Elizabethan Magic

Elizabethan Magic March 22, 2006

Educated Elizabethans lived in a world of similitudes. As EMW Tillyard argued, the Elizabethan world picture was constituted by a series of analogous chains of being. The social world manifested and was manifested by the natural world; the universe as a whole resembled human beings; there was a hierarchy among plants and rocks and animals that mirrored the hierarchy of planets and the hierarchy of political order.


Michel Foucault has drawn attention to this by discussing the “Four Similitudes” that helped to construct European thinking through the end of the sixteenth century. Things that are similar by “convenience” (conventia) are similar because they are in close proximity to each other. Body and soul are convenient to each other: the soul is made dense and earth-like so that it can be joined to the material body, and the soul both animates the body and is affected by bodily appetites. Things related by “emulation” (aemulatio) are not dependent upon their proximity for their connection. The human face emulates the sky, in that “his two eyes, with their limited brightness, are a reflection of the vast illumination spread across the sky by sun and moon; the mouth is Venus, since it gives passage to kisses and words of love; the nose provides an image in miniature of Jove’s scepter and Mercury’s staff.” Analogy (analogia) is the third similitude, and combines the two former ones. Analogy is not dependent on visible, substantial similarities but includes more subtle ones that are based only on relation: The stars are to the sky as plans are to the earth, as diamonds are in the rocks, as sense organs in the face, and so on. Analogy stretches out in endless resemblances. Finally, there are the “sympathies,” powers of attraction that pull things together. Standing opposed to sympathy is “antipathy,” which forces things apart. Were sympathy given free rein, all would be drawn into undifferentiated sameness (Parmenides); were antipathy to reign supreme, it would be a war of all against all (Heraclitus). The tension of the two forces creates space, time, and also makes possible the other forms of resemblance, because it is this tension that makes for difference and similarity. These similitudes are not always apparent, but have to be read off the “signatures” evident in visible reality, which are signs pointing to similitudes of various sorts. The fact that a walnut resembles a brain is a sign that walnuts are useful for relieving headaches.

In such a world, the line between science and magic, between knowing and divination, becomes exceedingly thin: “The world is covered with signs that must be deciphered, and those signs, which reveal resemblances and affinities, are themselves no more than forms of similitude. To know must therefore be to interpret: to find a way from the visible mark to that which is being said by it and which, without that mark, would lie like unbroken speech, dormant within things.” In such a system, “divination is not a rival form of knowledge; it is part of the main body of knowledge itself.” In short, “The project of elucidating the ‘Natural Magics,’ which occupies an important place at the end of the sixteenth century and survives into the middle of the seventeenth, is not a vestigial phenomenon in the European consciousness; it was revived . . . because the fundamental configuration of knowledge consisted of the reciprocal cross-reference of signs and similitudes. The form of magic was inherent in this way of knowing.”


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