Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa by Anthony Grafton

Sometime in 1506, the Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius, stopped at a tavern in the German town of Gelnhausen. There he encountered Doctor Faustus – then going by the name of Georg Sabellicus – handing out what were in essence business cards. Faustus was, the cards said, “the chief of necromancers, an astrologer, the second magus, a reader of palms, a diviner by earth and fire”.

As Anthony Grafton points out in Magus, his rewarding new study of Renaissance magic, many saw the diabolical in such claims; Luther, for one, described Faustus as “brother in law” to the devil. But where some caught a whiff of sulphur, others smelled snake oil. Another contemporary, the Greek scholar Joachim Camerarius, dismissed Faustus as a purveyor of “juggler’s tricks”. Trithemius probably agreed with both of them. “You will find him not be a philosopher but a fool,” he wrote of Faustus to a friend.

Yet at the very moment that Trithemius was condemning Faustus, he himself was battling almost identical accusations about himself and his work. A sometime house guest, French philosopher Charles Bovelles, had denounced Trithemius’s manuscript work on cryptography, the Steganographia, for its invocation of “barbarous and unheard-of… spirits (not to say demons)”. The book should be suppressed and never printed, he wrote.

Trithemius was, among other things, an expert on demonology. When the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, wanted to know everything there was to know about demons and witches, it was Trithemius he turned to. Maximilian was no neophyte in these matters; he had a magical ring named der Teufel – ‘the devil’ – which he attempted to use, unsuccessfully we assume, to repair his finances. Indeed, he was more sympathetic to necromancy that Trithemius was, and made him tone down his denunciations between the manuscript was printed.

But what both Trithemius and Maximilian shared was a belief that there was such a thing as natural magic, that occurred when “the secret application of a natural power by experts produced marvellous effects”, Trithemius said. This was a longstanding tenet of magical thought. Pico della Mirandola, a Florentine scholar of the occult, cited the third-century Greek philosopher Plotinus in arguing that “the magus is Nature’s minister, not her Artificer”. It was [inimical], its proponents argued, to the tricks of necromancers, who relied on malignant spirits for their effects. “All the miracles of demons are phantasms,” Trithemius wrote. True magical work was, in Grafton’s phrase, a kind of “spiritual agriculture”, realising the natural potential of God’s creation, not abusing it.

The nexus of religion and magic that Trithemius embodied was not a coincidence. St Augustine’s in Canterbury had the largest library of occult writing in Europe; magical practice in England flourished in the 1530s and 1540s as the monastic diaspora occasioned by the dissolution forced learned clerics out from their cloisters and into the world. More broadly, the material world of late-medieval Catholicism was already also a spiritual and supernatural one: across Europe both religious houses and, increasingly, secular princes had amassed large collections of holy relics – Grafton likens these collections to “celestial power stations” – each of which was charged with divine power and could generate miracles. The Florentine hermetic scholar Marsilio Ficino wrote to the pope in 1478 to inform him that some relics of St Peter, recently discovered nearby, had caused “twelve great miracles in one month”.

This idea of occult – that is, hidden – power and divinity is at the heart of Renaissance magic. The question was, how to unlock that power. Many practitioners – among them Pico, Ficino and Trithemius – stressed a quasi-monastic need for spiritual and physical purity when pursuing these studies. The magical self was something that required cultivation, sometimes expensively so. Ficino, for instance, recommended the consumption of edible gold. Grafton follows other historians in drily noting the analogy between Ficino and “the twentienth-century analyst, sitting in a luxuriously appointed room and offering the sort of therapy that, if it does not always get the patient back on his or her feet, at least explains why analysts have such large houses”. But Trithemius, for whom the practice of magic was a form of contemplation, a kind of meditative practice, was perhaps more typical. “The mind and spirit of man can naturally do miracles,” he wrote to Maximilian, “so long as it knows how to recall itself away from distraction and… above the senses, into unity.”

