In Our Time - Renaissance Magic

Episode Date: June 17, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Renaissance obsession with Magic. In 1461 one of the powerful Medici family’s many agents carried a mysterious manuscript into his master’s house in Florence. It purported to be the work of an ancient Egyptian priest-king and magician called Hermes Trismegistus. When Cosimo de Medici saw the new discovery, he ordered his translations of Plato to be stopped so that work could begin on the new discovery at once. Hermes promised secret knowledge to his initiates and claimed to have spoken with the spirits and turned base metal into gold. His ideas propelled natural magic into the mainstream of Renaissance intellectual thought, as scholars and magi vied to understand the ancient secrets that would bring statues to life and call the angels down from heaven.But why did magic appeal so strongly to the Renaissance mind? And how did the scholarly Magus, who became a feature of the period, manage to escape prosecution and relate his work to science and the Church?With Peter Forshaw, Lecturer in Renaissance Philosophies at Birkbeck, University of London; Valery Rees, Renaissance historian and a translator of Ficino’s letters; Jonathan Sawday, Professor of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. What makes people want to believe in aliens? I'm Tristan Redmond, one of the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. Donald Trump last week announced that he'd be releasing the US government's UFO files. So why the renewed interest in life out there? And what deeper spiritual meaning might people be searching for? Check out the global story. We are serious journalists on BBC.com.

or wherever you get your pods. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in 1461, one of the powerful Medici family's many agents carried a mysterious manuscript into his master's house in Florence. It purported to be the work of an ancient Egyptian priest, king and magician

called Hermes Trismegistus. When Cosmo D' Medici saw the new discovery, he ordered his translations of Plato by Vichino to be stopped so that work could begin on the new discovery at once. Hermes promised secret knowledge to his initiates and claimed to have spoken with the spirits and turned base metal into gold. His ideas propelled natural magic into the mainstream of Renaissance intellectual thought, as scholars and magi vied to understand the ancient secrets that would bring statues to life and call the angels down from heaven. But why did magic appear to?

so strongly to the Renaissance mind, and how did the scholar the Megas, who became a feature of the period, managed to escape prosecution and relate his work to science and the church? With me to discuss Renaissance magic is Peter Forshaw, a lecturer in Renaissance philosophies

at Birkbeck University of London, Valre Rees, Renaissance historian and a translator of Fichino's letters, and Jonathan Sorda, Professor of English Studies at the University of Strath Clyde. Let's begin with this extraordinary figure, Hermes, she's magistus, Peter Fawar. Who did the Renaissance scholars think he was, and when did they think he was writing?

Okay, there are various ideas that we find in Renaissance texts about who he was. Some people, for example, suggest he was the son of Prometheus, others that he was a grandson of Abraham. Essentially, he was a legendary figure who became the representative of Egyptian mysteries and Egyptian truths. You mentioned Marsiliot Ficino, who was the first person. to really translate the main hermetic corpus of texts and introduce them to the Western world. Ficino believed that he was five steps before Plato, the divine Plato, and he was at the head of a pious philosophical tradition, which went from Hermes to Zmagistus through individuals like Orpheus and Pythagoras,

eventually arriving at Plato, whom Ficino saw as being a pagan philosopher, very much in tune with Christian truths, foreshadowing them and prefiguring them in many ways. So he was given this enormous sort of genealogy about as much of an authority as he could get. But wasn't there supposed to be, again, a link with Moses just to sort of key that in as well? Yeah, certainly.

It's interesting to find there's a cathedral in Siena, which has a mosaiced image of hermese chrysumazus there, where he's described as Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus contemporary of Moses. And this was seen as highly significant. Moses, after all, was the putative author of Genesis, and so the whole story of creation and cosmogenesis. And Hermes was seen as a pagan equivalent of that. And so when do they think that he was writing?

