CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION
Aim of this book — Period covered — How to study the history of thought — Definition of magic — Magic of primitive man ; does civiliza- tion originate in magic? — Divination in early China — Magic in ancient Egypt — Magic and Egyptian religion— Mortuary magic — Magic in daily life — Power of words, images, amulets — Magic in Egyptian medicine — Demons and disease — Magic and science — Magic and industry — Alchemy ■ — Divination and astrology — The sources for Assyrian and Babylonian magic — ^Was astrology Sumerian or Chaldean? — The number seven in early Babylonia — Incantation texts older than astrological — Other divination than astrology — Incantations against sorcery and demons — A specimen incantation — Materials and devices of magic — Greek culture not free from magic — Magic in myth, literature, and history — Simul- taneous increase of learning and occult science — Magic origin urged for Greek religion and drama — Magic in Greek philosophy — Plato's attitude toward magic and astrology — Aristotle on stars and spirits — Folk-lore in the History of Animals — Differing modes of transmission of ancient . oriental and Greek literature — More magical character of directly trans- mitted Greek remains — Progress of science among the Greeks — Archi- medes and Aristotle — Exaggerated view of the scientific achievement of the Hellenistic age — Appendix I. Some works on Magic, Religion, and Astronomy in Babylonia and Assyria.
"Magic has existed among all peoples and at every period." — Hegel}
This book aims to treat the history of magic and expert- Aim of
mental science and their relations to Christian thought dur- ^^'^ ^odk.
ing the first thirteen centuries of our era, with especial
emphasis upon the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. No
* Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion ; quoted by Sir James Frazer, The Magic Art (1911), I, 426.
2 MAGIC AND EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE chap.
adequate survey of the history of either magic or experi- mental science exists for this period, and considerable use of manuscript material has been necessary for the medieval period. Magic is here understood in the broadest sense of the word, as including all occult arts and sciences, supersti- tions, and folk-lore. I shall endeavor to justify this use of the word from the sources as I proceed. My idea is that magic and experimental science have been connected in their development; that magicians were perhaps the first to experiment; and that the history of both magic and experimental science can be better understood by studying them together, I also desire to make clearer than it has been to most scholars the Latin learning of the medieval period, whose leading personalities even are generally inac- curately known, and on perhaps no one point is illumination more needed than on that covered by our investigation. The subject of laws against magic, popular practice of magic, the witchcraft delusion and persecution lie outside of the scope of this book.^
At first my plan was to limit this investigation to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the time of greatest medieval productivity, but I became convinced that this period could be best understood by viewing it in the setting of the Greek, Latin, and early Christian writers to whom it owed so much. If the student of the Byzantine Empire needs to know old Rome, the student of the medieval church to comprehend early Christianity, the student of Romance languages to understand Latin, still more must the reader of Constantinus Africanus, Vincent of Beauvais, Guide Bonatti, and Thomas Aquinas be familiar with the Pliny, Galen, and Ptolemy, the Origen and Augustine, the Alkindi and Albumasar from whom they drew. It would indeed be difficult to draw a line anywhere between them. The ancient
*That field has already been soon to be edited by Professor
treated by Joseph Hansen, Zau- George L. Burr from H. C. Lea's
berwahn. Inquisition und Hexen- materials. See also a work just
prozess im ISfittelalter, 1900, and published by Miss M. A. Murray,
will be further illuminated by A The Witch-Cult in Western Eu'
History of Witchcraft in Eurofie, rope, Oxford, 1921.
1 INTRODUCTION 3
authors are generally extant only in their medieval form; in some cases there is reason to suspect that they have undergone alteration or addition; sometimes new works were fathered upon them. In any case they have been pre- served to us because the middle ages studied and cherished them, and to a great extent made them their own. I begin with the first century of our era, because Christian thought begins then, and then appeared Pliny's Natural History which seems to me the best starting point of a survey of ancient science and magic, ^ I close with the thirteenth century, or, more strictly speaking, in the course of the four- teenth, because by then the medieval revival of learning had spent its force. Attention is centred on magic and experi- mental science in western Latin literature and learning, Greek and Arabic works being considered as they con- tributed thereto, and vernacular literature being omitted as either derived from Latin works or unlearned and unscien- tific.
Very probably I have tried to cover too much ground How to and have made serious omissions. It is probably true that f^^^^ *^^-
^ -' . history of
for the history of thought as for the history of art the evi- thought.
dence and source material is more abundant than for politi- cal or economic history. But fortunately it is more reliable, since the pursuit of truth or beauty does not encourage deception and prejudice as does the pursuit of wealth or power. Also the history of thought is more unified and consistent, steadier and more regular, than the fluctuations and diversities of political history; and for this reason its general outlines can be discerned with reasonable sureness by the examination of even a limited number of examples, provided they are properly selected from a period of suf- ficient duration. Moreover, it seems to me that in the present stage of research into and knowledge of our subject
^ Some of my scientific friends a treatment of the science of the have urged me to begin with genuine Aristotle per se, although Aristotle, as being a much abler in the course of this book I shall scientist than Pliny, but this would say something of his medieval in- take us rather too far back in fluence and more especially of the time and I have not felt equal to Pseudo-Aristotle.
