Mag. Sztuka magiczna od Fausta do Agrippy

by Anthony Grafton, Bartłomiej Kaniewski (Translator)

Najnowsza książka Anthony’ego Graftona to błyskotliwa, oparta na bogatych źródłach z epoki, a przy tym napisana z dużym ładunkiem humoru opowieść o słynnych renesansowych intelektualistach, takich jak Roger Bacon, Giovanni Fontana, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Faust, Jan Tritemiusz czy Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Grafton osadza ich dokonania i losy w szerokim historyczno-ideowym kontekście, pieczołowicie rekonstruuje ich metody badawcze, źródła i koncepcje filozoficzne, nie pomijając uwarunkowań społecznych i politycznych. Wiele uwagi poświęca też ich osobistym aspiracjom, o ile bowiem dla jednych magia była sposobem na sprawowanie władzy nad światem, o tyle innym jawiła się jako ćwiczenie duchowe w drodze do samodoskonalenia. Barwne opisy działań tytułowych renesansowych magów – prowadzonych przez nich eksperymentów, spekulacji oraz krytycznej analizy i intelektualnego namysłu nad wynikami doświadczeń – składają się na fascynujące dzieło o źródłach nowożytnej nauki.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Occult, Magic, Audiobook, Mythology, Religion

288 pages, Hardcover

First published December 5, 2023

About the author

Anthony Thomas Grafton is an American historian of early modern Europe and the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, where he is also the Director the Program in European Cultural Studies. He is also a corresponding fellow of the British Academy and a recipient of the Balzan Prize. From January 2011 to January 2012, he served as the President of the American Historical Association. From 2006 to 2020, Grafton was co-executive editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

Reviews

[K.J. Charles]

Interesting overview of European academic magic in the 15th and 16th centuries, as it intersected with science and religion and the move towards the Enlightenment. Scholarly rather than sensational and not for people looking for instructions obv. Lots of illustrations.

The Penguin pb has risibly tiny type though, it can't be more than 8pt. I don't know if their production people all eat carrots all day or what but I'm starting to find it not worth buying Penguin in paperback because they're so miserly and it's just so hard to read.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting. Didn't realize so much was known about the real Faustus, will have to look more into him at some point. Bit of a problem with the book is that it's so diffuse, I felt it sort of went off the rails a bit when it got into engineering. The author does connect it back to the art of magic but at times why he was taking certain paths. 'Why this guy in particular?' I kept asking myself. That's not to say the book is ever uninteresting, there's a lot of weird little freaks in here, inventing cryptography and carving designs on turnips so no one can steal them when they rot, and all kinds of stuff.

[Sherwood Smith]

Back more than half a century ago, when I was in graduate school, I became fascinated by figures such as Philip Melancthon (Marti Luther's successor) John Dee, Pico della Mirandola, Agrippa, Ficino, Trithemius and a host of others who were basically working hard on what we would call now Unified Field Theories. I eventually moved away from that--too much human and animal suffering, especially of women, all heat, little light.

But I retain enough lingering interest to grab this book when it came up at NetGalley. And it's definitely worth reading.

This is a vast area of study, which Grafton attempts to grapple with in a single volume. Just one focus alone could fill fascinating books, as thinkers of the time attempted to tease astronomy from astrology. That meant not only figuring out the "truth" of observation, but separating out the threads of classical Greek thinkers, current religious thought, and goals: this person wants alchemical knowledge (lead into goal the usual suspect) that one a cure-all for disease, another a form of energy that doesn't involve burning wood or coal. And one of those ways surely had to be through magic. Only what was true magic, and what was the nonsense of charlatans?

Oh, and there was always the lure of automata.

Grafton does a good job of covering vast surfaces by focusing on the individuals whose studies led in so many directions. Angelic cryptology, steganography, the Kabbalah, divination, codes and secrets as well as experiments of those claiming to be magi and those skeptical of magi are only a few of the subject covered.

The notes, which take up thirty percent of the book, are absolutely packed with detailed data and references. For those alone I'd pay the price of the book.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

When flame wars had a whole different meaning. You could use the word magus for natural philosophers you didn't like.

An odd volume, I found bits and pieces fascinating, other bits consisted of endless trivia. Grafton concentrates on several historical figures, the stories ranged from outrageous to something that read like reality. Interspersed were descriptions of devices, some counted as magic, others like the lodestone read like a modern DIY. I would have been happy with an organized section on this subject, but the topic is scattered throughout.

It did have some information about DaVinci and other itinerant artist engineers.

I wished this book was organized in a different fashion, maybe less politics or organized by topics instead of by persons.

[Dimitribazos · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting attempt to orient the learned magician as a kind of counter-cultural renaissance man, which I think is the correct instinct. However, it reads a little like several small biographies of just a few characters in particular, like Ficino, Pico, Trithemius, and Agrippa, rather than the story of renaissance magic in any kind of holistic sense. While I appreciated learning more about these interesting individuals, I would have liked a more systematic approach.

To my memory there was no attempt to peg down a definition of magic, or any attempt to explore any of the number of competing theories of magic, which I think is important when dealing with a wiggly term like “magic”, which is riven with biases and culturally/socially subjective meaning. What do we mean when we say “magic”, and how do we differentiate it from any other aspect of human spirituality, like religion? Are we ascribing magic to these individuals and practices etically, or are we using the terms used by their contemporaries emically? I think that’s an important thing to disentangle at the outset.

I think the second chapter, which goes into engineering, was a bit superfluous and a side-track. The book also then ends abruptly on Agripp, without any kind of concluding chapter or anything that satisfactorily ties it all together.

Overall an interesting read, hampered by some issues with flow and organization.

[Janalyn, the blind reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very interesting book about magic and it’s almost legitimate beginning and how it was viewed in the renaissance. And those who were popular defenders and skeptics of the practice. I found this book very interesting as I do most things written about medieval times and was so surprised as to all the names I knew that either dabbles in a straight up against it this is a very good book and one I highly recommend to others who love history especially the McCobb in the different this is a great addition to any library. I want to thank the publisher and net galley for my free arc copy please forgive any mistakes as I am blind and dictate my review.