Because again, there was some thought building up this extraordinary figure that he had discovered writing. When did they think he was writing about the time of Moses, before Moses? Again, those who believed that he was a grandson of Abraham would place him before Moses. But basically, it was in the mists of antiquity. Some people did equate him with Thoth, the Egyptian god who discovered writing. Ficino, for example, so Hermes, Mismegistus inventor of hieroglyphs. Varie, the man who translated, has already been mentioned two or three times,

translated the corpus for Cosimo, was Massilia Ficino. Why do you think that he's absorbed in Plato? He's going to be the first great translation of Plato. Why did he switch immediately? Was it just because Cosimo told him he had to, or was he too as excited by this text? Well, a bit of both. Partly Cosimo did ask him to do it,

and Cosimo was his patron who had supported him through his studies and given him the texts and set him on this path. But for him, what was so exciting was that it validated the study of philosophy because in the figure of Hermes, you could see the union of the entire Greek tradition of rational and speculative philosophy. But because of the connection with Moses that's been mentioned, you could also see it as the single source from which both traditions, the Judeo-Christian and the Greek philosophical tradition, sprang. So it was now perfectly fine to study rational philosophy, and in particular Platonic philosophy,

and to pursue all the many ideas that grew out of that in the later Platonic tradition while still holding to a profoundly religious devotional view of man's place in the universe. It might seem as strange to some people that a figure like Vichino is involved in magic and amegas and he's still receiving letters from the Pope and is involved with the Medici at a time and he's not being tried for witchcraft. So what's going on here? I mean, because we haven't come quite to the magical side of Trismagistice yet, have we? No. One of the dangerous things in Hermes was that there are some passages where instructions are given for calling down spirits with which to animate statues.

In other words, to make living gods through human manipulation of the cosmos, if you like. So this was considered dangerous. But the idea of Amagus has two sides to it. there's magic as we consider magic today. But to be Amegas was to be someone who knew and understood the secrets of the heavens, the science of the cosmos, if you like. And the idea that was predominant in Hermes wasn't so much this animation of statues. But the ability to see the universe as one and to recognize that what went on in the heavens

was reflected in what we see round about us in earth, on earth, and also within the soul of man. So this was an entirely new way of looking at things, but it was also an old way. So you have that excitement of new old things, if you like, beginning to yield up their knowledge. Jonathan Sotley, how widespread is this kind of magic, let's keep calling it, during the recant-s-s-on?

Is it a superstition and a strenum? or just compete with the early science and the astronomy at that time. I think it's quite difficult for us in a lot of ways to sort of re-enter the world of knowledge that was existing in the 14th, 15, 16th century. It isn't as that now we would see magic as something rather kind of esoteric and rather removed from the mainstreams of thought. But that wasn't the case then. And I try, I suppose, to think of this as a sort of triangle

in which religion is at one apex of the triangle, magic at the other, science at the other, and all three are forms of knowledge which are as it were wrestling with each other. There's a kind of jostling going on. And I suppose eventually what will come out is that science predominantly will win. But at this point, magic, the observation of nature, science, aren't actually in opposition to one another so much as in a kind of creative tension. So the careful attention to the properties of plants, of stones and so on

that you find in the kind of the works of the Renaissance magists, that's not so far removed from the idea of experiment and observation and the careful recording and cataloguing of the natural world which will become familiar in the end as a sort of scientific approach to the world. So this is the first wedge in what we're talking about it, it's Renaissance magic. Who was he? Is there any sense, does the question who was he really make any sense? I mean, apart from being up there with Orpheus and Moses and Prometheus and so on,

Was he Egyptian? Was he of the time of Moses? What does later scholarship discovered about him? Well, one thing that's discovered is that the text of, the corpus of text attributed to him really have been written at different periods in history. It was believed that they were written way before Plato. In fact, in 1614, the Swiss scholar Isaac Osorbon said, no, if you examine the Greek, it's later Greek. and in fact he dated them to about the first century AD, so after the birth of Christ. So it's no surprise that all these things were included if he's after, after Plato, after Plato and after Christ. Yeah, yeah, quite.

