Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, considered the founding father of western esotericism (Frazer's Golden Bough called it sympathetic magic and Brian Copenhaver 1990, more soberly `occultism') was twenty-three years old when he first proposed his thesis centered on a Christian Cabalah mistitled Oration on the Dignity of Man (initially Oration in Praise of Philosophy) at Rome in 1486. This was followed by the suspension of a proposed debate, by Pope Innocent VIII; Pico's publication of his 900 thesis, the appointment of a high-level papal commission to investigate Pico's orthodoxy; his flight from Rome; his capture, excommunication, and imprisonment in France; the intervention of the French court and Lorenzo de' Medici on his behalf; his provisional release and escape to Florence; and so on. Parallels have been drawn to Galileo's fate nearly a hundred and fifty years later, and the story fits in nicely with old romantic images of the Renaissance.

One of the central elements in Picos thesis was the traditional belief that the deepest meanings of sacred texts transcended their outer sense and indeed might extend to the isolated shapes of letters. Thus in Pico's first or historical set of Cabalistic theses, we find that there is no letter or even part of a letter in the Torah that does not conceal divine secrets; in his second set, presented "according to his own opinion," Pico was prepared to unveil the Christian truths that Moses hid in the Law in the order of otherwise trivial words (like the Hebrew word for "then"), or even in single strokes of single letters (as in the closed form of the letter mem). Every stroke of every letter in the Torah contains Christian secrets-supplying ammunition "against the rude slander of the Hebrews," "leaving them no corner in which to hide."

Following the fact that numbers were represented by letters in Semitic languages and Greek, various techniques commonly known as gematria were developed in antiquity for trans­forming words and texts through their numerical values. Thus the numerical values of words or letters could be added up or operated on arithmetically in other ways to hide or reveal secret messages in texts-this was the method used in Revelation 13:18 to hide the secret name of the Beast-or other messages could be concealed or uncovered by substituting one letter for another using fixed nu­merical procedures.

Others like Edelman in 1973 proposed that in fact Pico in his 900 thesis attempted to harmonize texts building complex hierarchical and correlative models reflected the nature of his own neurological processes. In other words that there would be neurobiological grounds of imitative magic, animistic religious thought, and other primitive correlative concepts including the universal micro­cosm/macrocosm theme.  Models of how these concepts were successively transformed in literate traditions, would then be a founda­tion for possible cross-cultural models of the evolution of premodern religious and philosophical systems. To discuss this further would go beyond a basic history of ideas this five part Esoterica 2004 series (for the first time ever), presents.

Pico's magical system, was closely tied to his mystical and eschatological thought, and the esoteric side of his work was studied intensely for nearly two hundred years after his death, with scores of writers from Johann Reuchlin and Agrippa von Nettesheim to John Dee, Giovanni Della Porta, Francesco Patrizi, Robert Fludd, and Athanasius Kircher plagiarizing merci­lessly from Pico's magical and Cabalistic theses or from his discussions of natural magic and Cabala in the Oration.

And as mentioned, the interpretation of Pico's magic in Frances Yates's, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964 was deeply indebted to the German work by Panofsky and Sax published by the Warburg Institute in Leipzig 1923. Thus in Yates's formulation, Pico first adopted Ficino's "natural magic" and then added to this his own "Cabalistic magic," which completed the foundations of all later Renaissance magical tradi­tions. While other sides of Yates's reading of Renaissance magic have been heavily criticized already in 1980’s (especially the role she assigned in it to so ­called Hermetism), her views of Pico's magic and its links to Ficino's work however have not until Brian Copenhaver's 1997 study of magic in Pico's Cabalistic theses, in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Convegno internazionale di studi nel cinquecentesimo anniversario della morte (1494-1994). Vol. 1 pp. 213-36) to which I am indebted, including the 1998, Syncretism in the West by S.A.Farmer and Michael Bentley, Companion to Historiography, 1997.

Following Panofsky and Sax published  in  1923, Yates associated Renaissance magia naturalis rather narrowly with the particular brand (or brands) of astrological magic found in Marsilio Ficino's De vita coelitus comparanda (On Obtaining Life Celesti­ally)-the last of the three treatises in Ficino's medical compilation De vita Yates traced the origins of the revival of magic she pictured in the Renaissance to Ficino's translation in 1463 of the Corpus Hermeticum, whose religious associations "rehabilitated" medieval magic, turning "that old dirty magic" into the "learned" and "religious" magic of the later De vita coelitus comparanda.