[Ben Chandler]

A detailed look at the crossover between religion, science and magic in a particular period, and one that was very useful to me in the research and preparation for a project.

However it did not teach me to summon any horrid little Creatures.

[Jeremy Gros · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book looked promising with its subject matter, which particularly touches on what I like in non-fiction, but unfortunately the thread wasn't there, the part titles didn't make sense and the names of historical figures were just thrown around, without any real introduction.

Kind of disappointed, but whatever.

For me, this book is a mixed bag.

[Rauko · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perhaps I'm incapable of reading non-history. This is merely a string of frayed philosophical threads that never made it to our modern world, often torn up by various factions of the church. Prevailing doctrine is exhausting to read as it is. Failed theories and faux wisdom are a downright waste of time.

[Stella B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"And followed on His Guiding Star.
By light their way to Light they trod
(Stellam sequentes praeviam,
Lumen requirunt lumine)"
- Ibant Magi

this was such an interesting read on writings of Renaissance men, really happy I picked it up

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title of Professor Grafton's book on early modern magical thinking and practice is a little misleading. Faustus is mentioned at the beginning of the book only briefly. Although it ends with Agrippa who is dealt with at length, the author reaches back to Roger Bacon to tell his story.

The core thesis may be nothing new - that magical thought was not as irrational as later observers had assumed and was at the cutting edge of the Renaissance and of its concern with technology and understanding a reality that had to take account of both classical philosophy and faith.

The book is scholarly and quite dense to start with. It is centred on roughly the mid-fifteenth through to the mid-sixteenth centuries with two chapters (of five) devoted to the contrasting figures of Trithemius and that great synthesiser of magical thought, Agrippa.

The story is complex and detailed (with excellent illustrations of key texts). It would be impossible to summarise the full argument of this excellent work in a relatively short Goodreads review. Each chapter is like a mini-monograph, the whole strung together to make the larger argument.

Grafton begins by exploring the dynamic tension between Catholic Christianity and magical thought. This led to great pains being taken to divide 'bad' magic (essentially folk magic and magic undertaken for corrupt advantage) from 'good' magic which was a precursor to the natural sciences.

We see here a late medieval and early modern discovery of what Arthur C. Clarke would later claim - that magic was just undiscovered science. In a world that accepted miracles from faith, magic was interested in wonder based on reason in that context.

The links between good magic as Christian, explanatory of the world, as a potential mastery of the world (very much like twentieth century visions of technology in science fiction) and actual technological innovation are well demonstrated in the book.

There is another trend that is explored: the discovery of neo-Platonic philosophy which, of course, had to be squared with Christianity. This created the conditions, in the differing thought worlds of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, for a Renaissance form of magic.

We can add to this the discovery of the Jewish Cabala, partially Christianised as Kabbalah, which was seen as an insight into the mind of God through techniques based on the magical use of language and numbers (gematria).

Magic could also call down demons (thus 'bad' magic or at least magic where good magicians must know what they are doing before attempting anything) or angels. This latter reached its latest form in that Enochian exploration of John Dee in the second half of the sixteenth century.

The relevance of Faustus is only that this figure became the model for the misuse of magic and example for those who would condemn charlatanism, manipulation, fraud and association with demons - as also exemplified in literature much later in Christopher Marlowe's 'Faustus'.

However, it is the link to technology or at least to a technological mind set that is most interesting. Grafton recovers astrology as a reasonable 'science' in the context of the time doing no more perhaps than Asimov's Hari Seldon claimed to do with The Foundation.

Some might make similar claims in advance of the 'magical' qualities of quantum AI. If everything is connected (a view held by many today), then those connections should be 'scientifically knowable' (and this would include the connections to Heaven and Hell and so to angels and demons).

Roger Bacon's alleged autonomous talking head, cryptography, engineering, theatre engines, herbal medicine and war machines could be seen as 'scientific' in being functionally effective but also mysterious as to some of the precise mechanisms that allowed them to work.

A lodestone could be both natural (an observable fact in the known world) and implicitly magical insofar as its uncanny properties could not be explained. Of course, engines of war or for courtly masques could be explained but the engineer might not wish to do so and so appear a 'magician'.

When technology worked but with no knowledge of the laws of physics or the findings of modern science then an early modern intellectual might reasonably say that something magical was going on without in any way implying the woo-woo of today. The 'artist' enchanted society.

Magicians and technologists were thus often conceptually interchangeable. The best example in the book of this is Trithemius' cryptographical work. This was simultaneously magical and scientific. It clearly disturbed contemporaries because of its 'secret' or occult implications.

However, it was also technology since encrypting messages within the extensive diplomatic networks of dynastic Europe required secrecy. Many codes could be easily broken once a specialist got hold of the correspondence. Science, technology and magic were all interconnected.

Magic was thus a rational response to what could be known at that time and was in fact 'progressive', creating testable explanatory models or paradigms that were ready-made for alternative explanation with new evidence or the eventual unwinding of medieval Christian faith assumptions.

The fluidity and uncertainty of all this meant that there was no fixed system, no rigid ideology, of magic until Agrippa's great work of synthesis. Even he, despite his huge commitment to his 'Occult Philosophy', seemed to retain a healthy doubt about aspects of what he was drawing attention to.

Both Trithemius and Agrippa, when looked at in the round, evidenced much more rationality and scepticism than we might expect. It is as if intellectuals were determined to understand the world whilst privately knowing that not all magical explanations were sufficient.

We should also remember that intellectuals have to eat. Demonstrating magical capacity (especially astrological prediction) was a fee-earner. The temptation to delude oneself about results or be a charlatan for profit might have been considerable. Faustus was just more obvious at the latter.

On the other hand, the risks in performing 'bad' magic could be considerable. There was a block on any scepticism about God's ordering of the world, necessary for scientific developmen. It was more than discouraged. It was taboo. Thinkers were thus partially trapped into magic by faith.

Any sign of atheism could lead to dire consequences as Giordano Bruno found. He was burnt at the stake even though nearly everyone else who slipped over the approved social and clerical line could generally draw back quickly with a carefully worded retraction

We suspect, on the basis of what we read in the book about Trithemius and our own awareness of the Socinian movement, that thoughts that might have been interpreted as cynicism or scepticism about the received Word were far more general and took place far earlier than we might expect.

