The Origins of Magic and Religion

 

What we all are only beginning to experience is a radical paradigm shift — a scientific reconsideration of the role of consciousness in the physical world. Major paradigms in science don’t change very often; they prefer to sit around like curmudgeonly custodians of conventional wisdom, scoffing at new ideas. But when those ideas do start to slide, confusion erupts, experts bicker, and skeptics start to sweat. When the dust settles, a new paradigm takes shape. Then what?

Then we live in a new world. One of the consequences of this new world is that the esoteric practice of magic will emerge from the shadows, where it has been quietly simmering for about five hundred years. But this time magic, sometimes spelled magick to distinguish it from magic tricks, will be seen through the lens of science. Societal taboos that long suppressed this natural capacity will begin to dissolve, and new light will shine on who we are and what we’re capable of.

Some say magic is a legendary power that can bend destiny at will. Modern minds are naturally skeptical about such claims. Science tells us that magic is wishful thinking. It violates the laws of physics. It’s fantasy. No educated person could take it seriously. But it turns out that magic is quite real and has been hiding in plain sight. Today, through the bright light of science, we can see and begin to understand magic in new ways.

Magic is to religion as technology is to science. That is, one difference between religion and magic is that the former is essentially a faith-based theory about the nature of reality, while the latter involves testable applications of that theory. Theories provide meaningful structures proposed to account for an otherwise chaotic and bewildering existence, while applications provide the means of controlling some of the chaos.

The religion-magic relationship is actually more complex than the science-technology connection because there are two major categories of magic: supernatural and natural. Initially, everything was considered to be supernatural because our earliest ancestors had no idea about how anything worked. So they naturally attributed everything to invisible, supernatural causes, meaning above or beyond the natural world — the divine, or one or more gods.

Then someone noticed that there were aspects of nature that were predictable —the movements of the sun and stars, healing qualities of certain muds and plants—and that realization sparked interest in visible, here-and-now, human-centric natural magic. Supernatural magic was eventually adopted by religion, and natural magic split into two branches, the exoteric (outer, physical world) and the esoteric (inner, mental world). The exoteric branch evolved into today’s science. The esoteric branch is where magic has been hiding.

Natural magic evolved into science as refined methods and technologies were developed that allowed us to control natural forces (like electricity) and to perceive beyond the common senses (as with a microscope). If instruments like the electric battery and the telescope had never been invented, life today in many ways would be as it was in the late Middle Ages. But with such instruments and many others like them, our worldview significantly expanded, theories were developed to account for the new observations, and in the process we’ve become highly adept at focusing on the outer, physical world. We know that our worldview is accurate because it continues to spawn reliable technologies, many of which would have seemed like pure magic even as recently as the 1950s.

Indeed, in the early twenty-first century it’s probably fair to say that most people have no idea how computing or communication technologies work. I don’t mean “work” in the sense of knowing how to operate a computer or a smartphone, but rather in the sense of knowing how to build these devices from scratch, or even understanding the main principles underlying these devices. These technologies aren’t considered magic because their easy availability gives us faith that someone, somewhere (or, more likely, teams of specialists distributed around the globe) knows how they work. Meanwhile, esoteric magic has also evolved, using its own methods and theories. Not surprisingly, the esoteric worldview is very different from the one that’s the basis of today’s technologies.

The history of esotericism is deeply entwined with the histories of science, religion, philosophy, and metaphysics, and it’s been explored in fastidious detail by many generations of scholars. But it’s important to review it here, even if briefly, to give you a feeling for two central ideas: first, that esoteric ideas have been vigorously suppressed in the Western world for at least a thousand years, and second, that the esoteric worldview provides hints for why magic works.

PREHISTORIC TIMES

Given the mystery of life, its endless uncertainties, and the certainty of death, the first self-aware creatures were strongly motivated to understand how they had ended up in this mess and whether there might be something better to look forward to. Some of those early souls may have gained mystical glimpses of reality through the discovery and use of entheogenic (psychedelic) compounds.

A persuasive case for this possibility is made by the esteemed religious scholar Huston Smith in his book Cleansing the Doors of Perception. As language developed, the experiences of these early psychonauts, amplified by their creative imaginations, became codified into cosmologies (that is, origin stories).