As Ficino's disci­ple, Pico "imbibed from Ficino his enthusiasm for magia naturalis which he ac­cepted and recommended much more forcibly and openly than did Ficino," add­ing to this his own "Cabalistic magic," which tapped forces "beyond the natural powers of the universe," invoking "angels, archangels, the ten sephiroth which are names or powers of God, God himself, by means some of which are similar to other magical procedures, but more particularly through the power of the sacred Hebrew language." By fusing Ficino's natural magic with his own Cabalistic mag­ic, in Yates's eyes, Pico completed the basic arsenal of the Renaissance magician. Pico's Oration-his preface to his Roman debate-was, in fact, "the great charter of Renaissance Magic, of the new type of magic introduced by Ficino and completed by Pico."

Yates attempted to tie Pico's magic to the growth of modern technological attitudes. Behind this side of her thesis lay another version of the romantic theme that "Renaissance man" developed a powerful "philosophy of will":

It was now dignified and important for man to operate; it was also reli­gious and not contrary to the will of God that man, the great miracle, should exert his powers. It was this basic psychological reorientation towards a direction of the will which was neither Greek nor mediaeval in spirit, which made all the difference.

According to Yates, Pico thus brought mankind to a critical turning point in history:

between Pico's earlier magical writings and Ficino's later ones. In the same place, they also endorse the view that following his troubles with the, church "Pico soon renounced magic and such astrology as he had ever believed in."

To show how Yates thesis was riddled with problems, let us look at even a small part like the above a bit closer:

A. Pico wrote his magical works before Ficino wrote his. The first problem involves an unfortunate chronological oversight. The fact that no one has made much of it in the thirty years of debates over Yates's work underscores the power of the traditional view that Pico was Ficino's disciple: The De vita coelitus comparanda­Ficino's only magical treatise, and our sole source of information concerning his magia naturalis-was not written until some two-and`-a-half years after Pico intro­duced his own magical thought in the nine hundred theses, Oration, and Apolo­gy-" One might argue that Pico learned his magia naturalis from Ficino through their personal contacts in Florence. But in the period in which Pico composed his three magical texts, in the fall and winter of 1486-1487, he was not near Flor­ence, nor had he spent more than a month there at the most since mid-1485.(1)

Ficino and Pico did keep in touch part of this time through letters and intermedi­aries. But relations between them in this period were at their lowest point ever, as we find from their letters and from the criticism that Pico aimed at Ficino in the Commento, Oration, and nine hundred theses, which were all written in the fall and winter of 1486-1487.

If Pico did learn his natural magic from Ficino, then, he must have done so at a minimum some four years before Ficino wrote his only magical work. Assuming that Ficino's views on magic were the same in 1485 as in 1489-a doubtful assumption, given his well-known vacillations on the subject-from what we know of relations between the two writers, the last thing we would expect in 1486 would be to find Pico endorsing those views. Support for this interpretation shows up in the nine hundred theses, where Pico brags of the magic that he "first discovered" in the Orphic Hymns-another apparent slap at Ficino, who had com­posed an earlier, nonmagical, commentary on the Hymns of which Pico certainly had knowledge." Further evidence on this point shows up in the Heptaplus, where Pico rejects magic using astrological talismans, whose use Ficino endorsed a few months later in the De vita coelitus comparanda.ss Ficino in fact alludes to the Heptaplus in that text, and hence was aware of Pico's attack, which came in a period in which the two philosophers were in regular contact.' If Pico and Ficino triggered a magical revival in this period-a claim that we will look at shortly-then it must have been Pico and not Ficino who started it. Pico himself, in fact, pointedly suggests something like this more than once in the nine hundred theses and Apology.

B. Pico's did not view Mercury (Hermes) Trismegistus as a magician. Another prob­lem in Yates's model (one by now widely recognized) involved what she pictured as the Hermetic sources of that revival. We can leave aside the question here, which has been discussed by other scholars, of how far Ficino's own magic was Hermetic, except to note the large number of non-Hermetic magical sources cited in the De vita coelitus comparanda (Galen, al-Kindi, Albumasar, Thabit, Haly, Avi­cenna, Albert the Great, Arnald of Villanova, Peter of Abano, etc.) or to recall that Ficino claimed that his work was part of his commentary-in-progress on Plotinus- a work that Ficino tells us was begun at Pico's urging.

