Solomon's Secret Arts (5 page)

Keith Thomas's influence on the study of magic in England has been enormous. Gradually, however, scholars have begun to stray from the imposing pathways set down by
Religion and the Decline of Magic
. Many of them have been students of the history of witchcraft. James Sharpe and others have pointed out that cultural factors, including gender, family relations and local rivalries, played at least as great a role in witch accusations as did the socio-economic explanation favoured by Thomas.
¹⁷
Ian Bostridge and Owen Davies have argued for the persistence of witch beliefs, far beyond the formal ending of trials for witchcraft or the repeal of existing witchcraft legislation in 1736.
Davies has also published a remarkable series of works on the survival of popular magic through village cunning-folk or traditional healers as well as through
grimoires
or ritual magic books. It is now evident that, in England as in other parts of Europe, ordinary people did not cast off their adherence to magic, no matter what their social betters might have thought, so that the question of when magic declined has become a much more complicated one.
¹⁸
The continuing popular appeal of astrological predictions has been traced down to the eighteenth century and beyond by Bernard Capp and Patrick Curry, while the importance of astrology in human and veterinary medicine down to 1700 has been emphasized by Louise Hill Curth.
¹⁹
Alan Macfarlane, whose work on witchcraft preceded and inspired that of Thomas, has suggested recently that the gradual decline of magical beliefs in England may be related less to the impact of urbanization, medicine or science than to the slow growth of “civility,” or of human control over private space.
²⁰
While it is unlikely that any of these scholars would claim that they have overturned the basic premise of Thomas's thesis that magic began to lose its appeal to segments of the public at some point in the mid-seventeenth century, they have certainly qualified it.

Scotland was outside the scope of Thomas's research and never quite fit his approach. Witch prosecutions there were more numerous and the results bloodier. Scottish judges, who exercised wider authority than their English counterparts, have been assigned a greater portion of the blame for the witch craze. Because they were learned men, whose attitudes may have been shaped by what they read, the impact of occult thinking on witch trials was from the start given more attention in Scotland than was the case in England. Major witch trials dragged on later in the northern kingdom, with the last outbreak in 1697–1700, but their disappearance has not been seen by historians as representing any sort of turning point in popular attitudes towards magic.
²¹
The assumption of cultural conservatism or even “backwardness,” especially in the Highlands, meant that few scholars were willing to argue in favour of an overall decline in Scottish magical beliefs, similar to that which had supposedly happened in England. As we now know from the researches of Lizanne Henderson and Edward Cowan, rural Scots were convinced of the existence of the fairy folk, or Sithian, throughout the eighteenth century, and their acceptance of witchcraft certainly did not end with the repeal of previous witch legislation in 1736.
²²

The English situation may have been closer to that of Scotland than has usually been thought, with popular confidence in the reality of witches and fairy folk surviving for long periods of time (my own grandmother, born in Somerset in 1889, was a strong believer in fairies). What can no longer be sustained is the hypothesis that magical beliefs had less appeal to ordinary labouring folk in
England after the mid-seventeenth century than in the preceding hundred years. While Thomas may be correct in assuming a decline in belief among educated people, it was not a uniform or straightforward process, and was far from complete even by 1800. How such a limited decline might have affected magical practices is unclear, since these did not require the active participation of educated members of the community and could be sustained in a private setting, leaving few traces in the archives. Arguably, the actual downfall of popular magical beliefs in Britain may not have come until the early twentieth century, through an increasingly universal system of education.

Revisionist assertions such as these are no longer particularly original or controversial, especially in relation to witchcraft. To assume that magic survived into the modern period has become a new orthodoxy, although its broader cultural implications have not been fully considered. As it relates to the eighteenth century, however, the argument for the survival of magic has to be qualified. Something in the magical cultures of England and Scotland did change after 1688, although the transformation was not one whose effects were found at every social level. The occult never again attained the intellectual impact or coherence it had enjoyed in the mid-seventeenth century. The argument that follows in the rest of this book will take an approach that emphasizes change as well as continuity. It is based on the occult writings favoured by the literate rather than on the magical behaviour of ordinary, and mostly illiterate, people. In short, it is a study of texts and how they were used, rather than of inherited customs or beliefs, which are difficult to isolate without using the testimony of educated observers.

How did these texts relate to magical practices? A basic assumption adopted here is that popular magic shared with occult thinking a desire to make use of spiritual or supernatural power. The wise woman or traditional healer, the alchemist, the astrologer and the ritual magus were engaged in similar endeavours, whose significance was as much intellectual as practical: that is, they wanted to exceed the boundaries of nature as they knew it, and to take charge of hidden forces that might be seen as diabolic or angelic, Satanic or divine. The village magician may not have given much thought to the philosophical significance of his philtres and potions, but he was nonetheless traversing the same territory as the learned astrological physician. Whether their methods were active or contemplative, efficacious or inefficacious, makes no real difference; nor does our modern view of them as rational or irrational, learned or half-crazed. What does matter is their relationship to what they perceived as the wonderful, the inexplicable or the supernatural. The herbal remedies of a cunning man may not have been magical at all, unless they claimed some power that went beyond that of nature. Similarly, alchemy was not always infused with the same level of occult
thinking, although its practitioners so frequently summoned angelic forces in pursuing their “great work” that it has to be wondered whether they were ever able to make a distinction between natural and supernatural results.
²³

If magic, like the occult, is associated with human use of the supernatural, it might encompass aspects of formal religion, such as miracles, prophecy or even prayer. The practitioners of magic, in Britain as elsewhere, seldom saw any contradiction between their pursuits and religion; indeed, many of them perceived magical activity as a form of religious devotion. Others, however, saw a very deep contradiction. In the minds of the defenders of Christian orthodoxy, magic was always demonic. No truly pious practice, in their opinion, could aspire to any measure of
control
over supernatural forces; a Christian could merely
petition
God to intervene in nature through miracles, which only the deity was able to perform. As William Fleetwood put it in 1701, “no Power less than that of God, can unsettle that establish'd Course of Nature, which no Power less than his could settle and establish.”
²⁴
The weighty impact of this view on the history of occult thinking will be measured in later chapters.

