The Notion of "Occult Sciences" in the Wake of the Enlightenment

WOUTER J. HANEGRAAFF The Notion of “Occult Sciences” in the Wake of the Enlightenment Modern scholars in the study of Western esotericism often use the notion of ‘occult sciences’ as a convenient umbrella category that covers at least magic, astrology and alchemy, and is often expanded to also include various arts of divination and even witchcraft. However, the terminology is not uncontested. In an important recent volume edited by two of the most influential contemporary scholars in the study of alchemy and astrology, William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton, the concept of ‘occult sciences’ has been criticised as a misleading 19th-century invention that causes us to neglect the relative autonomy of astrology and alchemy through most of their histories. Newman and Grafton attribute the idea of a close coherence between alchemy, astrology and magic to the influence of the Renaissance concept of philosophia occulta, but emphasise that, in fact, “even during the heyday of Renaissance neoplatonism, astrology and alchemy lived independent lives, despite the vast inkwells devoted to the rhetorical embellishment of occult philosophy”.1 In his study Promethean Ambitions of 2004, Newman goes even a step further, claiming that “the hackneyed modern view that automatically equates alchemy with witchcraft, necromancy and a potpourri of other practices and theories loosely labeled ‘the occult’ has little historical validity before the nineteenth century”.2 This criticism is part of a larger argument that is central to the so-called ‘new historiography’ of alchemy. Generally speaking, specialists like William Newman and Lawrence Principe are fighting against a double legacy that derives from the 19th century. On the one hand, they reject the idea (popularised by 19th-century occultism and by Carl Gustav Jung and his school) that alchemy is not really science but rather a ‘spiritual’ discipline; and on the other hand, they reject the positivist idea that alchemy is not science but pseudo-science or superstition. Both traditional approaches deny any scientific status to alchemy. In sharp contrast, Newman and Principe argue that alchemy in the early modern period was a 1 2 William R. Newman, Anthony Grafton: Introduction. The Problematic Status of Astrology and Alchemy in Premodern Europe. In: Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe. Ed. by William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton. Cambridge, MA, London 2001, pp. 1–37, here p. 26. William R. Newman: Promethean Ambitions. Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature. Chicago, London 2004, p. 54. 2 perfectly acceptable part of current scientific discourse and practice, and should not be set apart from ‘normal science’ by putting it in a special ‘occult’ category.3 Regarding the history of astrology, one finds very similar defenses of its ‘scientific’ character by specialists from Lynn Thorndike to David Pingree, who emphasise that classical astrology was grounded in a concept of universal, immutable natural law. In Pingree’s formulation, astrology was the supreme attempt made in antiquity to create in a rigorous form a causal model of the kosmos, one in which the eternally repeating rotations of the celestial bodies, together with their varying but periodically recurring interrelationships, produce all changes in the sublunar world […] Ancient Greek astrology in its strictest interpretation was the most comprehensive scientific theory of antiquity, providing through the application of the mathematical models appropriate to it predictions of all changes that take place in the world of cause and effect.4 What these modern approaches to alchemy and astrology have in common is not just their emphasis on science, but also an insistence on understanding phenomena like astrology or alchemy from a strictly historical perspective by studying the sources within their own context. They react against the ‘whiggish’ drift of 19thcentury positivist historiography rooted in Enlightenment ideologies, which commit the anachronistic fallacy of projecting modern concepts back into previous periods. In the case of alchemy, they also react against 19th-century occultist perspectives that see alchemy as concerned mainly with the ‘spiritual’, and particularly against the development of that idea in the approaches inspired by Carl Gustav Jung, that became extremely influential in the study of alchemy after World War II. The notion of ‘occult sciences’ has clearly become a contentious matter in the wake of Newman and Grafton; and because we are dealing here with a central concept in the study of Western esotericism, it is important to clarify the issue. In this contribution I will first go back into history to explore the origins of the terminology. Next I will discuss how traditional understandings of ‘occult sciences’ were reconceptualised in the period of the Enlightenment. And finally, against those backgrounds, I will come back to the present, focusing in particular on the very recent debate between William R. Newman and the most vocal contemporary defender of the notion of ‘occult sciences’, Brian Vickers. ! " For the details of these debates, see Wouter J. Hanegraaff: Esotericism and the Academy. Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. Cambridge 2012, Chapter Three. David Pingree: Hellenophilia versus the History of Science. In: Isis 83/4 (1992), pp. 554–563, here p. 560. This does not mean that Pingree believes astrology is true: “on the contrary, I believe it to be totally false” (ibid., p. 559). 3 History of the terminology The concept of ‘occult sciences’ can only be understood if we begin with the notion that magic is a kind of ‘science’, that is to say: with the concept of magia naturalis. In the ancient Greek context, mageia could originally have a positive connotation as “worship of the gods“, but it rapidly acquired negative connotations.5 In Christian culture up to the 13th century, the notion of magic was dominated entirely by its negative connotations with the sinister or threatening, demonridden or simply fraudulent practices attributed to ‘others’. As summarised by Richard Kieckhefer: Up through the twelfth century, if you asked a theologian what magic was you were likely to hear that demons began it and were always involved in it. You would also be likely to get a catalogue of different forms of magic, and most of the varieties would be species of divination.6 Astrology was, of course, one of the main disciplines that were seen as belonging to the latter category. As a divinatory art and as a practice linked to traditional understandings of the heavenly bodies as living and divine beings, it was usually seen, as early as Roman antiquity, as falling under the negative umbrellas of magia and superstitio, and more specifically, that of superstitio observationis.7 Patristic polemics against astrology largely focused on fatalism, which was seen as incompatible with the notion of free will, and this would remain an important issue through the middle ages.8 But already in Tertullian’s De idolatria, astrology was presented as a species falling under the more general genus of magic, and # $ % & Albert de Jong: Traditions of the Magi: Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin Literature. Leiden, New York, Köln 1997, pp. 387–394, here pp. 387f.; and, in more detail, idem: The Contribution of the Magi. In: Birth of the Persian Empire. Ed. by Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis, Sarah Stewart. Vol. 1. London, New York 2005, pp. 85–97, here pp. 85–88. See also Fritz Graf: Gottesnähe und Schadenzauber. Die Magie in der griechisch-römischen Antike. München 1996, pp. 24f.; Jan N. Bremmer: The Birth of the Term “Magic“. In: Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 126 (1999), pp. 1–12; and the updated version: Persian Magoi and the Birth of the Term “Magic”. In: Jan N. Bremmer: Greek Religion and Culture, the Bible and the Ancient Near East. Leiden, Boston 2008, pp. 235–247, plus separate appendix “Magic and Religion” in the same volume, pp. 347–352. A particularly useful discussion of early Greek terminologies is Matthew W. Dickie: Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World. London, New York 2001, pp. 12–16, who emphasises that persons called “goetes“, “epodoi“, “magoi” and “pharmakeis” may originally have pursued distinct callings, but the terms had become wholly interchangeable by the 5th century BCE. Richard Kieckhefer: Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge 1989, pp. 10f. Dieter Harmening: Superstitio. Überlieferungs- und theoriegeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur kirchlich-theologischen Aberglaubensliteratur des Mittelalters. Berlin 1979. Kocku von Stuckrad: Das Ringen um die Astrologie. Jüdische und christliche Beiträge zum antiken Zeitverständnis. Berlin, New York 2000, pp. 771–782; M. L. W. Laistner: The Western Church and Astrology during the Middle Ages. In: Harvard Theological Review 34/4 (1941), pp. 312–343. 