Individuals who were especially adept at entering these rarefied states of awareness, which afforded visions of reality beyond the here and now, were the first magicians and shamans. Religions developed as the mystical cosmologies were elaborated. Later, those origin stories were supplemented with rules for acceptable behavior and proper forms of homage to authority. Shamans didn’t enter these states because all the cool kids were doing it; rather, they did it because their tribe’s survival depended on it. They were healers, oracles, and warriors wrapped into one, and they were charged with sustaining their tribe and defending it against rival groups through whatever means necessary, including magical techniques.

ANCIENT TIMES

As tribes’ settlements matured into towns, cities, and empires, the cognoscenti of the day gained the luxury of time to turn their thoughts from matters of daily subsistence to grander concepts of spirituality and religion. German-Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) labeled the period from about 800 to 200 BCE the “axial age.” The term refers to an intellectual swing from matters of basic survival to more abstract and transcendent ideas.

Given today’s fast pace, you might have to schlep through a computer or smartphone software update every month or two. But in primordial times thousands of years and untold hundreds of human generations would come and go, and absolutely nothing would change. Considering the almost inconceivably leisurely pace of our ancestors’ lives, the six-hundred-year axial age arrived like a historical lightning bolt.

During that period Taoism and Confucianism emerged in China; Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism appeared in India; the Hebrew prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others emerged in Palestine; Zoroaster (the Greek name of the Persian prophet Zarathustra) founded one of the first monotheistic religions; and the Greek philosophers, including Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, did something new: they questioned the origins of the universe, pondered the meaning, morality, and fate of humanity, and founded the origins of logic, mathematics, and rational analysis.

This shift in perspective is sometimes referred to as the emergence of “second-order” thought, in that humans—at least the ruling classes—began to think about themselves from broader or higher perspectives. The new way of thinking led humanity away from worship of tribal deities and toward contemplation of more universal concepts. Unified kingdoms and “supreme” gods became a new vision. To achieve such goals it was necessary to develop ways other than raw brutality to respond to insults and other aggressions. 

The new vision was hopeful, an aspiration that has always been difficult to sustain given our hard-wired drive to strike first and ask questions later. But the impulse was set, and a case can be made that human violence has steadily declined as civilization has spread throughout the world. Of course, instances of violence tend to saturate the news media, so it might seem like the world is becoming more dangerous. But that’s only because breaking-news reports of carnage cause our hearts to beat faster than calm stories about simple human kindness.

One of the sparks that energized the axial age may have emerged from personal experiences within the various mystery schools, which flourished throughout the ancient world. These schools had similar goals: initiation into the mysteries sought “to ‘open the immortal eyes of man inwards’: exalt his powers of perception until they could receive the messages of a higher degree of reality.” In practice, this consisted of experiencing a ritual death of the physical body and subsequent resurrection into a new body, with new capabilities of intuiting secret wisdom, often regarding the functioning of the body itself.

One of the longest-lasting schools was the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries, active from about 1500 BCE to 392 CE. Most of the Greek philosophers regarded the Mysteries with awe. Even the Roman skeptic Cicero (106–43 BCE) wrote, “Nothing is higher than these mysteries…they have not only shown us how to live joyfully but they have taught us how to die with a better hope.” Hundreds of years later, the Greek philosopher and statesman Themistios (317–385 CE) mentioned the Eleusinian Mysteries in an essay he wrote on the soul: "The soul [at death] has the same experience as those who are being initiated into great Mysteries….[A]t first one wanders and wearily hurries to and fro, and journeys with suspicion through the dark as one uninitiated: then come all the terrors before the final initiation, shuddering, trembling, sweating, amazement: then one is struck with a marvelous light, one is received into pure regions and meadows, with voices and dances and the majesty of holy sounds and shapes: among these he who has fulfilled initiation wanders free, and released and bearing his crown joins in the divine communion, and consorts with pure and holy men."

The Lesser Rites of the Eleusinian Mysteries involved a theatrical allegory of what (supposedly) happened after death. It was unusually democratic for its time, being available to both citizens and slaves. But the Greater Rites were available only to selected patrons. These were said to provide a personal experience of the afterlife. The ritual included drinking a potion known as kykeon, a mixture consisting of barley, mint, and water. Kykeon might have been similar to soma, the potion mentioned in the Hindu Vedas that some scholars now believe was an entheogenic compound. While the actual composition of these concoctions is unknown, we do know that they were made from grains, and ergot—a poisonous fungus that commonly grows on grains — contains lysergic acid, the core component of the most powerful psychedelic drug, lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD.