Attempts to identify Pico's magia naturalis with Hermetism-a tradition that Pico closely associated with Ficino-rest on even less solid grounds. In the Oration and Apology Pico provides us with a long list of maocians who might be reason­ably viewed as the sources of this side of his thought. In this class "among the moderns" Pico singles out three writers who had "scented out" magia naturalis­al-Kindi in the ninth century and William of Paris (William of Auvergne) and Roger Bacon in the thirteenth." The Apology also mentions one of Pico's con­temporaries-not Ficino, but a mutual friend, Antonius Chronicus (Antonio Vinciguerra)-as someone who had mastered natural magic in Pico's own day .'9 The Apology elsewhere associates magic with still another "modem," Albert the Great 6° Pico further lists as ancient magicians-drawing this time from Pliny, Apuleius, Porphyry, and similar late-ancient sources-Homer, Pythagoras, Empe­docles, Democritus, Plato, Zalmosis, Zoroaster, Eudoxus, Hermippus, Apollonius of Tyana, Plotinus, and several minor Pythagoreans.61 He also makes much in the nine hundred theses, Oration, and Apology of his "discovery" of magic in the Orphic Hymns and Cabala.

What is remarkable in these lists is that virtually the only prominent priscus theologus who is not listed as a magician is Hermes Trismegistus! The one clear reference to Hermetic magic in Pico's early works-a negative one---shows up in the Apology, where Pico repeats a complaint from William of Auvergne's De uni­verso concerning the Egyptians' use of illegal magic invoking demons. Going to Pico's source, we find that William's target was a famous passage on enticing demons into idols found in the Hermetic Asclepius-a text that Yates viewed as a central catalyst in the Renaissance magical revival. Significantly, none of the ten conclusions that Pico attributes in his theses to Mercury Trismegistus contains any of the astrological magic that Ficino associated with that figure .6' Finally, in Pico's posthumously published Disputations against Divinatory Astrology, magical works attributed "by some" to Hermes are treated with scom.

Given the wide range of magical texts already available in the Middle Ages­including the long list of Greek, Arabic, and Latin authors provided by Pico and the ancient and medieval medical, astrological, and philosophical sources cited by Ficino-it is not clear in what way a magical revival was needed in the Renaissance. If as evidence for such a revival we point to the expanded magical syntheses of the later Renaissance that included Cabala, then again it was Pico and not Ficino who must be credited with having started it." Obviously, fresh Renais­sance translations of Greek magical and theurgic treatises already indirectly under­lying medieval magic, the most important translated by Ficino after Pico's proposed debate, added fuel to the enthusiasm for the occult in the later Renais­sance. This was especially true as the printing press made wide distribution of these sources and their broader syntheses in magical handbooks like Agrippa von Nettesheim's possible for the first time. But this phenomenon was not depen­dent on the recovery of any privileged set of Hermetic (or non-Hermetic) texts. This interpretation is confirmed by the enormous popularity in the later Renais­sance of the same medieval Arabic and Latin magical treatises that lay at the foundations of much of Pico's and Ficino's magical systems-works attributed to al-Kindi, William of Paris, Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, and so on-which apart from the absence in them of Cabala are virtually indistinguishable from Renaissance magical texts. A number of these medieval treatises were, in fact, first printed in the sixteenth century and gained unprecedented circulation in an appendix to Agrippa von Nettesheim's popular magical handbook.(4)

C. The mechanisms of Pico's natural magic differed from Ficino's. Another part of Yates's model involves the mechanisms that she associated with natural magic­above all, given the stress she put on Ficino's text, mechanisms of a celestial sort.  Yates pointed to the spiritus mundi or "world spirit" as the me­dium by which celestial powers flowed into the terrestrial realm. (5)

Part of Western magic was indeed "spiritual magic" of this sort , t especially the medical-magical traditions adopted in Ficino's medical compilation, in which the spiritus mundi provided a handy link between the celestial world and the quasi-physical spirits binding body and soul in Greek, Arabic, and Latin medicine. But the spiritus mundi was only one of a large number of mechanisms used to explain these interactions. Numerous ancient, medieval, and Renais­sance magical tracts refer vaguely to stellar rays (radii) or influences (influxus) with­out mentioning the spiritus mundi at all. Others ignore the problem of transmission completely, considering the mere existence of cosmic correspondences as a suffi­cient explanation for the magical powers found in the world. In other texts, inter­actions between the celestial and terrestrial worlds are depicted in a quasi-mechan­ical fashion, with direct contact between the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic spheres, ending in the derived motion of the lunar orb, "churning" the four sublunary elements and hence transmitting celestial effects into the material world. Still other works, tied less directly to astrological models, invoke the Neo-Platonic "vehicle" (or "body of the soul") as a magical bond between man and the Platonic "world soul" (anima mundi), which penetrated the whole of the created realm." Other treatises, which are strikingly similar in a wide range of Eurasian cultures, develop elaborate theories of musical-magical resonances that link heaven and the earth.