4 condemned as an idolatrous practice invented by the fallen angels.9 From the fourth century on, with the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Empire, these understandings of astrology as a form of superstition and idolatrous magic became dominant, at least in the Latin West.10 One often reads that astrology was hardly ever condemned during the middle ages, but this is misleading: in fact, it was very often condemned indirectly, as part of the larger rubric of superstition. The decisive change in these traditional understandings of magic and astrology, which would eventually affect alchemy as well, occurred around the 13th century, with the emergence of the concept of magia naturalis. When late medieval intellectuals began to rediscover the treasures of ancient science from the Islamic libraries, they naturally needed to find a way to legitimate the serious study of such subjects in spite of their common association with superstition and demonic magic. Fortunately for them, they could profit from a terminological loophole that had been opened by Isidore of Sevilla in his extremely authoritative Etymologiae. Although Isidore, too, had ranged the various kinds of divination under “magic” and condemned all of them as involving contact with demons,11 in his section on “astronomy” he had also distinguished between astrologia superstitiosa and an acceptable astrologia naturalis.12 Only a very small step was required to apply a similar distinction to the category of magic as a whole, and argue that the demonridden and idolatrous practices known under that name should not be confused with the legitimate study of the workings of nature: magia naturalis. This new term should therefore not be understood as an attempt to present magic as scien- ' 10 11 () Tertullian: De idolatria 9.1–2 and especially 7–8. For the suppression of astrology by the Christian church, see von Stuckrad: Das Ringen (see note 8), pp. 767–800 (and for the association of astrology with magic, esp. pp. 782–787, 791, 794–797). For the period from Constantine to the end of the 9th century, see Laistner: Western Church and Astrology (see note 8). Against the traditional thesis that Christianity was hostile to astrology from the very beginning (Wilhelm Gundel, Hans Georg Gundel: Astrologumena. Die astrologische Literatur in der Antike und ihre Geschichte. Wiesbaden 1966, p. 332; Dieter Blume: Regenten des Himmels. Astrologische Bilder in Mittelalter und Renaissance. Berlin 2000, p. 8; cf. von Stuckrad: Das Ringen [see note 8], p. 767) von Stuckrad emphasises the plurality of Christianities before Constantine, concentrating on astrology in Gnostic and Manichaean contexts (implicitly confirming the wholly negative attitude among what eventually became mainstream or “centrist” Christianity). Thorndike’s thesis that during the Middle Ages “even the most educated men believed in astrology” (Lynn Thorndike: The Place of Magic in the Intellectual History of Europe. New York 1905, p. 5) is mildly misleading since the revival of astrology happened only with the translations from Arabic sources in the later middle ages (cf. Lynn Thorndike: A History of Magic and Experimental Science. New York 1923. Vol. 1, pp. 551–782). Isidore of Sevilla: Etymologiae 8. 9; cf. Kieckhefer: Magic in the Middle Ages (see note 6), p. 11. Isidore of Sevilla: Etymologiae 3. 27; cf. Jim Tester: A History of Western Astrology. Rochester 1987, pp. 124ff.; von Stuckrad: Geschichte der Astrologie. Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. München 2003, pp. 187f. 5 tific! On the contrary, magia naturalis was an apologetic concept intended to protect the study of the ancient sciences against theological censure. Now, to understand this new concept of magia naturalis, we need to take a closer look at the concept of ‘occult qualities’, and here too, the first step is to go back to its roots in antiquity. At the very origin of the terminology, we find the common recognition that there are certain forces and connections in nature that remain invisible or ‘hidden’, and are bound to strike us as mysterious because they are hard to account for in rational terms. In Greek antiquity, such ‘hidden’ forces were discussed notably in terms of the concepts of !"#$µ%& and ἐ#'()*%$ (to which we owe our ‘dynamics’ and ‘energy’), +"µ,-.*%$ and ἀ#/%,-.*%$ (sympathy and antipathy), and the peculiar notion of ἰ!%0/1/*& ἄ((1/2% (literally meaning ‘unspeakable qualities’).13 This notion seems to have been used more exclusively than the other terms for forces in nature that we would nowadays tend to see as ‘occult’; and it was probably as a translation of this specific terminology that the crucial medieval concept of qualitates occultae (occult qualities) emerged in a scholastic context during the middle ages, closely connected with the peripatetic concept of “substantial form“.14 The key importance of ‘occult qualities’ to the history of science has been clearly demonstrated in recent scholarship, and almost every contributor has warned against anachronistic confusion with modern ideas about ‘the occult’ or ‘occultism’.15 In the medieval reception of Aristotelian natural philosophy, a dis13 14 15 The indispensable reference, with copious quotations for all the relevant terms, remains Julius Röhr: Der okkulte Kraftbegriff im Altertum. Philologus Supplementband 17, Heft 1. Leipzig 1923. Röhr: Der okkulte Kraftbegriff (see note 13), p. 96, 105 (notwithstanding Röhr’s careful distinctions between ‘qualitas’, ‘potentia’, and ‘proprietas occulta’). See Brian P. Copenhaver (The Occultist Tradition and its Critics. In: The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Ed. by Daniel Garber, Michael Ayers. Vol. 1. Cambridge 1998, pp. 454–512, here p. 459) for how the concepts of ἰ!%0/1/*& ἄ((1/2% and ‘substantial form’ came to be connected by Galen and his followers. On Thomas Aquinas and substantial form, cf. Paul Richard Blum: Qualitates occultae: Zur philosophischen Vorgeschichte eines Schlüsselbegriffs zwischen Okkultismus und Wissenschaft. In: Die okkulten Wissenschaften in der Renaissance. Ed. by August Buck. Wiesbaden 1992, pp. 45–64, here pp. 50f. As observed by Ignaz Wild in his pioneering article of 1906 (mostly consisting of quotations from Latin sources), “in the 18th century […] the true meaning of the expression [qualitates occultae] was no longer known, and misguided opinions are still reflected in current historiography” (Ignaz Wild: Zur Geschichte der Qualitates Occultae. In: Jahrbuch für Philosophie und spekulative Theologie 20 [1906], pp. 307–345, here p. 344). Few specialists of scholasticism even knew the expression, except as a “scientific term of abuse” (ibid., pp. 307f.). Although Lynn Thorndike discussed the role of “occult virtues” in all the eight volumes of his magnum opus, they were put back on the agenda due to a provocative article by Keith Hutchison in 1982 (Keith Hutchison: What happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution? In: Isis 73 [1982], pp. 233–253), followed by John Henry in 1986 (John Henry: Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy: Active Principles in Pre-Newtonian Matter Theory. In: History of Science 24 [1986], pp. 335–381), both focused on the scientific revolution. Fundamental for the medieval context are two articles by Paul Richard Blum published in 1989 and 1992 (Paul Richard Blum: Qualitas occulta. In: Historisches Wörterbuch 6 tinction was made between the manifest, directly observable qualities of things (such as colors or tastes), and their occult qualities, which were not directly observable and therefore could not be accounted for in terms of the four elements. Many important natural effects of which the reality was not in doubt – such as magnetic and electrostatic attraction, the curative virtues of specific herbal, animal or mineral substances, or the influences of the sun and moon – were impossible to account for in terms of the primary elemental qualities (moist/dry, warm/cold) and their mixtures or combinations. Their efficient cause therefore had to be some ‘hidden’ (occult) quality: hidden not only because the senses could not perceive it, but even more importantly, because it was beyond the reach of scientific investigation altogether. By definition, occult qualities could not be scientifically accessed: they could only be studied indirectly through their effects, but not directly as causes, as required by medieval scientia. This made them into the black box of scholastic science: a necessary part of the technical apparatus, but also a reminder that God had set limits to man’s curiosity.16 Now, the concept of qualitas occulta came to play a key role in the project of emancipating the ancient sciences from the domain of superstitio, and legitimating them as magia naturalis. The reason is that it provided a cogent scientific argument for claiming that many ‘wondrous’ or ‘marvellous’ phenomena of nature, which the common people tended to attribute to demonic or supernatural agency, were in fact purely natural. Again: far from suggesting an ‘occultist’ worldview according to modern understandings of that term, the notion of qualitas occulta der Philosophie. Ed. by Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer. Vol. 7. Darmstadt 1989, pp. 1743–1748; and idem: Qualitates occultae [see note 14]). Important recent contributions are Christoph Meinel: Okkulte und exakte Wissenschaften. In: Buck (ed.): Wissenschaften (see note 14), pp. 21–43; Ron Millen: The Manifestation of Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution. In: Religion, Science, and Worldview: Essays in Honor of Richard S. Westfall. Ed. by Margaret J. Osler and Paul Lawrence Farber. Cambridge 1985, pp. 185–216; and Copenhaver: The Occultist Tradition (see note 14). For a general overview of the terminological problematics, see Wouter J. Hanegraaff: Occult/Occultism. In: Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Ed. by Wouter J. Hanegraaff in collaboration with Antoine Faivre, Roelof van den Broek and Jean-Pierre Brach. Leiden, Boston 2005, pp. 884–889. A parallel and previously neglected alchemical tradition concerning occult/manifest is analysed in William R. Newman: The Occult and the Manifest among the Alchemists. In: Tradition, Transmission, Transformation. Proceedings of Two Conferences on Pre-Modern Science held at the University of Oklahoma. Ed. by F. Jamil Ragep, Sally P. Ragep. Leiden, New York, Köln 1996, pp. 173–198. In his seminal article of 1982 (What happened to Occult Qualities [see note 15]), Keith Hutchison argued that not the concept of qualitates occultae as such, but their banishment into the category of the unknowable by definition, i.e. their confinement in an “asylum of ignorance“, as famously formulated by Julius Caesar Scaliger in 1557 and often repeated since then; see Blum: Qualitates occultae (see note 14), p. 58 and note 44f., was unacceptable to the new science of the 17th century. Far from rejecting occult qualities, as has traditionally been assumed by historians of science, philosophers and scientists in the wake of Descartes were arguing that they could and should be made into an object of research, and sought to account for them in mechanical terms. Even more than that, they rejected ‘manifest qualities’ and argued that all qualities were occult, but nevertheless knowable! 