In Magus (Harvard Univ., Dec.), historian Grafton traces the connection between Renaissance-era magic and the birth of science.
How did you come to this topic?
I realized that there were connections between what seemed the two rather distinct fields of Renaissance invention: the invention of working machines and the invention of magical displays of power.
What does magic mean in this context?
“Natural magic” at this time is the idea that plants have powers, stones have powers; and those are not occult powers, in the sense that they’re not diabolic. The idea is, we can see that these powers happen in a regular way. We can see that they’re part of the natural order. “Learned magic” is a kind of harnessing of natural magic with spiritual power. Like, where you do rituals; you fumigate, you burn incense, you use a talisman.
Why start the book with Johann Georg Faust, the inspiration for the character of Doctor Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s play?
It’s because he’s putting all these pursuits together at this moment when others are putting them together in books. But he becomes scorned as a totally marginal figure. And it’s true that he is not super competent at the kinds of magic that he does—though some of them he seems to do pretty well. His projection of images [with a kind of proto-magic lantern] was clearly effective.
What role did the printing press and bookmaking play in legitimizing magic?
What’s really fascinating is how Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa produced this magnificent book with the first author photo. I mean, it’s not a photo—it’s a wood engraving. But on the title page there is an image of the author himself, and that becomes a model which other people then use. This gave the book a kind of deep authority. Yet at the same time, it was condemned by the Inquisition. You could get in real trouble for owning it. It is simultaneously a case of the legitimating power of print—the way in which something looking this striking gives it authority—and the power of print to subvert authority.
You write about the magicians as inventors who mythologized themselves.
When I watched Oppenheimer, I saw him as this real magus figure. No one mythologized himself more than Oppenheimer. So, that mythologizing enterprise can be applied to things that actually work; though, of course, as we know from Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried, you can also apply it, just the way Faustus did, to things that don’t work. We’re still not great at establishing criteria that enable us to separate the fake from the genuine—the actual astonishing achievement from the achievement that just sort of looks astonishing.