Magic has been described by Richard Kieckhefer as “a kind of crossroads … a point of intersection” where religion met science, popular culture met learned culture, and fiction met reality.
²⁵
For our purposes, the metaphor is felicitous, because popular magic and occult thinking often travelled through the same points. This does not mean that they were identical, or that one simply depended on the other. Popular magic had its own vitality, its own methods and its own history; it was neither a “debased” form of the occult nor a misreading of learned interpretations of the supernatural. On the other hand, occult philosophers were not simply trying to elevate popular practices by endowing them with the aura of intellectual legitimacy. Few of them had any time or patience for “vulgar” customs; rather, they prided themselves on being the proponents of a distinct type of higher knowledge that dated back to the beginning of time, a
prisca sapientia
that had been known to Adam, Moses and King Solomon. The last of these Biblical figures was regarded as the master of all forms of secret knowledge, which he was thought to have enshrined in the features of his Temple (hence the use of his name in the title of this work). Once we begin to explore such ways of thinking, the history of magic as a set of practices or behaviours no longer explains much about the occult, and we have to find a different means of entrance into a narrow and very crowded sanctuary.

The Esoteric

If popular magic has dominated the field in British historical scholarship, the occult as a theoretical construct has been a pre-eminent concern outside
Britain. A leading figure in this field of investigation has been the French religious scholar Antoine Faivre. In a dazzling variety of works, he has defined the occult as a category within what he has called esoteric religion.
²⁶
According to Faivre and others who adhere to his approach, the occult is neither a response to a lack of effective solutions to worldly problems, nor a set of practices distinguished by a desire to gain control over nature. Rather, it is part of a coherent tradition of knowledge, expressed in a body of writings that flourished for centuries on the fringes of the three major monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The basic premise of occult knowledge is that a search for hidden causes in nature may lead towards something higher than nature: absolute wisdom, supernatural power or the divine.

Faivre's esoteric approach might be accused of giving too much unity and direction to writings that are often characterized by highly individualistic, sometimes conflicting and occasionally chaotic points of view. This deprives certain occult writers—William Blake comes immediately to mind—of what may be their most salient feature: their inventiveness or even quirkiness. In addition, students of esoteric religion are open to the criticism that they have regarded the texts they study as comprising a discrete and largely self-referential intellectual tradition, hermetically sealed so as to ward off the taint of other forms of thought, not to mention social trends and popular practices. This has led, on the one hand, to some dubious claims of connections between writers whose similarities may be less significant than their differences and, on the other hand, to a lack of interest in what may be classified as “non-esoteric” influences. Finally, scholars of esoteric religion have a tendency to interpret whatever they are studying with the greatest seriousness, so that hucksters or charlatans turn into philosophers, and minor references in obscure esoteric works take on labyrinthine significances that would have bewildered their original authors.

In spite of these shortcomings, the esoteric approach has helped to restore the philosophical and theological importance of writings that have too often been dismissed as irrelevant. By relating these works primarily to religious questions, it has placed them, correctly, within a sphere of inquiry that was dominant in western European thought until the nineteenth century. Because occult writers quoted frequently from one another and drew freely on one another's ideas, the suggestion that they perceived themselves as working within an intellectual tradition is certainly not misguided, although it is easily overstated. Even if that tradition was indebted to invention as much as to inheritance, it represented received wisdom to those who tried to make sense out of it. Occult thinking, in short, was a hybrid plant with very deep roots. It had an extensive, albeit episodic, intellectual history, which has to be reviewed here briefly, as a background to the argument that follows.

Many of the chief sources of occult thinking in Europe appeared in Egypt during the early Christian centuries, a period of remarkable religious syncretism. This was the age of the Gnostics, who sought divine wisdom through philosophy, of the Alexandrian alchemist Zosimus of Panopolis and, above all, of “Hermes Trismegistus,” the mythical author of the diverse Greek and Latin works later collected under the title of
Corpus Hermeticum
. While the
Corpus Hermeticum
was set down on papyrus long after the building of the pyramids by writers familiar with Christianity and Gnostic thought, its various components were to some extent informed by memories of the learning of Pharaonic Egypt. Until the mid-seventeenth century and beyond, the
Corpus Hermeticum
was read more or less uncritically as a pure distillation of ancient Egyptian teachings on everything from hieroglyphs to alchemy. Another ancient school of thought, emphasizing the dominance of spirit over matter, was introduced in the third century
CE
by Greek and Near Eastern philosophers: Plotinus, his student Porphyry and Porphyry's Syrian follower Iamblichus. Because they sought to revive a version of the Platonic theory of forms (which they called spirits), they were known as Neoplatonists. Plotinus saw the Divine Mind or
Nous
as an emanation of the indivisible One; in turn, the World Spirit and all individual spirits emanated from the
Nous
. Iamblichus was particularly interested in magic, which he linked with the preservation of polytheism. During the early Middle Ages, these Egyptian and Neoplatonic texts were preserved, reinterpreted and augmented, not by Christian but by Arab scholars, many of whom made original contributions to occult thinking. Meanwhile, a Jewish form of
gnosis
, or divine wisdom, was elaborated in the writings known as the Kabbala, gathered together and transcribed in the thirteenth century.