Once some people started to think as an intellectual class across borders, the power of faith was ultimately doomed but a long transitional period had a lot of very intelligent people working very hard to square divinity with observation and technological creation.

There is not much in the book about 'bad' magic except in terms of exhortations about charlatanism and that is probably because not a lot of demonic magic was actually going. If it was it was simplistic incantation and talismanic magic and what was mostly happening was deliberate fraud.

One insight though is how the debate, from the point of view of those determined to justify 'good' magic, about what was 'bad' magic helped to institute the fear and anxiety that led to the atrocious wave of witch trials that disfigured Europe and North America in the subsequent century.

If magic becomes established as undiscovered science and is taken seriously then intent (as with atomic power or genetic engineering or AI) becomes a subject of concern and debate. If all is connected, those who would summon demons from hell become as real as those summoning angels.

This excellent book adds a great deal of meat to the bones of our understanding that magic (whatever happened to it later) was part of the process of discovering reason in the world and so a step towards our modern conception of science.

It is a highly recommended book with, incidentally, very interesting material on the curious dynamic betweem Judaism and Christianity. The occult tale here is of the emergence of an early attempt, using many new sources, at scientific and philosophical investigation of reality in an age of faith.

Magic was thus a sound working model in this context even if it would be overtaken as an intellectually acceptable form of knowledge a hundred years after the high point of Agrippa's 'Occult Philosophy'. Today it seems to be just an adjunct to traditionalism and a form of psychotherapy.

[William Bies · Rating 4 out of 5]

The enduring popularity of the Faust legend (especially in German-speaking lands) is revelatory of the characteristic stance towards God and the cosmos held by modern man, who is not, like medieval man, content calmly to accept the revealed order and the well-crafted plans of providence tending to our ultimate salvation, but, rather, adopts a questioning and Promethean posture. To be Faustian is to nurse a dissatisfaction with quotidian knowledge and to be consumed by a longing for mastery over nature, even if it mean turning to the dark arts. For most of us, a literary trope, whether in Christopher Marlowe’s fairly simplistic retelling or in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s masterly refashioning of the tale, which draws out its psychological roots and, what is more, pursues the spiritual fate of the man so driven.

To digress! The historical Doctor Faustus was an astrologer and magician who lived in central Germany around the year 1540, during the time of intellectual ferment known to us as the early modern period. In western Europe of those days, one was aware of a turning of the age: medieval scholasticism had reached a ripe maturity and was due to be superseded by a more humanistic model of learning, new modes of interacting with the world were afoot (stimulated by the ongoing advance of technology), voyages of exploration were being ventured, natural philosophy and the exact mathematical disciplines were witnessing mounting progress and a renaissance in the arts was underway.

In the present work, the early modern historian and tenured professor at Princeton University, Anthony Grafton, wants to draw our attention to another facet of the era, namely, the surprising prevalence of magic, astrology and alchemy. For the modern empirical sciences, as we know them since Galileo and Descartes, were still in a formative stage and had not yet differentiated themselves from the heady mix of speculation that embraced magical modes of relating to the world as well.

Grafton’s writing is very dense, stuffed with anecdotes, historical curiosities and telling details, and wanders, circling around a few recurring themes (natural magic versus other kinds, intellectually serious pursuit versus charlatanism, practical magic versus the high resp. the demonic). The value added compared to doing the research on one’s own may be minimal. Yes, scanning Grafton’s erudite disquisitions may save some time over reviewing the scholarly literature oneself, but, in general, the reason for consulting a good historian is that he can provide insights one would be unlikely to arrive at on one’s own. By this test, our author falls flat, yet his work is worth the perusal for the wealth of historical incidents he relates.

Grafton’s prose exemplifies what one may call a ‘workmanlike’ style; i.e., conscientious but uninspired, and exhibits a lamentable loss of perspective typical of the ivory tower. For Grafton conceives his project as merely to ruminate on what others may have thought in the past in the dispassionate non-judgmental tone of the modern historian. Thus, too academic in the pejorative sense, uninterested in the truth of the matter much less its significance for us, or what may confer on it relevance.

The point nevertheless is, while reading this book to reflect on the real ground of the belief in magic and to ponder whether magic could have any force behind it, other than superstition. At the same time, one will be fascinated to catch a glimpse into what life was like for the magi’s contemporaries ahead of the scientific revolution that so transformed the landscape of European culture in subsequent centuries. For instance, some degree of credence in occult astrological powers of the planets was a commonplace among medieval men, even Aquinas subscribes to it. Remember, the great quantitative successes of modern empirical science still lay in the future. In such a milieu, magic (whether natural or demoniacal) could well have enjoyed a measure of plausibility among educated people that it cannot have for us today, instructed as we are in a thorough-going mechanistic world-view.

Chapter one on the medieval background wields Nicholas of Cusa as a foil, but has nothing on his subtle and paradoxical teaching itself, just his views on learned magic and astrology. Also mentioned are Roger Bacon and the humanist Gaspare of Verona. By the close of this chapter, one will have become familiar with Grafton’s style: long-winded, studded with detail, usually starts out obliquely and works its way up to the main theme – a kind of information dump, not tight and consecutive argument.

