MAGIC AND THE OCCULT

Magic may be defined as the use of preternatural forces to control and manipulate nature. Although such powers may or may not be supernatural, being outside the normal course of nature, they are held to be responsible for the magic’s extraordinary productions. Magical events are, thus, distinct from miracles in the sense that magic manipulates natural, though hidden, forces, while miracles are caused solely by supernatural powers. Whether assisted by angels or demons or done by purely natural means, magic seeks to place control of nature in human hands.

There are commonalities as well as sharp differences among magic, religion, and science. Magic has been so intertwined with religion as to be virtually indistinguishable from it; yet, from the standpoint of official religion, it is a forbidden art. Like religion, magic invokes extraordinary realities and beings, but it adopts a manipulative attitude toward them, while religion venerates and supplicates the gods. Historically, magic has occupied an equally ambiguous status with respect to science. Like science, magic uses empirical techniques, but its secretiveness and its supposed “superstitious” character are anathema to science. While magical and quasi-magical ideas have profoundly influenced natural philosophy, modern science categorically rejects magic.

Early Christianity and Magic

The emergence of Christianity coincided with a revival of magic and occult science in the Roman Empire. By the time the Romans made their first major contacts with the Greek world, the philosophical tradition of the Periclean age had given way to a preoccupation with the occult “mysteries of nature.” Equally significant was the revival of Pythagoreanism, not merely as a formal philosophy but as a religious cult and way of life. Neo-Pythagoreanism became the principal stimulus to the codification of Greek magic, which developed in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire and spread westward.

The most important works associated with the revival of magic were the so-called Hermetic treatises, supposedly consisting of the revelations of the Egyptian god Thoth, called Hermes Trismegistus (“Thrice-Great Hermes”) by the Greeks. Composed between the first and third centuries A.D., the Hermetic texts promised access to “secrets of nature” that would enable one to master nature’s occult forces. To an age terrorized by angry divinities and the omnipotence of fate, the Hermetic teachings were popular and influential. The Corpus Hermeticum became the most famous magical text in the West. According to the teachings of Hermes, the secrets of nature were absolutely opaque; they could be known only by revelation.

Science was practically indistinct from religion. It was no longer rational understanding, but gnosis (revealed knowledge), an outcome of piety. Because of its quasi-religious character, the early Christians were ambivalent about Hermeticism. Lactantius (c. 240–c. 320) dressed Hermes in the garb of a Christian prophet, while Augustine of Hippo (354–430) attacked him as an idolater. Part divine and part diabolical, Hermetic doctrines were both food for heretical thought and grist for polemical mills.

Kyranides, a second-century treatise, illustrates the character of Hermetic magic. Supposedly a compilation of the writings of a certain Harpocration of Alexandria (first or second century A.D.) and King Kyranos of Persia, the work consists of four books divided into chapters arranged according to the letters of the Greek alphabet. Each chapter describes the magical properties of the animals, plants, or stones beginning with that letter. Under the letter alpha, for example, are entered ampelos (grape vine), aquila (eagle), aetitis (eagle-stone), and aquila (eagle-ray). All have marvelous virtues that are cunningly related to one another. From the grape, wine is made; the root of the grapevine cures epilepsy and drunkenness. The stone found in the head of the eagle-ray prevents someone from getting drunk. If you sketch the form of an eagle on an eagle-stone and place it by your door with an eagle’s feather, it will act as a charm to ward off evil. According to Kyranides, every natural object possesses magical virtues. Hence, the realm of natural philosophy was scarcely distinguishable from the realm of mysticism and the occult.

The matrix of early Christianity was a Palestinian Judaism that had been permeated by Hellenistic influences. During the early centuries of Christianity, magic (despite its deviant religious status) constituted a strong undercurrent in Judaism. Jewish magic became part of the Christian heritage. The Gospels record numerous instances of miracles performed by Jesus that resemble magical practices, including exorcisms, healing, wonder-working, and nature miracles. The pagan writer Celsus (second century A.D.) claimed that Jesus, like other magi, learned the magical arts in Egypt.