Of course, Fichino didn't know that. And I believe that he really firmly believed that these were pre-Plateo, pre-Christian and were prophetical. Do we believe he was a person or was he a collection to which a person's name was appended? A collection to which a person's name was appended? person's name is often appended. But I want to come back to that idea of is it a sensible question to ask because I think that the concepts of authenticity and fraud or forgery are much more slippery in the Renaissance. I mean, we now have kind of very strong, we think we have very strong

ways of approaching such a subject to test out whether it's true or not true. But I think that's only just emerging at this point. There's a sort of story about Michelangelo faking statues, faking the antiquity of statues, which would suggest that by the 1560s, yeah, people are thinking about this being real or unreal. But I'm not sure that that holds good. At Ficino's time, it doesn't hold good. If a text could be seen to be ancient, it was worth studying in its own right, and it didn't really matter how ancient. I want to move on from Hermes to go to the Kabbalah. Now, Peter Faw, that's another key thought that plays into this intellectual idea of magic in the Renaissance. Can you give us an outline of

of the main, just a main line of Kabbalistic thought. Okay. Okay, if we have Hermes Trismegistas as a source in Egypt, a contemporary of Moses, Moses is often seen as a significant figure in Jewish tradition as someone who on Mount Sinai not only received the written law, but also received a secret esoteric law, which was passed on verbally to an elite, really. Starting with 70 elders. Starting with 70 elders, yeah.

This tradition is called Cabela, which means reception or tradition, literally, and is a method of finding secret meanings in the Old Testament. Are these the 32 roots to truth? That certainly is, yes, you've got this idea. One of the earliest books connected with, or the text connected with Kabbalah is called the Sephir, a fourth century text. The book of formation talks about the universe created from the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and then introduces the idea of God himself can only be known by looking at his creation

and the Kabbalist posited ten emanations of God called the Sephirot or numerations. 22 letters of the alphabet, the ten sephirot or numerations, emanations of God make the 32. So you've got the 22 letters and the ten numbers, the 32 and the combination and the interplay of those combinations was the basis for the cabana. Certainly number was a strong basis for the cabala. For example, the Hebrew alphabet has both a letter significance and a numeric significance. So Kabbalists would make computations of the meaning of a word.

For example, the word heart for heart adds up to 32, the 10 Sephirots and the 22 letters. And each word was seen as having a numeric significance. And words with the same sum were seen as sharing truths. Again, Barre, we have a great scholar who brings this ancient knowledge into the Renaissance, and this is a fantastical young man called Picot, with a fantastical name, Pico della Mirandula. At the age of 23, he publishes 900 propositions from Arabic, Greek. Anyway, what is he bringing in of the cabala, and why is it again so seized on and taken, like Hermes Tresmajistus, who was just learning to pronounce rather fluently he was?

Yes, Pico burst on the scene as a very young man And he had He was absolutely brilliant And had absorbed knowledge from all the different sources And was tremendously excited by all this new knowledge And he was trying to find the truths of Christianity Confirmed in all the traditions Now amongst those was Kabbalah

But just took me then That they're going after a unified theory then I think just as we are now Absolutely Everything changes, yes Except some of them just looked for what the theory was and some of them looked to try to find their own ideas confirmed in the theory, which has a slight difference of emphasis.

But Pico was certainly looking for the confirmation of Christianity in other sources. And in the Kabbalah, he found prefigurations of Christian truths, and he felt that Kabbalistic methods should be applied in the Christian exegesis of Scripture. For instance. For instance, taking the learning from the Sefeiatsira that Peter's mentioned and also from the Zohar, the Book of Splendor, which is full of wonderful mystical tales, learning from this and applying it to the Old Testament in order to illuminate ways in which the Old Testament might be seen to prefigure the New Testament.

For example, the doctrine of the Trinity, because explicitly it says any Kabbalist, meaning any Jewish Kabbalist, will have to acknowledge. that by applying these cabbalistic techniques of exegesis, they will have to acknowledge the doctrine and the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which is highly significant. Thank you, Jonathan. I'm just fascinated why should, can we just rummage around?