Then chapter two, entitled power over nature: art, engineering and humanism, takes us into the Renaissance world when other trends began competing against magic. Examples include Giannozzo Manetti, Leon Battista Alberi, Filippo Brunelleschi, Leonardo da Vinci. Many enterprising projects were underway in this period, the construction of the dome of the cathedral in Florence, cryptography, automata, ships and war engines. In such an environment, Grafton observes,

Magic was not only unlawful but unnecessary: devices crafted by human intellect and energy could produce wonder. [p. 59];

These men did more than practice the mechanical arts – though they valued their skills in these greatly. They also insisted that their craft had a major intellectual component. Their very title, ingegneri or ingeniatores – ‘engineers’, in a particular period sense not to be confused with modern ones – designated them as men of the intellect, ingenium, as well as creators of clever new devices, ingenia. These were the terms that Manetti consciously echoed in his praise of human inventiveness. [p. 60]

The at first glance straightforward-seeming situation is complicated, though, in that

In one vital respect at least, the engineers departed from the path that Bacon and Nicholas would have wanted them to follow. Almost all of them connected their practice, implicitly or explicitly, with the powers of magic. [p. 63]

Manetti exclaimed that human industry had transformed the world into a simulacrum of heaven: ‘They are ours, that is human, since they are all the products of human industry: all the houses, all the towns, all the cities, and finally all the buildings over all the world. They are so great that on account of their excellence, they ought properly to be evaluated as the work of angels rather than men’. Both men celebrated the feats of navigation that had stitched networks of trade and communications across the known world and beyond. And both men made clear that machines embodied the creative energy of the human mind at its highest level. The chief lesson that the humanists drew from the work of the engineers was clear: the advancing edge of human effort had transformed, and was continuing to transform, the natural world. Like Bacon and the alchemists he cited, the artist-engineers and the literati who praised them framed a vision of human power, found ways to praise the creativity of their own culture, and identified a set of objects and techniques: all produced by applying force to materials that evoked as much wonder as any products of magic. [p. 89]

In order to secure continued relevance, magic had to evolve, as we see in chapter three about Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino – names with which every student of the history of philosophy will be conversant. Grafton proceeds to a study of their contrasting characters and their dependence on traditional influences, and inducts us into their strange world of thought; for instance:

The stars, Ficino argued, following al-Kindi and Bacon, send out their influences in rays, which traverse the ‘spirit of the world’. The human being, a composite of body and soul, also possessed a third and vital element, which joined the other two. This ‘spirit’, a subtle vapor produced from the blood – pure, hot and clear – flies upward to the brain. There ‘the soul uses it continually for the exercise of interior as well as the exterior senses. This is why the blood subserves the spirit; the spirit, the senses; and finally, the senses, reason’. The rays from the planets, transmitted through the ‘spiritus mundanus’, come into contact with the ‘spiritus humanus’. Through that they can influence the ‘imaginatio’ and ‘ratio’ but not the free ‘mens’ of man. This tight-knit and symmetrical system, constructed from both Neoplatonic and Stoic ingredients, made clear what connected every set of elements in the system, from the stars to human appetites. It also explained how individuals could bring superior forces down to aid them without engaging in illegal communication with supernatural beings. [pp. 94-95]

Both Pico and Ficino, in other words, promised that good magic, in their sense, did not promise a violent transformation of the natural world but the full realization of its powers. [p. 99]

There follows an inward turn, under the influence of Plotinus, and a curious episode in early modern history, the reception of Jewish kabbalah by Christian scholars. Grafton portrays Pico and Ficino as transitional figures who made intellectually acceptable a new form of learned magic, for

Learned magic might be able to claim something like divine power. Many efforts would be made, in the decades to come, to extirpate this new magic. Thanks to Pico and Ficino, they failed. The new form of magic was nearing what would prove to be its mature form, and it had left the bottle. It would not return. [p. 124]

Next, chapters four and five deal with this mature from, first in Johannes Trithemius then in Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, which Grafton sketches thus:

As to the positive core of his magical cosmology, Trithemius described it in letters to Joachim of Brandenburg and others that seem to confirm this interpretation. Like Ficino, he explained that magic rested on a sort of higher numerology. The magus must understand ‘the division of the whole universe of superior and inferior beings, from one up to the quaternary resting in the ternary, and he must know that the order of descent and ascent, the degree, the number, the influx and reflux are and are not into one and three. And it is very hard to know this, for the whole root of miraculous effects, however they are carried out in natural and supernatural magic, rests on this principle’. In his original responses to Maximilian he offered a similar account of how the learned man could take advantage of the ‘subtle and difficult’ principles of unity: the binary, the ternary and the quaternary. These he described as ‘the center of the wisdom of the Chaldeans, who were famous for their miracles’. Trithemius applied this scheme, most reminiscent of the Pythagoreans, in many different ways. He used it, for example, to rationalize alchemy. [p. 157]

Yet for Grafton Trithemius is an ambivalent figure who wishes to criticize diabolical magic and at the same time forward a good kind of magic which turns out to be more of a ruse, or in the term Grafton employs, a camouflage: he is really interested in such things as developing the newfound art of cryptography but hides it behind a veneer of magical terminology to throw unserious researchers off the track.

The final figure of Agrippa is approached via a discussion of magic squares, as in the famous print Melencolia (1514) by Albrecht Dürer, leading to Grafton’s characterization of him as follows:

‘The mathematical disciplines are so necessary and so organically connected to magic that one who practices magic without them will go completely astray, and his work will be in vain….But even without the aid of natural powers, works like the natural ones can be produced from the mathematical disciplines alone, as Plato says: not things that take part in truth and divinity, but certain simulacra related to them, like bodies that walk and speak even though they lack any animal virtue, like the statues and automata of Daedalus among the ancients….’ ‘All of these things’, Agrippa admitted, seemed repugnant to the natural order. Hence the ignorant ascribed them to the work of devils. In fact, however, these transformations in – or violations of – the natural order resulted from the application of natural and mathematical disciplines, and they had brought the human race enormous gains. Where earlier magi had written of bringing out nature’s occult powers and subtly combining and enhancing them, Agrippa evoked the possibility of building machines that rivaled natural organisms and using them to transform the natural world. [pp. 202-203]

The loose connection between engineering and magic may be expounded thus,

The fact that Agrippa came to the Kabbalah and other late discoveries from the world of natural magic and engineering explains much. First, it helps to account for the strongly practical emphasis of his use of the Kabbalah and other rich, complex traditions….As an engineer, Agrippa looked for sources less of knowledge than of power….The structure of the universe as a whole, and the identity of language and thought that had brought it into being, mattered to him. But they mattered less than his dual goal: obtaining power over it and using prayer to ascend through it. And Jewish magic promised to make that possible. Kabbalah, in this context, offered a dream of power over nature, to be obtained by radically new means, that captivated even a practical builder of pumps and explosives. [p. 216]