The Eleusinian Mystery School was forced to close in 392 CE when Christian emperor Theodosius I, head of the Holy Roman Empire, officially declared the rites pagan and therefore heretical (that is, they were so popular that they interfered with the Church’s authority).

One of the more famous mystery school initiates was Plato (427–347 BCE), student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle. Plato proposed the existence of a “higher domain” of pure Ideas. To help explain his concept, Plato used an allegory of prisoners in a cave. As the story goes, these prisoners spent their entire lives chained up in a cave in such a way that all they could see was the cave wall in front of them. They couldn’t see a fire that was glowing behind them, nor that a group of actors was holding up puppets and casting shadows on the wall of the cave. For these prisoners, their entire world consisted of those shadows.

One day a prisoner was released from the cave and taken outside. At first blinded by the light, after a while his eyes adjusted to the brilliance, and for the first time he saw the vibrant colors and depth of “real” reality. His former ideas about the world were shattered, and when he was allowed to return to the cave he excitedly explained to the other prisoners that their shadow existence was an illusion. There was a richer, intensely luminous world just a few steps outside the cave. But regardless of what he said, or the arguments he used to try to convince them that their reality was a pale cartoon of reality, the other prisoners thought he had gone mad.

Plato used this allegory to argue that there was a difference between the everyday appearance of the world, shaped by everyday language and concepts, and the world itself. Common sense provides a poor facsimile of what is really “out there,” so to grasp the true nature of reality — Plato imagined that this consisted of what he called eternal Forms or Ideas — requires a special form of knowing, called gnosis. Knowledge gained through gnosis is different from intellectual or rational knowing. American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910) provided a definition for a similar word, noetic, in his famous book The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Noetic experiences were, as he described in the flowery language of the early twentieth century, states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority.

Gnosis is thus a type of deep intuition, a means of knowing that transcends the ordinary senses and rational thought, like knowing “from the heart.” A mother knows she loves her child; it’s not something she has to rationally, logically, or analytically figure out. Note that gnosis being non-rational does not mean it’s irrational, for that would imply faulty knowledge.

From the perspective of magical practice, gnosis may be thought of as an “intense consciousness of something.” The term grok, from Robert Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, also gets at this idea. At one point in that novel the character Mahmoud describes grok as to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us [ordinary humans] as color does to a blind man.

During the Hellenistic period in Greece (from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE to the emergence of the Roman Empire in 31 BCE), Plato’s ideas evolved into an esoteric worldview. A key figure associated with development of what is now called Neoplatonism was Plotinus (204–270 CE), a philosopher born in Egypt half a millennium after Plato. Neoplatonism proposed the existence of deep interconnections among all things, including what is normally viewed as the distinction between mental and physical phenomena. From the everyday, ego-based state of awareness (I’ll call this personal form of consciousness [c]), mind and matter appear to be fundamentally different. But from the rarefied state of gnosis, which provides direct access to higher states of existence (I’ll call this state of Universal Consciousness [C]), the apparent distinctions between mind and matter, or space and time, are revealed as illusions. That is, from [c] we see objects separated in space and time, and we see obvious differences between mental and physical phenomena. But from [C], all such differences dissolve and naked reality is experienced as entangled relationships in a holistic reality, completely free of the constraints of space or time.

From [C], you directly perceive what [c] experiences as the future or the past. From [C], you also transcend the distinctions that separate you from other objects, and by so doing, you can directly influence the physical world. That is, in a domain without separation you may “become one with,” say, a dark cloud, whereupon you could introduce an intention to rain. Or by becoming one with a friend, you could know your friend’s thoughts and emotions. By proposing the notion of a “higher” reality beyond the shadow existence of ordinary experience, Plato and later Neoplatonism provided a worldview that opened the door to the possibility of real magic.

Treatises on Neoplatonism and many other esoteric ideas were collected in one of the supreme accomplishments of ancient times: the library of Alexander of Macedonia (356 BCE–323 BCE), better known as Alexander the Great. Alexander charged this library with collecting all of the world’s knowledge. He began it in 334 BCE, and in its prime the Alexandrian library was the largest single repository of knowledge in the world—the Internet of the ancient world. The library contained over a half a million documents collected from Assyria, Greece, Persia, Egypt, India, and many other places. More than a hundred scholars from all civilized countries traveled to the library to live, study, and translate the documents into all known languages.

