The Reenchantment of the World (15 page)

philosophy
about how the universe worked. Magic was. Of
course, there were many types of magic and many magical philosophies,
but all of them, in sharp contrast to church Aristotelianism, urged the
practitioner to operate on nature, to alter it, not to remain passive. In
this sense, then, the ascendancy of magical doctrines and techniques
in the sixteenth century was fully congruent with the early phases
of capitalism, and Keith Thomas has recorded (for England, at least)
how extensive and intense occult activity was during this time.44 The
idea of dominating nature arose from the magical tradition, perhaps the
first explicit statement of the notion occurring in a work by Francesco
Giorgio in 1525 ("De Harmonia Mundi"), which is not about technology,
but -- of all things -- numerology. This art, he says, will confer upon
man as regards his environment 'vis operandi et dominandi,' "the power
of operating and dominating." We should not be surprised that, in the
sixteenth century, this concept was easily extended from numerology to
accounting and engineering.

 

 

Numerology provides a very instructive example, in fact, of the split
between the esoteric and exoteric traditions of the occult sciences. At
the heart of the cabala, for example, lay the notion of a "dialing
code." In the Hebrew alphabet, letters are also numbers, and hence an
equivalence can be established between totally unrelated words based on
the fact that they "add up" to the same amount. The right combination,
it was believed, would put the adept in contact with God. Pico della
Mirandola, for example, was fascinated by the mystical ecstasy brought on
by number meditation, a trance in which communication with the Divinity
was said to occur (the meditation could, of course, produce such ecstasy
if the activity narrowed one's attention in a yogic fashion).45 At the
same time, similar techniques formed the basis of a practical cabala
that the adept might use to obtain love, wealth, influence, and so on.

 

 

 

 

 

Plate 9. The Ptolemaic universe according to Robert Fludd, 1619. Courtesy,
The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

 

 

 

 

Under the pressure of the technical and economic changes of the sixteenth
century, pursuit of God or world harmony began to seem increasingly
quaint, and emphasis on the practical or exoteric tradition resulted in
a purely representational use of the Hebrew alphabet. We can see this
shift in books published only a decade apart by Robert Fludd and Joseph
Solomon Delmedigo. In Plate 9, Fludd's illustration of the Ptolemaic
universe (1619), the Hebrew letters signify the "spiritual intelligences"
that rule each of the twenty-two spheres, from the World Mind, ("Mens")
down to the sphere of the earth. (This same type of labeling also occurs
in cabalistic illustrations of the human body, where Hebrew letters
serve to identify the spiritual intelligences that govern each particular
part.) Fludd was a major proponent of the view that the Hebrew letters in
the diagram corresponded to something real: they concretely identified the
ruling archetypes of each region, and this information could be plugged
into certain types of cabalistic "equations" to generate significant
results for the practitioner. It was hardly a problem that the letters
did not correspond to anything material or substantial in in nature.

 

 

 

 

 

Plate 10. Engineering illustration from "Elim," by Joseph Solomon
Delmedigo, 1629.

 

 

 

A very different use of the Hebrew alphabet is depicted in Plate 10,
an engineering sketch from Joseph Solomon Delmedigo's book "Elim"
(1629). Here, the letters are used to label a set of gears in a diagram
illustrating how power can be multiplied so that, in Archimedean fashion,
an individual with a place to stand can move a large section of the
earth. It is no accident that Rabbi Delmedigo had been a student of
Galileo at Padua, that he was an ardent Copernican, the first Jewish
scholar to employ logarithms, and ultimately a leading popularizer
of scientific knowledge. Yet the labels have a still more complex
significance. "Elim" means "powers" or "forces," and its implication can
be both sacred and secular. Thus Jehovah is addressed as "El" in Hebrew
liturgy; and more generally, an "el" can be a power that carries the
essence ("spiritual intelligence") of God. But "el" can signify a purely
material force as well, such as the power developed by a gear train. This
ambiguity is reflected in the book itself, which deals with both religious
and scientific matters, and in the authors attitude toward the cabala
-- an attitude that was so ambiguous that present-day Jewish scholars
remain uncertain whether Delmedigo was a critic or a proponent. For a
time, then, disparate concepts of number could exist side by side, even
within a single mind, but ultimately, the esoteric tradition was unable
to sustain itself. Under the pressures of a new economy, the spiritual
aspect of the cabala, along with the evocative power of the spoken Hebrew
word, became increasingly irrelevant. It was not that the cabala was
"wrong," but that technology and mercantile capital had little use for
religious mathematics.46

 

 