In conclusion, this reviewer’s take-away (not anywhere expressly stated by Grafton himself): in so far as one can extract a main thesis from the mass of detail, it would be that during the sixteenth century learned magic fused with engineering, thus diverting the original spiritual impulse into a technological project:

Mathematical magic was a solid foundation on which much of the edifice of learned magic now rested. In this respect as in others, Campanella and Dee were true, if partial, heirs of Agrippa – and through Agrippa, of Alberti and Fontana, Trithemius and Agrippa. From a discipline that challenged the magi and their art, it had become a central part of magic, and it would continue to have that status even as machines became the principal sources of wonder for erudite natural philosophers. [p. 219]

Now there is space for two comments of our own:

1) There is not that much in the present work on the figure of Faust himself, it is just used as a lead-in in the introduction. Why can we we post-moderns scarcely share his intellectual excitement (for our disenchantment is all but complete)? The persistence of, indeed, recrudescence of witchcraft in the twenty-first century testifies, however, to a yearning on the part of many, particularly women, for a deep connection with the world such as once prevailed under the aegis of the medieval symbolist mentality but which was stripped away by Protestant rationalism. The Protestant’s pared-down stereotype of Christianity, in which its profound theological doctrines lose all resonance and relevance and fall prey to an exclusively literal mode of scriptural exegesis, fails to be convincing to anyone who happens to have a literary sensibility acquainted with the complexities of the human heart actuated by all its longings, including openness to the transcendental. Evangelical Protestants are not so very different after all from Mormons and about as glib in their lack of psychological sophistication as well as willingness to subscribe to a Baconian view of a natural world drained of mystery but affording us merely with a field for the untrammeled exercise of technological mastery.

2) The greatest shortcoming of Grafton’s book, however, is that he limits himself to a descriptive and historical not a theoretical analysis of magic. Nowadays, we enjoy the inestimable advantage over scholars of sixteenth century in that the lost literatures of the ancient near East have been recovered and we can read the magi’s actual texts! The point: if one be willing to entertain a typological reading of the Old Testament it certainly implies that, despite the rule of disinterested natural law over wide swathes of our experienced life-world, at a deep level there does in fact obtain a symbolical architecture superimposed on what would otherwise be a random flux of events, and, if so, could there be a place for a magical means of engaging with that reality?

But there has always presided an ambiguity within magic itself between its spiritual ambition and theurgic tendency. Does the apotheosis of the technological understanding of being in the currently reigning epochal dispensation merely signify the triumph of magic as engineering? Thus, we could feign Protestants as the logical heirs of the Renaissance turn to a conflation of engineering and practical magic. In the vaulting of technology to the supreme role, the spiritual side, such as once figured in alchemy, recedes into desuetude (though Grafton does not stress this very much). Therefore, we moderns distinguish ourselves not in that we have outgrown magic but in that we can at last have devised a better technology!

There resides a parallel ambiguity in science itself as well: is science to be understood solely as an enabler of technology, as Francis Bacon thought, or could it be contemplative, as the ancients viewed it? Recall the title of Grafton’s book: the art, not science, of magic. Etymologically, science [from Latin scientia = knowledge, science from scient-, sciens (present participle of scire = to know)] should be connected with wisdom in the ancient sense, i.e., knowledge directed to God, whereas under the star of technology modern physics tends to degenerate into an art, as one may well discern in so much of present-day research into quantum computing, optics, lasers, cold atoms, Bose-Einstein condensates and what have you, all of which amounts to mere gadgeteering.

Then in a Feuerbachian register we could infer that, just as (supposedly) atheism constitutes the repressed truth of religion, so too, modern empirical science represents the hidden truth of magic! And along with this, licenses the entire forgetting (so characteristic of the Protestant mind-set) of a contemplative attitude oriented to God.

Four stars: overall, a smidgen disappointing in view of the promise of its theme. Not to fault Grafton’s scholarship, which appears to be dependably solid, but the telos that animates it. If only, perchance, the staid professor of history were himself to be propelled by more of a Faustian striving after secret knowledge, it would have lent urgency to what is, in the main, an anodyne and antiquarian narrative!

[Oakley C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I recently read a similar history book (published by Yale) which, while not sharing an exact subject did share a common time period and series of themes; They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos Eire.

Eire, for his part, engages in something remarkably delightful for a contemporary historian living and writing in the "Post-Christian" and "Post-Enlightenment" West; he takes the actual observations, writings, and comments of past peoples seriously. More specifically, in that work he tackles the rather awkward fact that at the dawn of the "enlightenment" (more so then during the "dark middle ages") numerous stories of so-called "impossible" events (levitation and bi-location are of supreme import) were shared by completely honest, educated, and "empirically inclined" individuals. So...did this happen or not? Such is a basic summary of Eire's work. Finally, both Eire and Grafton ultimately tell about a historical period and subject matter through the lens of individuals which means chapters tend to showcase biographies.

And it is in light of Eire's work that I come to critique Grafton's. First and foremost, I'm not quite "sure" what Grafton's thesis happens to be. For Eire the argument was somewhat "general" but still overt--how are we to understand the very concept of the "impossible" in light of such "events" seeming to have multiplied ten fold just when the West was becoming so "reasonable?" No guiding question like this, or conceptual frame of investigation is present in Magus. Rather, it really is just a jumble of well-written and well-researched, but seemingly disconnected biographies of Renaissance men who might have been called "magicians" in their time and place.

And this leads to an even larger issue--what IS magic, according to Grafton? Unless I completely breezed over it, there seems to be about 50,000 possible definitions in the book but not ONE which was sufficiently deployed. Ultimately it appears to have been a moniker of abuse (but sometimes not) for a given set of learned activities that could be literally calling upon spirits to making talismans to...cryptography...to engineering...all of which only leads to greater befuddlement. Yes, I am familiar with the concepts of "white" versus "black" and "natural" versus "theurgy" but apart form restating these controversies there is no wider understanding of magic or magical practices in this book and thus the rather intriguing history of the actual Faustus is contrasted with a very dour and disengaging pair of chapters that are literally about Italian dudes designing fancy toys and buildings as well as some guy who was a "magician" because he wrote in secret codes.