This list of mechanisms could be greatly expanded. In a typical syncretic fashion, Renaissance magical treatises commonly collected conflicting or partially conflicting accounts of magical transmission from older sources and combined them with varying degrees of systematic consistency. Much evidence shows that Pico's nine hundred theses and Ficino's De vita coelitus comparanda, despite their many other differences, both fall squarely in this category.

Given its extreme syncretic nature, the text of the nine hundred theses predictably invokes a large number of magical mechanisms: the Neo-Platonic "vehicle" or body of the soul, cosmic or stellar "influxes," and many others. Curiously, however, one mechanism that does not show up in Pico's text is the spiritus mundi, which according to Yates lay at the center of Ficino's magia naturalis..(7)

Pico believed that music-which he associated with one at least one kind of magic-operated on the soul through its quasi-physical "spirits," another idea that has been claimed as original to Ficino's later magical work. This minor point aside, however, these theses do not suggest that the spiritus mundi played any role in Pico's magical thought. In his posthumously published Disputations against Divinatory Astrology, it is true, Pico does speak of a "celestial spirit" (caelestis spiritus)-if not a spiritus mundi-that transmits forces of some sort into the lower world. Yates, claims that the Disputations repeats "what is practically Ficino's theory of astral influences borne on a `celestial spirit'," and based on that claim proposes a sweeping reinterpretation of the Disputations-which explicitly, at least, attacks magic--as a hidden defense of "Ficinian `astral magic" and "a vindication of Ma­gia naturalis."  D.P.Walker “Spiritual and Demonic Magic From Ficino to Campanella”(1958), whom Yates miscites on this point, noted a critical distinction between Pico's caelestis spiritus and Ficino's spiritus mundi-a distinction that in Walker's eyes, at least, rendered Pico's version of that concept useless in magic. Due to the infirmity of the lower world, Pico's "celestial spirit" could affect sublunary objects in only a general way; all individual proper­ties arose from unpredictable material differences in nature. Walker writes:

One could not, therefore, on [Pico's] view, say that any particular herb, sound or food was more solarian or venereal than any other, nor use [Pico's caelestis spiritus] to transform one's own spirit, as Ficino proposed:

nor could one consider oneself as specially subject to the influence of any one planet.”(p.25)

Walker rather overstates the case, however, at least in respect to Pico's early thought, although this is not to claim that Pico repudiated all forms of celestial magic, as Farmer points out in Syncretism in the West he did not-however Farmers translation  also shows that Pico‘s concept of magia naturalis was significantly different from the magia naturalis dis­cussed in Ficino's later work.

4. Yates misread Pico's views of magic and Cabala. Yates oversimplified other important parts of Pico's magical thought, including his views of "practical Cabala," or what Yates labeled "Cabalistic magic" (a phrase not used by Pico himscjlf Starting from the assumption that Pico's magia naturalis was celestial magic like Ficino's, Yates argued that his practical Cabala "attempted to tap the higher spi­ritual powers, beyond the natural powers of the universe," invoking for magical ends angels, archangels, and the powers of "God himself."

Pico did distinguish the powers of Cabala from those of natural magic, but that distinction did not involve a simple identification of magia naturalis with astrologi­cal powers or Cabala with higher ones. Instead, as we would expect from his syn­cretic system, Pico acknowledged many different types of natural magic and Cabala that possessed complex and overlapping roles. Thus while Pico hints that one kind of Cabala invoked intellectual or angelic powers,82 as Yates tells us, he also dis­cusses at length another part "that concerns the powers of celestial bodies." He also tells us that one side of his magia naturalis involved "the powers and activities of natural agents"-that is, sublunary forces-suggesting again that his natural magic did not deal solely with the celestial or astral realm." Moreover, Pico went to extraordinary lengths-for obvious reasons, given the location of his planned debate at the Vatican-to deny that the magus had direct access to God's power, except in the general sense that God was the ultimate source of all magic.