16 7 was therefore originally an instrument for disenchantment, used to withdraw the realm of the marvellous from theological control and make it available for scientific study. However, to theological critics the concept might look like a Trojan horse. It could account for unquestionable realities in nature, such as magnetic attraction or the connection between the moon and the tides, but it could be used quite as easily to legitimate more questionable influences, such as those emanating from the stars – not to mention an enormous range of other ‘occult’ powers, such as the evil eye, monstrous births caused by the influence of the mother’s imagination on the fetus, or ‘sympathetic’ cures at distance, like the famous weapon salve.17 In principle, by referring to the notion of ‘occult qualities’, all these strange and marvellous phenomena could now be seen as legitimate parts of natural science, and they did indeed become a major preoccupation of scientists in the early modern period. The emergence of the concepts of ‘occult philosophy’ and the ‘occult sciences’ during the 16th century becomes not just understandable, but almost predictable against these backgrounds. In the wake of the Platonic revival, the original concept of magia naturalis was expanded and transformed into a much more all-encompassing and explicitly religious prisca magia, with Agrippa’s great compendium as the paradigmatic example. From that perspective, magic was understood as neither demonic nor purely natural, but as the ancient religious wisdom that had been proclaimed by its inventor Zoroaster. Furthermore, particularly under the influence of Pico della Mirandola and his Christian kabbalah, references to secrecy and concealment became increasingly prominent within the same discourse of ancient wisdom, culminating, again, in Agrippa’s notion of occulta philosophia:18 the 17 18 For a provocative discussion of Renaissance magic focused particularly on these dimensions, see Ioan P. Couliano: Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. Chicago, London 1987. On the powers attributed to the imaginatio, see Marieke van den Doel, Wouter J. Hanegraaff: Imagination. In: Dictionary of Gnosis (see note 15), pp. 606–616. For the ‘sympathetic’ cure and its remarkable tenacity in serious medical debate, see e.g. Juliette van den Elsen: The Rotterdam Sympathy Case (1696–1697). A Window on the Late Seventeenth-Century Philosophical Discourse. In: Aries. Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 2/1 (2002), pp. 34–56. The most famous example of sympathetic treatment was the weapon salve, e.g. the belief that wounds could be cured at distance by treating the weapon that had caused them; but it could take many other forms, as in the controversy of 1696–1697 (analysed by van den Elsen) around Henricus Georgius Reddewitz, who claimed to have cured patients in their absence, by stirring a ‘secret powder’ in their urine. See especially the extremely popular book by Kenelm Digby: Discours fait en une celèbre assemblée par le chevalier Digby touchant la guerison des playes par la poudre de sympathie où sa composition est enseignée, & plusieurs autres merveilles de la nature sont développées. Paris 1658 (twenty-nine editions in five languages; cf. Thorndike: History [see note 10]. Vol. 7, pp. 498–512; Copenhaver: The Occultist Tradition [see note 14], pp. 480ff.). The term ‘occulta philosophia’ was picked up by various authors later in the 16th century: a pseudo-Paracelsian Occulta philosophia was printed in 1570, followed by several other works under that title, and by 1600 the term was also commonly used as a synonym for alchemy (Joachim Telle: Astrologie und Alchemie im 16. Jahrhundert. Zu den astroalchemischen Lehrdichtungen von Christoph von Hirschenberg und Basilius Valentinus. In: Die okkulten 8 hidden philosophy of the ancients, now revealed to the Christian world. And finally, Pico was at the origin of a strong Renaissance revival of ‘correlative thinking’, focusing on the notion of hidden non-causal correspondences between all parts of reality.19 It was practically inevitable that the traditional notion of mysterious ‘hidden’ powers that are somehow ‘secretly’ at work in nature would now be expanded and transformed, together with the original notion of magia naturalis, so that from the black box of scholastic naturalism, the ‘occult qualities’ became the privileged sanctuary of divine mystery in the world. This subtle but important process of conceptual transformation amounted, in other words, to a re-enchantment of magia naturalis. How the term ‘occult’ could transmute from technical scholastic terminology into something closer to current understandings of the word may be illustrated at many examples. For instance, Giovanni della Porta, in his books on Magia Naturalis, discussed the occult qualities as follows: They are occult and hidden because they cannot be known with certainty by way of demonstration. This is why the ancient sages considered it good to establish a certain limit, beyond which one cannot pass in researching the reasons of things. In Nature there are many inner sanctuaries, hidden and full of energy, whose causes the conjecture of the human mind can neither search out nor understand. For Nature is obscure and full of a hidden majesty, which one should better admire rather than wish to penetrate.20 Even more instructive is the work of a minor but representative 16th-century poet, mythographer, cryptographer, Christian kabbalist, and alchemist, Blaise de Vigenère (1523–1596). Throughout his Traicté des chiffres (1586), the term ‘occult’ is used according to its normal dictionary sense, whenever de Vigenère is Wissenschaften [see note 14], pp. 227–243, here pp. 242f., with note 64). It also appears e.g. in the subtitle of Campanella’s De sensu rerum et magia. Concepts of ‘occult causality’ assume the existence of some kind of hidden medium by which influences are transmitted from cause to effect (for example al-Kindi’s “rays”), whereas concepts of ‘correspondence’ assume that things can be connected by some kind of preestablished harmony, without a need for mediating forces (see e.g. Plotinus: Ennead 4.4.41– 42). Already in Ficino’s De Vita Coelitus Comparanda we find mixtures between the two concepts (Carol V. Kaske, John R. Clark: Introduction. In: Marsilio Ficino: Three Books on Life. A Critical Edition and Translation with Introduction and Notes. Binghamton 1989, pp. 3– 90, here pp. 48f.), and ‘correlative thinking’ became a fundamental notion in the ‘occulta philosophia’ since Pico della Mirandola (Steven A. Farmer: Syncretism in the West. Pico’s 900 Theses [1486]. The Evolution of Traditional Religious and Philosophical Systems. Tempe 1998, pp. 18–29, 91–96; cf. Jean-Pierre Brach, Wouter J. Hanegraaff: Correspondences. In: Dictionary of Gnosis (see note 15), pp. 275–279. Of particular importance in that context was the Renaissance revival of arithmology started by Pico and Reuchlin (Jean-Pierre Brach: Mathematical Esotericism. In: Hermes in the Academy. Ten Years’ Study of Western Esotericism at the University of Amsterdam. Ed. by Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Joyce Pijnenburg. Amsterdam 2009, pp. 75–89; and idem.: Number Symbolism. In: Dictionary of Gnosis [see note 15], pp. 874–883). Io. Baptista Porta: Magia naturalis, sive de miraculis rerum naturalium, Libri IIII. Antwerp 1560, pp. 7f. Here and in the rest of the article, all translations from foreign languages are by the author. 19 20 9 referring to his main topic, ‘secret writing’ by means of codes or ciphers. However, he also uses it to refer to qualitates occultae, and more generally to the “most occult and intimate secrets of nature.”21 In using that formulation, he was merely repeating the common medieval topos of secretae naturae;22 but of considerable importance is the fact that De Vigenère may well have been the first author to refer to sciences concerned with those secrets of nature explicitly as “occult sciences”.23 He does this within a more general context entirely dominated by the ancient wisdom narrative of the Renaissance and its central authors; and under the explicit influence of Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia, the term ‘occult’ now suggested religious mysteries hidden from the vulgar but revealed to the wise as “higher knowledge“.24 From that perspective, kabbalah, magic, and alchemy were presented by de Vigenère as the three “occult and secret sciences” (occasionally also “mystical sciences”25), and he was evidently thinking of them in terms of Agrippa’s “three worlds”: May nobody be scandalised by these appellations, which have such a bad reputation everywhere, and are so much abused. Rather, I will give them other names: that of the elemental science, the celestial one, and the super-mundane or intelligible one.26 A similar process of re-enchantment took place in alchemy, again focused on the notion of occult qualities. As shown by Barbara Obrist, the very fact that the 21 22 23 24 25 26 Blaise de Vigenère: Traicté des Chiffres, ou secretes manieres d’escrire. Paris 1586, fol. 7v (the “occulte proprieté” of magnetism as an analogy for family cohesion), 17v, 27r–v, referring to a quotation in Giorgi da Veneto about a “very occult and hidden [caché] spirit” by which metals are connected to a superior force of “life”, 66v, 106r–v (alchemical), 143v. William Eamon: Science and the Secrets of Nature. Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Princeton 1994; apart from the technical term qualitas occulta, “occultus” according to its normal dictionary meaning was used along with equivalent terms such as arcanum, secretum et cetera. De Vigenère: Traicté des Chiffres (see note 21), fol. 18v (“the occult and secret sciences, buried [ensevelies] at present”), 77r (on “the three worlds, of which the three occult sciences are the key”), 112r (“one must turn to the Prophets to encounter the true sources of all the philosophies and occult sciences”), 340r (reference to Antonio de Fantis as a “person of high renown in all the occult sciences”). That the term “occult sciences” originated with de Vigenère is suggested, although not explicitly stated, by François Secret: De “De occulta philosophia” à l’occultisme du XIXe siècle. In: Charis. Archives de l’Unicorne 1 (1988), pp. 5– 30, here p. 7. De Vigenère: Traicté des Chiffres (see note 21), fol. 37v, 39r, 45r, 59v. The term “occult philosophy” is used regularly, evidently in Agrippa’s sense. In line with original connections of ‘mystical’ with ‘secret’: see Louis Bouyer: Mysticism. An Essay on the History of the Word. In: Understanding Mysticism. Ed. by Richard Woods. Garden City, New York 1980, pp. 42–55, here p. 43. De Vigenère: Traicté des Chiffres (see note 21), fol. 19r. De Vigenère is a sloppy writer, and evidently the order of the three sciences is meant to be reversed: alchemy belongs to the world of the elements, “magic” is understood here as pertaining to the celestial world, and kabbalah to the supercelestial world. On 128v, De Vigenère defends his use of the term “magic” for the celestial world, describing it as “the natural and licit occult philosophy: definitely not that detestable acquaintance and commerce of evil spirits that one has wanted to colour with the name of magic, where there are only shadows and confusion.” 