Session sponsored by the Societas Magica
History of Science Society Annual Meeting
November 20-23, 2003
Cambridge, MA

Further information about the HSS may be found at www.hssonline.org

Seeing and Believing: Theories of Vision, Imagination, and Divination from the Medieval to the Modern

From the medieval through the early modern period, the socio-historical and intellectual context of magic as it related to natural philosophy was a nexus of academic, legal, and theological disputes. Theologians, princes, inquisitors, and scholars eng aged in heated debates over the legitimate scope of magic and divination as a kind of experimental and practical inquiry into the "occult," or hidden, powers of nature. These disputes over the extent and legitimacy of the occult powers of nature generate d a body of theological and philosophical literature which continued to inform debates during the Scientific Revolution and beyond. Even through the nineteenth century such ideas may be found alive and well on the margins of academia, in theosophical writ ings and the activities of the spiritualists and ceremonial magicians of the Occult Revival. This session will explore the evolving attitudes towards magic and theories of nature from the medieval period to the 19th century, and the effect these attitudes had in determining boundaries between the natural and the supernatural.

Claire Fanger - Independent Scholar
"Like a Virgin: the Body and the Cosmos in Late Medieval Theurgic and Catoptromantic Texts"

In the later middle ages, practices designed to induce visions of intermediary beings for divinatory purposes were numerous and widespread. Medieval natural philosophy tried to account for and explain the mechanisms of these practices and their effects on the operators, generally dismissing the actual information elicited from these forms of divination as likely to be false and/or demonically inspired, but often in complex and qualified ways that rested on then current notions in cosmology and physiolo gy. For example the commonplace requirement that catoptromantic mediums should be virgin boys may be seen from a religious perspective as a reflection of the requirement for ritual purity in the operator; but from the perspective of natural philosophy, b oth William of Auvergne and Nicole Oresme discuss this requirement for virginity in waysthat make it an efficient cause of the effects of catoptromancy on the medium (their explanations resting on both the platonic cosmological idea of macrocosm being ref lected in microcosm, and physiological accounts of the impressionable psychology of young boys). However, the flow of ideas is not all one way, for the ritual texts themselves rest on a cosmological underpinning not greatly different from that of natural philosophy and susceptible to influence from it. This paper will examine several fourteenth and fifteenth century ritual texts concerned with inducing visions of intermediary beings, focussing on the ways the prayers and ritual actions link physiology and cosmology, and examing the ways information is expected to be delivered in visions whose visual and auditory components are often tightly scripted. Texts examined will include John of Morigny's Liber Visionum, the extended crystallomancy in the prayer b ook of Wladislas of Varna, and a series of experiments for inducing visions of angels or demons in reflective surfaces in the necromantic manual edited by Richard Kieckhefer.

Sarah Anne Smith - Indiana University-Bloomington
"Mirrors on the World, Mirrors of the Mind: Nicole Oresme's Doctrine of Configuration and Theories on Tatoptromancy in De Configurationibus."

In Nicole Oresme's discussion of the geometry of qualities and motions in the Tractatus de Configurationibus qualitatum et motuum, the figuration of qualities and their actions are viewed as formative characteristics which endow naturally occurring phe nomena and objects with their particular natures, and in some cases, powers. The configuration doctrine is advanced as an explanatory scheme for naturalizing operations more typically viewed as supernatural (i.e., the magical or curative powers of preciou s stones, divinatory and prophetic practices, and certain magical operations) in the sense that a general explanation can be sourced in a specific and determinate cause derived from occult figurations of qualities. The first part of this paper will introd uce the tenets of the geometry of the figuration doctrine and its application in the determination of internal and external configurations of qualities. The second part of the paper will focus on Oresme's application of his doctrine of configuration to th e physical and psychological phenomena parceled under the divinatory practice of catoptrics and catoptromancy, with particular attention to Oresme's discussion of the interrelation between a received medieval theory of vision and the configuration of inte llective power.

