How Magic Made the Renaissance

“January 6 marks the Feast of Epiphany, which commemorates the journey of the Three Kings — or, as medieval theologians termed them, the ‘Magi’”

“TS Eliot’s poem … ‘We returned to our places, these Kingdoms / But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation / With an alien people clutching their gods’”

“Half a millennium before Eliot, the theologian Nicholas of Cusa chose a 1431 Epiphany Day sermon as the occasion to tackle the same paradox”

“Nicholas was devoted to astronomy (the practice of mapping the stars) but a sceptic about astrology (fortune-telling by those same starry maps). He was also a future cardinal, eager to police the boundaries of theology and superstition”

“Anthony Grafton’s intriguing new book introduces us to the polymaths who modelled themselves on the Persian magi (originally a Zoroastrian word for ‘priests’), and the Christian gatekeepers—Nicholas of Cusa foremost among them—who denounced them”

“the magus existed in a liminal position in pre-Enlightenment Europe, testing the boundaries of Christian knowledge”

“Astrology was central to the practice of Renaissance magi; but so too were advances in physics and rationalism on whose insights we still rely”

“As Grafton shows in his dense, scholarly survey, the figure of the magus haunts the birth of science in early modern Europe”

“Learned, able to cross-reference natural histories or star charts from his vast library, equally fascinated by new developments in mechanics that inspired him to build automata, hydraulic systems and weapons of mass destruction, he was a disreputable godfather to the scientific method”

Commentator’s Note: The opposition of techne to philosophical reason. The magus makes do; the magus is a cyborg.

“One magus reportedly taught his followers how to prove their manliness through ordeals by fire, like a 16th-century Jordan Peterson”

“He might be an unsuccessful student or an expelled clergyman ‘who sought powers and status denied to him in life’ by peddling his book-learning in new, more gullible markets”

“He was, invariably, a he, emerging from the all-male world of the university and the cloister”

“the magi’s claims to learned and scientific status distinguished their ‘masculine’ pursuits from the peasant cunning associated with female magic, for which so many women would die in witch hunts a couple of centuries later”

“Navigating this weighty work of intellectual history will come easier to readers who already know their Pico della Mirandola from their Giambattista della Porta”

“How can rational inquiry reveal the world we cannot see?”