10 qualitates occultae were considered inaccessible to the human intellect led to the idea, as early as the second half of the 13th century, that they could be accessed by means of other and ‘higher’ faculties for gaining knowledge: those of direct intuition or divine revelation.27 To have any chance at achieving certain knowledge in the domain of alchemy, one needed to submit oneself to the divine truth by means of faith. The new status of alchemy from such a perspective, as explained by Obrist, is shown exemplarily in Petrus Bonus of Ferrara’s Pretiosa margarita novella (The New Pearl of Great Price) from the first part of the 14th century, which states explicitly that alchemy is “partly natural and partly divine or supernatural” and speaks of an invisible “divine hidden stone” (lapis divinus occultus) that is indispensable for completing the Great Work. This stone cannot be apprehended by the human intellect but can only be known through divine inspiration or revelation, and is what enabled the ancient sages to prophesy.28 Religious interpretations of ‘occult qualities’ therefore existed already by the 14th century, and the notion of occult sciences is not a 19th-century invention. It emerged in the specific context of the Renaissance discourse of ancient wisdom, and reflected the project of a synthetic occulta philosophia more in particular. It is of critical importance to understand that, in this framework, it was much more than just a pragmatic umbrella category for covering a range of otherwise diverse and relatively autonomous sciences. On the contrary: from the outset, the term implied an underlying, ‘hidden’ unity and coherence, ultimately grounded in the ‘ancient wisdom’ (of Hermes Trismegistus in particular). Seen merely ‘from the outside’, the domains of magic, astrology, kabbalah, and alchemy might look like relatively distinct disciplines; however, referring to them as ‘occult sciences’ carried the deliberate suggestion that they were unified at a deeper level, because they reflected one and the same, comprehensive, hidden, but universal knowledge about the true nature of reality. A particularly clear example of this perspective comes from the Paracelsian Gérard Dorn (1584): Adam was the first inventor of the artes, because he possessed knowledge of all things, both before and after the Flood. […] His successors drew up two stone tablets, on which they inscribed all the natural arts, in hieroglyphic characters. […] After the Flood, Noah […] found one of these tablets under mount Ararat. It showed the course of the superior firmament, and of the inferior globe, and of the planets. Finally, being divided into different parts, this universal knowledge was diminished in power, and as an effect of this separation, one [person] became an astronomer, another a magus, yet another one a kabbalist, and the fourth an alchemist. […] The monarchy of the true artes was divided up into diverse and various democracies, that is, into astronomy, magic, kabbalah, alchemy, etcetera. But in their perfect form they all came 27 28 Barbara Obrist: Les rapports d’analogie entre philosophie et alchimie médiévales. In: Alchimie et philosophie à la Renaissance. Ed. by Jean-Claude Margolin and Sylvain Matton. Paris 1993, pp. 43–64, here pp. 52ff. Of course, this is another example of the ‘re-enchantment’ of the qualitates occultae discussed earlier. Petrus Bonus: Pretiosa Margarita Novella de thesauro, ac pretiotissimo philosophorum lapide. Venice 1557, pp. 38r–39r; and Obrist: Les rapports (see note 27), pp. 56f. 11 from one single fountain of truth, and from the knowledge of the two lights, natural and supernatural.29 The Enlightenment Enlightenment understandings of the ‘occult sciences’ were derived straight from such Renaissance concepts, and precisely the unifying perspective is the key to understanding their eventual rejection. The concept of ‘occult sciences’ as one integrated unity made it possible for rationalists to oppose them wholesale against the ‘real’ sciences. In this argument, ‘magic’ usually became an equivalent of ‘occult science’ and was opposed to real science and physics; astrology stood against astronomy; and alchemy against chemistry. The well-known success of this line of argumentation in intellectual and academic discussion since the end of the 17th century has, however, much less to do with strict scientific arguments than is usually assumed. For example, scientists seldom bothered to refute astrology at all. Historians of astrology are sometimes puzzled by this fact, and find it a mystery that astrology got so universally rejected without ever having been refuted; but their puzzlement may well have to do with an ‘internalist’ focus that tends to overlook external factors. Much more important than strictly scientific argumentation was the success of a largely Protestant polemics against paganism, which had gathered steam during the 17th century and specifically targeted the Renaissance belief in an ancient wisdom rooted in the preChristian Oriental cultures such as Egypt, Mesopotamia or Persia.30 In the domain of history of philosophy, this polemic ended up discrediting any type of discourse that used such references to pagan antiquity to legitimate itself. This anti-pagan polemic culminated in the work of the Enlightenment pioneers of the history of philosophy Christoph August Heumann and Jacob Brucker. Heumann’s formulations in his Acta Philosophorum in 1715 are fully representative of the new attitude: in tones of utter contempt and ridicule, he states that “the philosophy the priests studied in paganism, and which is known as philosophiam barbaricam, is necessarily a false and fake philosophy. So adieu, dear Philosophia Chaldaeorum, Persarum, Aegyptiorum, &c, that one usually makes such a fuss about, out of blind veneration of its age.”31 29 30 31 Gérard Dorn: In Theophrasti Paracelsi Aurorum philosophorum, Thesauram, & Mineralem Oeconomiam, Commentaria, et quibusdam Argumentis. Frankfurt a.M. 1584, pp. 10f., 16; Jean-Marc Mandosio: La place de l’alchimie dans les classifications des sciences et des arts à la Renaissance. In: Chrysopoeia 4: 1990–1991 (1993), pp. 199–282, here pp. 280f. On this development, see Hanegraaff: Esotericism and the Academy (see note 3), Chapter Two. Christoph August Heumann: Von denen Kennzeichen der falschen und unächten Philosophie. In: Acta Philosophorum 2 (1715), pp. 179–236, here p. 209 („daß diejenige Philosophie, 12 Brucker still devoted detailed discussions to all the currents in question (which we nowadays study under the rubric of Western esotericism), but only to refute their status as ‘real’ philosophy;32 and accordingly, historians after him saw no more reason to discuss them at any great length in their histories of philosophy. In this manner, academic discourse ended up excluding them as unworthy of serious discussion, and as a result, the field came to be dominated almost entirely by amateur scholars throughout the 19th century. They, too, accepted the thesis of the occult sciences as an integrated unity, opposed against the unity of official science. But from their perspective, the latter could then be dismissed as consisting of relatively superficial pursuits concerned merely with the external surface of things, but blind to their deeper spiritual essence. In this manner, we get the basic 19th-century opposition between positivists legitimating science by pitting it against ‘the occult’, and esotericists legitimating the occult sciences by pitting them against mainstream science. In both cases, we are essentially dealing with the dualistic logic of identity politics: “my perspective is right, for look how wrong its opposite is!”33 That the exclusion of the ‘occult sciences’ did not essentially happen on the basis of scientific argumentation can be shown with particular clarity in the case of alchemy. Newman and Principe have recently reminded us that our terminological distinction between ‘chemistry’ and ‘alchemy’ simply did not exist in the 17th century, and for this reason they propose to use the term ‘chymistry’ as a general term that covers the whole.34 But why then did the polemical opposition of ‘alchemy versus chemistry’ emerge in the 18th century, and why did it become so welche die Pfaffen im Heydenthum getrieben haben, und die man Philosophiam barbaricam nennet, nothwendig eine falsche und unächte Philosophie sey. Adieu demnach, du liebe Philosophia Chaldaeorum, Persarum, Aegyptiorum, etc. davon man insgemein aus blinder veneration der Antiquität so ein grosses Wesen machet“). Cf. idem.: Von der Barbarey, where he splits up “religious barbarism” into “pagan barbarism” (consisting in “tasteless ceremonies, veneration of lifeless creatures, and other irrational and godless things”), “mohammedan barbarism“, and “papist barbarism“. We have been liberated from all this by Luther, the “great Antibarbarum” (Acta Philosophorum 8 [1717], pp. 204–253, here pp. 229f.). Wouter J. Hanegraaff: Philosophy’s Shadow. Jacob Brucker and the History of Thought. In: The Making of the Humanities. Ed. by Rens Bod, Jaap Maat and Thijs Weststeijn. Vol. 1: Early Modern Europe. Amsterdam 2010, pp. 367–384. Gerd Baumann: Grammars of Identity/Alterity. A Structural Approach. In: Grammars of Identity/Alterity. A Structural Approach. Ed. by idem., Andre Gingrich. New York, Oxford 2004, pp. 18–50; and Hanegraaff: Esotericism and the Academy (see note 3), Conclusions. Alan J. Rocke: Agricola, Paracelsus, and “Chymia“. In: Ambix 32/1 (1985), pp. 38–45; JeanMarc Mandosio: Quelques aspects de l’alchimie dans les classifications des sciences et des arts au XVIIe siècle. In: Aspects de la tradition alchimique au XVIIe siècle. Ed. by Frank Greiner. Paris, Milan 1998, pp. 19–61; William R. Newman, Lawrence M. Principe: Alchemy vs. Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a Historiographic Mistake. In: Early Science and Medicine 3 (1998), pp. 32–65. Ferdinando Abbri: Alchemy and Chemistry. Chemical Discourses in the Seventeenth Century. In: Alchemy and Hermeticism. Ed. by Michela Pereira. (Special issue of Early Science and Medicine 5/2 [2000]), pp. 214–226; Robert Halleux: Les textes alchimiques. Turnhout 1979, pp. 47ff. 32 33 34 13 singularly successful? Attempts to answer this question have been surprisingly scarce: if scholars of alchemy refer to it at all, it is usually clear that their thinking stands under the spell of the ‘magic versus science’ dualism, and hence they seldom suggest much more than that alchemy was separated from chemistry due to the rise of experimental science.35 But clearly that will not do. If alchemy did not exist apart from chemistry, even terminologically, then there was no such entity for scientists to reject in the first place! A much more convincing solution has been suggested, almost in passing, by Allen G. Debus in 1985. Discussing the controversy between the anti-paracelsian Hermann Conring and his opponent Olaus Borrichius – which was given wide publicity in the world of science and learning through the Journal des Sçavans and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in the 1660s and 1670s36 – Debus argued that whereas the French chemical textbooks of the 17th century paid scant attention to the historical backgrounds of their discipline, other currents of chymistry, notably the Paracelsians, were marked by a strong interest in presenting themselves as the inheritors of an ancient and venerable tradition going back to Hermes Trismegistus, if not all the way to Adam.37 The approach that would generally come to be known as “alchemy” has been nicely described by M.J. Ehrard in the early 1960s: “When the chymist is not at his furnace and his flasks, he is collationing, with a passion full of respect, the 35 36 37 See e.g. the section on “the separation between chemistry and alchemy” in Halleux: Textes alchimiques (see note 34), pp. 47ff. Newman and Principe note that “in the early eighteenth century, the domain of ‘alchemy’ was for the first time widely restricted to gold making” (Lawrence M. Principe, William R. Newman: Some Problems with the Historiography of Alchemy. In: Secrets of Nature [see note 1], pp. 385–434, here p. 386), but this seems to be an effect of the polemical distinction rather than its fundamental cause. Philosophical Transactions 3 (1668), pp. 779–788; ibid. 10 (1675), pp. 296–301. Journal des sçavans 3 (1675), pp. 209-211. Allen G. Debus: The Significance of Chemical History. In: Ambix 32/1 (1985), pp. 1–14, here p. 3. For suggestions that point into a similar direction, see W. Ganzenmüller: Wandlungen in der geschichtlichen Betrachtung der Alchemie. In: Chymia 3 (1950), pp. 143–154, here p. 152; Halleux: Les Textes alchimiques (see note 34), pp. 50f.; Mandosio: Quelques aspects (see note 34), pp. 21f.; Abbri: Alchemy and Chemistry (see note 34), esp. pp. 218–221, 224. The historiographical tradition begins with the Paracelsian R. Bostocke: The difference between the auncient Phisicke (etc.). London 1585 (see Allen G. Debus: An Elizabethan History of Medical Chemistry. In: Annals of Science 18/1 [1962]; idem.: The Chemical Promise. Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New York 1977, pp. 219– 228). The criticism of such historiographies seems to have begun in 1661 with Ursinus (Ganzenmüller: Wandlungen, p. 145), but the confrontation between Conring and Borrichius has been more important historically. See Halleux (La controverse sur les origines de la chimie, de Paracelsus à Borrichius. In: Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Turonensis. Ed. by Jean-Claude Margolin. Vol. 2. Paris 1980, pp. 807–819, here pp. 812f.) on the initially surprising focus on ancient Hermetic origins even among the followers of Paracelsus, known for his rejection of ancient authorities like Aristotle, Galen or Avicenna. In practice, Paracelsians do not seem to have seen any contradiction: their discipline was considered at least as ancient as whatever could be claimed by their Aristotelian and Galenic rivals, but superior precisely because of its method of studying nature directly instead of learning about it from books. 14 precious texts of the Ancients: his ambition is less that of making science progress than that of recovering a lost secret.”38 The search for the historical origins of ‘chymistry’ became systematic in the 16th and 17th centuries.39 However, in the wake of Isaac Casaubon and the general decline of belief in the prisca theologia, such attitudes of antiquarian scholarship grounded in historiographies of ancient wisdom seem to have turned into a serious liability for Paracelsians and, more generally, for chymists who understood themselves as Filii Hermetis (sons of Hermes). If there was certainly no clear distinction between chymia and alchymia in the early modern period, then, it may be useful to draw a distinction along a different axis: between chymists who thought of themselves primarily as belonging to a learned tradition whose forgotten secrets they tried to recover from the texts and test in the laboratory, and those who saw themselves primarily as experimental scientists and could therefore dispense with a historical pedigree. Both were doing science, but they looked differently at what they were doing, and were perceived differently. The distinction is reminiscent of what would become known, in the terms of C.P. Snow, as the ‘two cultures’ of humanities and sciences in the modern academy: one primarily historical and hermeneutical, the other primarily concerned with direct experimental study of the natural world. It would seem that, by and large, the former trend was discredited along with the general decline of the ancient wisdom narrative of the Renaissance, and was eventually rejected under the label of ‘alchemy’, while the latter trend developed into what we now recognise as ‘chemistry’. That alchemy got separated from chemistry not because of its scientific backwardness but because of its association with ancient genealogies becomes even clearer if we look at what had happened to the discourse of ‘secrecy’ during the 17th century. Newman and Principe have emphasised that the strange symbols and mythological images in alchemical literature are often no more than codes (Decknamen) for technical recipes.40 However, this does not exhaust the topic, for alchemists since the 15th century also began to interpret ancient monuments, myths 38 39 40 M. Jean Ehrard: Matérialisme et naturalisme. Les sources occultes de la pensée de Diderot. In: Cahiers de l’association internationale des études françaises 13/1 (1961), pp. 189–201, here p. 197. The same point was made very recently by Robert Halleux: “First of all, the alchemist is a man alone in front of a book. The book affirms that the Ancients have realised the magisterium (expertum), and the alchemist believes it. But the alchemist does not understand how.” (Robert Halleux: Le savoir de la main. Savants et artisans dans l’Europe pré-industrielle. Paris 2009, p. 137). Halleux: La controverse (see note 37), p. 807 and passim. See William R. Newman: Decknamen or Pseudochemical Language? Eirenaeus Philalethes and Carl Jung. In: Revue d’Histoire des Sciences 49/2–3 (1996), pp. 159–188; Lawrence M. Principe: Revealing Analogies. The Descriptive and Deceptive Roles of Sexuality and Gender in Latin Alchemy. In: Hidden Intercourse. Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism. Ed. by Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Jeffrey J. Kripal. Leiden, Boston 2008, pp. 209– 229. 15 and biblical stories as alchemical allegories:41 in such cases, we are dealing not with coded recipes, but with an alchemical hermeneutics of architecture and mythology inspired by the search for ‘ancient wisdom’. And furthermore, during the baroque era, alchemical games of dissimulation often became an end in themselves.42 The enormous emphasis on secrecy led to a distinction between two basic styles of writing in chymical literature, and this distinction is much earlier than the terminological separation between alchemy and chemistry. An excellent example is David de Planis Campy’s Opening of the School of Metallic Transmutational Philosophy (1633), devoted specifically to this question, where we read the following: Those who have discussed the Arts & Sciences have taken care to give them a very clear & intelligible order, beginning with general matters so as to end with special ones. But in this Art [of metallic transmutation] one does the complete opposite, for sometimes one has begun at the end & ended at the beginning, & all that with so little order that, not at all having determined what it is, they have driven their readers into despair about never understanding nothing of it.43 In sum: texts that presented chymistry as concerned with recovering ancient secrets – typically concealed by obscure language, enigmatic symbolism, or other techniques of dissimulation – became perceived as ‘alchemy’. In contrast, texts that used clear and sober language to speak about experimental science became ‘chemistry’. Even in the domain of natural science, then, it was not, as so often assumed, the perceived irrationality, unscientific attitude, factual incorrectness, or superstitiousness of certain disciplines in the ‘chymical’ study of nature that functioned as the mark of ‘otherness’ by which acceptable discourses were demarcated from unacceptable ones. Rather, this demarcation was based upon the rejection of the Renaissance narrative of ancient pagan wisdom and its concern with recovering the forgotten secrets of the past. The Contemporary Debate On the basis of Enlightenment concepts, modern scholars have adopted the concept of ‘occult sciences’ as a convenient shorthand category for astrology, alchemy, and 41 42 43 Robert Halleux: Le mythe de Nicolas Flamel, ou les mécanismes de la pseudépigraphie alchimique. In: Archives internationales d’histoire des sciences 33/3 (1983), pp. 234–255, here p. 237; idem: La controverse (see note 37), pp. 811f. For many examples, see Frank Greiner: Art du feu, art du secret. Obscurité et ésotérisme dans les textes alchimiques de l’âge baroque. In: Greiner: Aspects (see note 34), pp. 207–231. David de Planis Campy: L’ouverture de l’escolle de philosophie transmutatoire metallique, ou, La plus saine et veritable explication & conciliation de tous les Stiles desquels les Philosophes anciens se sont servis en traictant de l’oeuvre Physique, sont amplement declarées. Paris 1633, pp. 8f. An interesting example from a few decades later (1672) is J.M.D.R. (Jean Maugin de Richebourg): Bibliothèque des philosophes chimiques (Lenglet du Fresnoy [ed.]). Vol. 1. Paris 1741, pp. CVI–CXLIV (“On the Obscurity of the Chemical Philosophers”). 