The early Christians were also accused of practicing magic. Such charges seemed plausible in light of the numerous quasi-magical acts attributed to the apostles. Peter’s shadow was said to have the power to cure (Acts 5:12–16), as had aprons and handkerchiefs Paul touched (Acts 19:11). On several occasions, the apostles overcame the power of competing magicians. Celsus charged that Christians got their powers by demonology and incantations. Although the Christians responded that their power came from God acting within them, from the pagan viewpoint they seemed merely to be claiming a superior form of magic.

Pagan and Christian Magic

Both pagans and Christians condemned magic, but for different reasons. For pagans, magic was reprehensible because it was secretive, antisocial, and a threat to the social order. Christians, on the other hand, condemned magic because it was the work of demons. Augustine, in his influential City of God, insisted that all magic is demonic. Augustine maintained that demons taught people how to perform magical rituals and how to make use of the occult power of stones, plants, and animals. He acknowledged certain marvelous natural powers, such as magnetic power or the power of goat’s blood to shatter a diamond. But magic, he concluded, attacking Hermes, was diabolical.

From the early fourth century, when Christianity became the official Roman religion, magic became a capital offense. In earlier centuries, Roman law had punished magic only when it was used to inflict harm (maleficium). In general, the Romans tolerated sorcery and divination except when such practices were seen to be politically dangerous. Thus, in A.D. 11, the Emperor Augustus (b. 63 B.C., r. 31 B.C.–A.D. 14) issued an edict that forbade publishing the emperor’s own horoscope or prophesying anyone’s death date. Nor were the legal measures introduced by Christianity effective against magic. Indeed, some authorities of the early Christian church acknowledged magic’s strength by accommodating Christian practices to pagan magic. Such accommodation to pagan culture was a common and effective missionary strategy in the early Middle Ages. Pagan temples were reconsecrated as Christian shrines. Missionary monks tolerated magical charms and amulets, requiring only that the names of Christian saints, instead of pagan deities, be invoked. Competition among healers, diviners, and priests offering access to spiritual powers caused some early Christian missionaries to assimilate rival pagan practices, thus encouraging the growth of magic.

Despite magic’s illicit status, the practice of magic was quite common in the early Middle Ages. The parish priests who practiced medicine as part of their duties did not think of themselves as magicians; yet, without scruples, they used charms and magical plants to combat illnesses. Secular healers also used magic.

The eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon medical manual Lacnunga explained how to cure “elf-shot,” or diseases caused by mischievous elves or spirits. The names of apostles and saints were also invoked for their healing powers. Amulets made of plants and animal parts were used to ward off illness and to protect the bearer from witchcraft. An eleventh-century lapidary by Marbode of Rennes described the magical properties of stones. The agate is an antidote to poison and can be used to strengthen eyesight. Chrysolite, worn as an amulet, drives away demons, while selenite reconciles quarreling lovers. Divination and fortune-telling, including astrology, the interpretation of dreams, casting dice, and reading thunder claps, were also common. Although the magical books provide but a glimpse into the magical world of the early Middle Ages, they suggest that the practice of magic was widespread throughout Europe.

The distinction between “white” (helpful) magic and “black” (harmful) magic was not always easy to make, since techniques for sorcery were essentially the same as those for medical or protective magic.

However, sorcery (magic used with evil intent) was strictly forbidden. Women, who often performed roles as midwives, healers, matchmakers, and finders of lost objects, were particularly vulnerable to charges of sorcery. Early Christian writers believed that women were especially prone to magical practices because of their supposed credulity and moral debility. Tertullian (c. 160–c. 220) wrote that demons took advantage of women’s inherent character flaws and taught them knowledge of magical herbs.