All of which leads me to the FINAL disappointment--is this book about "magic" or really just "early science" or are they the "same" or does our author even have an opinion on the difference?

Interesting, in its own way, but could be shorter and should be marketed as a series of short biographies about men during the renaissance who were all called "magicians" for no uniform reason.

[Mateusz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good summation of the most important personalities that practiced and coined "learned magic", when armchair magicians and lecturers, abbots, adventurers, monks and theologians meet the Gods half-way and continue their art under auspices of Theion Ergon. Children of their age, they attempted to disenchant the folk-magic superstitions and place the art and science of magoi on the throne of sciences once again among the theological supremacy of that time, this time far removed from the classical ancient setting of theurgy, but remarried to the existing traditions. i.e. Judeo-Christian, Catholic and Protestant setting. They established foundations for reclaiming magick in the modern era for the "last magicians of rational thought", the analytical general scientists that seek to fulfill their humaneness in metaphysics, without which no men may be called complete. It is a tricky ground and always was, a mixture of revelations, discoveries, effects, truths, inasmuch as being carried away by fantasy, imagination, delusion and ignorance. Yet in the eye of the learned beholder, the practicing magician's discernment is to be trained by experience, in order to sieve the useful from the superficial and engage succesfully in Via Regia, the Kingly road of nobility, arete, greatness, and liberation of the genii-daimon posthumously. The great participation in the Opera Omnia of the Universe starts with being the disciple of the universe.

"Plotinus had made the strongest argument for nature being a single, organic being connected in all of her parts by influences that moved instantaneously. Pico cited him at the core of his discourse on magic: “Plotinus,” he wrote, “also mentions it where he shows that the magus is Nature’s minister, not her Artificer. That man of the loftiest wisdom approves and confirms the one magic and abhors the other, so that, when he was summoned to the rites of evil demons, he said that it was better that they should come to him than he to them."

Magus : The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa. 2023. Cambridge Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, p.99

“The crowd, which is quick to believe in vice, rages as usual against the innocent. Since it does not know the principles of nature, it ascribes to evil operations whatever it does not understand. The ignorant never realize that the marvelous is possible, and they measure the power of nature by the capacity of their own minds. Hence they are fooled, as completely as if they were blind.”, ibid. p.149

[History Today]

In the period just before and after 1500 a new kind of cultural and intellectual figure emerged. He was learned (or at least had pretensions to learning), but not in the stilted methodologies of the medieval schoolmen. Nor was he a specialist in any field. Instead, his interests ranged widely over mathematics, astronomy, technology, cryptography, empirical experimentation and the hidden forces of the natural world. Yet the glue which held together all these interests in a coherent whole was something much stranger, to our world at least: a belief in magic. This special kind of ‘Renaissance man’ was the magus, a figure who defies classification according to either modern or medieval categories. While modernity presents the magician as either a charlatan or a self-deluded occultist, the medieval magician was a transgressive figure who conjured demons to do his will and manipulated sacred power. The Renaissance magus, by contrast, was something else: a strange mixture of scientist, occultist, craftsman and polymath. In Magus one of the world’s leading intellectual historians of the Renaissance tackles the reality and perception of this key, if shadowy, figure.

Anthony Grafton’s book is, on one level, a collective intellectual biography of a group of men – including Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino, Johannes Trithemius and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa – who saw themselves, and were seen by others, as magi of a new type. In exploring the magus as a type of person (or type of intellect) rather than making the ideas the magi formulated the focus of his book, Grafton adopts an original approach. He acknowledges his debt to Frances Yates, who initiated the modern study of the stranger side of the Renaissance, while recognising that her conclusions have all since been questioned. Nevertheless, Magus evokes some of the excitement Yates’ books generated about intellectual history – the sense of the Renaissance as a time when people were adopting intensely innovative approaches, and yet claiming, in doing so, that they were really reviving something very ancient.

Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...

Francis Young’s latest book is Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain’s Supernatural Beings (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

[Emmanuel Gustin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the story of roughly half a dozen men (all men) who were of the opinion that, whatever Arthur C. Clarke might say, any sufficiently advanced technology IS magic. For these Renaissance scholars, the firm distinctions between technology and magic, between science and religion, were far in the future. (For some of them, frankly, the distinction between true and false was a bit fuzzy as well.) Immersing the modern reader in such a heady view of the world, one that sees threads of hidden power everywhere, is a feat that Grafton largely if not entirely accomplishes.

This book is a complex dialogue with the works of complex men such as Johannes Trithemius and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Grafton discusses their own evolving and sometimes contradictory opinions, their friendly or hostile interactions with contemporaries, their evaluation by later scholars, and his own thoughts. The result is much like a painting by a cubist who wants to show us three sides of an object simultaneously in one image: It can be interesting, but also confusing and alienating. The author successfully avoids the trap of turning his exhibition into a freakshow, without hiding just how strange some of the beliefs of these men are to us. He shows us that they were, in fact, engaged in an intellectual exercise that they often enough approached with common sense and critical analysis, even if the objective of their efforts seems irrational to us.

Grafton tries to convince us that the renaissance magus was not a dead end, philosophically speaking, but part of the flows that combined into the rushing current that became modern science and technology. In this he doesn’t entirely convince me. Grafton shows that some of these scholars of magic willingly or even enthusiastically embraced the achievements of contemporary artists and engineers. But that the methods of the magical thinker could find room within the system for the achievements of others does not prove the validity of those methods.

This is a good read — perhaps stronger in its narrative than its conclusions. It is informative, erudite, and sometimes very funny.

[sologdin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great survey of a focused range of writings, it's hard to overstate its quality. It starts with notes on the historical Faust, considers medieval ideas (Roger Bacon, William of Auvergne, Albertus Magnus), moves through Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino, focuses clearly on Johan Trimethius, and then ends up with Cornelius Agrippa. Figures such as Dee, Bruno, and Paracelsus might be mentioned as a by the bye in the footnotes, but the survey concludes before getting to them chronologically.