Why caught on with obviously the cleverest people? There's an idea that comes out, I think, in the study of the Kabler, that what's on the surface of a text or an object under scrutiny isn't really necessarily what it means, that you have to delve below the surface to find out from the features of the superficial features of the text, it's deeper in a secret meaning. And this is a culture which loves secrecy.

It loves the idea of penetration into secrets. But there's a wonderful sort of simplicity and a sort of, if you've got 22 letters in an alphabet, which is probably one of the greatest inventions ever, and the ten numbers, which is one of the other greatest inventions, you can think, well, that is the key. That is the way we see the world. But there's some sense of that.

You need somebody to tell you that, you see. Oh, yeah. That's why to tell me everything. It's guarded information, which you're privileged. You have privileged access to and are then able to perform these wonderful operations on top of text. And the interplay becomes very complex because these ten numbers were ten great metaphysical principles as well. Can you give us an example? What's the metaphysical principle of number two?

That's a good one. Two is an interesting number. All numbers are interesting. I've got a man who knows at the old time of this time. But certainly one of the big things, if you think of the ten, metaphysical principles. The second one, the name is Hockma, which is wisdom. And what became very significant for Christian Kabbalists is they say, wisdom equates with Christ. And this was one of the big messages of Christian Kabbalah. One is God as the father. Two, comes from that as Christ

the Son. Three is the Holy Spirit. In the Hebrew emanations, it's the crown, Keta, then Hokma, wisdom, and then Bina which is understanding. And all Christian Kabbalists said, this is the Christian trinity. You have to accept that. There's a habit of mind here that I think is kind of interesting to unravel a bit. Renaissance culture, whether it's in Italy,

whether it's in elsewhere in Europe, loved the idea of allegory of working by indirection in certain ways. You think of Edmund Spencer in England writing in the Fairy Queen in the 1590s, much later on, terming his poem a dark conceit. And that idea of, of something hidden, dark, mysterious, interior to the text,

pervades Renaissance culture. And actually it's going to kind of carry on into what will emerge as literary criticism. I mean, literary criticism, hermeneutics, the explication of texts and so on, is all the kind of built on this. Yes. But what the Kabbalah had that was particularly attractive was this idea that through exploring these different metaphysical principles, there was a way of assent where, by knowledge and understand,

and seeing all these things in operation in the creation, man could come back to finding his true nature, which was divine in origin and the same as God. And this is tremendously important. And here the Kabbalah and the hermetic texts are both really conveying the same message. They're providing steps of assent towards the divine, which man can climb.

We put Neoplatonism as a third branch coming in. Can we explore that a little while? then maybe all the pieces are finding place. Jonathan Sorday, how does that fit in with it? We've had a little discussion about the cabula, little discussion about hermeticism, and there's neoplatonism. These seem to be the three pillars.

The neoplatanism is the sort of reinterpretation and re-inscription of Plato, the authority of Plato, the kind of discovery of Plato that takes place in this period. I think the easy way to understand it, or a quick way to understand it, is an exaltation of the soul over the body. It's a concentration of the soul.

So that it becomes, if you like, a kind of cult in, I think in Italy, but certainly in England in the late period, whereby, if you like, love, human effective love, desire for other people can be transformed into something rather soul exulting to use a kind of platonic type phrase. The human affections become, if you like, mirrors or versions of, the greater affection that the soul can feel or should feel in its tendency towards God. And always in Platonic thinking and Neoplatonist thinking there's the notion of an ascent.

An escape out of the body. The body is seen as quite literally incarceration. Your court incarcerated in flesh. And your end is to kind of claw your way out of the body up towards knowledge, up towards heaven, up towards God. And that links in with the charity of Ezekiel, isn't it? Yes. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, the more mystical tradition. Going into the realm of gold. One thing I do notice is that what I'd say is that the Neaplatonic elements, for example, Proclos, one the Platonist, who wrote a text on Sacrifice and Magic, translated by Puccino and Yamblicus, who wrote another text, again translated by Ficino, called on the mysteries of the Egyptians, Syrians and Chaldaeans. That's a far more operative or transitive form of magic.