Learned Magic

During the twelfth century, European intellectual life underwent a transformation as a result of the introduction of Arabic learning into the West, which acquainted Europeans with the rich philosophical and scientific tradition of Greco-Roman antiquity. However, because ancient philosophy came into the West through Arabic sources, it came as a potpourri of genuine philosophical treatises and pseudepigraphical tracts on the occult sciences, which the medieval scholastics had difficulty distinguishing from the original ancient works. The Hermetic writings had exerted a powerful appeal among radical Muslim sects. The Ismaili, a Shiite sect, added their own works on alchemy, astrology, and magic to the already sizable Corpus Hermeticum. One of the most influential magical textbooks in the medieval West, the notorious Picatrix, was a translation of a work produced by the Brethren of Purity, a radical Ismaili sect.

The appeal of the Arabic magical books to medieval intellectuals is revealed by Roger Bacon’s (1213–91) enthusiastic assessment of the Secretum secretorum (Secret of Secrets), a ninth-century Arabic work attributed to Aristotle (384–322 B.C.). Couched in the form of a letter from Aristotle to his pupil Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.), the work described the rules of statecraft, including the use of astrology and magic to defeat one’s enemies. Bacon thought that the Secretum contained “the greatest natural secrets which man or human invention can attain in this life.”

The Secretum secretorum was a key text in the formation of the image of the magus, which found an especially favorable reception in the medieval courts. Whether in the form of casting horoscopes for princes or using sorcery to gain a prince’s favor, magic and fear of magic were pervasive in courtly society. In 1159, John of Salisbury (1115–80) warned that magicians were particularly active in the courts, where ambitious servants used whatever devious means were available to them to curry favor with princes. The engineer Konrad Kyeser of Eichstatt (fl. fourteenth century), in dedicating his treatise on military technology to the emperor Rupert, portrayed himself as a magus in possession of powerful secrets.

The tendency to overlap magic and technology caused Bacon to distinguish carefully between them in his letter On the Secret Works of Art and Nature (c. 1260). Bacon contrasted magic, which he considered to be demonic, with legitimate experimental science, or “art using nature as an instrument.” Similarly, Albertus Magnus (1193–1280) explained that the Three Magi “were not sorcerers…. For a magus is different from the astrologer, enchanter, or necromancer; properly a magus is only a great man who, with the requisite knowledge, produces marvels” (Commentary on the Book of Matthew). Bacon’s concept of “art using nature as an instrument” was the core idea underlying what would later be called “natural magic.”

Despite the nearly ubiquitous presence of magical books after the twelfth century, magic had a marginal status in relation to conventional scholastic philosophy. According to Aristotle, the dominant medieval authority on scientific methodology, science (scientia) meant knowledge of universal, necessary causes of quotidian phenomena. Magic, however, had to do with the manipulation of the occult properties of matter, which could not be apprehended by the senses, although their effects could be known empirically. (The attractive virtue of the magnet, for example, is an occult quality, although its effect upon iron is manifest.)

Some medieval thinkers, such as Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74), traced the origin of occult properties to the heavens, while others attributed them to the “substantial form” of matter itself.

Perhaps no work better illustrates the assimilation of the occult sciences into scholastic philosophy than the Liber aggregationis (Book of Collections), attributed to Albertus Magnus but, in fact, composed by an unknown thirteenth-century scholastic. By far the most famous medieval book of “experimental” magic, the work was a compilation of “secrets” and “experiments” drawn from a variety of classical and medieval sources. The Liber aggregationis was essentially a treatise on employing the “secret” or marvelous virtues of plants, stones, and animals. The work is obviously indebted to the occult tradition leading back to the Hellenistic era. However, what makes it so different from the Hermetic books is pseudo-Albertus’s unwillingness to accept that marvels are merely marvelous. Instead, he attempted to explain them according to the principles of scholastic science. In his tract, De mirabilibus mundi (The Marvels of the World), appended to the Liber aggregationis, pseudo-Albertus argued that marvels are, in fact, natural events caused by the “rational virtues” in things, even though these causes may be hidden from the intellect.

