox was that as demonologists debated with their critics about whether the effects of witchcraft, sorcery, and magic were natural or diabolical, they promoted the very skepticism they were at pains to allay. Among the skeptics were Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525), who offered naturalistic explanations for the power of incantations; Johann Weyer (1515–1588), who turned to medicine, arguing that witches were simply insane old women; and Reginald Scot (1538–1599), who denied that incorporeal spirits could have contact with humans. Even more damaging were those like John Wagstaffe (1633–1677), who concluded that witchcraft was simply a politically useful tool, an idea that led Francis Hutchinson to conclude in 1718 that beliefs about witches and sorcerers were products of their historical contexts. Witch-hunting was therefore not an anomaly in the age of the socalled scientific revolution but a constituent part of it. Underlying the debate over magic and witchcraft were fundamental issues concerning the authority and credibility of the Christian revelation; the physical constitution of the created world; the nature of causality; and the basis of politics, ethics, and morality. Every one of these involved the more general problem of what constitutes valid evidence and how knowledge may be obtained. But however beneficial this kind of scientific questioning and skepticism was in the long term, it was not immediately responsible for the decline of witch-hunting. That fell to the judicial skepticism—created largely by the excesses of witch-hunting—which led those in charge of witch trials to demand more restraint in the use of torture and stricter standards of evidence. As a result of changes in judicial procedures, mass panics ended, more of the accused were acquitted, and courts became increasingly reluctant to initiate prosecutions. This did not happen because judges, magistrates, and inquisitors denied the reality or possibility of witchcraft but because they increasingly came to believe that witchcraft was not a crime that could be proven by law.

See also Astrology; Catholicism; Occult Philosophy; Reformation, Protestant; Ritual, Religious; Scientific Revolution; Witchcraft.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ankarloo, Bengt, and Stuart Clark, eds. Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Middle Ages. Philadelphia, 2002.

——. Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Period of the Witch Trials. Philadelphia, 2002.

Geertz, H. "An Anthropology of Religion and Magic." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6 (1975): 71–89.

Idel, Moshe. "On Judaism, Jewish Mysticism and Magic." In Envisioning Magic, edited by Peter Schafter and Hans G. Kippenberg, pp. 195–214. Leiden, 1997.

Malinowski, B. Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays. New York, 1954.

Moran, Bruce T. Patronage and Institutions: Science, Technology, and Medicine at the European Courts, 1500–1750. Woodbridge, U.K., 1991.

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Stephens, Walter. Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief. Chicago, 2002.

Thomas, Keith. "An Anthropology of Religion and Magic, II." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6 (1975): 91–109.

——. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England. London, 1975.

Thorndike, Lynn. A History of Magic and Experimental Science. 8 vols. New York, 1923–1958.

Trevor-Roper, H. R. The European Witchcraze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Other Essays. New York, 1969.

Walker, D. P. Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella. London, 1958.

Wilson, Stephen. The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-Modern Europe. London and New York, 2000.

ALLISON P. COUDERT, JOHN SEWELL