Solomon's Secret Arts

by Paul Kléber Monod

  The lines that connect occult ways of thinking, however, are intricate, ramified and frequently imaginary. Most modern devotees of occult organizations lay claim to some body of ancient wisdom on which their beliefs are purportedly based. For them, the appeal of such wisdom is direct and unmediated by time—it speaks to them just as clearly as it did to the ancients. Adherents of such beliefs are rarely open to the suggestion that they may have changed, that they have to be understood in a historical context, or that they might actually have been invented at some point, for some now-forgotten purpose. The believer is more likely to regard with wonder what he or she sees as the vast chronological and cultural scope of the occult. Scholars have sometimes adopted the same perspective. This has encouraged a few of them—notably, the psychologist Carl Jung—to conclude that the occult is a universal category, better explored through the structures of human personality than through any time-bound discipline like history.2 The occult, for Jung and his followers, represented a fundamental state of mind, a yearning or need to express the “collective unconscious” of the psyche, which surpassed temporal boundaries and approached the eternal. To his critics, Jung's approach represents an abdication of intellectual inquiry, constituting not an explanation but an obfuscation, yet another form of “occultism.”

  However we judge Jung, his theories confront us with a serious question that any scholar who is not a devotee must ask: how universal or unchanging is the phenomenon known as the occult? A sceptical observer who follows astrological predictions or peruses the web pages of various occult organizations will soon wonder how much they have to do with “ancient wisdom” of any identifiable variety. The further one travels from cosmically vague concepts, and the more one hones in on specific examples of occult thinking, the greater the role of cultural and historical factors appears to be. Under this scrutiny, the agelessness of the occult turns out to be an illusion—or, in many cases, a mystification, because its adherents have made such efforts to disguise its recent origins. It seems doubtful that much in the commercialized occultism of today can be traced back beyond the late nineteenth century. Examined closely, the promotional activities of contemporary psychics and astrologers do not bear much resemblance to the ritual practices of Egyptian or Babylonian priests.3 Even the foundations of serious occult thinking owe more to modern anxieties, and to modern marketing techniques, than to the builders of pyramids or ziggurats. To borrow the terminology of Eric Hobsbawm, the occult as we know it today seems largely to be an “invented tradition.”4 Its direct evocation of the past, its venerable heritage and alleged roots in “the wisdom of the ages,” have as often as not been misappropriated, distorted, embellished or even fabricated, whether out of enthusiasm, ignorance or just plain chicanery.

  This is not to say that the modern occult tradition is deliberately spurious, that it was wholly manufactured at some particular point in time, or that it was created (magically, perhaps?) out of nothing. Even traditions that are constantly reinvented may be honest in sticking to their established goals. They may also have legitimate antecedents, whose influence is hard to trace. As will be suggested here, there is indeed a lineage of occult thinking that goes back to the early centuries of Christianity. While it may have been reinterpreted several times since 1400, and substantially rewritten since 1875, it provides a series of points of reference that are more or less fixed. The occult tradition might be regarded as an old ritual garment, worked and reworked at regular intervals, with new patterns and colours added, until almost nothing original is left in it, apart from the overall shape and a few stray threads. With every repair, the garment has taken on an altered appearance, suited to the demands of contemporary society, although it has been presented to the public as if it were the miraculous product of an eternal and unchanging heritage. In this respect, of course, the occult is not very different from most organized religious traditions—except that it has not usually been very organized, and its beliefs, however broad their philosophical reach, have not always possessed the theological or ethical dimensions of a religion.

  It might be objected at this point that we have begun to discuss the historical features of a phenomenon that remains undefined, and may not be coherent at all. What exactly are we looking for in tracing the history of “the occult” in a pre-modern age? How can we hope to put to use such a vague and mutable concept, so deeply imbued with modern implications, in making sense of the ideas of Britons who lived before television and the Internet—even before general literacy and mass communication? We might begin by asking how the term was used at different times in the English language. In Samuel Johnson's 1755 Dictionary, “occult” is not listed as a noun; instead, it appears as an adjective meaning “secret; hidden; unknown; undiscoverable.”5 Before the late eighteenth century, the idea of “the occult” would not have made much sense to speakers of English. In dealing with earlier periods, we are imposing a modern expression on a diverse body of material that was identified by contemporaries in various ways: as occult philosophy, occult science or the occult arts. Evidently, we have to separate the early-modern occult from contemporary, organized “occultism,” which is largely a product of the period since 1875—although we also have to explain how the former began to point towards the latter. At the same time, our use of “the occult” has to be distinguished from the assumption that there is a real Philosopher's Stone, the substance that turns base metals into gold—in other words, that an occult realm of knowledge objectively exists, beyond the personal views and experiences of those who seek it. While this is certainly possible, it cannot be proven historically, one way or the other. For better or worse, the author of this book does not believe in it. For the purposes of our argument, the occult existed purely in the minds and actions of its adherents.