In making this argument, pseudo-Albertus adopted a conventional scholastic strategy to explain occult qualities. Although certain qualities in nature may be insensible or idiosyncratic, he argued, it is, nevertheless, possible to find rational, physical explanations for them—unless, of course, they are caused by demons. In the fourteenth century, Nicole Oresme (c. 1320–82) devoted an entire scholastic treatise, De causis mirabilium (The Causes of Marvelous Things) to arguing that “marvelous” phenomena do not require supernatural causes to explain them. Oresme contended that all of the events that people generally regard as marvelous proceed instead from natural causes that are overlooked, or they result from perceptual errors. Once their causes are known, they are no longer marvelous.

To the growing number of scholars whose curiosity was aroused by magic, the religious and academic establishment issued a stern warning. Hugh of St. Victor (c. 1096–1141), writing in the 1120s, categorically denounced magic, charging that “it seduces [people] from divine religion, prompts them to the cult of demons, fosters corruption of morals, and impels the minds of its devotees to every wicked and criminal indulgence” (Didascalicon 7.15). Hugh’s denunciation of magic, like virtually au “official” medieval pronouncements on the subject, was essentially a restatement of the Augustinian position. However, underlying the medieval hostility toward magic was a deep and pervasive suspicion of intellectual curiosity in general. In contrast to legitimate intellectual inquiry, magic was considered to be a form of aimless erudition (curiositas), the “passion for knowing unnecessary things.”

Although curiositas referred to any form of intellectual inquiry carried to excess, magic was the medieval world’s paradigmatic example of forbidden knowledge. For the boundary between “natural” and demonic magic was ambiguous. Hence, magic of any kind might tempt practitioners into making pacts with demons in order to learn the secrets of creation. So, in the Renaissance, Faust would sell his soul to Satan in order to know the secrets of nature. Not only did the magus pry into nature’s hidden recesses and steal its secrets, he used his illicitly won knowledge to glorify himself and to impress the world with his “marvels.” According to medieval accounts, pride and curiosity about secret things caused Gerbert of Aurillac (c. 945–1003), who later became Pope Sylvester II (999–1003), to leave his monastery and journey to Spain in order to study astrology and magic under Saracen teachers—at the price of his soul. Gerbert, whose insatiable thirst for knowledge was legendary, was but the most famous medieval example of the overly curious cleric who crossed the boundary of legitimate intellectual inquiry to dabble in the forbidden art. Similar stories implicated Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste (c. 1168–1253), and Michael Scott (c. 1175–c. 1230). Indeed, any medieval scholar who had a reputation for his knowledge of natural science was a potential antihero in this rich legendary tradition.

Renaissance Magic

Magic’s reputation and intellectual standing underwent a dramatic reversal beginning in the fifteenth century. In 1463, the humanist Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) translated the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin at the request of his patron, Cosimo d’Medici (1389–1464). In developing a theory of magic, Ficino maintained that the key to magical power was the spiritus mundi, a subtle material substance that is diffused throughout the universe and acts as a medium for influences between celestial bodies and the sublunar world. Using magic, Ficino argued, one can attract the “spiritual” influence of any planet by employing talismans, music, scents, and foods appropriate to that planet. Such influences, channeled through the cosmic spirits into humans, act as powerful medicines.

Within a few decades of Ficino’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticum, magic became a respectable, even pioneering, humanistic subject. Dozens of treatises reflecting this new “learned magic” appeared in the Renaissance, while Hermetic influences turn up in art, literature, philosophy, theology, and politics. Ficino’s famous Oration on the Dignity of Man (1489) is replete with magical influences and references. Another proponent of magic, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535), brought magic to a broad academic audience in his influential De occulta philosophia (On the Occult Philosophy [1533]), which proclaimed magic to be the most perfect knowledge of all.