16 natural magic, occasionally expanded so as to include witchcraft. And with that, we return to Newman and Grafton’s criticism: should we, as scholars, maintain this terminology? It is important to emphasise first of all that, whether intentionally or not, any usage of the term ‘occult sciences’ still implies the unifying perspective inherited from the Renaissance project of occulta philosophia: after all, these sciences or practices are classed together only because all of them are seen as ‘occult’. This, of course, begs the question of what that means for modern scholars. How convincing is the assumption of unity? What are its underlying assumptions? And what are its effects on our ways of studying the phenomena in question? It is fair to say that prior to Newman and Grafton, modern scholars and critics have very rarely asked themselves these questions, let alone answered them. Rather, they have tended to take the category for granted, usually on the basis of an implicit (often unconscious) acceptance of ‘magic’ as a universal category sui generis. A classic example is Keith Thomas’ celebrated Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), which made a point of emphasising “the unity of magical beliefs” such as astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, natural magic, and the various divinatory arts.44 In a truly extreme form, the modernist bias underlying that perspective can be studied in Wayne Shumaker’s much-quoted study The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance (1972).45 But by far the most explicit and sustained defense of the “unity of the occult sciences“, understood as the essentially irrational and superstitious counterpart to reason and science, comes from a contemporary scholar of English literature and history of science, Brian Vickers. As formulated by him in 1988: There are sufficient internal resemblances among astrology, alchemy, numerology, iatromathematics, and natural magic for one to be able to describe the occult sciences as forming a unified system. They all invoke a distinction between the visible and invisible worlds; they all depend on the designation of symbols relating to this dichotomy; they all make great use of analogies, correspondences, and relations among apparently discrete elements in 44 45 Keith Thomas: Religion and the Decline of Magic. Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (1971). London 1973, pp. 755–761 (and cf. p. 767 for the motifs of ‘closed system’ and ‘resistance to change’: “Such systems of belief possess a resilience which makes them virtually immune to external argument”). It is hard to find a scholar who expresses his contempt for anything “occult” as explicitly as Shumaker. If Keith Thomas famously claimed in his foreword that “Astrology, witchcraft, magical healing, divination, ancient prophecies, ghosts and fairies, are now all rightly disdained by intelligent persons” (Religion and the Decline of Magic [see note 44], p. ix), Shumaker went as far as stating that anyone holding such beliefs today was “the victim of some special psychological need” (The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance. A Study in Intellectual Patterns. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1972, p. xiv, 7), and kept emphasising their status as “delusions“, the prominence of which in early modern thinking had “shocked” him (ibid., cf. p. 198). Shumaker’s study must be seen against the background of his moral concerns about the contemporary “crisis” of society and the resurgence of the occult among his students, reflective of the 1960s counterculture (ibid., p. xiii, xv). That Shumaker’s perspective remained essentially unchanged is clear from the extreme whiggishness and anachronistic reasoning that pervades his Natural Magic and Modern Science: Four Treatises 1590–1657. Binghamton, New York 1989. 17 man and the universe. As a system the occult sciences were imported into Greece from various oriental cultures, and were systematically codified in the Hellenistic period, following the death of Alexander in 323 B.C. Once codified they retained their essential assumptions and methodology through the Middle Ages, into the Renaissance, and beyond – indeed, one of the most remarkable features of the occult tradition is its static nature, its resistance to change.46 In its essence, ‘the occult’ according to Vickers is not a historical phenomenon at all, but a universal tendency of the human mind. In all his publications on the subject, he argues that the fundamental unity, homogeneity, continuity, and ‘resistance to change’ of the occult sciences is based upon a basic ‘mentality’, which they share with non-scriptural cultures studied by anthropologists. Thus, the occult sciences are grounded not in experimentation, explanatory theories, or even just ideas, but in abiding pre-rational mental habits that are structurally similar to those of ‘primitive’ peoples. This is why they are not supposed to change and develop, as science does. Vickers’ approach is based essentially on E.B. Tylor’s Victorian concept of ‘magic’ and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s theory of ‘participation’ versus ‘causality’.47 In sharp contrast with the instrumental causality basic to rational science, the occult sciences have their foundation, according to Vickers, in the reification of symbols and analogies: that is to say, the tendency of the human mind to project mere mental connections into the real world, and confuse linguistic signs with their signified objects.48 The result is a view of the world as permeated 46 47 48 Brian Vickers: On the Function of Analogy in the Occult. In: Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe. Ed. by Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus. Washington, London, Toronto 1988, p. 265. On the same page, see Vickers’ emphasis on the “fundamental homogeneity and continuity” of the occult sciences. Vickers’ two other major statements on the topic were published four years earlier in his edited volume Occult and Scientific Mentalities (Introduction. In: Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance. Ed. by idem. Cambridge et al. 1984, pp. 1–55; Analogy versus Identity: The Rejection of Occult Symbolism, 1580–1680. In: ibid., pp. 95–163). Patrick Curry: Revisions of Science and Magic. In: History of Science 23 (1985), pp. 299–325, here p. 307. For Vickers’ anthropological references, see Vickers: Introduction (see note 46), pp. 32–43, with long discussions of Robin Horton and Ernest Gellner. Vickers refers to Robin Horton for describing science and the occult as respectively ‘open’ and ‘closed’ systems, but as pointed out by Curry (ibid., p. 306; referring to Robin Horton: Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West. Essays on Magic, Religion and Science. Cambridge 1993, p. 319), Horton himself has eventually rejected that dichotomy as “ripe for the scrap heap“. Vickers’ reception of Lévy-Bruhl’s theories seems mostly indirect, through authors such as Stanley Tambiah (Vickers: Analogy versus Identity [see note 46], pp. 96f.; idem.: On the Function of Analogy [see note 46], p. 280). Note that the notion of “resistance to change” is an anthropological cliché so common as to be shared even by Lévy-Bruhl’s opponent Malinowski: “Follow one rite, study one spell, grasp the principles of magical belief, art and sociology in one case, and […] adding a variant here or there, you will be able to settle as a magical practitioner in any part of the world” (Bronislaw Malinowski: Magic, Science and Religion. In: Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays (1948), Prospect Heights, IL 1992, p. 70). For the collapse of analogy into identity, see especially Vickers: Analogy versus Identity (see note 46), pp. 118, 122, 125ff. (quoting Paracelsus as the example par excellence, cf. ibid., p. 131); idem.: On the Function of Analogy (see note 46), pp. 276f., 283f., 289. For the confusion of signifier and signified, with reference to De Saussure, see Vickers: Introduction (see note 46), p. 97; idem.: On the Function of Analogy, p. 277. 18 by non-causal correspondences (reified analogies), in sharp contrast with the instrumental causality basic to science.49 Accordingly, Vickers concludes, there can be no question of any historical influence of the ‘occult sciences’ on the development of real science:50 on the contrary, science is based upon “the rejection of occult symbolism“. This stringent application of the traditional ‘magic versus science’ argument to the historiography of science has been sharply attacked by representatives of the ‘new historiography’ in these fields,51 who reject it, very convincingly in my opinion, as a fundamentally anachronistic and unhistorical perspective out of touch with current scholarship.52 If the ‘occult sciences’ are really a homogeneous unity, there would seem to be no point in seeking to differentiate between its various manifestations or studying their historical development in detail (because there can 49 50 51 52 On correspondences, see Vickers: Analogy versus Identity (see note 46), pp. 120, 122; idem.: On the Function of Analogy, passim. Vickers: Introduction (see note 46), pp. 31, 44 (“The error […] lies in arguing that the occult sciences in the Renaissance were productive of ideas, theories, and techniques in the new sciences”); idem.: On the Function of Analogy (see note 46), p. 288 (“I cannot see that any constructive borrowing took place”). Curry: Revisions of Science and Magic (see note 47); William R. Newman: Brian Vickers on Alchemy and the Occult. A Response. In: Perspectives on Science 17/4 (2009), pp. 482–506. For some less trenchant criticisms, see e.g. Rivka Feldhay: Critical Reactions to the Occult. A Comment. In: The Scientific Enterprise. The Bar-Hillel Colloquium. Studies in History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science. Ed. by Edna Ullmann-Margalit. Vol. 4. Dordrecht, Boston, London 1992, pp. 93–99; Kaspar von Greyerz: Alchemie, Hermetismus und Magie. Zur Frage der Kontinuitäten in der wissenschaftlichen Revolution. In: Im Zeichen der Krise. Religiosität im Europa des 17. Jahrhunderts. Ed. by Hartmut Lehmann and Anne-Charlott Trepp. Göttingen 1999, pp. 415–432, here