  In writings of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century, most uses of the adjective “occult” were in broad accordance with Samuel Johnson's definition, which is to say that they referred to things that were “hidden.” This led to expressions like “occult motion,” “occult [political] influences,” or, in medical literature, “occult wounds.”6 Hence, when the philosopher Lord Kames, in a work published in 1774, wrote of “occult crimes, hid from every mortal eye,” he did not mean to imply that such crimes were committed by spirits.7 Evidently, what was occult need not have been supernatural. In fact, the term was often used to designate purely natural phenomena that were not immediately intelligible, but might become so through further investigation. As the physician and antiquarian Walter Charleton put it in 1654, “what difference is there, whether we say, that such a thing is Occult; or that we know nothing of it?”8 He was confident that all natural things, visible and invisible, could be explained through mechanical causes.

  Behind Charleton's question lay a simmering intellectual debate. Charleton was objecting to the philosophy of Aristotle, long dominant in western Europe, which posited that natural qualities must be “manifest,” or open to the senses, in order to be understood. Occult qualities had no place in traditional Aristotelian science, because they could not be seen, felt, heard, smelled or tasted and were therefore imperceptible. By the late seventeenth century, however, this view was under attack from writers like Charleton, who believed that nature was often affected by insensible or occult forces: magnetic attraction or repulsion, movement at a distance, gravity. Such occult qualities, which were hidden but not supernatural, might be explored through “magia naturalis” or natural magic. The latter had famously been described by the Italian scientist Giambattista della Porta as “nothing else but the survey of the whole course of Nature.” Della Porta was scrupulous in separating natural magic from the “infamous, and unhappie” kind, that had to do with “foul spirits … Inchantments, and wicked Curiosity”: that is, with anything supernatural or otherworldly. Natural magic, by contrast, was simply “the dutiful hand-maid” of nature in revealing the secrets of occult things.9 In short, it was an experimental science devoted to the unveiling of hidden natural
properties.

  The distinction within occult qualities between natural and supernatural, however, could be slippery. A treatise on miracles published in 1683, for example, explained that “Moses’s rod had many great, many occult, yet Natural Qualities, very hard indeed to explain or conceive, and very admirable though not miraculous.”10 The author accepted that true miracles violated natural laws, and were therefore extremely rare. This led him to argue, somewhat tortuously, that while God could ignore the laws of nature when he chose to do so, in cases where he opted to observe them, his actions might be called hidden or occult, but were not, strictly speaking, supernatural. A less scrupulous mind, of course, might perceive an instrument like Moses’ rod, which summoned up winds and rain, as both occult and supernatural. In any case, the debate over where to draw the boundary between nature and the supernatural remained contentious and unresolved. It was nonetheless highly important to orthodox religious writers, who believed that only God—not angels or spirits or even the Devil—could transgress the limits of nature.11

  The distinction between natural and supernatural was not always strictly held by those who were fascinated by occult sciences and philosophy, including alchemy, astrology and ritual magic. They might place themselves within a tradition of occult thinking that sought to explain nature in terms of spiritual or even supernatural forces over which human beings exercised some control. The element of human intervention in the supernatural was crucial: it distinguished occult enthusiasts from those who accepted the existence of spirits, but believed any traffic with them was unlawful or demonic. In the following argument, the occult will be understood as a type of thinking, expressed either in writing or in action, that allowed the boundary between the natural and the supernatural to be crossed by the actions of human beings.

  The historian of science John Henry has written of a “fragmentation” of occult thinking in the seventeenth century, between those who favoured natural explanations and those who sought after supernatural wisdom.12 The fracture line between the two, however, tends to be less precise or obvious than we might wish it to be. Even the apparently level-headed Della Porta was prone to quote ancient writers who promoted contact with spirits. Many of those who pursued experimental science in the late seventeenth century, including highly respected figures, were tempted towards the supernatural wonders that lay beyond, which from a strictly orthodox perspective were forbidden. In their own view, they were approaching an angelic or spiritual realm of freedom and power, but as far as their critics were concerned, they were wandering blindly into a pandemonium of superstition, heterodoxy and witchcraft: in short, into demonic magic.

  Popular Magic

  How mixed up was occult thinking with magic, other than the natural variety? In addressing the question, many modern scholars have heeded the shrill warnings of seventeenth-century critics, and have sought to keep the two apart. Cultural historians of early-modern Britain have given a great deal of attention to the question of magical practices, but they have tended to treat the occult as if it were a separate issue, to be left mainly to scholars of science, philosophy and religion.13 The publication in 1971 of Keith Thomas's magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic provided this segregated approach with a powerful foundation.14 Thomas was mainly concerned with the practical uses of magic, which he interpreted as behavioural responses to the predicament of not having more effective means of dealing with everyday problems. These encompassed all sorts of “superstitious” practices. Thomas did not see magic as a coherent belief system, or as having much to do with contemporary philosophical thought. Its aspirations were not supernatural; rather, they were functional and worldly. Magic rested on customary usage and was chiefly characterized by a more or less irrational belief in the effects of certain actions, perhaps even including prayer. In other words, what made something magic was its outcome rather than the way by which it might work. How a philtre caused someone to fall in love was irrelevant to its users, so long as it led to the desired results. Who cared about the specific words inscribed on a charm so long as they did the job of ridding the house of rats?15 Such practices constituted magic because no fully rational person could accept them as efficacious.