To some extent, Renaissance magic was an attempt to unify nature and religion. Thus, Paracelsus (1493–1541) condemned Aristotle on both scientific and religious grounds. The Paracelsians maintained that Aristotle was a heathen author whose natural philosophy was inconsistent with Christianity. Therefore, it had to be replaced by a Christian Hermeticism that attempted to account for all natural phenomena in a manner that was consistent with Scripture.

Magic found particular favor in the Renaissance courts. The Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (b. 1552, r.1576–1612) was passionately devoted to magic, and his court at Prague became a center of magical studies. Not coincidentally, Rudolf’s court was also a thriving center of scientific research. Both Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) lived at Rudolf’s court. In many instances, magic served as an impetus to science, promoting experimentalism and mathematics and creating a positive image of the scientist as a magus.

Another center of Renaissance magical activity was Naples, where the philosophical naturalism of Bernardino Telesio (1509–88) took root. Telesio’s vitalistic naturalism provided the philosophical foundation for what Renaissance philosophers called “natural magic,” an experimental approach to nature that attempted to use occult forces for practical ends. Telesio’s followers established experimental academies with the goal of discovering natural “secrets.” They wrote learned treatises on astrology, physiognomy, and the occult secrets of nature.

The most famous Neapolitan magus was Giambattista Della Porta (1535–1615). His Natural Magic (1558) was not only the Renaissance’s most famous book of magic, it was also, for a time, a highly respected scientific work. Della Porta argued that natural magic was not demonic; it manipulated solely natural forces. Della Porta’s ideas made a deep impression on the Dominican friar Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), who used natural magic as part of his scheme to establish a Utopian community in southern Italy. The abortive revolt of Calabria, which Campanella led in 1599 to eject the Spanish from the Kingdom of Naples, was framed by an ideology pervaded with magical ideas.

Hermeticism was immensely popular among Renaissance humanists and intellectuals. Its adherents numbered some of the leading intellectuals of the day, including Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), and John Dee (1527– 1608). Renaissance magic invoked both natural and supernatural powers and, to that extent, became linked to both science and religion, arousing debate and controversy from both sides.

Despite attempts to create an occult theory based solely on nondemonic principles, magic continued to be the focus of religious controversy. Although natural magic looked innocent to some, it claimed to produce the same effects as religion without any supernatural agencies. Hence, critics charged, it bordered dangerously on atheism. Thus, on two separate occasions, Della Porta was brought before the Inquisition and questioned about his magical activities. In the 1580s, he was implicated in a famous dispute over witchcraft between the French jurist Jean Bodin (1529–96) and the German physician Johann Wier (1515–88). Arguing, in his De prestigiis daemonum (On the Sorceries of Demons [1564]), against the persecution of witches, Wier cited Della Porta’s experiment demonstrating that the “witch’s salve,” supposedly used to transport witches into flight, could be understood according to naturalistic principles. Della Porta maintained that the witch’s salve was, in reality, a hallucinogenic drug that caused the supposed witches to fantasize their nocturnal flights. Attacking Wier in his Démonomanie des sorciers (Demon Mania of the Sorcerers [1580]), Bodin brought Della Porta into the dispute, damning him as “the great Neapolitan sorcerer.”

The sixteenth-century debate over magic is best understood within the context of Counter-Reformation politics. The Roman Catholic Church, determined to consolidate its monopoly over supernatural forces, saw any attempt to utilize occult powers as a threat to its jurisdiction over the miraculous. The history of Inquisitorial processes in the sixteenth century confirms the Church’s growing concern about magic. After about 1580, illicit magic replaced doctrinal heresy as the most common charge brought before the local tribunals of the Holy Office. In most of these cases, the accused were charged with using charms, incantations, and magical devices to heal physical complaints, to detect thieves, to find stolen objects and buried treasure, or to incite sexual passion. Formerly, such popular practices were considered harmless. But, in its attempt to protect the faithful from the demonic magic, the Church condemned all magic as heretical. In the heat of the Reformation conflict, natural magic was caught in the net along with popular superstitions, witchcraft, and sorcery.

