PRINCIPIOS QUE REGULAN EL ESTABLECIMIENTO E IDENTIFICACIÓN DE LOS PUNTOS SIGNIFICATIVOS

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In my introductory sentences I referred to the many fields and aspects of magic that in their entirety cannot be addressed in the present book. I am interested in that particular ambition of magic that aimed at producing a complete explanatory system of the world and since the early modern era has offered itself as an alternative to what we nowadays call the scientific way of interpretation. I am looking for the intertextualized documents of this primarily theological-philosophical program with its roots reaching back to Antiquity and with its various manifestations in Renaissance art, science, and also in diverse social practices. I shall concentrate on those elements that from the classical and Judeo-Christian sources became ab- sorbed in European high culture, although—as we shall see—from time to time I will have to touch upon aspects of popular cultural programs as well as black magic and witchcraft.

Since the forthcoming investigations will try to analyze the occult philosophy and its manifestations in various symbolic systems—religion, magic, and art—it seems natural and necessary to start with some expla- nations of how I understand the key terms: mysticism, occultism, and magic. I relate all of these to the ambition and desire of man to reach exaltation and union with the Deity. A suitable start might be to recall the ancient, archetypal experience of mankind concerning the Fall, precipitated by some original sin, the loss of Eden, or the Golden Age. This theme can invariably be found in all religions and mythologies (cf. for example Barr

1992; Delumeau 1995; Eliade 1968 and 1992). This negative experience, however, has always been counterbalanced by the age-old ambition of man to regain the lost harmony, eventually to deify himself and regain his position at the side of God. The Hungarian cultural historian and sociolo- gist Elemér Hankiss has named these experiences and the efforts to handle them the Promethean and the Apollonian strategies of humankind. The former comprises the technical side of civilization aiming primarily at the demarcation of human Lebensraum from the uncontrolled and chaotic universe by means of fences, walls, electronic rays, and innumerable other devices that provide the boundaries of those spheres within which the human being is the commanding master. The Apollonian strategy means a spiritual demarcation or fence-building: symbolization—the creation of a sphere of myths, illusions, images, and artworks.1 _{The agenda of exaltatio}

can be connected with this latter strategy.

As an attentive reader of the Bible, Dee was, naturally, well aware of those pieces of information in the sacred book that intrigued many Renais- sance philosophers. Primarily among such topics was the doctrine asserting the dignity of Adam in Paradise and, related to this, the omniscient intellec- tual capacity given to man prior to the Fall. Particular signs of this excep- tional power and knowledge were Adam’s linguistic qualities, namely, that he could directly converse with God and that he was entrusted to name the creatures of the world in Paradise. As we can read in Genesis:

And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. (2:19)

The basis for this privilege was, of course, God’s original intention in the creation of man:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth. . . . So God created man in his own image. (Gen., 1:26–27)

This happy state and high status, then, as we know, was ended by our forefather’s disobedience. Even so, whole generations of Renaissance think- ers were enthralled by these words, which encouraged them to try the impossible: to regain the lost dignity and reinstate themselves in the bosom

of God.2 _{They were searching for other hopeful instances in the Bible that}

would testify to the possibility of occasional magical exaltations. So some verses of the Psalms suggested that man had (almost) the same all-powerful privileges as the angels:

What is man, that thou art mindful of him?

For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels and hast crowned him with glory and honor.

Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands: thou hast put all things under his feet. . . . (Psalm 8:4–6)

And in the Wisdom of Solomon one could read that the mighty king directly received omniscience from the Creator:

God hath granted me to speak as I would, and to conceive as is meet for the things that are given me: because it is he that leadeth unto wisdom, and directeth the wise. [. . .]

For he hath given me certain knowledge of the things that are, namely, to know how the world was made, and the operation of the elements.

The beginning, ending, and midst of the times: the alterations of the turning of the sun, and the change of seasons. [. . .]

And all such things as are either secret or manifest, them I know. (Wisdom 7:15–21)

This Biblical framework naturally encouraged the savants of the Renaissance to look for parallels and reinforcements among their highly esteemed classical authorities. Among the Greeks we find these notions most crystallized in the works of Plato. According to his poetically ex- pounded mythology, the charioter of the Symposium and of Phaedrus, the soul imprisoned in the body, with good fortune, may remember the world of ideas and this arouses the desire in man to elevate himself above the physical existence and to open a channel of communication with the transcendental world, the divine.

If a man makes right use of such means of remembrance, and ever approaches to the full vision of the perfect mysteries, he and he alone becomes truly perfect. Standing aside from the busy doings of man- kind, and drawing nigh to the divine, he is rebuked by the multitude as being out of his wits, for they know not that he is possessed by a deity. (Phaedrus 249c–d; Plato 1963, 496).

