Lynn Thorndike

“ The art of signatures, oneiromancy, augury, divination, astrology, alchemy, the Cabala, sorcery, and necromancy are some designations which at once come to mind. But no one of them is at all adequate as a class name for all these beliefs and the practices which they involve, taken together. Are not these notions, nevertheless, closely allied; is there not an intimate relation between them all? And is not “magic” a term which will include them all and denote the general subject, the philosophy and the art, of which they all are branches? ”

“ The stars signify all things in the sensible world but the soul is free unless it slips and is stained by the body and so comes under their control. Fate or the force of the stars is like a wind which shakes and tosses the ship of the body in which the soul makes its passage. Man as a part of the world does some things and suffers many things in accordance with destiny. Some men become slaves to this world and to external influences, as if they were bewitched. ”

“ Are there other sides of our life and thought to-day where magic still lingers and no such march as that of modern natural and experimental science has been begun or progressed so far? We fear that there are. One can well imagine that a future age may regard much of the learning even of our time as almost as futile, superstitious, fantastic in method, and irrelevant to the ends sought, as were primitive man’s methods of producing rain, Egyptian amulets to cure disease, or medieval blood-letting according to the phases of the moon. ”

“ Perhaps, though I am far from asserting this, magic played a less prominent part then in science and in philosophy than in the later Middle Ages. Perhaps we may picture to ourselves the minds of men in the twelfth and thirteenth and succeeding centuries as awakening from a long, intellectual torpor during the chaotic and dreary "Dark Ages," and, eager for knowledge and for mental occupation, but still inexperienced and rather bewildered, as snatching without discrimination at whatever came first to hand of the lore of the past. ”

“ On the whole, while to us to-day the Natural History seems a disorderly and indiscriminate conglomeration of fact and fiction, its defects are probably to a great extent those of its age and of the writers from whom it has borrowed. If it does not reflect the highest achievements and clearest thinking of the best scientists of antiquity—and be it said that there are a number of the Hellenistic age of whom we should know less than we do but for Pliny—it probably is a fairly faithful epitome of science and error concerning nature in his own time and the centuries preceding. ”

“ Finally, we should remember that man always is a factor in magic. His knowledge, skill or power is always essential to the performance of a feat of magic. Even when demons do the deed, they must be invoked. A miracle may be contrary to natural law but it is not magic, for man is not the cause of it. Even if wrought in answer to his prayer, the miracle is not magic, for the gods answer only if they choose. But the magic formula compels the desired marvel; by it man coerces nature or even deity.
Such are some of the chief characteristics of magic. ”

“ Science is a gradual evolution, not a modern creation.
Be that as it may, if the anthropologists are correct in asserting that magic forms a great part of the life and thought of early man and of all primitive peoples, it is evident that only gradually would the science and thought of civilized peoples free themselves from the old habits and instincts. Modern science cannot exempt itself from its own theory of evolution as Julius Firmicus exempted the Roman emperor from the rule of the stars. Science did not come down from above nor invade from without. ”

“ But while magic is condemned, its great powers are admitted. Simon Magus makes great boasts of the marvels which he can perform. These include becoming invisible, boring through rocks and mountains as if they were clay, passing through fire without being burned, flying through the air, loosing bonds and barriers, transformation into animal shapes, animation of statues, production of new plants or trees in a moment, and growing beards upon little boys. ”

“ Besides this sharp separation of divination from science and besides his rejection of tradition, a third creditable feature of Cicero's book is his question: What intimate connection, what bond of natural causality can there be between the liver or heart or lung of a fat bull and the divine eternal cause of things which rules the world? [23] He refuses to believe in any extraordinary bonds of sympathy between things which, in so far as our daily experience and our knowledge of nature's workings can inform us, have absolutely no connection. He appeals to the canons of common sense. ”

“ Such a figment, Cicero scornfully affirms, as that the heart will vanish from the carcass of a victim is not believed even by old-wives now-a-days. How can the heart vanish from the body? Surely it must be there as long as life lasts, and how can it disappear in an instant? “Believe me, you are abandoning the citadel of philosophy while you defend its outposts. For in your effort to prove soothsaying true you utterly pervert physiology.... For there will be something which either springs from nothing or suddenly vanishes into nothingness. What scientist ever said that? ”

“ He who yields to the charms of love and family affection or seeks political power or aught else than Truth and true beauty, or even he who searches for beauty in inferior things; he who is deceived by appearances, he who follows irrational inclinations, is as truly bewitched as if he were the victim of magic and goetia so-called. The life of reason is alone free from magic. Measuring our age by such a standard, we shall be tempted to cry out, Magic of magics, all is magic! What else is there to write about?
Importance of the history of experimental science. ”