pp. 423–427. The “new historiography of alchemy” (Lawrence M. Principe: Reflections on Newton’s Alchemy in Light of the New Historiography of Alchemy. In: Newton and Newtonianism. Ed. by James E. Force, Sarah Hutton. New Studies. Dordrecht, Boston, London 2004, pp. 205–219; Brian Vickers: The “New Historiography” and the Limits of Alchemy. In: Annals of Science 65/1 [2008], pp. 127–156) is representative of a wider phenomenon, and the notion is therefore expanded here so as to include new approaches to the study of astrology (see e.g. Newman and Grafton: Secrets of Nature [see note 1]) and natural magic. It represents an important “paradigm change” in the historiography of science, as reflected emblematically in the removal, in 2002, of the category “pseudosciences” from the classification scheme of the famous “Current Bibliography of the History of Science” in the leading scholarly journal for the history of science Isis (Stephen P. Weldon: Table of Contents and Introduction to Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science and its Cultural Influences. In: Isis 93 (2002), p. i–ix). The new scheme has separate categories for “Occult sciences and magic“, “Astrology“, and “Alchemy“. Newman: Brian Vickers (see note 51), p. 483 (“To read Vickers’ essay review is to find oneself suddenly back in the world of Rupert Hall and E. J. Dijksterhuis in the 1960s”) and p. 502 (“It is time, in short, for scholarship to move on”). Vickers’s defense against the charge of anachronistic “Whig” reasoning can be found in the final paragraph of an article published in German in 1988 (Brian Vickers: Kritische Reaktionen auf die okkulten Wissenschaften in der Renaissance. In: Zwischen Wahn, Glaube und Wissenschaft. Magie, Astrologie, Alchemie und Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Ed. by Jean-François Bergier. Zürich 1988, pp. 167–239, here pp. 226–229) but deleted from the English version in 1992 (Brian Vickers: Critical Reactions to the Occult Sciences during the Renaissance. In: The Scientific Enterprise [see note 51], pp. 43– 92). 19 be no such development). But scholars like Newman, Principe or Grafton seem to be right that, to the contrary, the residual influence of the unifying Renaissance concept of occulta philosophia has caused a sort of blindness with regard to the relative independence and autonomy of disciplines such as astrology and magic;53 and they are undoubtedly right in pointing out that, far from being uniform and static, each discipline has gone through highly complex processes of change, transformation, and innovation over time. Again, if the specificity of the ‘occult sciences’ according to Vickers resides in a basic mentality typical of ‘primitive thought’, not in any rational attempt at studying and understanding the natural world, and if this mentality is merely the result of conceptual confusion and delusionary mental projections, then they cannot possibly be seen as relevant to the history of science: they will never be more than ‘proto-scientific’ dead ends, or ‘pseudo-sciences’ pure and simple. But the ‘new historiography’ points out again and again that, contrary to popular assumptions, each of the disciplines in question (astrology, alchemy, magia naturalis) has been deeply and centrally concerned with rational models of causality and empirical study of the natural world, and that they have made significant contributions to the history of what we consider as science today.54 The criticism of Vickers’ approach seems perfectly convincing. Authors in the wake of Blaise de Vigenère may have spoken of ‘occult sciences’, but this concept should better not be used as etic terminology by modern scholars. The notion of ‘occult sciences’ forces very different historical phenomena into the straitjacket of an artificial and reductive sui generis concept, thereby causing us to lose sight of their actual complexity and development over time. It falsely suggests that the disciplines in question have no interest in empirical observation or experimentation, and that they refuse to recognise causal connections because their deep involvement in pre-rational, ‘primitive’ modes of thought allegedly makes them blind to any genuinely scientific concerns.55 In short: by calling them ‘occult 53 54 55 Newman and Grafton: Introduction (see note 1), p. 26; Newman: Promethean Ambitions (see note 2), p. 54; idem.: Brian Vickers (see note 51), pp. 488–491, 502; Didier Kahn: Alchimie et Paracelsisme en France (1567–1625). Genève 2007, pp. 2, 8f., 11. For a detailed analysis, see Telle: Astrologie und Alchemie (see note 18); and cf. Jacques Halbronn: Les résurgences du savoir astrologique au sein des textes alchimiques dans la France du XVIIe siècle. In: Aspects de la tradition alchimique au XVIIe siècle. Paris, Milan 1998, pp. 193–205. Representative are the many recent studies by Newman and Principe (e.g. William R. Newman: Gehennical Fire. The Lives of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge, MA, London 1994; idem.: Promethean Ambitions (see note 2); William R. Newman, Lawrence M. Principe: Alchemy Tried in the Fire. Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry. Chicago, London 2002; Lawrence M. Principe: The Aspiring Adept. Robert Boyle and his Alchemical Quest. Princeton 1998). For the criticism of Vickers’ concept of ‘occult sciences’ from this perspective, see Newman: Brian Vickers (see note 51), esp. pp. 485–497 (focusing on the elements of ‘unity’, reified analogy and symbolism, and ‘resistance to change’). The mistake is identical with the one committed by Malinowski in his famous critique of LévyBruhl, who was supposed to have claimed that “primitive man has no sober moods at all, that 20 sciences’, scholars inevitably end up endorsing an argumentative logic that, against the weight of historical evidence, is designed to exclude them from the history of science.56 Nevertheless, as happens so often in the heat of ‘scientific revolutions’, there is always a risk of throwing out some babies with the bathwater. In their zeal to get fields like astrology and alchemy back on the core agenda of history of science, the ‘new historians’ do sometimes overshoot the mark. In Newman and Grafton’s defense for the independence of astrology and alchemy, one cannot help noticing a certain degree of impatience with the ‘occult philosophy’ of the Renaissance, held responsible for the ‘hackneyed’ thesis of a “unity of the occult sciences“, and constantly evoked by scholars of “the Hermetic Tradition” since Frances Yates in the 1960s.57 One understands the irritation of contemporary specialists about how that perspective still dominates any discussion in the field, even when it comes to medieval astrology or alchemy.58 Nevertheless, it remains an irrefutable fact that there was a very widespread concern in the 16th and 17th centuries with integrating astrology, alchemy, and natural magic, along with such fields as kabbalah and number symbolism, as parts of one unified worldview grounded in correspondences and occult forces,59 and Renaissance adherents of philosophia occulta can he is hopelessly and completely immersed in a mystical frame of mind. Incapable of dispassionate and consistent observation, devoid of the power of abstraction, hampered by ‘a decided aversion towards reasoning’ […] unable to draw any benefit from experience, to construct or comprehend even the most elementary laws of nature” (Malinowski: Magic, Science and Religion [see note 47], p. 25). Malinowski’s refutation of that thesis, by demonstrating that the Trobriand islanders showed an acute understanding of natural law while fishing or hunting, was directed against a straw man, for the summary is a caricature of LévyBruhl’s work, and ‘instrumental causality’ and ‘participation’ are not mutually exclusive but can easily coexist (see discussion in Wouter J. Hanegraaff: How Magic Survived the Disenchantment of the World. In: Religion 33/4 [2003], pp. 371–378). Vickers could respond with a variation on Tylor’s view of magic as proto-science: “the very reason why magic is almost all bad is because when any of it becomes good it ceases to be magic” (Edward Burnett Tylor: Magic. In: Encyclopaedia Britannica. 9th ed. Vol. 15. Edinburgh 1883, pp. 199–206, here p. 206; for the importance of this neglected article, see Wouter J. Hanegraaff: The Emergence of the Academic Science of Magic. The Occult Philosophy in Tylor and Frazer. In: Religion in the Making. The Emergence of the Sciences of Religion. Ed. by Arie L. Molendijk and Peter Pels. Leiden, Boston, Köln 1998, pp. 253–275, 262–265): the occult sciences would then be not scientific, because when anything in them becomes scientific, it automatically ceases to be occult. But this would not save Vickers’ argument, for if so, we are no longer dealing with ‘occult sciences’ as an umbrella concept: instead, ‘occult’ becomes a simple synonym for ‘unscientific’, resulting in an empty tautology. Newman, Grafton: Introduction (see note 1), pp. 21, 26; Newman: Promethean Ambitions (see note 2), pp. 44, 54. William R. Newman: Technology and Alchemical Debate in the Late Middle Ages. In: Isis 80/3 (1989), pp. 423–445, here p. 425: medieval alchemy was “a perfectly reasonable and sober offshoot of Aristotle’s theory of matter“, as opposed to “the eclectic, Neoplatonic alchemy of the Renaissance, suffused with theosophy and cabalism“. This is correctly pointed out not only by Vickers (The “New Historiography” [see note 51], p. 130) but even by Newman and Grafton themselves: they trace the ‘unifying’ perspective to authors like Ficino, Agrippa, and Elias Ashmole (Newman and Grafton: Introduction [see note 56 57 58 59 21 hardly be blamed for what rationalists and occultists (not to mention 20th-century historians) did with that idea two centuries later. In a historiography that wishes to avoid essentialism, the occulta philosophia project of the Renaissance just cannot be dismissed as marginal to what astrology or alchemy were ‘really’ all about: rather, it must be studied as an important historical phenomenon that resulted in creative and extremely influential new religious ways of understanding these disciplines and their relationship to one another.60 If this somewhat blurs their fresh scientific image in the context of the ‘new historiography’, so be it. Finally, if Vickers’ central notion of “analogical thinking”61 cannot be used to define a unified concept of ‘occult sciences’, what then