It's not just the sort of person I'm changing myself. self-psychologically. It really is the idea of acting in the world. And as Jonathan mentioned, power. And this is one thing that Fichino was worried about. Augustine, yes, mentions Hermes Trismogistus, but totally negatively, he condemns in the city of God, Asclepius and this operative magic in the world. In the 16th century, we get far more of this idea of working on matter and on other people as well, influencing them. I think we just have to mention we didn't go into it, that a lot of us would come from the three kings, the major, who followed a star to the cradle of Christ.

So you bring, as it were, the Chaldeans and the astronomy are all out of that huge Middle Eastern culture into Christianity by actually following the star and having the power to nominate the king. Yes, he is the king. Exactly. They found, and that is another sort of, it's another cylinder, isn't it,

that's giving this the energy it had. Just one moment on Prospero before, I know he got much time, he was thrown away by John, but Prospero, the last play of Shakespeare, maybe that is, that in itself is significant, the magician, and at the end he breaks his rod and so, and Ariel, all the things around the world and so.

Lots of people I've read about for this programme, he was the model for prostero. He was the model for prostero. All of them was the model for postero. I mean, that was very bubbling around all over the place, wasn't it? Whoever it was, whether it was Gino, whether it was, and so on. Well, they were all the figures who appeared in the 16th century,

and D is probably the most likely actual model. At the court of Queen Elizabeth. But they were all drawing on, they were all reading Ficino, and they were meeting Proclos and these other Neoplatonists through Ficino's translations. And it was in the 16th century. This is that this idea of power manipulation got picked up. And people started,

people like John D got into difficulties when they started trying to claim power through this special knowledge. John D was our very own. He was our very own, yes indeed. There's flood as well, but John D. was a great library at Mortlake and travelled around. And the Queen's favour and so on.

And he was really interested in the knowledge and understanding the science of the natural world. And he had laboratories and he observed things. But he also got involved in experiments with crystal balls because he believed that there must be something to it. He had a man who read them for him, didn't he? He did indeed. He had a scryer. His main scryer was Edmund Carey who was someone who describes what the ball is.

is probably a feeling. Yes. Yeah, but Edward Kelly was his main order. The thing that's interesting, though, is about dissemination here, the way in which these guys start this kind of work, and then they form networks in which they're sending the information around. And it travels in a kind of European-wide constituencies. We haven't even mentioned Germany, have we?

Yeah. But what's interesting is how many of them claim this knowledge as their own special claim, and if you come to me, I will explain it, although some of them didn't even want to explain the methods by which they got their knowledge. Well, it's lucrative, isn't it, by the 16th century? Exactly, so they're using this knowledge and power for personal gain,

and that's where it all goes wrong and why they all get into trouble with the church, and they're all very quarrelsome individuals. That's another thing, isn't it? Every time I come across the description family, he said, bad temper fell out with somebody. That's right. That's right. Bad tamper fell out with somebody.

I've got a series of exclamation, like it. And Ficino is the one who didn't. And Ficino made no claim over the knowledge. He simply made it available for people and explained what it meant. But there are two reasons for keeping the knowledge. Several reasons to keep an knowledge to yourself. First of all, if you are an initiate, if we come from the Kambliff,

it's been handed on by Mercer through the 70 elders and its private knowledge, just like Newton didn't want to talk about alchemy for one of the reasons because he wanted to keep it for the elite. So it's sort of part of being in the cult that you keep it to yourself. And then I suppose there's the money thing as well. Because these men were very clever, and they did find ways through... And infuring, through cures, didn't they? They were all poverty-stricken.