“ They are phenomena in that union—or struggle—of magic and science which marked the decay of the former and the development of the latter. As such, they warn us not to picture a magician to ourselves as armed with a wand, clad in solemn robes, and attended by a black cat. They warn us, on the other hand, not to regard the learned students of nature, mathematics and medicine in ages past as modern scientists in mind and spirit, who were merely handicapped by such obstacles as crude instruments and want of data. ”

“ It is therefore perhaps not surprising that men like Galen, Apuleius, Apollonius, and Dunstan were accused of magic by their contemporaries; that men like Gerbert, Michael Scot, and Albertus Magnus were represented as magicians in later, if not contemporary legend; that Lithica and Roger Bacon tell us of the danger of sages being accused of magic; that the Book of Enoch, Cyprian, Firmicus, and Picatrix confuse magic with other arts and sciences; and that no one of our authors, try as he may, succeeds in keeping magic entirely out of science or science entirely out of magic. ”

“ Can the student of that age, we may ask in concluding, rightly interpret and appreciate it, can he make proper use of its extant records, unless he recognizes not merely that men made mistakes then and accepted a mass of false statements concerning nature, but that the best minds were liable to be esoteric and mystical, to incline to the occult and the fantastic, to be befogged by absurd credulity and by great mental confusion, to be fettered by habits of childish and romantic reasoning such as occurs in Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos and in Plato’s Timaeus? ”

“ To deny to Babylon, to Egypt, and to India, their part in the development of science and scientific thinking is to defy the testimony of the ancients, supported by the discoveries of the modern authorities. The efforts which have been made to ascribe to Greek influence the science of Egypt, of later Babylon, of India, and that of the Arabs do not add to the glory that was Greece. How could the Babylonians of the golden age of Greece or the Hindus, a little later, have taken over the developments of Greek astronomy? ”

“ Yet our material has conclusively shown that the history of magic is bound up with the history of science as well as with folk-lore, primitive culture, and the history of religion. Sometimes our authors have spoken of natural magic, but I rather wonder whether there could well be any other kind, since man must always reckon with his natural environment. It is not without reason that the Magi stand out in Pliny’s pages not as mere sorcerers or enchanters but as those who have gone farthest and in most detail—too curiously, in his opinion—into the study of nature. ”

“ But as time went on and observation taught men, it must have been impressed upon their minds that either the events they sought to produce, or the methods by which they sought to produce them, were a little out of the ordinary, although of the possibility of the events and of the validity of the methods they still remained convinced. If we wish to sum up the whole history of magic in a sentence, we may say that men first regarded magic as natural, then as marvelous, then as impossible and absurd. Evidently then magic is subjective, as anything false must be. ”

“ Magic a human art: theurgy divine.
Neither Porphyry nor Iamblichus, I believe, employs the word, “magic,” but they both often allude to its practitioners and methods by such expressions as “jugglers” and “enchanters” or by contrasting what is done “artificially” or by means of art with theurgical operations. In the last case the distinction is between what on the one hand is regarded as a divine mystery or revelation and what on the other hand is looked upon as a mere human art and contrivance. And “nothing ... which is fashioned by human art is genuine and pure.” ”

“ In the reality of such feats of magic, then, Thomas firmly believes.
Magic not a science but due to demons.
But Aquinas will not admit that the magician and his materials are a sufficient cause of the magic. He also denies that certain men are especially endowed with magic power by the stars at their birth or that the influence of the constellations can be controlled to perform particular feats of magic. Demons in his opinion really perform the magic. Words, figures, spells are mere signs to them; the poor magician is their dupe. ”

“ The Natural History is a great storehouse of misinformation as well as of information, for Pliny’s credulity and lack of discrimination harvested the tares of legend and magic along with the wheat of historical fact and ancient science in his voluminous granary. This may put other historical investigators upon their guard in accepting its statements, but only increases its value for our purpose. Perhaps it is even more valuable as a collection of ancient errors than it is as a repository of ancient science. ”

“ Such are the beliefs which for a long time pervaded the thought and learning of Europe; beliefs of the widespread acceptance of which we have noted but a few striking illustrations. They constitute a varied and formidable class of convictions. There was the notion that from such things as the marks upon one’s body, or from one’s dreams, or from peals of thunder, flight of birds, entrails of sacrificial victims and the movements of the stars, we can foretell the future. ”

“ Peter says, “Moreover, this should be understood, that after Aristotle faith is to be put in Albert above all who have written in philosophy, because he has himself illuminated the writings of almost all philosophers and has seen wherein they spoke truly or falsely, nay more, since he himself was experienced above all others in natural phenomena. It may be that some, relying on their metaphysics or logic, can impugn him by certain arguments, but I think that no matter of great concern, since Albert himself says that faith is to be put in anyone who is expert in his art.” ”

