Lynn Thorndike

“ 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. ”

“ The Lithica opens by representing Hermes as bestowing upon mankind the precious lore of the marvelous virtues of gems. In his cave are stored stones which banish ghosts, robbers, and snakes, which bring health, happiness, victory in war and games, honor at courts and success in love, and which insure safety on journeys, the favor of the gods, and enable one to read the hidden thoughts of others and to understand the language of the birds as they predict the future. Few persons, however, avail themselves of this mystic lore, and those who do so are liable to be executed on the charge of magic. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Moreover, remorselessly adds the clear-headed Plotinus with a burst of insight that may well be attributed to Hellenic genius, 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. ”

“ Men and demons.
Once a year in the neighborhood of the Red Sea a man is seen who spends the remainder of his time among “nymphs, nomads and demons.” [943] At his annual appearance many princes and great men come to consult him concerning the future. He also has the gift of tongues to the extent of understanding several languages perfectly. His speech is like sweetest music, his breath sweet and fragrant, his person the most graceful that his interlocutor had ever seen. He also was never afflicted with any disease, for once a month he ate the bitter fruit of a medicinal herb. ”

“ But Vitruvius believed that an architect should not be a mere craftsman but broadly educated in history, medicine, and philosophy, geometry, music, and astronomy, in order to understand the origin and significance of details inherited from the art of the past, to assure a healthy building, proper acoustics, and the like. It is in an attempt to air his learning and in the theoretical portions of his work that he is prone to occult science. ”

“ Like Philo Judaeus Origen holds that the stars are merely signs instituted by God, not causes of the future, and quotes passages from the Old Testament in support of his view; like the Book of Enoch he holds that men were instructed in the interpretation of the stars’ significations by the fallen angels. He argues at length that divine foreknowledge does not impose necessity. While, however, God instituted the stars as signs of the future, He intended that only the angels should be able to read them, and deemed it best for mankind to remain in ignorance of the future. ”

“ That we can predict when the mind is diseased and disordered, and that stupid or simple-minded men are often better able to prophesy than the wise and learned, are for him but further proofs that foreknowledge is a divine gift and not a human science, while divination by such means as rods, pebbles, grains of corn and wheat simply excites the more his pious admiration at the greatness of divine power. ”

“ Basil is alive to the absorbing interest of the world of nature and to the marvelous intricacies of natural science. He tells his hearers that as “anyone not knowing a town is taken by the hand and led through it,” so he will guide them “through the mysterious marvels of this great city of the universe.” [2099] As he had said in the preceding homily, “A [Pg 490] single plant, a blade of grass is sufficient to occupy all your intelligence in the contemplation of the skill which produced it.” ”

“ This side of magic has sometimes been lost sight of in hasty or assumed modern definitions which seem to regard magic as merely a collection of rites and feats. In the case of primitive men and savages it is possible that little thought accompanies their actions. But until these acts are based upon or related to some imaginative, purposive, and rational thinking, the doings of early man cannot be distinguished as either religious or scientific or magical. Beavers build dams, birds build nests, ants excavate, but they have no magic just as they have no science or religion. ”

“ Think you so many thousand stars shine on in vain? What else, indeed, is it which causes those skilled in nativities to err than that they assign us to a few stars, although all those that are above us have a share in the control of our fate? Perhaps those which are nearer direct their influence upon us more closely; perhaps those of more rapid motion look down on us and other animals from more varied aspects. But even those stars that are motionless, or because of their speed keep equal pace with the rest of the universe and seem not to move, are not without rule and dominion over us. ”

“ In the use or criticism which they make of earlier writers and investigators they are also our chief sources for the science of the preceding Hellenistic period. By their voluminousness, their generous scope in ground covered, and their broad, liberal, personal outlooks, they have painted, in colors for the most part imperishable, extensive canvasses of the scientific spirit and acquisitions of their own time. Pliny pursued politics and literature as well as natural science; Ptolemy was at once mathematician, astronomer, physicist, and geographer; Galen knew philosophy as well as medicine. ”

“ Works of magic and miracles, Origen affirms, are no more alike than are a wolf and a dog or a wood-pigeon and a dove. They are, however, so closely related that if one admits the reality of magic he must also believe in divine miracles, just as the existence of sophistry proves that there is such a thing as sound argument and an art of dialectic. ”

“ My idea is that magic and experimental science have been connected in their development; that magicians were perhaps the first to experiment; and that the history of both magic and experimental science can be better understood by studying them together. I also desire to make clearer than it has been to most scholars the Latin learning of the medieval period, whose leading personalities even are generally inaccurately known, and on perhaps no one point is illumination more needed than on that covered by our investigation. ”

“ The magicians of Egypt, too, who withstood Moses and Aaron before Pharaoh, were able to turn rods into snakes and water into blood, feats which no man could accomplish by mere bodily strength. Indeed, because the king of Egypt knew that his magicians could do such things by a human art of words, he thought, at first at least, that Moses too was doing the same things not by the help of God but by the magic art. ”

“ Here again we see Pliny failing to recognize magic as a primitive social product and regarding it as a degeneration from ancient science rather than science as a comparatively modern development from it. But he may well be right in thinking that many particular far-fetched recipes and rites were the late, artificial product of over-scholarly magicians. Thus he brands as false and magical the assertion of a recent grammarian, Apion, that the herb cynocephalia is divine and a safeguard against poison, but kills the man who uproots it entirely. ”