After being the hub of the world’s knowledge for two hundred years, the library was partially destroyed by an accident in 48 BCE, when Julius Caesar ordered ships in the harbor to be burned during a military campaign. The fire spread to the docks and eventually destroyed part of the library. Over the next five hundred years the library was slowly whittled away as the city came under the control of different factions and religious authorities. Stories have been told about how one or another individual was responsible for burning or gutting the library, but scholars today agree that most of those stories were apocryphal. There are undoubtedly many reasons the library slowly dissolved, but the full story is lost in the mists of time.

Fortunately, over the centuries of its existence many of its documents were copied by scholars from other countries, so portions of the ancient world’s knowledge were retained. Much of that knowledge was about magic. This is not to say that real magic was uniformly accepted by ancient scholars. Some regarded claims about magic with disdain.

An example is the Greek historian Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE), author of one of the earliest known encyclopedias. Entitled Naturalis Historia (Natural History), Pliny’s work was consulted by scholars for a thousand years. Regarding magic, he wrote: “Without doubt magic arose in Persia with Zoroaster. On this our authorities are agreed, but whether he was the only one of that name, or whether there was also another afterwards, is not clear.” He also wrote: "I have often indeed refuted the fraudulent lies of the Magi, whenever the subject and the occasion required it, and I shall continue to expose them. In a few respects, however, the theme deserves to be enlarged upon, were it only because the most fraudulent of arts has held complete sway throughout the world for many ages."

And yet, after that opening dismissive salvo, Pliny goes on to describe more than sixty recipes that the magi of the day used to treat various ailments. Some of those methods were based on sympathetic magic, the idea that objects with certain appearances or properties would sympathize, or resonate, with similar objects. Thus, to reduce a fever the magi might create an amulet that looked like a snake, or contained bits of a snake, because a snakebite can produce the sensation of a fever. 

But not all folk medicine was based on magical concepts. Many treatments were developed by pure trial and error. Here’s Pliny’s description of how to treat a cold and sore throat: "I find that a heavy cold clears up if the sufferer kisses a mule’s muzzle. Pain in the uvula and in the throat is relieved by the dung, dried in shade, of lambs that have not yet eaten grass, uvula pain by applying the juice of a snail transfixed by a needle, so that the snail itself may be hung up in the smoke, and by the ash of swallows with honey."

Kissing a mule on the snout and gargling with dried, grassless lamb dung sounds a lot worse than suffering through a cold and sore throat. Maybe patients just said that the treatment was soothing so they didn’t have to do that again. But there’s also an alternative explanation. Some of these ingredients, as odd as they sound, may have had chemical properties that were medically useful. For example, an article in the European Journal of Pharmaceutical and Medical Research describes how cow urine, a traditional Ayurveda elixir, has antioxidant, anti-diabetic, wound-healing, and immunomodulatory properties. 

We are so used to synthetic drugs today that it’s easy to forget that modern pharmaceuticals are a recent invention. For millennia, the pharmacopeia consisted exclusively of natural ingredients, because that’s all that was available. Sometimes those forms of natural magic worked wonders, and for reasons that we’re only now beginning to understand in modern terms.

EARLY MIDDLE AGES

Also known as the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages refers to a period of about a thousand years in Europe, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the Renaissance, roughly from the fifth to fourteenth centuries. After Rome fell to the “barbarians,” other than a few pockets of civilization most of Europe turned into one of those post-apocalyptic zombie movies. All forms of scholarship in Europe significantly subsided.

To further tarnish the image of the early Middle Ages as a desirable travel destination for future time-travelers, during that period the Catholic Church’s tolerance of magic rapidly dissipated as Church leaders clamped down on the widespread popularity of pagan beliefs. In the early thirteenth century, Pope Gregory IX created the holy police force known as the Inquisition, to combat heresy. In 1252 Pope Innocent IV formalized the Inquisition and authorized it to use torture to force confessions and to burn people alive for their heretical beliefs.