“ One remarkable corollary of the so-called Italian Renaissance or Humanistic movement at the close of the middle ages with its too exclusive glorification of ancient Greece and Rome has been the strange notion that the ancient Hellenes were unusually free from magic compared with other periods and peoples. It would have been too much to claim any such immunity for the primitive Romans, whose entire religion was originally little else than magic and whose daily life, public and private, was hedged in by superstitious observances and fears. ”

“ So strong was the tendency to believe in the marvelous, that men of learning were often pictured by subsequent tradition, if not by contemporary gossip, as mighty necromancers. Even Gerbert, who seems to have done nothing more shocking than to write a treatise on the abacus and build a pipe-organ, was pictured as running off with a magician's book and daughter, hanging under bridges between earth and water to escape noxious spells, and making compacts with Satan. ”

“ When men still believed in demons and witches and divination from dreams, it is not surprising that they believed also in natural magic. Only a small part of nature’s secrets were revealed to them; of the rest they felt that almost anything might turn out to be true. It was a time when “one vast realm of wonder spreads around.” They had to struggle against a huge burden of error and superstition which Greece and Rome and the Arabs handed down to them; yet they must try to assimilate what was of value in Aristotle, Galen, Pliny, Ptolemy, and the rest. ”

“ Not only will he understand why there is light and darkness, and why sin and vice exist and life and death, but also why there are reptiles and wild beasts and why they shall be destroyed, why there are birds and beasts of burden, why there are gems and precious metals, why there are brass, iron and steel, lead, glass, wax, herbs, waters, “and why the wild denizens of the sea.” Why there are four points of the compass, why demons and men, why heat and cold, stars, winds, and clouds, frost, snow, planets, aeons, decans, and so on and so forth. ”

“ To attempt to define magic further than has been done in our description of the notions of primitive man is like trying to embrace a phantom. Magic rested upon man’s conjecture of the characteristics and processes of nature, not on a knowledge of nature correctly deduced from observation and experiment. ”

“ If a man is always sad and in the dumps, after purifying the mandragora root in a fountain, let him take it to bed with him, hold it so that it will be warmed by the heat of his body, and say, “God, who madest man from the dust of the earth without grief, I now place next me that earth which has never transgressed”—Hildegard has already stated that the mandragora is composed “of that earth of which Adam was created”—“in order that my clay may feel that peace just as Thou didst create it.” ”

“ It is to this adulterated and evil magic that Philo again refers when he likens political life to Joseph’s coat of many colors, stained with the blood of wars, and in which a very little truth is mixed up with a great deal of sophistry akin to that of the augurs, ventriloquists, sorcerers, jugglers and enchanters, “from whose treacherous arts it is very difficult to escape.” ”

“ Indeed, Bacon seems to think that magic has taken such a hold upon men that it can be uprooted only by scientific exposition of its tricks and by scientific achievement of even greater marvels than it professes to perform. Perhaps he realizes that religious censure or rationalistic argument is not enough to turn men from these alluring arts, but that science must show unto them yet a more excellent way, and afford scope for that laudable curiosity, that inventive and exploring instinct which magic pretends to gratify. ”

“ Coming to a later age, we find Agrippa frankly owning his trust in magic, and including under it, in his three books of Occult Philosophy, practically all the beliefs that we have mentioned. For him magic embraced the fields of nature, mathematics and theology. Indeed, men of his day and of the century following displayed a tendency to stretch the term to include true science. He himself called magic "the acme of all philosophy." ”

“ The erudite fortitude of students of the Merovingian period commands our admiration, but sometimes inclines us to wonder whether anyone without a somewhat dry-as-dust constitution could penetrate far or tarry long in the desert of early medieval Latin learning without perishing of intellectual thirst. As a rule the writings of the time show no originality whatever, and least of all any scientific investigation; they are of value merely as an indication of what past books men still read and what parts of past science they still possessed some interest in. ”

“ However, I suspect that it is not so much that magic has been shown to be false, as it is that men have come to set a greater value upon truth, that accounts for magic’s decline. As I survey the practice and “beliefs” of primitive and savage tribes or the columns of modern newspapers and much of modern literature, I become convinced that men have a natural tendency to assert, and craving to hear the sensational, exaggerated, and impossible, and to fly in the face both of reason and experience. ”

“ It has often been remarked that, as a new religion comes to prevail in a society, the old rites are discredited and prohibited as magic. The faith and ceremonies of the majority, performed publicly, are called religion: the discarded cult, now practiced only privately and covertly by a minority, is stigmatized as magic and contrary to the general good. Thus we shall hear Christian writers condemn the pagan oracles and auguries as arts of divination, and classify the ancient gods as demons of the same sort as those invoked in the magic arts. ”