is its relation to the fields of astrology, alchemy and natural magic? Nobody denies that they do have their roots in an ancient Hellenistic culture permeated by belief in hidden correspondences and analogies; as “textually cumulative disciplines”62 they clearly retained those dimensions as a vital part of their theoretical apparatus; and there is no doubt at all that such analogical modes of thought experienced an enormous boost in the wake – again – of the Platonising tendencies of the Renaissance occulta philosophia. Although the ‘new historiography’ does not deny these facts, it does have a 1], pp. 24ff.), thereby contradicting Newman’s own thesis that it is a modern 19th-century invention. At issue here is the risk of an implicit essentialism even among strong and explicit defenders of strictly historical research: see discussion, with reference to a different but strictly comparable field of research, in Wouter J. Hanegraaff: The Beginnings of Occultist Kabbalah. Adolphe Franc and Eliphas Lévi. In: Kabbalah and Modernity. Interpretations, Transformations, Adaptations. Ed. by Boaz Huss, Marco Pasi and Kocku von Stuckrad. Leiden, Boston 2010, pp. 107–128. Gershom Scholem’s refusal to take the study of occultist and contemporary kabbalah seriously (Boaz Huss: Ask No Questions. Gershom Scholem and the Study of Contemporary Jewish Mysticism. In: Modern Judaism 25/2 [2005], pp. 141–158) stood in sharp conflict with his explicit historical methodology. There is no agreement even about basic terminological conventions in this extremely complex domain of overlapping concepts, speculative systems, worldviews, and mental habits. Alternative terms are e.g. “correspondences” (see overview in Jean-Pierre Brach and Wouter J. Hanegraaff: Correspondences. In: Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism [see note 15], pp. 275–279), “correlative thinking” (Joseph Needham: Science and Civilization in China. Vol. 2: History of Scientific Thought. Cambridge 1956; Steve Farmer, John B. Henderson and Michael Witzel: Neurobiology, Layered Texts, and Correlative Cosmologies. A Cross-Cultural Framework for Premodern History. In: Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 72 [2002], pp. 48–90), “ressemblance” (Michel Foucault: Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris 1966), “participation” (Lucien Lévy-Bruhl: Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures. Paris 1951; idem.: Carnets. Paris 1998; cf. Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah: Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality. Cambridge 1990, pp. 84–110) and in all cases there is a close interwovenness with traditional concepts such as sympathy/antipathy, micro/macrocosm, ἐ#'()*%$, and the ἰ!%0/1/*& ἄ((1/2% mentioned above (e.g. Röhr: Der okkulte Kraftbegriff [see note 13]; George Perrigo Conger: Theories of Macrocosms and Microcosms in the History of Philosophy. New York 1922; Rudolf Allers: Microcosmus. From Anaximander to Paracelsus. In: Traditio 2 [1944], pp. 319–407). The formulation is taken from Vickers: The “New Historiography” (see note 51), p. 132. See similar emphasis in Ehrard: Matérialisme et naturalisme (see note 38), p. 197; Newman: “Decknamen” (see note 40), pp. 164f. 60 61 62 22 tendency to marginalise them, by very much putting the emphasis on those aspects of alchemy that are more clearly in line with what we consider sound rational and scientific thinking. However, the delicate task for historians consists precisely in recognising and analysing these dimensions as integral to much of pre-modern thinking, and to the Renaissance philosophia occulta more in particular,63 and yet to do so without falling prey to the bad dualistic habit (inherited from the Enlightenment) of playing them out against ‘science’. What makes this task so difficult is the fact – keenly perceived by Vickers, and not to be underestimated – that ‘analogical thinking’ can, indeed, take forms that violate our most basic canons of logic and common sense. To give just one example, think of the pervasive fascination with a ‘natural language’ of ‘real symbols’ (highly relevant to astrology and talismanic magic) in which signs are treated as being what they signify, so that names or images do not just ‘refer’ to persons or things, but are assumed to somehow contain their very essence.64 Among many other instances, one might mention the peculiar non-linear logic that informs Agrippa’s elaborate tables of correspondences, systematically linked to elaborate numerical systems and ‘magical squares’, talismanic images, and angelic and demonic hierarchies.65 One might also think of the deliberate paradoxes of kabbalistic speculation, the coincidence of opposites in Cusanian metaphysics, or Paracelsus’ tendencies to radicalise the theory of microcosm and macrocosm to a point where the former seems to contain the latter in which it is itself contained.66 The list could go on. The fact is that such concepts were pro63 64 65 66 It can be argued that if understood as spontaneous tendencies of the human mind, they are integral to all cultures and societies, including our own (Hanegraaff: How Magic Survived [see note 55], pp. 373–376), but the implications do not need to concern us here. Apart from Vickers, see e.g. Allison P. Coudert: Some Theories of a Natural Language from the Renaissance to the Seventeenth Century. In: Magia Naturalis und die Entstehung der modernen Naturwissenschaften. Ed. by Albert Heinekamp and Dieter Mettler. Wiesbaden 1978, pp. 56–113 (with a helpful overview of examples from Plato’s Cratylus to Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont’s Alphabet of Nature) or the classic article by Ernst H. Gombrich: Icones Symbolicae. The Visual Image in Neoplatonic Thought. In: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 11 (1948), pp. 163–192, esp. 175ff. The Cratylus discusses “real symbolism” at length but ends up rejecting it. However, as pointed out by Coudert, “In the following centuries many people forgot Socrates’ conclusion. What impressed them most was the suggestion that a language which mirrored nature would be the most perfect” (Coudert: Some Theories, p. 65). Cornelius Agrippa: De occulta philosophia libri tres. Ed. by V. Perrone Compagni. Leiden, New York, Köln 1992, II.4–14; and cf. Christopher Lehrich: The Language of Demons and Angels. Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy. Leiden, Boston 2003, pp. 98–146; Karl Anton Nowotny: The Construction of Certain Seals and Characters in the Work of Agrippa of Nettesheim. In: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 12 (1949), pp. 46–57. For the centrality of paradox in Jewish kabbalah, see especially Elliot R. Wolfson: Language, Eros, Being. Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination. New York 2005. For paradox and analogy in Cusanus, see Werner Schulze: Zahl, Proportion, Analogie. Eine Untersuchung zur Metaphysik und Wissenschaftshaltung des Nikolaus von Kues. Münster 1978; and for his influence and relevance to the ancient wisdom discourse, Stephan Meier-Oeser: Die Präsenz des Vergessenen. Zur Rezeption der Philosophie des Nicolaus Cusanus vom 15. bis zum 18. 23 claimed, not just as a frivolous afterthought but deliberately and persistently, by highly educated intellectuals. Even allowing for the power of traditional authority, it therefore makes no sense to dismiss them as instances of irrationality, lack of logical competence, primitive thinking, or plain stupidity. Nor are they representative of some ‘occult’ subculture out of touch with mainstream intellectual discourse, as popular clichés would have it. Rather, they are the reflection of intellectual traditions that have become unfamiliar to us, and of basic modes of thinking that are grounded in sets of priorities (metaphysical rather than physical) entirely different from those of modern science and philosophy. Both frameworks are equally capable of rejecting the other as fundamentally false and misleading. 67 There is no reason, then, to continue the habit of calling early modern ones ‘occult’, except as an admission of ignorance on our part: if they have become a closed book to most of us, that is because we have forgotten its language. Conclusion I have been making some larger and smaller points in this article, but its most important conclusions are the following. First, the concepts of ‘natural magic’ and ‘occult qualities’ have gone through complicated processes of disenchantment and re-enchantment, in which both science and religion play a crucial role. Only an interdisciplinary approach is therefore capable of making sense of them. Second, the separation between ‘occult’ and ‘normal’ sciences and the separation between ‘alchemy’ and ‘chemistry’ in the Enlightenment had far less to do with scientific argumentation than with the decline of the Renaissance discourse of pagan wisdom under the influence of the Protestant attack on paganism. And finally, the notion of ‘occult sciences’ is grounded in the unifying perspectives of the Renaissance (not, as sometimes assumed, in the 19th century); but applying it as a general scholarly second-order concept to the domains of magic, alchemy and astrology leads to anachronisms and hence to historical distortions. In short: the notion of ‘occult 67 Jahrhundert. Münster 1989. On Paracelsus, see Conger: Theories of Macrocosms and Microcosms (see note 61), pp. 55–60; Vickers: Analogy versus Identity (see note 46), pp. 126– 132 (relying heavily on Alexandre Koyré: Paracelse. In: Mystiques, spirituels, alchimistes du XVIe siècle allemand. Paris 1971); Wolf-Dieter Müller-Jahncke: Makrokosmos und Mikrokosmos bei Paracelsus. In: Paracelsus. Das Werk – die Rezeption. Ed. by Volker Zimmermann. Stuttgart 1995, pp. 59–66; Katharine Weder: “das jenig das am subtilesten und am besten gewesen ist.” Zur Makrokosmos-Mikrokosmosbeziehung bei Paracelsus. In: Nova Acta Paracelsica: Beiträge zur Paracelsus-Forschung, Neue Folge 13 (1999), pp. 3–47. On this point, see Wouter J. Hanegraaff: Under the Mantle of Love. The Mystical Eroticisms of Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno. In: Hidden Intercourse (see note 40), pp. 175–207, here p. 177 (here illustrated at the example of Ficino’s metaphysics of eros as opposed to modern psychoanalysis). 24 sciences’ should be an object of historical study, not a concept used for studying alchemy, magic, astrology, or other currents in the field of Western esotericism.