Robert Mathiesen - Brown University
"Through a Glass, Darkly: A Medieval Model of the Cosmos as Reflected in Late Medieval and Early Modern Scrying Devices and Practices"

The term scrying refers to a method of divination that uses a reflective surface to produce (apparent) visions. Objects commonly used in scrying include mirrors, crystal spheres or shew-stones, basins of water and pools of ink. From late Medieval and early Modern descriptions we know how many such objects were mounted or positioned for scrying, and a very few of the objects themselves have been preserved in museum collections (e.g. the shew-stones that once belonged to Dr. John Dee). These objec ts were often mounted or positioned in ways that derive from a Medieval model of the cosmos as a circle or disk. This model is otherwise well known from many texts and drawings, including some of great complexity (e.g. Byrthferth's diagram, the Hereford Cathedral mappa mundi and the mappa mundi formerly at Ebstorf). In scrying, either the object in which one scries is positioned or mounted at the center of this model, or the scrier himself stands at its center. By occupying the center of the model, the object or the scrier symbolically stands at the center of the cosmos. For Medieval and Early Modern scriers, this practice may sometimes have been more than just symbolic. The unknown Medieval author of the Hermetic text, Liber XXIV philosophorum, clai ms that the circumference of the cosmos is infinite, and that in consequence the center of the cosmos, mathematically defined as a point equidistant from every point of the circumference, is everywhere within that circumference. His argument was accepted by several important Medieval philosophers (e.g. Bonaventure). By this argument any scrier could consider the center of his model (wherever he might happen to place it while scrying) to be the center of the cosmos not just symbolically, but in actual fa ct. This paper will look at some Medieval and Early Modern descriptions of scrying objects and scrying practices, show how their specific details reflect the above-mentioned Medieval model of the cosmos, and draw out the cosmological assumptions that are implicit in these objects and practices.

Allison Coudert - Arizona State University
"Religion, Magic, and Science on the Eve of the Enlightenment"

Boyle and many of his colleagues in England's Royal Society were deeply concerned by what they saw as the growth of skepticism and atheism and the role that science may have inadvertently played in promoting both. The debate about witchcraft was a case in point. During the 17th century a growing number of naturalistic and medical explanations had been given for the supposed actions of witches and spirits, and these were taken by many as a direct assault on Christianity. Hobbes, Descartes, and Spinoza w ere singled out as especially pernicious in this regard, for by denying the existence of spirits, they were accused of undermining the belief in God. Joseph Glanvill, a vociferous advocate of the Royal Society, considered a disbelief in spirits the first step in the inevitable march to atheism. This paper will discuss the evolving attitudes towards magic and the demonic in the late 17th century and the effect these attitudes had in determining boundaries between the natural and the supernatural. Underlyin g the interest in magic and the supernatural were the same issues that surfaced in the debate over witchcraft about the authority and credibility of the Christian revelation, the role of God and spirits in the physical universe, and the epistemological pr oblem of what constitutes sound scientific knowledge. The investigation of phenomena such as witchcraft was therefore not an anomalous aspect of the period of the scientific revolution but an integral part of it. To arrive at the modern definition of a sc ientific "fact" or "theory" required new concepts of what constituted valid scientific evidence and convincing scientific explanations.

Mioara Deac - University of Notre Dame
Looking Into the Darkened Window: The 'Alchemical Eye' and Psychological Theories of English Christian Spiritualists

Jonathan Crary, in his Techniques of the Observer, has argued that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the 'camera obscura' (the natural magic of della Porta) was the most widely used model for explaining human vision. After 1830, t he Lockean-Cartesian-Newtonian model of vision was substituted by the image of an observer posited as the active, autonomous producer of his visual experience. By contrast, I shall argue that during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, t here had always been around a different model of vision and imagination, one that sprang from alchemical and mystical sources, and reflected a monistic and animistic worldview. In England, from the Glorious Revolution throughout Boyd Hilton's Age of At onement, various groups of religious dissenters or Romantic voices were espousing Boehme's alchemical and mystical models of vision, having their sources in Paracelsian imagery and themes. I shall also show the way in which the concept of an autonomous v isual perception was selectively used by different nineteenth-century thinkers who pondered the nature of mind and human representations in order to support their worldview, theological affinities, or social interests. (Imagination came to be regarded by the scientific world of psychology as a constant addition to sensorial stimuli, supplementing them in every act of perception. However, this assumption was selectively correlated, either with positivism and subjectivism, or with realism and Platonism). Crary's identity between 'modernist psychologists' and Romantic and mystical thinkers proves inadequate. I shall also analyze the doctrines used by the 'mystical psychologists' in England -- by which I mean a well-defined category of English spiritualis ts (such as William and Mary Howitt, Sophia de Morgan, Camilla Newton-Crosland) who used the scientific resources offered by contemporary physiological psychology in order to offer credibility to age-old mystical and alchemical tenets regarding the nature of vision and imagination.

Updated: May 17, 2004