Learned magic

Abstract

The Renaissance humanist and monastic reformer Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516) rarely hesitated to express skepticism about claims of magic as practiced in his own day or in the past. In his Annals of Hirsau, he introduced readers to a thirteenth-century praestigiator admirabilis from Frisia named Theodo. Theodo was reputed to have restored a servant to life whom he had decapitated an hour earlier. He could also walk in the air, devour armed men whole, swallow cartloads of hay in one gulp, and drag great weights of wood and stone single-handedly. Trithemius denounced him not for deriving power from demons, as might be claimed of someone suspected of necromancy, but for deluding simple people. Elsewhere, in correspondence with an astrologer at the court of the Elector Palatine in Heidelberg, Trithemius reflected on an encounter with a man who identified himself as "Master George Sabellicus, a new Faustus, a font of necromantics, an astrologer, a magician, and a prolific diviner through the reading of palms, soil, fire, and water." Trithemius derided this "prince of necromantics" as a deadbeat in an invective that counts among the earliest written references to that most renowned of Renaissance magicians, Dr. Faustus. But Trithemius was not merely, or even most famously, magic’s detractor. Quite to the contrary, he enjoyed notoriety in his own day, and has since, as a sorcerer, accomplished in his own right, and as the teacher of such other celebrated Renaissance magicians (or mages) as Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486-1535) and Paracelsus (1493-1541). Martin Luther even denounced Trithemius as a master of black magic in his table talk of 1539. This aspect of his fame was inspired by a letter he wrote in 1499 to a sympathetic poet and theologian in Ghent, in which he mentioned his work in progress on steganography, a form of coded communication by angelic transmission. A third party with heightened sensitivity to the demonic intercepted the letter and publicized its contents with an insinuation of Trithemius’s depraved curiosity. As distressing as this development may have been for the abbot, his reaction - remaining engaged, if more surreptitiously, in the study of magic and committed to discerning a distinction between illicit, demonic magic and licit forms of magic that were closely associated with approved natural philosophy - represents a common characteristic of practitioners of magic in the Renaissance.