What I take away as an initial impression is that everyone who considers the question of sorcery (whether designated as magic, necromancy, theurgy, thaumaturgy, goetia, witchcraft, and so on) in the period oscillates between condemnation of satanic arts and approval of useful processes and procedures. There's a chapter on renaissance engineers, and it's fairly plain that Clarke's notion that technology will appear to be magical to some people applies generally to the extent that most of these students of sorcery, even when trying to learn it in order to condemn it, include as one of the magical arts things such as mathematics, architecture, machinery, optics, and other items fully considered to be natural processes now.

This text certainly cements my hypothesis that magic, miracles (magic but given by grace of god rather than controlled by hubristic humans), and other supernatural occurrences are usually ciphers for labor power, labor exploitation, and labor organization. Most of the practices condemned by all of these figures involve contracts with or compulsions of demons to do some service--though sadly the objection is not about the forced servitude but rather that demons are evil--so there's a casual anti-demonic racism paired with a non-objection to slavery. That sounds reasonably familiar and foundational. Otherwise, it's plain that it is not really plausible to separate the history of sorcery and related disciplines (alchemy, astrology, numerology, cabala, etc.) from the history of the development of the sciences and engineering.

[Lucia Graziano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Se dovessi dire a qualcuno "ok, eccoti tre libri che devi leggere per capire davvero la figura del mago medievale", suggerirei una triade composta da "Magic and Masculinity" di Frances Timbers, "Wizards" di P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, e "Magus" di Anthony Grafton. E l'ultimo dei tre sarebbe decisamente al primo posto.

Non c'è bisogno di soffermarsi sul curriculum accademico dell'autore, perché vabbeh, a uno così cosa gli devi dire?, né sulla qualità di tutti i libri che vengono vengono pubblicati dalla casa editrice. Quindi penso che mi soffermerò sulla scorrevolezza dell'argomentazione, sulla piacevolezza della prosa e sull'abilità non scontata di rendere comprensibili a un pubblico non-specialistico concetti teologici ed esoterici anche complessi. "From Faustus to Agrippa" passa un sacco d'acqua sotto i ponti nel panorama dell'alta magia, in quegli stessi secoli in cui l'Europa viveva il fenomeno della caccia alle streghe e della riforma protestante, che con le sue nuove basi teologiche scardinava buona parte dei presupposti logici su cui s'era basata molta della magia cerimoniale nel Medioevo. E infatti c'è un abisso tra il mago "modello Agrippa" e il mago (sedicente) devoto che Niccolò Cusano tratteggiava nel 1431 nel suo memorabile sermone "Ibant magi" con cui si apre il primo capitolo di questo libro.

Grafton è abilissimo nello spiegare le tappe intermedie attraverso cui il mago medievale s'è trasformato nel mago rinascimentale: e lo fa con una scorrevolezza francamente non scontata in un testo così documentato e puntuale.

Ho ricevuto una copia omaggio di questo libro via NETGallery in cambio di una onesta recensione, e sono assolutamente onesta nel dire che questa è la nuova uscita sull'alta magia che secondo me dovete portarvi a casa quest'anno.

[Kristján Hannesson]

Magic during the Renaissance runs the gamut between precise science, or the dream of attaining it, and ridiculous superstition, laced with crazy conspiracy theories. What modern scientists seek in neuroscience, early modern scholars hoped to find in astrology, namely the hidden forces that are influencing our decisions, the ability to foresee crime and the behavior of whole populations and even, in the most optimistic of cases, to turn back the clock (albeit virtually) to study the past minute by minute. This was believed possible with the concerted effort of about 100 expert astrologers working around the clock, documenting the movement of the sky every hour of every day for about a year. The Mongols had mastered the dark forces which allowed them to succeed militarily, hence the West needs to catch up. There are good forces, natural forces, as well as demonic forces. Engineering is a kind of magic. The boundaries are quite vague and they keep changing from author to author. Agrippa is the greatest of them all, a deeply learned humanist that amasses a large encyclopedia of ways to deal with the hidden forces. No stranger to scandal and the sensational, he is nevertheless offended by the stupidity of the witch hunts and rulers' obsession with horoscopes.
In many ways, our contemporary questions and problems have not been altered much, we have just learned to seek elsewhere--not always with obvious improvement.

[Federico · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author’s judgmental, dismissive attitude toward the “learned magus” pervades the whole book. The title, subtitle, and every piece of marketing point to a more neutral, nuanced take. Nothing could be further from the content. I’m inclined to suspect that the supposed neutral take toward the subject was meant to appeal to the only people willing to read the book (save for the five academics interested).

There is no action from any of the protagonists (Ficino, Trithemius, and Agrippa) that is not met with harsh, negative remarks. Ignorant, reckless, charlatan, misogynist—they’re seen very negatively, and the author usually agrees with orthodox medieval priests in their critiques of them (when they were even more ignorant and misogynist).

Attacking a theory by the morals of its proponent is a low punch anyway, well below the standards of an Academic™. Regardless of the research involved and the author’s clear intentions, the book has some serious drawbacks. It comes back again and again to the paradox of monks, artists, and engineers publicly rejecting magic while practicing it.

He briefly mentions the Inquisition, the witch trials, the unending persecution of everyone practicing magic—even in the most permissive states. But he never seems to add two and two and realize that it might have something to do with the public dismissal of privately practicing magicians. There are far better books on this fascinating subject.

[Joshua Fundafunda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm torn on this book. I found it fascinating and new, but it was a real slog to get through. I kind of dreaded opening it up sometimes and felt like I was forcing myself through many of its pages. I think the general arrangement of the book kind of threw me off, I was hoping for some more personal accounts and stories from the strange characters in this history, but on paper it reads more like a straight forward timeline. Whenever Grafton dug into the stories of these magi I felt immediately pulled back into the book, but he doesn't really stay there for long, opting instead to discuss what I found to be the more boring aspects of early 20th century Europe.

I will say I was constantly fascinated by the nature of belief and the intersections between religion, philosophy, and older sciences (astronomy, astrology, engineering, mathematics, etc.). It really reiterated just how much our 'knowledge' is based on perception and how we use our sentiments to justify our worldview. Many of these old men; learned, "wise", often religious figureheads of society at the time, seemed just as eager as our figureheads today to project their own ideals onto what they couldn't understand. The idea presented by the end of the book, that magic (importantly distinct from necromancy) is just nature that we've yet to understand, felt like an important mental pillar that lead to the more 'reason/logic' driven scientific method that developed thereafter.