About two hundred years later, Pope Innocent VIII authorized two inquisitors, Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, to accelerate the holy work of the Inquisition. Sprenger and Kramer wrote a book entitled Malleus Maleficarum (The Witches’ Hammer), which essentially turned witch-hunting into a religiously sanctioned sport. Hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps as many as a million, were arrested, tortured, and killed at the hands of the Inquisition. These horrific acts forced esoteric interests deep underground, and the cultural memory of the terror associated with being declared “deviant” because of one’s ideas or beliefs continues to affect us today.

Now—for reasons you’ll presently discover—we’ll briefly jump five hundred years into the future, to 1945 in Nag Hammadi, a city on the Nile in Upper Egypt. At that time a set of thirteen ancient papyrus manuscripts was discovered. These texts, which were not fully translated until the 1970s, altered our understanding of the Christian Bible. Known as the Nag Hammadi codices, they describe “gnostic gospels” that were left out of early efforts to establish the orthodox interpretation of Christianity, perhaps because the information provided by these gospels differed from the stories included in the New Testament.

The gnostic gospels include the Gospel of Thomas, which begins with a startling opening sentence: “These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and which the twin, Judas Thomas, wrote down.” Elaine Pagels’s book The Gnostic Gospels provides an excellent description of the discovery and mysteries of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts and their influence on understanding the origins of Christianity as we know it today.

Returning to the early Middle Ages: The esoteric tradition of Gnosticism, like Neoplatonism, viewed the central importance of gnosis as a way of directly perceiving higher states of being. But it also added a distinct sense of purpose to Neoplatonism’s cosmology. The Gnostics taught that we are like the prisoners chained up in Plato’s cave. That is, we have a spark of the divine within us, but we’re unaware of it. Fortunately, even though we fell from grace, we can work our way back up the spiritual hierarchy by attaining gnosis of our true being. In this way the gnostic allegory provided a way to escape from the chains of ignorance and the suffering of the material world. We can be like Plato’s prisoner who escaped from the cave.

The Gnostics regarded the Catholic Church with disdain, seeing it as having lost its way through corruption and politics and having neglected the teachings of Christ. As one might imagine, Church authorities were not amused by this criticism, as dramatically exemplified by the plight of the Cathars. The Cathars were a group of Gnostic Christians in the town of Béziers, in southern France. The thirteenth-century pope Innocent III was increasingly annoyed by the Gnostics because their criticism was becoming a major challenge to his authority. The Cathars even went so far as to accuse the Pope of being the puppet of Satan. So the Pope sent his army of Crusaders to Béziers, accompanied by his representative, a French monk named Arnaud Amalric. The military leader of the Crusaders was Simon de Montfort, a French nobleman who was offered a cruel incentive by the Pope—de Montfort could keep the land of any Cathar heretic that he dispatched.

On July 22, 1209, de Montfort arrived at Béziers and demanded that the town turn over the Cathar heretics. The town refused and the Crusaders attacked. During the siege a soldier asked Amalric how were they supposed to tell who was a heretic and who was a proper Catholic. Amalric famously replied, “Kill them all. Let God sort them out.” All twenty thousand people in the town were massacred and the city was burned to the ground. On July 22, 2009, the town of Béziers observed the eight-hundredth anniversary of this massacre. History lesson: it is advisable to think twice about annoying those in power.

THE RENAISSANCE

During the Renaissance, from the fourteenth through the seventeenth century, translations of manuscripts long held in Arabic, Greek, and Asian states were slowly being reintroduced to Western scholars. The invention of the printing press in the fourteenth century and distribution of the translated texts resulted in an explosion of renewed ideas and relief from the stagnation of the previous thousand years. This in turn stimulated an upheaval in religion, politics, economics, and scholarship, and it established the basic structures and Western cultural beliefs that would come to define the modern world.

Religious reformers such as Martin Luther challenged the rigid authority of the Catholic Church, its increasingly corrupt practices, and its monopoly in defining what Christian practice meant. That challenge provoked decades of wars and persecutions, but it also dramatically changed European politics and national boundaries. As old structures began to crumble, the dust generated a heavy price in the form of nearly continuous conflicts. Fortunately, it also fostered a new intellectual openness that eventually allowed for the rediscovery of Hermeticism.

