Critical Reactions to the Occult Sciences During the Renaissance

Abstract

The revival of the occult sciences — astrology, alchemy, numerology and natural magic — during the Renaissance used to be an embarrassment to historians. Some preferred to address themselves to the Scientific Revolution and simply ignore the occult leanings of Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, John Dee, Robert Fludd, and others. If one scholar changed this conspiracy of silence it was Lynn Thorndike, in his History of Magic and Experimental Science, published in eight volumes between 1923 and 1958. This vast survey — as Eugenio Garin described it, “a catalogue and index rather than a history” (Garin 1983, 133, n. 8)¹ — is much more reliable on magic than on science; indeed, as his work progressed, Thorndike came to identify rather with the occult tradition, and could barely bring himself to discuss its opponents with either objectivity or fairness. Thorndike’s unrivaled knowledge of manuscript materials and his indefatigable researches certainly laid a new scholarly foundation for studies in the occult sciences; and his work, together with the tradition established by Eugenio Garin in Florence (including Paolo Rossi and Cesare Vasoli), can be seen as both an inspiration and a reference point for the sudden popularity of magic in the English-speaking world in the 1960s and 1970s. One other source of influence was the Warburg Institute, whose library and teaching staff reflected the full range of Aby Warburg’s interests, including astrology and magic. D. P. Walker, whose Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Fieino to Campanella (1958) was a key work in this tradition, moved from the Department of French of University College, London, to the Warburg Institute in 1961, while Frances Yates had been a Research Fellow of the Institute since 1938.

Men seldom seek a high degree of proof for what they already believe to be true. Thomas 1973, 657