[Khin (storyatelier_) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 3.5 stars, rounded up

In MAGUS, Anthony Grafton traces the history of the figure of the magician, of the different perceptions of magicians and why these differences in perception exist (e.g. the one who does the devil’s work vs. the one who performs), and the development of what can be considered what kind of magic. Starting with the much-maligned Faustus and ending off with the controversial Agrippa, Grafton introduces us to a number of key “magi” in history and their reputations during their time. There are scholars, artists, inventors, and engineers, all of them performing exceptional work, even publishing papers and books to share their arcane knowledge.

This book was interesting precisely because Grafton shows us how what is perceived as magic gradually morphed into what, today, is recognised as science. The book’s trajectory and very interesting facts aside, the reading of the book was a different matter: I wouldn’t call it particularly accessible, and after a while a lot of the names and figures started to blur together for me. MAGUS demands concentration for its arguments and knowledge to be followed enough to do the book justice, but it was also dense and very heavy in terms of its content.

[Sarah-Hope · Rating 3 out of 5]

I approached this book with interest, but was disappointed. As I'm looking at other reviews, my sense is that those with this field of study really enjoyed it, but those of us interested in, but not familiar with, the topic found it rough going.

Part of the issue is that this is some seriously dense prose. It cannot be read quickly. Adding to that challenge is the fact that the writer doesn't do a lot of signalling of the point or central idea he's trying to convey in different sections. I needed more help from him to follow his thinking, and I didn't get it. Detail after detail after detail is related, and I found myself hard-pressed ro understand the purpose of all these specifics.

If you have a background in this field of study, you may find this a remarkably enlightening book. If you're coming to the field with little or no experience, it's apt to wash over you without leaving much behind.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are my own.

[Andrea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Magus, a book that describes the development of magic during Renaissance Europe, was both fascinating and in a way, mind-bending. I found the information presented to be fascinating and in the progression that was used, it showed the changes in people's thinking during the Renaissance as well as the people who were involved in magic. On the other hand, I did not find that there was any real flow in the book. I found myself confused in places whereas the initial point of reference was not clear due to lack of connection. Also, though I understand that ferry people were chosen, there seemed to be no obvious reason for the choices due to what I perceive to be a,lack of connection (and flow). I'm wouldn't necessarily recommend this book as,something to read, but as a,book with useful information - if someone were to ask me about information on magic in Renaissance Europe, then I would suggest this book.

[Mark Dickson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t think this book fully achieves what it was trying to achieve.

I was entertained throughout, because who doesn’t love reading about obsessive, freaky men, but it had far too much repetition for my liking; the specific focus changes, but the end result is the same.

What I did love about this book was how it discusses the degree to which this information was shared between these freaky little men and how it completely demystifies the whole arena. The way that the people involved were so fallible and often so self-motivated (looking at you Trithemius inventing demonic cryptography to get laid) injects whimsicality into this book at each stage.

There were also too many detours and proper nouns for me to take in a good chunk of it, but it has got me extremely intrigued to find out more about these people. I would imagine that if I came back to this book multiple times, I would get more out of it and ultimately rate it higher.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

A survey of the "magus," a specific type of European well-read dabbler in the dark arts. The author shares his obvious passion for these misguided geniuses and shows how they played a role in formalizing European knowledge, just like many other thinkers of their times. There is an implied argument that they helped pave the way for modern engineering and invention.

It's dense, so it's hard to recommend. I didn’t know much about the subject coming into it. It was hard for me to understand why the author included some parts of the books (some sections within each chapter feel disjointed, like you're expecting a broader point that doesn't come; I might have caught them if I had been more careful). I learned a lot about the Kabbala (sp?) and other esoterica like that. It's a good survey of that kind of stuff from a knowledgeable source, and also in a way that's not trying to convert you to any kind of new age stuff. You get a sense you're reading the real history. The important stuff.

[Samuel Clarkbourne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Makes for a good academic thesis, but not a good book.

It's more a history of figures from history who called themselves magicians, rather than a history of magic. It's structured therefore around these people rather than the themes or concepts, which makes it a little dry in the long run. Expect standard chronological history-telling. The lack of a conclusion to tie up the main themes was also a big miss. The book just kind of...ends, almost with an expectation that you picked up on all the diffuse mentions of themes yourself.

The book also assumes quite a bit of prior knowledge, and I wouldn't say it's appropriate for the general reader.

There was still a lot thay was interesting to take away from it, but it shouldn't have been marketed in the way it was by Penguin or in bookstores.

[Nadia Saleh · Rating 2 out of 5]

I could not finish this. This book consists of scattered bits of trivia and historical context thrown into a bag, shaken up, and presented as they fell. The first 50 odd pages are laundry lists of various “natural philosophers” and their ideas and purported exploits, contrasted with the Church’s views on their actions. I flipped to another section to see if it would get more interesting, but it didn’t. I had more fun googling the holy women that appeared as an aside.

Beyond all those complaints, I have to ask: who copy-edited this? One typo I can excuse, but the number of errors I found in the 50 pages I read is simply egregious.

[Justin]

more academic than I realized, with laughably unhelpful (to me) paragraph length footnotes in untranslated Latin or Greek. I got a bit confused throughout as it hops around similarly named Italians and sometimes forgets to explain that the mononymic "Flavius" being mentioned for several pages is in fact co-identical with the aforementioned "Samuel ben Nissim Abulfaraj, a Sicilian Jew who had converted to Christianity in the 1460s and was baptized as Guglielmo Raimondo Moncada. In the best humanist fashion, he gave himself a classical name: that of King Mithridates VI Eupator Dionysus of Pontus."

[Ioana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very interesting book.

It focuses on learned magic tracing its roots from Medieval times up up to Renaissance, following the scholars who were passionate about it and who extensively wrote and debated about it. It is filled with interesting pieces of information, context and world views and it has been an enriching read, though it's probably best appreciated by those who usually enjoy reading about the subject and the times featured. An interesting read, nevertheless .

I received a copy of this in order to share my view on it.