Plato distinguished between four such channels, as he called them, sacred enthusiasms, or furies. As none of these forms of communication with the transcendental is a logically concievable experience, we can call them mystical apprehensions. Among them the first two (religious enthu- siasm and prophetic fury) are rather passive operations. They happen to man without the active cooperation of the medium who is suddenly enlightened through epiphanic revelation. The other two—furies of love and poetry—are more active and inspire individual acts, leading even to a creative process. Thus man becomes the imitator of divine creation and eventually a partaker of the transcendental reality. At this point Plato clearly differentiates between the uselessness of the imitative poet who creates without sacred elevation and the high quality output of the in- spired bard. One should remember this distinction in adopting the com- monplace about Plato’s condemnatory opinion of painters and poets:

There is a third form of possession or madness, of which the Muses are the source. This seizes a tender, virgin soul and stimulates it to rapt passionate expression, especially in lyric poetry. [. . .] But if any man come to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, per- suaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought to nought by the poetry of madness, and behold, their place is nowhere to be found. (Phaedrus 245a; Plato 1963, 492)

It is obvious that such mystical experience cannot be classified as part of the common human knowledge, which normally derives from discur- sive logic. Yet it is still some kind of knowledge, in my definition, occult knowledge, that is, a secret learning which is a privilege of the hypersen- sitive elect.

At this point it may be worth recalling Edgar Wind’s distinction be- tween the three senses of the term mystery. According to him it refers to rituals, figurative understanding, and magical practices (1968, 6 and the whole of chapter 1). These three phases, naturally, could never be strictly separated from each other; however their interrelatedness also comprised some sort of internal evolution. Originally ‘the mysteries’ meant collective ritualistic practices, such as the rites of Eleusis at which the ancient philoso- phers (such as Diogenes Laertius, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, and others) looked with distrust and irreverence as befitting only the vulgar multitude. Plato’s opinion, however, was more ambiguous. On the one hand he spoke with irony about the possibility of such hierophany, according to his famous

maxim: “Many are the thyrsus-bearers but few are the bacchoi.”3 _{But on}

the other hand he himself emphasized that the final end of wisdom was the purgation of the soul from the follies of the body and that the true philosopher’s occupation “consists precisely in the freeing and separation of soul from body” (Phaedo 67d; Plato 1963, 50). While this separation happens naturally in death, the wise man has to try to achieve it while still alive. For Plato a rational excercise, the art of dialectic, was a feasible alternative way to cleanse the soul and achieve communion with the Be- yond (Wind’s phrase). In this sense, in philosophy, ‘the mystery’ is to be understood figuratively.

Plato’s chief follower, Plotinus, was more permissive concerning the possibility of syncretic approaches to philosophy and religion. Although he claimed that “the gods must come to me, not I to them,”4 _{he also}

approved the significance of manifest symbols for those who are still on the outside but aspire to enter.

Although Plato himself did not care much for magic, its hellenistic revival resulted from the inner logic of his theory of enthusiasms. In addition to the four sacred madnesses, inevitably was added a fifth chan- nel through which one could contact the transcendental. If poetic inspi- ration could be defined as a mystère littéraire (Festugière 1932, 116ff.), the mystical exaltation ought to have been achieved also by means of incantations, application of sacred names and numbers, or other magical- ritualistic procedures. Plotinus, and especially his disciples, the hellenistic “Platonici” (Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, and Synesius) accomplished a complex program of syncretism that resulted in the fact that magic be- came gradually readmitted as a handmaid of philosophy and, as Wind wryly remarked, “soon rose to become her mistress” (6). In this context magic may be defined as that type of human action that, exploiting occult knowledge, connects man’s intellect with the supernatural and through this connection man tries to exercise his will in the spirit world. It is well known to what extent the neopletonist philosophers of the Renaissance came under the spell of this syncretic, theological under- standing of magic, especially since they did not see an unbridgeable divide between this hellenistic inheritance and the Christian doctrines. The final goal remained the same: the deification of man, a program which was corroborated by the biblical doctrine according to which man was created after the image of God and shared all God’s characteristics. The most important among those characteristics were omniscience and omnipotence, which all magi craved. Christian magic seems to have followed Plato’s logic in the Phaedo, namely that while man normally

could expect the union with the divine only after death, magic tried to overcome the existential limits of the human species and elevate the individual soul to the world of ideas during earthly life. Nothing expressed this objective better than Pico della Mirandola’s passionate words in De

hominis dignitate:

Who would not long to be initiated into such sacred rites? Who would not desire, by neglecting all human concerns, by despising the goods of fortune, and by disregarding those of the body, to become the guest of the gods while yet living on earth, and, made drunk by the nectar of eternity, to be endowed with the gifts of immortality though still a mortal being? (section 16, Pico 1948, 233)

This was the program that the Renaissance magi became obsessed with and this became the lifelong aspiration of the English mathematician John Dee, too.

To sum up the set of definitions established so far: first of all, mys- tical experiences constitute the widest category within which one finds occult knowledge, a somewhat more systematic body of doctrines devel- oped on the basis of mystical experiences. Occult knowledge is thus a synthetic amalgam of traditionally transmitted lore and its philosophi- cally organized explanation. And, as we can safely claim that only a smaller circle of the recipients of mystical experiences became conscious of occult wisdom, an even smaller circle among those would attempt to express active, magical will. Depending on the magical program and the evoked agents of the magus, one can thus distinguish between white and black magic.