Yates tells usfurther that "what exactly he meant by this amazing statement is nowhere fully explained," although she speculates that the thesis might be tied to a concept "of the Eucharist as a kind of Magia." If Yates were right, this would have been a particularly hard sell for Pico at Rome. In fact, however, Pico explained his views on this issue in detail in Pico’s Apology.

And the fact that Christ performed miracles, and did so supernaturally, is known to us exclusively through the testimony of Scripture. If, however, any human sciences can help us confirm Christ's divinity, these are natural magic and that part of Cabala that is not a revealed science. The rest of Pico's defense distinguishes sharply between the powers of natural magic and God's divine powers-presumably why Yates chose not to cite this passage in her study:

For [to know] this, that Christ's miracles test to us his divinity, it is first necessary to recognize that they were not accomplished through any natural power but only through the power of God. Second, it is necessary to know that Christ had that power from himself and not from anything else. In [regard to] the first [point], no human science can help us more than that which understands the powers and activities of natural agents, and their mutual applications and proportions, and their natural strengths, and recognizes what they can and cannot do through their own power. And among the human sciences, the science that knows the most about this is the one that I call "natural magic"-on which my conclusions were posited-and that part of the Cabala that concerns the powers of celestial bodies. Because through these it is known that those works that Christ performed could not be done by means of natural powers.”

The fact that Pico originally planned to defend his thesis on Christ's divinity in this pedestrian fashion-and was not backtracking in the Apology to save his skin­is confirmed by the wording of the two theses that immediately precede it in his magical conclusions. The second of these (the orthodoxy of the first was never questioned) was reluctantly admitted by the papal commission to be "true and tolerable," although it complained that the thesis could easily "be taken to a bad sense, since it is connected with magical things".

Pico believed that one part of Cabala drew down not only celestial powers but powers in the intellectual or angelic nature as well; evidence also shows that Pico thought that part of natural magic tapped celestial as well as sublunary forces. Recognition of hierarchical distinctions of power in both natural magic and Cabala was a predictable feature of Pico's syncretic system and is repeatedly suggested in the theses themselves. With this granted, the evidence shows that the two central claims in Yates's reading of Pico's magic-her identification of his magia naturalis with Ficino's celestial magic and her association of his "practical Cabala" exclusively with powers "beyond the stars"­are both fundamentally in error.

5. Pico's magic was not operative in any simple sense. Yates's interpretation of Pico's magic lies in her picture of its goals and historical signifi­cance. Like Walker before her, Yates admitted that much of Pico's magic was more concerned with regenerating the soul than with material manipulation of the world. But she also claimed that Pico "formulated a new position for European man" in his magic, endorsing operational views of nature that paved the way for modern science.

One problem in this interpretation arises from its assumptions about what Pico and other Renaissance magi meant by magical "works." One side of Renaissance magic-although this was equally true of ancient and medieval magic-could be plausibly linked to modem science insofar as it aimed in some way at improving the conditions of human life. We only need to think here of the medical magic in the ancient and medieval medical works drawn on by both Pico and Ficino.89 Outside of this clearly operative side of magic; however, Renaissance writers also used the term magical "works" to describe different ways of acquiring occultknowledge, sought for contemplative or prophetic reasons more often than for material ends.

One such type of "magic" involved esoteric means of textual exegesis; thus Pico's theses on the Orphic hymns are entitled "Thirty-one conclu­sions according to my own opinion on understanding the Orphic hymns accord­ing to magic, that is, the secret wisdom of divine and natural things first discov­ered in them by me".

The magical "work" in these theses-which apparently involved gematria or other word-number translations to calculate the seven ages of the world (one symbolized by each "god")-refers to prophetic exegesis and not to material opera­tions of any quasi-technological sort. Much of Pico's magic was clearly of this variety and can be included in the "practical part of natural science" that he identified with magia naturails only in the sense that it involved an esoteric means of reading texts. Indeed, Pico apparently viewed any exegetical method that yielded secret wisdom as just as magical as the celestial magic discussed by Yates.

In his attack on Pico's theses, Petruss Garcias (1489:) adopted a succinct definition of magic that balanced the prophetic and material sides of magic-and which probably could have been accepted by Pico himself "Magia secundum communiter loquentes est ars cognoscendi et divinandi occulta facien­dique magna et mirifica in natura" [Magic according to the common way of speaking is the art of knowing and divining hidden things and of making great and wonderous things in nature].

