Nuts & Bolts: Interview With Magic Historian Anthony Grafton
By Tom Joyce
The great thinkers of the Renaissance get plenty of credit for their indelible mark on art, science, and architecture. But maybe they don’t get enough credit for another field to which they made an enormous contribution – horror tropes.
Demon-summoning rituals? Deals with the devil? Spellbooks full of dark secrets that must not fall into the wrong hands? All part of the legend surrounding Renaissance-era “magi,” who straddled the line between scientist and sorcerer, and who inspired literary accounts of Faust and Prospero.
Anthony Grafton, a Princeton University history professor, tells their fascinating story in Magus, his study of Renaissance-era magic and its practitioners, which should provide plenty of inspiration for horror or fantasy writers who want to add an element of historical accuracy to their fictional sorcerers.
Q: Very briefly, who were the Renaissance magi?
A: Renaissance magi were men who believed that magic came in both evil and good forms. Evil magic involved collaboration between humans and devils, and any wonders it produced were really illusions. Good magic rested on knowledge of the special properties of stones, plants, and animals, and the ways in which the stars and planets projected their rays onto the earth. Those who mastered this discipline could heal physical and mental illnesses — in some ways, they resemble modern therapists—build automata and project messages over long distances, all without diabolic help (though some claimed to work with good angels). They drew on multiple traditions, from the ritual practices of late Greek philosophers to the visions of the Jewish Kabbalists of their own time, and composed magical manuals that went through multiple editions even though it could be dangerous to own them.
Q: How did Renaissance magicians influence our popular conception of sorcerers, and tropes such as demon-summoning and deals with the devil?
A: Magic and magicians fascinated great writers in the Renaissance and after. Christopher Marlowe wrote a play about Faustus, a historical figure who, many thought, had made a pact with the devil. In it, he brings to life both the power of diabolic magic to enchant the most brilliant humans and the terror of knowing that one was in the power of the devil. In The Tempest, Shakespeare imagined a magus, Prospero, who controlled the island on which he was exiled through his powerful art, manipulating the weather, making spirits do his bidding, and even waking the dead. At the end of the play, Prospero addresses the audience, renouncing magic in a speech of great beauty and insisting that prayer is better than enchantments. Two centuries later, Goethe made Faustus the subject of his greatest work, an immense and brilliant play based on close study of the actual practices of Renaissance magicians. Many real magi went about their craft in a much more quiet, artisanal way than these great artistic versions suggest — but they have stamped our imaginations with images of the magus as agonized genius and charismatic performer.
Q: Was there a connection between the Renaissance magicians, and later occultists such as Aleister Crowley?
A: In the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, occultists across Europe — Aleister Crowley was the most famous one in the English-speaking world — set out to revive the magical tradition. They translated older sources, explicated them, and recreated the rituals that the older magicians had supposedly practiced. They were not scholars, so they approached the earlier magi not as scholars but as colleagues: they were sometimes credulous, both in reading earlier sources, and in believing that all forms of magic, from China to Meso-America, were somehow connected. But they drew attention to magic and magi, and they made early texts available even if they didn’t set them into context.
Q: What is modern historical research uncovering about Renaissance-era magicians that we didn’t know previously?
A: Over the last century, we have learned an immense amount about Renaissance magicians. Scholars have shown that at least two of the arts that interested them most had practical results. The Renaissance was the first great age of modern diplomacy. Ambassadors living in foreign states had to communicate safely with their home governments. Magi devised multiple forms of cryptography, some of which were highly effective. Alchemy could not turn base metals into gold. But historians of science have shown that much of what the alchemists did was practical chemistry, which concentrated on metallic crystals—which helps to explain why even as magic lost prestige in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, alchemy continued to fascinate thinkers like Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton.
More generally, historians have shown that the magi, with their insistence that humans had the power to reach into nature and learn how to make it obey them, had a deep impact on European culture. When Francis Bacon and René Descartes argued that the study of nature, rightly pursued, would give humanity increased wealth and better health, they were drawing on what the magi had taught—even though they rejected the methods that the magi had practiced. Nowadays, as climate change and pollution caused by human action batter us, we can see that increasing human power over nature has not always been beneficial. But for centuries, the optimism of the magi lived on in the belief of modern scientists that they could transform the world and that they would certainly benefit humanity by doing that.