Hermeticism is named after Hermes, the son of the Greek gods Zeus and Maia. Hermes is known as Mercury in the Roman pantheon and Thoth in the Egyptian pantheon. Hermes/Mercury/Thoth was considered an emissary between the gods and humans, the god of writing, wisdom, and magic, and a trickster. Thoth was held in such high regard by the Egyptians that referring to him as Thoth the Great was simply not good enough. Even Double-Great Thoth wasn’t adequate. But, like in the Goldilocks tale, Great-Great-Great Thoth was just about right. That honorific title led to Thoth’s better-known Greek name, Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes three-times-great).

Hermetic cosmology contends that reality consists of a single Universal Consciousness, known by many names: the One Mind, the Divine, the Tao, Brahman, Allah, God, Source, and so on. To avoid religious connotations of these terms, I’ve referred to this concept as consciousness with a big C, or [C]. In Hermeticism, [C] appears in two complementary aspects, like the two sides of the same coin. One form is a manifested, primordial, “plastic” energy, sometimes referred to within the alchemical tradition as the One Thing. The other form is a non-manifested, transcendent element known as the One Mind. The One Thing reacts to and is shaped by the One Mind.

The One Thing is similar to the Hindu idea of akasha. In Swami Vivekananda’s book Raja Yoga, akasha is described as follows: "It is the omnipresent, all-penetrating existence. Everything that has form, everything that is the result of combination, it is evolved out of this Akasha. It is the Akasha that becomes the air, that becomes the liquids, that becomes the solids….It cannot be perceived; it is so subtle that it is beyond all ordinary perception…. At the beginning of creation there is only this Akasha."

Because the One Thing is viewed as a consciousness-shaping “substance,” its appearance depends on who’s looking and what they’re expecting to see. Moses was stunned to encounter a burning bush that spoke to him. On October 13, 1917, three children near Fatima, Portugal, saw the Virgin Mary, while tens of thousands of others who were present witnessed anomalous lights and atmospheric effects that seem very much like what we’d today describe as a UFO.

Hermeticism may sound like a dualistic concept, with the One Mind and the One Thing being starkly different from each other... but that’s only because [C] is beyond human comprehension, so it’s just described in two forms that are easier to grok. That is, the One Mind only has the appearance of being different from the One Thing. Similarly, personal consciousness, [c], is not separate from the physical world. In other words, from the Hermetic perspective reality is not just physical, it’s psychophysical. This interaction is commonly studied in the form of mind-body connections within the mainstream scientific disciplines of psychoneuroimmunology, psychophysiology, and the neurosciences. It’s also the basis of psychosomatic medicine and the placebo effect. But when [c] influences the physical world outside of the body, which it can do because [c] has properties similar to [C], then that’s called magic.

Hermeticism was considered heretical by the Church because it asserts that all humans have an inherent spark of divine power within us. That is, we have Godlike abilities because [c] is a part of [C]. As a result, from the Hermeticist’s perspective there were no special benefits conferred by following someone else’s dogma, because each of us could achieve enlightenment on our own. As you may imagine, such insolence was unacceptable, so the Church applied its well-honed strategy for maintaining control, and like Neoplatonism and Gnosticism,

Hermeticism was forced to go underground. Hermeticism was rediscovered in the fifteenth century largely due to the efforts of Prince Cosimo de Medici of Florence, Italy, and that was allowed to happen only after the Church’s millennium-old stranglehold on scholarship began to loosen. At this point an important figure enters the picture: Marsilio Ficino, head of the Florentine Academy. Ficino was commissioned by de Medici to translate a set of seventeen ancient manuscripts that had been found in the Middle East.

Ficino’s translation, subsequently called the Corpus Hermeticum and published in 1471, thrilled scholars who were in the process of rediscovering the ancient Greek, Egyptian, and Jewish traditions, all of which were thought to predate the Church. The Corpus Hermeticum manuscripts were originally imagined to be ancient, harking back to the time of Plato or even before the Greek philosophers, but modern scholars now consider them most likely to be a combination of ideas from Egypt and Greece from the first and second centuries.

In Ficino’s day, the excitement over these manuscripts was due to the belief that Hermes Trismegistus might have been a contemporary of Moses, or maybe he was Moses. In either case, scholars hoped that the translations might reveal an ancient wisdom that preceded the Bible, because if that knowledge were brought to light it could demonstrate the long-fabled dream of a prisca theologia, or first true religion, and that in turn might break the Church’s domination of acceptable scholarship and allow fresh ideas to flourish.