They got through whatever. money came to them. Also, it's kind of an access to temporal power. That's to say that it's influence on the court, or you can have influence in this sort of strange, rather kind of enclosed. I mean, the world of Hamlet, if you think, if you think about it, very

enclosed in which people are sort of manipulating one another, operating on one another. And if you can actually claim that your power comes from somewhere, you know, completely removed, then you are a very special person. But although they made these claims, it's remarkable that none of them really exercise. They weren't very great power.

I don't know. A lot of the people who were practicing magic were actually medical doctors. Let's talk about Paracelsus here, for instance. I mean, he had patrons. He made great advances in medicine, didn't he? And he introduced Mercury to medicine, for instance, and he was a megai. And so he was some, I'd like to, for the last part of the period, move on, not move on, but the people are moving it towards what we would call science,

what we would recognise. And he seems to be one of the figures doing that person. Okay, yeah. He's certainly, I mean, he's often classed as the father of Ayatrochemistry, so of medical chemistry. He took alchemy and before him medieval alchemy had been very much the idea of transmutation of lead into gold, for example, on the most basic level, understanding the properties of matter for transmutation.

He suddenly said, no, the main focus of alchemy should be medicine and healing, and saw no problems with that. Carouselso's the wound salve man, isn't he? He's the wound salve man, yeah, yeah. The idea that the object that you're struck by or wounded by has about it's certain properties that have to be what negotiated or have to be kind of pulled into play in the healing process. Basically he was prepared to try anything.

He would treat the wound because he was a battlefield surgeon. But also he'd say, well, we might as well try everything. Why not anoint the weapon? If you believe in sympathetic attractions, the whole universe is a network of correspondences between everything. the swords that stabbed you, anoint that as well. You may as well. I'd say he's the ultimate pragmatist on that level.

He'd treat the wound and he'd treat the weapon. And some harmonic correspondence between the two would, he hoped. It's a different way of thinking to our own, but it's not so divorced if you're thinking about it in terms of a grand, going back to that idea of a grand theory. Did magic, as you see it, did what people generally recognize as magic? Did that feed into science? Was it necessary for the push through the Renaissance?

Was it an aberration, a throwback, a fakery, or was it, did it become a progressive intellectual, progressive intellectually? I think one thing it did, and the hermetic text did, was legitimise a focus on nature. Suddenly nature wasn't something profane which should be escaped from. We've got, yes, the Neoplatonic ascent, but also focus and observation. Astronologists had to observe and optimists.

It was like a phrase as below, as above so below, yeah. Yes. And you really, you can. You've got astronomers really making close observation of the heavens. You've got alchemists. They're not dabbling. They're looking at the properties of matter. And yes, often there was a sort of spiritual motivation for this.

But at the same time, it really did legitimize the fact that you could focus on material substance as science does. At the same time, you've got a tremendous interest in beauty as being part of this natural order and real appreciation of what was there. And as Peter said, the legitimation of further study not only of nature, but of the whole concept of beauty. So it's expanding in that way at the same time. And how did that figure?

I mean, you brought it in very light, Valerie, beauty. It's a heck of my idea. It's like a little bonny. But it's quite hard to present beauty on radio. But painting, for example, of the time, takes on a different quality. And it's going on at the same time as the observation of the natural world.

Everything's moving forward together. Everything's expanding, going into more detail of, observation. Magic also, I think, chips away at the authority of the church. This is how science, as it were, in the how it comes to emerge. I mean, when it chips away at orthodoxy, it doesn't take on trust what an institution will tell you. And of course, that's an absolutely fundamental move in order to get going into the 17th century scientific revolution. Many of the Lutherans, sorry, many of the Magi alchemists were Lutherans. This whole idea of

personal relationship with God also gives you a sort of independence of approach to science. Well, thank you all very much. We should come back to that sometime. I hope we do. I really enjoyed that. Thank you, Valerie Rees, Peter Fawshaw and Jonathan Sourday. Next week, which will be the last in our current series,

we will be talking about George Washington and the American Revolution. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com.