It was evidently this kind that Pico had in mind when, drawing on Porphyry, he tells us that in the Persian language magus means "inter­preter and worshipper of divine things."This natural magic seeks out "the hid

Taken together it is a mistake to think that such operations have much in common with modem science as Yates next proceeds to suggest. Later Renaissance magi living on the edge of the scientific revolution, like Giovanni Della Porta, might have considered magic as a way for man "to control his destiny through science," to recall Yates's words. But we have seen too much of Pico to expect to find him supporting this view. Why should "divine" man, who was capable of union with God, become involved in the material realm?

The answer to this question underlines a profound difference between typical premodern and modem attitudes towards nature. The magus, as Pico pictured him, was not a transformer of nature but its "minister." Following the principle that "every inferior nature is governed by whatever is immediately superior to itself," mankind, according to Pico, is ruled by the lowest order of angels and in turn is entrusted with governing the material world. Once the soul has been elevated by philosophical studies to the contemplative seat of the Cherubim, it is prepared to rise to God like the Serafim and descend to the world like angelic Thrones, "well instructed and prepared, to the duties of action."

The operative side of Pico's magic thus is best interpreted in terms of the traditional concepts of cosmic fall and redemption, which are discussed in a Christological context in the Heptaplus.96 Just as the whole universe was corrupted by the fall of man-a result of the cosmic correspondences in the "man the microcosm" con­cept-so following his mystical purification homo magus receives the power to raise fallen nature with himself, to "actuate" and "unite" the cosmos, "to marry the world" just as Christ "marries" the soul prepared by philosophy for the mystical ascent. The suggestion is that the operative side of Pico's magic was linked to a general plan for cosmic salvation-a view fitting in perfectly with the eschato­logical goals of his Vatican debate.

As I explained, Pico's magical writings antedated Ficino's by several years, developed a view of "natural magic" that was significantly different from Ficino's, and from the start included a wider range of magical traditions (including Cabala) than that found in Ficino's later magical works. And Yates's claim that Pico's magic prepared the way for scientific attitudes towards the world-simply a new twist on an old Burckhardtian theme-is diffi­cult to reconcile with the views that Pico advances of the magus as cosmic priest.

In fact Brian Vickers in his “Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance”(1984), already stressed that the distinction between occult and non­occult science was clear even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and he rejects any historical model in which modern science might be seen as emerging out of an occult or magical view of nature or in which the occult work of various early modern scientists (most notably Newton) might be har­monized with their non-occult science. It is erroneous, he asserts, either to seek any connection between these two distinct systems of thought or to claim that Renaissance occultism had any kind of positive role in the production of scientific ideas or techniques. Vickers proceeds to offer a catalog of what he sees as the fundamental distinctions that must be drawn between science and magical occultism.

The first important difference between science and occultism is that occult science is marked by resistance to change. In Vickers's view, the scientific mentality depends on an ability to reflect and to abstract and, in turn, to assim­ilate the results of this reflection and abstraction (leading ultimately to an awareness of the very process of theorizing itself). In this regard, he quotes Robin Horton on the key difference between traditional African thought and Western science: "In traditional cultures there is no developed awareness of alternatives to the established body of theoretical tenets; whereas in scientifi­cally oriented cultures, such a awareness is highly developed. It is this differ­ence we refer to when we say that traditional cultures are `closed' and scien­tifically oriented cultures `open."' In Vickers's view, the closed system of the occult is "self-contained, a homogeneity that has synthesized its various ele­ments into a mutually supporting relationship from which no part can be removed. Thus, the occult system (like "African" and all other "traditional" systems) is fundamentally conservative, blind to alternatives, and improperly holistic in the synthetic sweep of its worldview.

Next Vickers asserts that magical thought fails to acknowledge the proper boundaries between language and reality, between human minds and materi­ality, between humanity and the nonhuman world. While the scientific world­view clearly differentiates literal and metaphorical meanings, in the occult tradition metaphors are mistaken for realities, "words are equated with things, abstract ideas are given concrete attributes." Magical occultism thus demon­strates a tendency to think in nebulous and self-referential images rather than appropriate forms of abstraction. Far from constituting "a disinterested study of nature," the magical system is built on "a self-centered concern" for human welfare. As Vickers states:

Much of occult science, if I may sum up the conclusions of my own researches, is built out of purely mental operations, the arrangement of items into hierarchies, the construction of categories that become matrices for the production of further categories. Far from being a science of nature, or even of man, it comes to seem more and more like a classification system, self-contained and self-referring.

Science maintains clear differentiation between words and things and between literal and metaphorical meanings, but occultism fails to acknowledge these boundaries.