Another promise was that the Corpus Hermeticum might be able to liberate long-suppressed prohibitions against the study of magic. Scholars reasoned that if the Church’s doctrine was found to be compatible with much older ideas, then the magical concepts within Hermeticism should also be allowed to be studied. Unfortunately, their hopes did not pan out because by then the Protestant Reformation had all but eliminated the magical rituals popular in Catholicism, such as the Eucharist. And that in turn forced Hermeticism to retreat even further into the background.

But Ficino’s translation was not forgotten. Ficino was one of the first to popularize the idea that there was an ancient secret wisdom at the core of all the world’s religions. This philosophia perennis would be the fundamental, first-principles truth around which the whole universe revolved. This idea was so appealing that it never faded away. The search for this particular holy grail can be found in today’s physics in the form of the many proposed Theories of Everything. Trying to develop a fundamental theory that explains everything remains the obsession of thousands of scientists who, like the esoteric scholars of the Middle Ages, hold the conviction that there must be one “secret truth,” or key principle, underlying all of reality.

One of Ficino’s students, Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), later added portions of the Jewish Kabbalah to Hermeticism. The Kabbalah was an ancient cosmology even in Pico della Mirandola’s time, based on sephiroth or spheres of “cosmic vibration” that connect the transcendent divine with the everyday world. The Hebrew word kabbalah means “to receive,” as in “received wisdom.” It refers to the Jewish mystical tradition discussed in texts such as the Zohar, a commentary on the Hebrew Bible.

Pico della Mirandola’s analysis of the Kabbalah proposed not only that Christianity was contained within pagan beliefs but also that it was part of the secret tradition of Kabbalah that (tradition tells us) Moses received on his second expedition up Mount Sinai. Like Ficino before him, Pico della Mirandola was motivated by a search for the prisca theologia. He claimed that his Hermetic-Kabbalistic synthesis, consisting of twenty-six “magical conclusions,” did the trick.

Incidentally, the Kabbalistic text known as the Sepher Yezirah (Book of the Creation) describes a cosmology that some scholars claim is identical to the Emerald Tablet, another key source of the Hermetic tradition. The Corpus Hermeticum is said by some to expand on principles written (in extremely compact form) on the Emerald Tablet.

Like other esotericists in the Middle Ages, Pico della Mirandola was nervous about attracting unwanted attention from the Church, so he described his magical synthesis as “the practical part of natural science.” This strategy was an attempt to separate magic from religious concepts and place it firmly within the bounds of the natural world. Pico della Mirandola’s synthesis was part of a long line of syncretic efforts, meaning a fusion of different religious ideas. Examples of popular syncretic rituals include Valentine’s Day, Halloween, Easter, and Christmas. All of these holidays are hybrids based on a blending of pagan and Christian rituals.

Ficino and Pico della Mirandola’s work sparked a flood of new combinations and syntheses of the esoteric traditions, many of which were instrumental in the development of the early sciences. A few of the key magician-scientists during this period were German scholar Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, English mathematician John Dee, Italian friar Giordano Bruno, and Swiss physician Paracelsus. These and many other individuals made the study of magic part of the scientific mainstream during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Briefly, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) wrote his first and most famous work on magic in 1510. Entitled De occulta philosophia (Occult Philosophy), the book was based on a Christian Kabbalistic framework. John Dee (1527–1609), adviser to Queen Elizabeth I, combined the study of the natural sciences with magical evocations aimed at establishing contact with spirits from (what he called) the angelic realm. Italian philosopher, mathematician, and Dominican friar Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) was attracted to Neoplatonic and Hermetic ideas. In his 1584 work, De l’infinito, universo e mondi (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds), he proposed that the universe contained an infinite number of worlds and that these were all inhabited by intelligent beings.38 This idea flatly contradicted Church dogma, and Bruno paid the ultimate price for his heresy.

Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (1493–1541), who called himself Paracelsus because it took too long to say his whole name, was one of the first modern medical theorists, the founder of homeopathy, and a pioneer in wound surgery. Paracelsus stressed that exercise of the imagination was the beginning of all magical operations. For the youth of the early twenty-first century, Paracelsus is perhaps better known as a character on one of the collectible Chocolate Frog Cards in the Harry Potter novels.

from Real Magic by Dean Rodin, pp. 35-54 and from The Science of Magic by Dean Rodin, pp. 7 and 12