  Thomas's interpretation of magic, anchored in modern social science, was extremely helpful in explaining why people resorted to such methods, but it was not especially conducive to the unravelling of magical ways of thinking. Apart from astrology, on which subject he made some brilliant remarks, Thomas was not particularly interested in the more learned aspects of his theme.16 Instead, he presented an exhaustive and highly perceptive examination of popular magical practices and beliefs. This left him at a disadvantage, however, when he came to the end of his immense work, and to the trickiest aspect of his argument: answering the question of when and why magic declined. His painstaking treatment of witchcraft accusations, which occupied a significant portion of the book, suggested that they mirrored the fate of magic as a whole. Witch prosecutions clearly waned in England after 1660, disappearing entirely after 1717. Thomas implied that the resort to magical solutions of all kinds declined after the mid-seventeenth century, due to greater social stability as well as the emergence of new (and presumably more successful) means of addressing everyday problems, such as fire insurance. Although his conclusions about the decline of magic were extremely cautious, Thomas left the impression that a threshold had been passed by 1700, the point at which magic seemed to have been found wanting in many, if not most, English minds.

  Keith Thomas's influence on the study of magic in England has been enormous. Gradually, however, scholars have begun to stray from the imposing pathways set down by Religion and the Decline of Magic. Many of them have been students of the history of witchcraft. James Sharpe and others have pointed out that cultural factors, including gender, family relations and local rivalries, played at least as great a role in witch accusations as did the socio-economic explanation favoured by Thomas.17 Ian Bostridge and Owen Davies have argued for the persistence of witch beliefs, far beyond the formal ending of trials for witchcraft or the repeal of existing witchcraft legislation in 1736. Davies has also published a remarkable series of works on the survival of popular magic through village cunning-folk or traditional healers as well as through grimoires or ritual magic books. It is now evident that, in England as in other parts of Europe, ordinary people did not cast off their adherence to magic, no matter what their social betters might have thought, so that the question of when magic declined has become a much more complicated one.18 The continuing popular appeal of astrological predictions has been traced down to the eighteenth century and beyond by Bernard Capp and Patrick Curry, while the importance of astrology in human and veterinary medicine down to 1700 has been emphasized by Louise Hill Curth.19 Alan Macfarlane, whose work on witchcraft preceded and inspired that of Thomas, has suggested recently that the gradual decline of magical beliefs in England may be related less to the impact of urbanization, medicine or science than to the slow growth of “civility,” or of human control over private space.20 While it is unlikely that any of these scholars would claim that they have overturned the basic premise of Thomas's thesis that magic began to lose its appeal to segments of the public at some point in the mid-seventeenth century, they have certainly qualified it.

  Scotland was outside the scope of Thomas's research and never quite fit his approach. Witch prosecutions there were more numerous and the results bloodier. Scottish judges, who exercised wider authority than their English counterparts, have been assigned a greater portion of the blame for the witch craze. Because they were learned men, whose attitudes may have been shaped by what they read, the impact of occult thinking on witch trials was from the start given more attention in Scotland than was the case in England. Major witch trials dragged on later in the northern kingdom, with the last outbreak in 1697–1700, but their disappearance has not been seen by historians as representing any sort of turning point in popular attitudes towards magic.21 The assumption of cult
ural conservatism or even “backwardness,” especially in the Highlands, meant that few scholars were willing to argue in favour of an overall decline in Scottish magical beliefs, similar to that which had supposedly happened in England. As we now know from the researches of Lizanne Henderson and Edward Cowan, rural Scots were convinced of the existence of the fairy folk, or Sithian, throughout the eighteenth century, and their acceptance of witchcraft certainly did not end with the repeal of previous witch legislation in 1736.22

  The English situation may have been closer to that of Scotland than has usually been thought, with popular confidence in the reality of witches and fairy folk surviving for long periods of time (my own grandmother, born in Somerset in 1889, was a strong believer in fairies). What can no longer be sustained is the hypothesis that magical beliefs had less appeal to ordinary labouring folk in England after the mid-seventeenth century than in the preceding hundred years. While Thomas may be correct in assuming a decline in belief among educated people, it was not a uniform or straightforward process, and was far from complete even by 1800. How such a limited decline might have affected magical practices is unclear, since these did not require the active participation of educated members of the community and could be sustained in a private setting, leaving few traces in the archives. Arguably, the actual downfall of popular magical beliefs in Britain may not have come until the early twentieth century, through an increasingly universal system of education.