Science and magical occultism also differ in their responses to the failure of their predictions, and here Vickers quotes Robin Horton: "In the the­oretical thought of the traditional cultures, there is a notable reluctance to register repeated failures of prediction and to act by attacking the beliefs in­volved. Instead, other current beliefs are utilized in such a way to `excuse' each failure as it occurs, and hence to protect the major theoretical assumptions on which prediction is based."

The progressivism of science stands in sharp contrast to the stasis of the occult, and the two modes of thought thus demonstrate radically divergent attitudes toward the past. While traditional and occult thought holds the past in relatively high regard (with the past often seen as a golden age of pure knowledge or simplicity), the scientific view is dramatically different:

Vickers next turns to anthropologist Ernest Gellner's "The Savage and the Modern Mind" (1972) to trace a further set of differences between occult and scientific thought. The occult system, Vickers explains, lacks abstraction; it relies too much on the concrete properties of the objects rather than a more general, second-order focus on the properties of explanation itself. Further, the occult is by its nature secretive or hidden, cultivating obscurity. While scientific thought is designed to be public and repeatable, the occult seeks to restrict knowledge to adepts or initiates, and the knowledge it generates is personal and idiosyncratic. And again, while the occult persists in using "anthropo­morphic, socio religious, or ethical categories" and characterizations, modern science is "socially neutral" and "ill suited for the underpinning of moral ex­pectations, of a status- and value-system." Science is superior to magical oc­cultism because science disclaims parochial social interests.

Further, in its effort to account for the world in "homocentric, symbolic, and religious terms," the occult seeks to form "totalities in which everything mutually coheres." Science, on the other hand, "depends on a classification of knowledge and language into various types" and into separate components, and then applies different criteria of validity to these respective domains. Thus, Vickers explains, "Primitive thought systems are able to tolerate logical con­tradictions that would be unthinkable to a modern European. 1179 Europeans avoid these contradictions, it appears, by segmenting the world and various forms of knowledge into differentiated components and by keeping these dif­ferences firmly in place.

As he concludes, Vickers cites Gellner for two last distinctions between Vickers uses this bifurcation of two antithetical modes of thought not only to consolidate the identity of the modern scientist but also to consolidate a single form of proper scientific thought. (Note, of course, that even as the differences among various forms of magic collapse, the differences among various forms of science also disappear.) The singular nature of scientific thought can then be used to bolster the claim that modern science is ontolog­ically distinct from all preceding forms of "traditional" thought. Through this process, the conclusions of Vickers's argument are largely determined by his reification of a singular mode of scientific thought.

Yet this rigid contrast between science and magic serves even more sig­nificant functions in Vickers's argument. This abstract notion of science has little definition or content until it is brought into contrast with its magical foil. It is actually by means of his extended account of magic that Vickers is able to demarcate the precise contours of science and to explain its nature. He here provides a vivid example of the use of magic for the purpose of giving shape to a concept of science.

Echoing innumerable earlier theories of magic in philosophy and the social sciences, Vickers explains to us that magic (of whatever cultural provenance) demonstrates a uniform and consistent set of features (it is resistant to change, closed, unresponsive to failure, traditionalist, inflexible, obscure, arrogant, morally biased). In fact, magic epitomizes everything that science is not-or should not be.

This leads to a further aspect of Vickers's argument that is worth under­lining. While he has explained that modern science is "socially neutral" and ill suited to serve as a tool in ethical or moral debates, the same cannot be said of Vickers's own account. In fact, his catalog of the contrasts between science and magic is characterized by a strident, and often moralizing, tone. Science, he tells us, should relativize the content of its theories (recognizing that this content is always contingent), but science's own relativizing method appears to be beyond question. Vickers uses the discussion of magical occultism as an opportunity to formulate and promote a distinctive set of scientific values and ideals, and he spells out those ideals and gives them rhetorical force through the deployment of magic as a foil. His account of magical thought demon­strates an overriding concern with policing human relations toward nature and technology. He offers a broad array of normative declarations concerning the proper mode of scientific inquiry, the appropriate shape of human engagement with the material world, and important limits on human efforts to manipulate nature.

In The Scientific Revolution (1994) then, Floris Cohen argues that one of the principal reasons that scholars have been so exercised by questions surrounding hermetic magic is that this topic opens onto broader questions concerning the role of science in shaping the modern world. Should the Sci­entific Revolution be seen as "the beneficial triumph of rational thought about nature" or as "the agent chiefly responsible for the destructive handling of nature".