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After the preliminary definitions we need to identify the intellectual framework that provides the theoretical basis for a magically oriented natural philosophy. First and foremost it is a hierarchical world picture, since in a uniform cosmos there is no transcendental sphere. A further prerequisite is the belief in the organic, or even occult, mystical corre- spondences between the elements of this hierarchical universe. Typical systems of such occult correspondences are astrology and alchemy. The latter has an important offspring, spiritual alchemy, which interprets the transmutation of metals on an allegorical-emblematic level and aims at the purification of the human soul.

We may also add that without the speculative Greco-Hellenistic philosophy no such complexity of European magical lore could have developed. All Christianized magical thinking can be traced back to the derivations of Platonism or Plotinus’ doctrine of emanations. I do not want to describe in detail the organic world picture; it is enough to refer to classical works that contributed to our understanding of that world model, so different from our own based on the Cartesian cosmos and the achievments of the Scientific Revolution. It was Arthur O. Lovejoy who in 1936 first employed the concept of “the Great Chain of Being” in cultural history (cf. Lovejoy 1960), which later became popularized in E. M. W. Tillyard’s controversial The Elizabethan World Picture (1946) and further explained in a great number of scholarly monographs, includ- ing S. K. Heninger’s important books (1974 and 1977). Although the concept of the Great Chain of Being—since it suggested a grand narrative or a universal formula in which scholars hoped to distill the essence of the premodern world picture—has been recently challenged, in my opinion, with ample fine tuning, it is still tenable, as is shown by the contemporary influential theory of Jurii Lotman who derived his cultural semiotics from a typology of world models, contrasting the medieval vertical with the modern horizontal ones.5 _{Instead of repeating the already known features}

of this premodern world model, here I would rather like to recall the evolution of the ways it was imagined and visualized throughout the cen- turies up to the great paradigm shift of the seventeenth century.

The central idea and metaphor was summarized by Cicero in his commentary to the dream of Scipio as follows:

Since from the Supreme God Mind arises, and from Mind, Soul, and since this in turn creates all subsequent things and fills them all with life, and since this single radiance illuminates all and is reflected in each, as a single face might be reflected in many mirrors placed in a series; and since all things follow in continuous succession, degenerat- ing in sequence to the very bottom of the series, the attentive observer will discover a connection of parts, from the Supreme God down to the last dregs of things, mutually linked together and without a break. And this is Homer’s golden chain, which God, he says, bade hang down from heaven to earth.6

The chain metaphor obviously recapitulated Plotinus’ concept of emana- tions; however, it also relied on Aristotle’s natural philosophy since it was the latter who produced a graphically conceivable picture concerning the struc- ture of the universe by dividing it into the sublunary and translunary spheres.7

Cicero’s visual metaphor was further developed and Christianized by Pseudo-Dionysius, the Areopagite who inserted the orders of angels into the Chain. His popularity was unshaken during the Middle Ages and his system gained a most sophisticated form in Aquinas’ scholastic theology. From the time of scholasticism more and more specialized works tried to explain and further develop the design of the Great Chain of Being and this culminated in the natural philosophy of the Renaissance, including thinkers such as Agrippa, Paracelsus, Fludd—and John Dee. These “scientific” descriptions are not easy to follow for the modern reader, but fortunately we also have literary-artistic visions as well as graphic illustra- tions showing how the fundamentally unchanged world model gained more and more refined explanations and representations up to the sev- enteenth century.

Hartmann Schedel’s late medieval world chronicle offered a naively “realistic” scheme of the hierarchies of the world, and this approach was preserved until the early decades of printing, as can be seen from the illustration in the 1493 edition (Figure 2.1).8 _{The spheres of the created}

world are surrounded by the hierarchies of spirits and angels and the whole structure of the cosmos is kept in place by the four principal winds.

FIGURE 2.1 A late medieval representation of the seventh day of the Creation, resulting in the Great Chain of Being. Hartmann Schedel, Weltchronik (Nürnberg, 1493), fol. 5v_{. Somogyi Library,}

In Charles de Bouelles’ Liber de intellecu (1510) we find a more exact table: a chain-like structure registers the hierarchies, avoiding the repre- sentation of realistic objects. The diagram actually offers two parallel columns, one representing the Great Chain of Being—that is, the mac- rocosm—while the other chain shows the corresponding levels of cogni- tion and sensation—that is, the functions of the microcosm (Figure 2.2). Bouelles, a well-known occult philosopher of the early sixteenth century and one of the chief authorities on number symbolism, corresponded with Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, Germain Ganay, Trithemius, and others. It is worth noting that his books on secret numbers, mystical geometry, and the seven ages of the world—including the one this illustration is taken from—were featured in Dee’s library in seven editions, both in Latin and in French.9

Renaissance magic naturally issued from the idea of the Great Chain of Being and its correspondences. It is not by chance that the Renaissance magi so often referred to the system, such as Agrippa in his introduction to De occulta philosophia:

FIGURE 2.2 Representation of the “Grait Chain of Being” from Charles de Bouelles, Liber de