But it is wrong to conceive of the occult as an ethereal or otherworldly pursuit. Maximilian was not alone among Europe’s great princes in being interested in the power, the dominion over nature, that magic promised: Ficino translated the Hermetic Corpus, then thought to be written by an Egyptian magus in antiquity, at the request of Cosimo de’ Medici. Roger Bacon, a 13th-century Franciscan philosopher and authority on magic, believed that the rapid expansion of the Mongol empire, which threatened to engulf [the Christian west], was due in part to their mastery of astrological talismans. He urged Christian authorities to take up similar technologies and use them for good.

Magus is an intellectual history of the occult from the late-medieval period to the early decades of the Reformation. Renaissance magic has been the subject of academic study since the late Frances Yates pioneered it in the 1960s. What Grafton brings is both a sense of its roots in the textual scholarship of the late-medieval period – and in the methods of humanist study more generally – as well as of its relationship with contemporary developments in the mechanical arts as practised by the likes of Brunelleschi and Leonardo.

The latter were exemplars of what Roger Bacon called “the science of experience”, by which he meant the practical ability to manipulate and transform the material world. “God has given men so much force of intellect,” the engineer Giovanni Fontana wrote, “that they have… brought about many things that nature herself could not have done.” He cited hydraulic screws, block-and-tackle pulley systems, and siege artillery as examples. It is no coincidence either that Cornelius Agrippa – whose De occulta philosophia, first published in 1531, is the definitive text of magical philosophy in the Renaissance – had been both a military and a mining engineer.

While scholarly philosophers of magic admired the mechanic arts, the admiration was only half-returned. “The ones that girls turn down, those are the ones they instruct to study letters,” wrote the Italian engineer, architect and cryptographer Leon Battista Alberti. Nevertheless, there is no avoiding the centrality of the written word, of manuscripts, books and the study of language, to occult studies. “Renaissance magicians were often bookish,” Grafton writes with masterful understatement. After being shown Trithemius’s library of rare books, one humanist wrote, “I dreamt of nothing but books, and waking too could think of nothing but them”. Trithemius himself noted “how sacred the task of the scribe is in the eyes of God” in a treatise aptly titled In Praise of Scribes.

God had made the world through words – the logoi spermatikoi – but much of its meaning and power lay hidden. Pico introduced a great deal of Jewish Kabbalistic thought into the study of the occult, and in particular a sense of Hebrew, the very language God used in Genesis, as holding hidden power. As Agrippa later wrote, God “knew all things before he named them, and… fashioned the names in such a way as to express [their] nature, quality and usage”. The task of the magus then was to decipher the divine cryptography of creation.

But the subject of cryptography brings us back to the Steganographia. Whatever else Renaissance magi were masters of, they were adepts of hidden writing in a broader sense. Their texts mirror their understanding of God’s creation, with true meanings scattered and concealed through verbal sleights of hand; mere manifest understanding was for the uninitiated. “What we have hidden in one passage, we have made manifest in another, so that it may be made clear to you men of wisdom,” Agrippa wrote.

And yet, thanks to the internet, encryption is part of our everyday lives. And some of their inventions are remarkably reminiscent of today’s apps and AI tools. Trithemius created a device which enabled someone unlearned in Latin to craft flawless sentences in the language; Alberti designed a tool which replicated the techniques of rhetoric for the benefit of unskilled orators. The former was one of the activities for which Bovelles attacked Trithemius: “How could be possibly achieve this without the help of spirits?,” he thundered. But the point is that while the effects were magical to the uninitiated, and often designed to appear so, the processes by which they were achieved were not.

It is easy to ridicule Renaissance magical thought. Many contemporaries did. Trithemius, the 16th-century mathematician Girolamo Cardano said, “pretended that he had practiced necromancy, when he should rather have been accused of stupidity”. But the questions they sought to answer – about human power over nature, about the relationship between language and reality, about the limits of materialism, about the great puzzle of existence – are with us still. And with us still too is the search for meaning, for a sense of human worth and agency in a fast-changing, disruptive world.

This is an extended version of a review that first appeared on Engelsberg Ideas in January 2024.