Lynn Thorndike

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Tetrabiblos, therefore, would seem a landmark in the entire history of astrology as well as a crucial instance of how that branch of magic formed a part of science in the Roman Empire. True, Ptolemy does not cover the whole field of sidereal influence. He limits himself to the effects of the stars on man and does not attempt to trace out how they affect all varieties of matter and of life upon our globe. However, to make the stars control each individual man is the climax of astrology and implies that the heavenly bodies govern everything else here on earth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Philosophy as well as science was not unfavorable to some varieties of magic. Neo-Platonism, the most prominent school of philosophy in the Empire, probably led men on to belief in magic more than any previous classical system. Nature was looked upon as real only in so far as it was soul, and its processes were regarded as the expression of the world-soul’s mysterious working. The investigation of nature thus tended to become an inquiry concerning spirits and demons, a study into the strange and subtle relations existing between things united, as all things are, by bonds of spiritual sympathy. ”

“ Then only would the performance of magic by the aid of supernatural beings commence.
There is another misleading idea which we should avoid. Fairy tales and romances picture magicians to us as few in number, adepts in a secret art. Instinctively, moreover, looking as we do upon magic as a mere delusion, we are prone to regard it as the creation of the popular imagination, and to believe that what magicians there were outside of the ordinary man's imagination were a few imposters who took advantage of his fancies, or a few self-deceived dreamers whose minds such fancies had led astray. ”

“ Do you hear, you who rashly charge me with magic, that this art is acceptable to the immortal gods, consists of celebrating and reverencing them, is pious and prophetic, and long since was held by Zoroaster and Oromagus, its authors, to be noble and divine? ”

“ 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." ”

“ Towards magic, as he understood it, Plato’s attitude seems to have been sceptical, though perhaps not confidently so. He maintained that persons acquainted with medicine and prophets or diviners were the only ones who could know the nature of poisons which worked naturally, and of such things as incantations, magic knots and waxen images; and that since other men had no certain knowledge of such things, they ought not to fear but to despise them. He admitted, however, that there was no use in trying to convince most men of this and that legislation against sorcery was necessary. ”

“ At first thought, then, the Natural History, vast in its scope and constituting a summary of the views of previous authorities, would seem the best single example of the science of the classical world. The fact that it touches upon many of the varieties and illustrates most of the characteristics of magic makes it the more fitting a starting-point for us. Indeed, Pliny makes frequent mention of the Magi, and in the opening chapters of his thirtieth book gives the most important extant discussion of magic by an ancient writer. ”

“ It does not explain how the ordinary man came to imagine the existence of magic. Magicians in the true sense were no mere imaginary order existent only in the minds of men, nor a profession of dreamers and imposters. Magic was not the outright invention of imagination; it was primitive man’s philosophy, it was his attitude toward nature. It was originally not the exercise of supposed innate, marvelous powers by a favored few nor a group of secret doctrines or practices known to but a few ”

“ Some have ascribed to him numerous important innovations in the realm of natural science and of the mechanical arts, and have regarded his promulgation of the experimental method, guided by the mathematical method, as the first herald note of that modern science which was not destined really to appear for yet several centuries. Yet he held that the alchemist, if given sufficient time and money, could discover a way not only to meet the state’s expenses by converting baser metals into gold, but also to prolong human existence beyond that limit to which it can be drawn out by nature. ”

“ The cosmopolitan character of the Empire, the mingling at that time of the science, theology, philosophy and superstition of different nations, religions and races, deserve equal emphasis. The lore of the magi of Persia, the occult science of Egypt, perhaps even the doctrines of the gymnosophists of India, may be regarded, together with that belief in divination which played such a rôle in classical religion and government and with other superstitious notions of Greeks and Italians, as contributory to the prominence of magic in the Empire. ”

“ But greater men than Neckam, men who were interested in learning and science for their own sake, men who knew more and wrote more, still cherished beliefs of the same sort. There was Michael Scot in the early years of the thirteenth century, the wonder of the cultured court of Frederick II, perhaps that monarch's tutor, the "Supreme Master" of Paris, the man who helped much to make the treasures of learning amassed by the Arabs in Spain the common property of Latin Christendom, the introducer to Western Europe of a Latin version of Averroes and of an enlarged Aristotle. ”

“ Fortunately we are not here concerned to measure either relatively or absolutely with any attempt at exactness the amount of magic in the learning of the closing centuries of Greek national life, but only to investigate whether in the philosophy of the Greeks there were not theories at least liable to encourage a later age to belief in magic. There was, for instance, the view of the Stoics that the universe is a single living whole—a theory well fitted to form the starting-point for a belief in sympathetic magic. ”

“ Much of alchemy, for example, was nothing but chemistry of a rude sort, and perhaps even its theories that metals may be transmuted and life greatly prolonged will some day prove to have had much truth in them. On the other hand, alchemy was based to a considerable extent on a belief that plants, animals and minerals have properties and powers which they cannot have: and if we ever do succeed in making gold or putting off old age, it is quite certain that such a consummation will never be accomplished by the fantastic methods which alchemists usually employed. ”

“ Pliny's condemnation of the magi and of all their beliefs as a matter of general principle was probably the regular attitude. A stigma seems to have been attached to the word "magic;" and magi seem to have been regarded as dangerous characters. In his history Dio Cassius represents Mæcenas as warning Octavius Cæsar that while the practice of divination is necessary, and augury by sacrifices and flight of birds an art to be encouraged, magicians ought to be entirely done away with. For, telling the truth in some cases but lying in more, they incite many persons to revolt. ”

“ But thus to deny that the stars are ruled by man’s destiny or doings is far from refusing to believe that men’s lives are ordered by the stars. Pliny, as we have seen, holds that Venus has a considerable influence over the process of birth in all animals. Also he certainly accepts the portentous character of various particular celestial phenomena. “From the stars celestial fire is vomited forth bearing omens of the future.” ”