Q: Can you recommend any resources for writers interested in learning more about magic history?
A: Very good resources for the history of magic are widely available. The Wikipedia entries on Magic and History of Magic, freely available to all, are richly informative and provide guidance to a wide range of sources and studies. Oxford has published an excellent general treatment: Magic, A Very Short Introduction, by Owen Davies (2012). This short, precise book traces the history of scholarly research on magic in the last two centuries and offers a good introduction to magical concepts and rituals. Brian Copenhaver has compiled a rich anthology, The Book of Magic from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Penguin, 2016). This offers accurate translations of sources of many different kinds, and gives a sense of the richness and variety of the magical tradition in the West. Two especially rich collections of sources in fine translations are Scott Bruce’s Penguin Book of Demons and Penguin Book of the Undead. In the 1960s and after, magical bookshops flourished, providing access to everything from early editions of Renaissance works on high magic to Tarot cards and horoscopes. In the age of megastores and Amazon, they are less common than they used to be. But London still boasts several of them. At Atlantis, Treadwell, Watkins, and other shops, Renaissance manuals of sorcery and modern digital versions of astrology flank each other on the shelves. Aseq, a bookshop in Rome that concentrates on magic, astrology, and alchemy, is one of the greatest bookshops in the world.
Q: Can you share any historical tidbits about Renaissance magicians that might be of particular interest to horror writers?
A: My favorite stories about Renaissance magicians are mostly about Dr, Faustus — a real person who lived in Germany from the late fifteenth century into the 1530s. The stories about him suggest that he had dazzling powers: once, challenged by another magician, he simply ate his opponent, whom he released unharmed three days later. When he lectured on the classics at the University of Erfurt, he brought the characters from Homer’s Odyssey on stage and introduced them to his students. The Cyclops, who came last, had a dead body hanging from his mouth and frightened the students when he refused to leave the stage. In this case, Faustus was using a simple device to project images on a screen, which a confederate jiggled to produce the illusion that the images of Homeric characters were alive. Johannes Trithemius, a contemporary of Faustus, got himself into deep trouble by claiming that he had taught a German prince to speak perfect Latin in an hour. (In an age in which Latin was the universal language of highly educated people, it seemed that he would have needed diabolical aid to achieve this.) In fact, he had devised a cipher that turned messages in ordinary German, letter by letter, into grammatically perfect Latin prayers. No wonder that when he also wrote a book that seemed to be full of spells for summoning demons to help gain access to women, no one realized for more than a century that this too was a cipher.
Q: Where can people buy Magus? Do you have any upcoming projects and/or social media sites you’d like to mention?
A: Magus is currently available from Amazon at well under the list price. Paperback editions will appear in the USA and the UK next year.
Professor Anthony Grafton’s special interests lie in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe, the history of books and readers, the history of scholarship and education in the West from Antiquity to the 19th century, and the history of science from Antiquity to the Renaissance. He joined the Princeton History Department in 1975 after earning his A.B. (1971) and Ph.D. (1975) in history from the University of Chicago and spending a year at University College London, where he studied with Arnaldo Momigliano. Professor Grafton is the author of ten books and the coauthor, editor, coeditor, or translator of nine others. Two collections of essays, Defenders of the Text(1991) and Bring Out Your Dead (2001), cover most of the topics and themes that appeal to him. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1989), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1993), the Balzan Prize for History of Humanities (2002), and the Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award (2003), and is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the British Academy. In 2011 he served as President of the American Historical Association. At Princeton, he is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History.
Tom Joyce writes a monthly series called Nuts & Bolts for the Horror Writers Association’s blog, featuring interviews about the craft and business of writing. Please contact Tom at TomJHWA@gmail.com if you have suggestions for future interviews. For more about what he’s looking for, see here.