The sixteenth century also witnessed the publication of countless “books of secrets” that professed to reveal the occult secrets of nature to general readers. The most famous of these tracts was Alessio Piemontese’s famous best-seller, the Secreti (1555). This work was, in fact, a book of experiments and recipes compiled by the humanist Girolamo Ruscelli (c. 1500–66) in his Academy of Secrets at Naples.

Alessio’s Secrets was widely reprinted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and became the prototype of a huge popular genre. Meanwhile, the fictional Alessio became the ideal of a new kind of scientific magus: the wandering empiric who travels throughout the world in search of the secrets of nature, which he publishes “for the benefit of the world.” Other writers on secrets included the Flemish physician Levinus Lemnius (1505–68), whose Occulta naturae miracula (Secret Miracles of Nature [1559]) assembled occult phenomena, natural prodigies, herbal lore, and folk beliefs, all deployed to prove that “in the smallest works of nature the Deity shines forth”; and Girolamo Cardano (1501–76), who compiled a massive encyclopedia of secrets entitled De subtilitate (Of Subtlety [1550]).

The New Philosophy

Many historians believe that magic had a profound impact on the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They argue that Renaissance magic contributed to the emergence of a new conception of the scientific enterprise: the idea of science as a hunt for nature’s secrets. Not satisfied with understanding nature on the basis of external appearances, the “new philosophers” insisted upon penetrating nature’s hidden recesses and uncovering the occult causes of phenomena.

According to the epistemology ofthe hunt, nature’s secrets were hidden from ordinary sense perception; hence, they had to be sought by extraordinary means. Instruments had to be made to enable researchers to penetrate nature’s interior. Experiments were devised that would enable researchers to force out nature’s secrets. New methods of reasoning had to be found to take the place of scholastic logic, which, according to the new philosophers, was incapable of reaching nature’s inner recesses and laying bare its secrets.

The advent of the hunt metaphor in the scientific discourse of the early-modern period testifies to the emergence of a new philosophy of science. Instead of viewing nature through the texts of the ancient authorities, the new philosophers tended to think of science as a search for new and unknown facts and of causes concealed beneath nature’s outer appearances. This conception of science rested, in turn, upon a new definition of scientific knowledge. Whereas in medieval natural philosophy unexplained facts had no place in science, in the new philosophies facts (in the sense of novel, unexplained data) began to take on powerful significance. In the tradition of natural magic, such novel, previously unnoticed facts were signs (“signatures”) that guided investigators to nature’s arcana. Della Porta wrote: “True things be they ever so small will give occasions to discover greater things by them.”

The hunt metaphor also underscores a reevaluation of the status of occult qualities in natural philosophy. For the epistemology of science as a hunt rested upon a distinction between knowledge of nature gained by common sense, which revealed only nature’s outer appearances, and knowledge of the inner causes of phenomena. Early-modern natural philosophers understood this difference in terms of the distinction between manifest and occult qualities, a problem that was at the focus of heated controversy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Instead of banishing occult qualities, the new philosophers embraced them and sought explanations for what the scholastics conceded was, in principle, unknowable. All qualities (in the sense of physical causes) are occult, they argued, but are nevertheless knowable. In the new philosophies, the concept of occult qualities was not an ending point but a beginning of inquiry.

But if occult qualities were, in principle, knowable, by what means could they be known? The new philosophers were in general agreement that access to nature’s secrets could be gained only by adopting a two-fold strategy that consisted of right method combined with instruments to aid the senses. In the 1680s, Robert Hooke (1635–1703) formulated such a strategy for the Royal Society of London in his General Scheme; or, Idea of the Present State of Natural Philosophy, which embodied many of the ideals of the new experimental philosophy. According to Hooke’s formula, the natural defects of the senses would be overcome by scientific instruments, while proper experimental methodology would overcome defects in human reasoning.

