Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa
Anthony Grafton
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2023. 289 pp., hardcover, $39.95.
According to social media, Renaissance men are all about us. We are encouraged to marvel at the linebacker who plays the violin, the crypto trader who writes novels, the stand-up comic who is a very deep thinker offstage.
Such well-rounded individuals are worthy of note and arguably models for those of us who never dream of picking up fiddle or pen. But we forget what the “Renaissance” part of “Renaissance man” actually means. Princeton University’s Grafton, a connoisseur of arcane arts and uncanny people, reminds us in this extraordinarily Renaissance-worthy book.
His Renaissance men—and yes, they are all men—are so multitalented, they are scary. They were scary 500 years ago. Grafton’s fifteenth- and sixteenth-century figures mastered virtually every art or science we can imagine, including the seven liberal ones of academic culture and the many forbidden ones embedded in intersecting cultural networks of their own. They wrote in Latin and Latinized their names, and some knew Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic. Some were also rumored to be fluent in the strange tongues of tossed dice, flowing water, sneezes, burning wood, human palms, shoulder blades, and spirit guests. They traversed Europe when the continent was splitting into Catholic and Protestant factions, at times eluding the then still fluid categories and often barely evading inquisitor, censor, and mob. Some found work in universities or courts, while others sought refuge in monastic undergrounds stocked with lavish occult libraries. All blurred the lines between philosopher and physician, artist and alchemist, doyen and deviant, scientist and sorcerer. Grafton describes them as the makers of early modern learned or “natural” magic. Their social role he defines as “magus.”
Five personalities and their intellectually adventurous and avaricious lives dominate Grafton’s narrative of Renaissance highbrow magic. Pico della Mirandola, famous for his Oration on the Dignity of Man and his advocacy of Christian Kabbalah, is recognizable to veterans of undergraduate Western civilization surveys. Doctor Faustus, likely the itinerant schoolmaster and university lecturer Georg of Helmstadt, accused of sexual misconduct and necromancy, is the most legendary. The others—Marsilio Ficino, priest and translator of the Hermetic Corpus; Johannes Trithemius, Benedictine abbot and cryptographer; and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, dubbed the “Archimagus” by a Jesuit opponent—are major if less-known forces in the Western esoteric tradition. What unites them all is the intellectual libido to know hidden things and the conviction that truth is one. Inexplicably, England’s John Dee receives only minimal treatment. Nostradamus and Paracelsus are not mentioned at all.
Grafton’s magi trafficked in ideas, and his book leaves no theory or debate unexamined. But, despite occasional voyages into other worlds, they also lived as embodied beings in specific social circumstances. Here Grafton excels as guide to both text and context. The very first chapter sets the stage as Faustus arrives for dinner at the Wittenberg home of Philip Melanchthon, Martin Luther’s humanistically inclined fellow Reformer.
Boundary crossing was evidently part of the magic of the magi. They sought the patronage of princes and produced erudite tomes for the literati but were also well acquainted with the fingernails, boiled urine, and bat’s blood of folk practitioners. Likewise, they displayed gifts for intellectual shapeshifting, arguing in the same book for and against a cherished thesis. Their “inky fingers” (title of another Grafton publication) reveal them straddling medieval and modern, producing manuscripts by hand and printing books by machine.
Other boundaries transgressed include those separating Christianity from paganism, Judaism, and Islam; the line between piety and power; and the watery frontier between Europe and what Trithemius called “the islands and regions recently discovered by Amerigo Vespucci in the western ocean.” For Grafton, the magi’s supreme overcoming may have been their storming of the barricade between “engineering and conjuring.” At home with flights of mental fancy, they were also fascinated, and facile, with the down-to-earth and public manufacture of mechanical clocks, magic lanterns, war machines, and automata that could move, speak, and spit fire.
Hence the “grammar and glamor” of the Renaissance magus. With his own blend of scholarship and showmanship, Grafton recreates the complex and alluring world of early modern esoterica. Sharing the magi’s venerable backward gaze, he sketches their unofficial fellowship and traces its lineage to medieval mentors, if not to Egypt, Persia, and Mount Sinai. Some readers might be disappointed that, aside from occasional glances forward, he does not connect the dots to the likes of Swedenborg, Éliphas Lévi, H.P. Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, or any of the alleged Renaissance personages lauded by today’s influencers and content creators. His touching memorial to his late wife, however, suggests he may not have been too far removed from the magus’s realm.
Reading Grafton’s magisterial work requires the discipline of the scribes he so admires. The reward is an unforgettable reminder of an age when wisdom and wizardry were one.
Peter A. Huff, author or editor of seven books, teaches religious history at Benedictine University. His article “The Current State of Unbelief” appeared in Quest, spring 2022.