A serious yet accessible history of learned magic, from Ficino to Faustus
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”.
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