On one hand, as Cohen explains, we find historians holding the traditional, Enlightenment-inspired view of early modern science as surmounting a premodern fear of nature with "the quiet certainty that we know, and can predict, nature's operations." Scholars in this tradition not only see science as a pro­foundly liberating force but also view it as decisively distinct from earlier forms of inquiry. Such scholars are eager to construct sharp boundaries between science and magic. A rigid separation of these categories bolsters the distinctive and singular nature of modern science.

Cohen argues, that historians such as Frances Yates emphasize the links between early modern science and magical thought because this very relation underscores that the new technical insights of science came only through the suppression of alternative perspectives on human identity and the human relation to nature.

As Cohen explains:

The persistence of Hermetic patterns of thought throughout much of the 17th-century adventure in science betrays an acute awareness, among many though not all of the pioneers of the Scientific Revolu­tion, that their new science, however irresistible in its intellectual sweep, causes an attendant loss of insight into the endlessly com­plex makeup of the human personality-not without consequences for man's future handling of nature.... Throughout the history of western European culture a dual attitude toward science can be dis­cerned: the enthusiastic embrace of science as the embodiment of our triumph over nature, accompanied by bitter denunciations of science for its dehumanizing reductionism.

Of course at the center of the Frances A. Yates claim over the role of hermetic magic in the emergence of early modern science are competing visions of the nature and effects of science in the modern world. One of the long-standing strategies for delineating the nature of modern rationality is to juxtapose rationality with magical thought. even magic aims at the reordering of a totality.

Having cleared this, we shall next move on to a description of Picos Christian Cabalism, that in contrast to the claim of Yates, predates that of Ficino.

1)        Pico left Florence for the University of Paris in the summer of 1485, returning to Italy in late March or early April 1486. After a brief stop in Florence, he was in Arezzo by 10 May 1486, where he became involved in a famous scandal-the so-called rape of Mar­gherita-that ended with the death of a number of Pico's retainers, with Pico's brief imprisonment in Arezzo, and with his temporary retirement to Perugia and nearby Fratta, where he composed the Commento, the Oration, and nine hundred theses. Pico had no face­to-face contact again with Ficino until 1488 (Farmer p. 118).

2)        At the end of June 1489, we find them together at the scholastic debate at Lorenzo de' Medici's house, and by September of that year, Ficino, like Pico two-and-a-half years earlier, was writing his own ecclesiastical Apology for his magic­printed at the end of the De vita-which concludes in part with a mock plea for help from his "Phoebus" Pico, who he knew could slay this "poisonous Python" (Ficino's ecclesiasti­cal opponents) rising from the swamp "with a single shlh". Given Pico's ongoing troubles with the church-Innocent VIII made it clear in that year that he viewed the Heptaplus as no less heretical than the nine hundred theses-it is impossible to miss the irony in Ficino's words. (Farmer p.120)

3)        Pico was not prepared to acknowledge Hermes Trismegistus, whom Pico closely linked with Ficino, as a real magician (Farmer p.122).

4)        Vol. 1 of Agrippa's Opera (repr. 1970), which corrlains the De ouulta philosophia, is bound with a dozen or so other medieval and Renaissance magical tracts including a commentary on book 30 of Pliny's Historia naturalis which (like so many other Renaissance magical texts) plagiarizes heavily from Pico's Oration or Apology. The work also includes other magical treatises attributed to medieval and Renaissance figures including Gerhard of Cremona, Peter of Abano, and Abbot Trithemius.

5)        Those terms are a bit misleading, since in Renaissance magical texts the words "spiri­tual magic" or "spiritual science" generally referred to magic involving angels and demons and not to magic transmitted through the spiritus mundi.

6)        The spiritus mundi and closely related concepts (spiritus sanctus, etc.)  originated in primitive concepts of divine breath inherited from preliterate animistic traditions. In their abstract manifestations in literate times, these concepts became useful devices to rationalize the transmission of magical forces in the cosmos; invocation of such devices was neither necessary nor universal, however; interactions in imitative magic could be pictured as being transmitted through any number of cosmic media-or through no medium at all.

7)  Given the central role that historians have assigned to the spiritus rnundi in Renaissance magic, however, it is notewor­thy that the concept played no role in the three earliest magical texts-Pico's nine hundred theses, Oration, and Apology-that we have from any major Renaissance figure (Farmer p.124).  

 

 

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