Last October, a brief skirmish in the culture wars broke out over the announcement of a new master’s programme at the University of Exeter. The MA in magic and occult science had inadvertently roused the demons of anti-wokery. On X (formerly called Twitter), headteacher Katharine Birbalsingh raged against the degree, declaring: “We have moved beyond the realms of lunacy.” Defending her course in the Guardian, programme director Emily Selove argued that rituals and superstition – from crystals and horoscopes to lucky scarves and match day routines – are part of everyday life, and yet works that deal with magic or occult subjects have been “systematically neglected by scholarship”. If only she could have waited a couple of months, she would have found Anthony Grafton’s serious but accessible Magus stepping in to redress that neglect, while showing that the difficulty of broaching the subject goes back more than half a millennium.
On Saint Nicholas’s Day 1455, the physician Johannes Hartlieb got into an argument with an army captain about a goose bone. The two men had been discussing the weather, and the prospect that the coming winter might be a mild one. Not a chance, declared the military man, pulling the breastbone from his pocket. He announced that studying a goose bone was by far the most reliable method of predicting the weather, and that the Teutonic knights had used it to plan all their campaigns. Exasperated, Hartlieb offered his own prediction: “Saturn is entering this month into a fiery sign, and the other stars are following after, so in three years there will not be a harsh winter.” As Grafton puts it wryly, Hartlieb’s prediction is based “not on a diabolical art but simply on good scientific astrology”.
To us this might seem like the difference between two equally implausible forms of credulous guesswork. But in the late middle ages it represented the difference between low superstition and the emerging discipline of learned magic. Think Prospero with his books, “rapt in secret studies”, rather than the weird sisters hovering through the fog. And the practitioner of this new mode of scholarly magic was the magus.
The magus, in Grafton’s estimation, is “a less respectable figure than the artist or the scientist … but he belongs in a dark corner of the same rich tapestry”. He – and it is always he – is perched at the intersection of magic and technology; he might rise to status and influence; there may or may not be a vein of real charlatanry running through his career. Most of all, however, he is a voracious collector of rare books in obscure languages: the Picatrix, an Arabic work from the 11th century; The Secret of Secrets, supposedly Aristotle’s advice to his pupil Alexander the Great; the works of Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus, conjuring fantasies of Persia and Egypt respectively. When the Italian magus Pico della Mirandola began to draw on the Kabbalistic tradition, he unwittingly reinforced the suspicion that magical practices inimical to Christianity were rife within the Jewish community.
In Grafton’s history of learned magic, an early fascination with the military possibilities of charmed objects gives way in the 15th century to an inward focus, a kind of astrological self-help to improve the health of the aspiring scholar. The Florentine Marsilio Ficino “cautioned against sex, especially wild sex; eating and drinking too much; and staying up late”. Hardly controversial, though he also noted that, beyond the age of 70, the human body starts to want for moisture: “Therefore choose a young girl who is healthy, beautiful, cheerful and temperate, and when you are hungry and the Moon is waxing, suck her milk.”
The balance between licit and illicit magic was in constant flux, with every magus keen to draw a line between the arts that he himself practised and those that were beyond the pale. In this world of cautious self-promotion, it is little wonder that the wild, indiscreet Faustus, a German alchemist of the 16th century whose life passed into legend, should cause such a commotion. He advertised himself as “the chief of necromancers”, bragged that he could easily carry out any of Christ’s miracles, and called down a plague of flying crockery on Luther’s right-hand man. Quite enough to bring the profession into disrepute.
By this time, however, the work of the seriously inclined magus was beginning to align more closely with another kind of magic: the feats of mathematics, engineering and perspective that could conjure spectacles and astound audiences. In 1546, for a play at Cambridge, a teenaged John Dee created a special effect that confounded onlookers: a scarab beetle appearing to ascend to the heavens with a man on its back. Many years later, Dee would complain of having been slandered as “a Companion of the Helhoundes, and a Caller and Conjuror of wicked and damned Sprites”. It is a reputation he has hardly shaken off in the intervening centuries. And yet, recalling some of the marvels he had seen or heard of – a moving automaton in Paris; an artificial eagle that flies above Nuremberg – Dee noted that it was by the mathematical arts that “Wonder-worke is wrought”.
• Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa by Anthony Grafton is published by Allen Lane (£30). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. From Friday 8 December 2023 to Wednesday 10 January 2024, 20p from every Guardian Bookshop order will support the Guardian and Observer’s charity appeal 2023.