A similar transition occurred in all of the occult sciences during the
sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, with the possible exception
of witchcraft, which was (to my knowledge) purely transitive and without
a subjective, or self-transforming, aspect. What science accomplished
(or rather, what became science) was the adoption of the epistemological
framework, indeed the whole ideology, of the exoteric tradition. All
of the "natural magicians" of the sixteenth century, such as Agrippa,
Della Porta, Campanella, John Dee, and Paracelsus, right down to Francis
Bacon, drew on both the technological and Hermetic traditions for the
phrase "evoking the powers of nature." Both traditions began to fuse at
this time and form the basis of modern scientific experimentation. Both
were active ways of addressing reality, constituting a sharp contrast to
the static nature of Greek science and the frozen verbalism of medieval
Scholastic disputation. The identity of knowledge and construction which
we discussed in Chapter 2, the "making that is itself a knowledge," which
received its clearest expression in the work of Bacon, was derived from
the numerous writings on magic and alchemy which appeared in Europe during
the sixteenth century.47 Della Porta candidly termed magic the "practical
part of natural science," and such men as Dee, Campanella, and Agrippa
tended to blur (from our point of view) control of the environment by
means of the art of navigation with control of the environment by means
of astrology.48 Prior to and during the English Civil War, remarked
John Aubrey in "Brief Lives," "astrologer, mathematician, and conjurer
were accounted the same things."49 It was only after magic had provided
technology with a methodological program that the latter was in a position
to reject the former. But it was more in the fusion of the two, than in
their subsequent separation, that the esoteric tradition was lost.

 

 

Examples of this sort can easily be multiplied. The esoteric tradition
in astrology, for example, as represented by the Florentine scholar
Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), who translated the entire Hermetic corpus for
Cosimo de Medici between 1462 and 1484, sought to condition the body and
spirit through music or incantation in order to alter the personality
("receive the celestial influence"). Bacon himself approved of this
aspect of the art, calling it "astrologia sana," and D.P. Walker has in
effect said the same thing when he calls Ficino's system "astrological
psychotherapy."50 But the ultimate legacy of the tradition, even among
present-day astrologers who consider themselves serious students, is for
the most part manipulative and this-worldly, and the horoscope column
in the daily newspapers represents the pathetic outcome of what was once
a magnificent edifice of dialectical thought.

 

 

In the case of alchemy, the causes of the exoteric-esoteric split
were once again technological, particularly because of alchemy's
age-old relationship to mining, metallurgy, and numerous crafts and
manufacturers. The sixteenth century saw the emergence of a coterie of
artisans who denounced the alchemists, this attitude being most clearly
expressed in works such as Biringuccio's "Pirotechnia" and Agricola's
"De Re Metallica."51 The split is at the same time a response to
changing economic relationships, in particular, the collapse of the
guilds. An increasingly laissez-faire economy challenged both the
feudal notion of maintaining secrecy about a craft's techniques and
the oral tradition that had been the basis of initiation into these
"mysteries." Pressure to reveal these secrets, to make them accessible
to all by way of Gutenberg's movable type, led to the publication of
craft handbooks (like those of Biringuccio and Agricola) which provided
detailed accounts of processes and illustrations of guild practices
(see Plate 11). These works, the appearance of which would have been
viewed with horror in the Middle Ages, now served the interests of a
large and amorphous social class. Craft processes themselves had become
commodities; and secrecy, revealed knowledge, and microcosm/macrocosm
analogies were seen as superfluous and even inimical by an artisanry that
was increasingly caught up in a market economy. Thus, when the surgeon
Ambroise Paré (1510-90) was accused of having betrayed guild secrets,
he felt confident in replying that he was not of those men who "make a
cabala of art."52 Indeed, the whole notion of scientific organization
which was trumpeted by Bacon in the "New Atlantis" was completely
incompatible with the medieval ideal of deliberate secretiveness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Plate 11. Separating gold from silver, from De Re Metallica (1556).
Courtesy, The Bancroft Library, Unversity of California, Berkeley.

 

 

The ideology of this attack was heavily linguistic in nature. Once
the idea of an inner psychic landscape (in our terms), or original
participation, was partly lost, technology was able to judge the
alchemical tradition from the point of view of technical clarity and
precision and, of course, find it sorely lacking. As we have seen, the
language of alchemy is dreamlike, symbolic, imagistic, but this world
of resemblance was disintegrating. Carrots were not bottles, lions no
longer devoured the sun, androgynes were inventions in the same category
as unicorns. Cryptic phrases such as "the sun and his shadow complete
the work" did not glaze pots or extract tin, and names for substances
such as "butter of antimony" or "flowers of arsenic" (which, however,
lasted down to the late eighteenth century) were now seen as cumbersome
and inefficient. The whole alchemical imagery of things being themselves
and their opposites, or possessing inherent ambiguity, was now regarded
as stupid, incomprehensible, an obstacle to be rooted out. Biringuccio,
Bacon, Agricola, Lazarus Ercker, and many others deliberately set
themselves against the tradition of wonder at nature, of credulity
about fabulous beasts and plants and stones -- a tradition that had
characterized medieval literature from Pliny to Agrippa. The notion of
'satsang' still present in esoteric disciplines like Zen and yoga,
that the truth is miraculously communicable through a relationship
with a teacher, was an anathema to these men, who correctly saw that
the attempted domination of nature depended on cognitive clarity. The
collapse of an ecological, or holistic, orientation toward nature went
hand in hand with the rejection of dialectical reason.53