4 MAGIC AND EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE chap.
sounder conclusions and even more novel ones can be drawn by a wide comparative survey than by a minutely intensive and exhaustive study of one man or of a few years. The danger is of writing from too narrow a view-point, magni- fying unduly the importance of some one man or theory, and failing to evaluate the facts in their full historical setting. No medieval writer whether on science or magic can be understood by himself, but must be measured in respect to his surroundings and antecedents. Definition Some may think it strange that I associate magic so
closely with the history of thought, but the word comes from the Magi or wise men of Persia or Babylon, to whose lore and practices the name was applied by the Greeks and Romans, or possibly we may trace its etymology a little farther back to the Sumerian or Turanian word imga or unga, meaning deep or profound. The exact meaning of the word, "magic," was a matter of much uncertainty even in classical and medieval times, as we shall see. There can be no doubt, however, that it was then applied not merely to an operative art, but also to a mass of ideas or doctrine, and that it represented a way of looking at the world. This side of magic has sometimes been lost sight of in hasty or assumed modern definitions which seem to regard magic as merely a collection of rites and feats. In the case of primi- tive men and savages it is possible that little thought accom- panies their actions. But until these acts are based upon or related to some imaginative, purposive, and rational thinking, the doings of early man cannot be distinguished as either religious or scientific or magical. Beavers build dams, birds build nests, ants excavate, but they have no magic just as they have no science or religion. Magic im- plies a mental state and so may be viewed from the stand- point of the history of thought. In process of time, as the learned and educated lost faith in magic, it was degraded to the low practices and beliefs of the ignorant and vulgar. It was this use of the term that was taken up by anthro- pologists and by them applied to analogous doings and
INTRODUCTION
notions of primitive men and savages. But we may go too far in regarding magic as a purely social product of tribal society : magicians may be, in Sir James Frazer's words,^ "the only professional class" among the lowest savages, but note that they rank as a learned profession from the start. It will be chiefly through the writings of learned men that something of their later history and of the growth of interest in experimental science will be traced in this work. Let me add that in this investigation all arts of divination, including astrology, will be reckoned as magic; I have been quite unable to separate the two either in fact or logic, as I shall illustrate repeatedly by particular cases."
Magic is very old, and it will perhaps be well in this in- troductory chapter to present it to the reader, if not in its infancy — for its origins are much disputed and perhaps antecede all record and escape all observation — at least some centuries before its Roman and medieval days. Sir J. G. Frazer, in a passage of The Golden Bough to which we have already referred, remarks that "sorcerers are found in every savage tribe known to us; and among the lowest savages . . . they are the only professional class that exists." ^ Lenormant affirmed in his Chaldean Magic and Sorcery ^ that "all magic rests upon a system of religious belief," but recent sociologists and anthropologists have
^ Frazer has, of course, repeat- edly made the point that modern science is an outgrowth from primitive magic. Carveth Read, The Origin of Man, 1920, in his chapter on "Magic and Science" contends that "in no case ... is Science derived from Magic" (p. 337), but this is mainly a logical and ideal distinction, since he admits that "for ages" science "is in the hands of wizards."
*_I am glad to see that other virriters on magic are taking this view ; for instance, E. Doutte, Magie et religion dans I'Afrique du Nord, Alger, 1909, p. 351.
* Golden Bough, 1894, I. 420. W. I. Thomas, "The Relation of the Medicine-Man to the Origin
of the Professional Occupations" (reprinted in his Source Book for Social Origins, 4th edition, pp. 281-303), in which he disputes Herbert Spencer's "thesis that the medicine-man is the source and origin of the learned and artistic occupations," does not really con- flict with Frazer's statement, since for Thomas the medicine-man is a priest rather than a magician. Thomas remarks later in the same book (p. 437), "Furthermore, the whole attempt of the savage to control the outside world, so far as it contained a theory or a doc- trine, was based on magic."
* Chaldean Magic and Sorcery. 1878, p. 70.
6 MAGIC AND EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE chap.
inclined to regard magic as older than a belief in gods. At any rate some of the most primitive features of historical religions seem to have originated from magic. Moreover, religious cults, rites, and priesthoods are not the only things that have been declared inferior in antiquity to magic and largely indebted to it for their origins. Combarieu in his Music and Magic ^ asserts that the incantation is universally employed in all the circumstances of primitive life and that from it, by the medium it is true of religious poetry, all modern music has developed. The magic incantation is, in short, "the oldest fact in the history of civilization.'* Although the magician chants without thought of aesthetic form or an artistically appreciative audience, yet his spell contains in embryo all that later constitutes the art of music. ^