The repeated references to the occult “secrets of nature” in the scientific literature of the seventeenth century should not be dismissed as mere rhetoric. Far from being a mere hackneyed metaphor, the appearance of that well-worn phrase indicates a fundamental shift in the direction of natural philosophy. The concept of nature’s “secrets”—the idea that the mechanisms of nature were hidden beneath the exterior appearances of things—was the foundation of the new philosophy’s skeptical outlook and of its insistence upon getting to the bottom of things through active experimentation and disciplined observation. The scholastics had been too trusting of their senses, the new philosophers asserted. Their naive empiricism was responsible for the erroneous belief that nature exhibits its true character on the outside. In reality, nature’s causes are hidden. The unaided senses do not reveal reliable information about what makes nature tick any more than observing the hands of a clock reveals how the clock works. All of the dogmatic pronouncements of scholastic philosophy were but chimeras based upon unreliable foundations.

The Decline of Magic

The rise of the mechanical philosophy in the seventeenth century dealt a nearly fatal blow to magic, as far as its relevance to science was concerned. As formulated by its leading proponent, the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), the mechanical philosophy rested upon two assumptions: First, all phenomena could be explained in terms of particles of passive matter in motion, and, second, the only way the motion of any particle could be changed was by direct contact with some other particle. In theory, the mechanical philosophy banished occult qualities from natural philosophy by reducing explanations of phenomena to mechanical causes.

Nevertheless, because of the inadequacy of the mechanical philosophy to offer a plausible and comprehensive view of the physical world, the status of occult qualities continued to be debated. The focus of the controversy was Sir Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) theory of universal gravitation. In the Principia mathematica (1687), Newton postulated the existence of a force that existed among all bodies in the universe. To many natural philosophers, Newton’s gravitation resembled the discredited occult forces of Renaissance magic. Somewhat unconvincingly, Newton responded that he “feigned no hypotheses” about the causes of gravity. But the physical interpretation of gravity continued to vex scientists throughout the eighteenth century.

The occult sciences came under sustained attack during the Enlightenment. In the seventeenth century, Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) had condemned magic for its secretiveness and its exclusivity. The Enlightenment philosophes, who believed that nature was completely rational, agreed. Such a position left little room for belief in the occult. In the popular tradition, however, belief in magic and the occult continued, giving rise to such movements as mesmerism and spiritualism. Mesmerism, the brainchild of Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), was a form of healing supposedly based upon the channeling of “animal magnetism” through the human body. His system descended directly from the vitalistic natural magical theories of the Renaissance. Although mesmerism was extremely popular in France during the 1780s, the system was roundly condemned by the academicians.

A number of prominent nineteenth-century scientists were adherents of spiritualism, the belief that spiritual forces operate in the natural world. Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), the codiscoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, was convinced that natural selection was unable to account for intellectual and moral evolution and, hence, invoked an occult spiritual force to account for human development. An avowed spiritualist, Wallace attended seances and investigated seance phenomena. Other prominent spiritualists included the physiologist and Nobel Prize-winner Charles Richet (1850– 1935), who carried out extensive research on psychic phenomena, and the physicist Oliver Lodge (1851–1940).

Psychic phenomena continued to be the subjects of scientific inquiry in the early twentieth century, notably by Joseph Banks Rhine (1895–1980), who founded the Society for Psychical Research. However, because its results proved too difficult to replicate, parapsychology was not accepted by the scientific community. Nowadays, scientists adamantly resist attempts to include paranormal phenomena in research programs. Efforts to obtain funding for such research are generally met with silence or scorn. From the standpoint of modern science, the separation of physical from spiritual and occult phenomena is, in principle, virtually complete.

By William Eamon in "The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition- An Encyclopedia", edited by Gary B. Ferngren, Garland Publishing, Inc, (a member of the Taylor & Francis Group), New York, 2000, pp. 608-616. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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