Lucius Septimius: Falling off the Edge Part II: Burning Questions

Deep Purple at CaliJam '74 ~ Burn

The sky is red, I don't understand,
past midnight I still see the land.
People are sayin' the woman is damned,
she makes you burn with a wave of her hand.
The city's a blaze, the town's on fire.
The woman's flames are reaching higher.
We were fools, we called her liar.
All I hear is "Burn!"

I didn't believe she was devil's sperm.
She said, "Curse you all, you'll never learn!
When I leave there's no return."
The people laughed till she said, "Burn!"
Warning came, no one cared.
Earth was shakin', we stood and stared.
When it came no one was spared.
Still I hear "Burn!"

You know we had no time,
we could not even try.
You know we had no time.


The sky is red, I don't understand,
past midnight I still see the land.
People are sayin' the woman is damned,
she makes you burn with a wave of her hand.
Warning came, no one cared.
Earth was shakin, we stood and stared.
When it came no one was spared.
Still I hear "Burn!"

SEE ALSO: LUCIUS SEPTIMIUS: FALLING OFF THE EDGE PART I

Burning Questions
by Lucius Septimius

Second in a series on the war between science and religion


Andrew Dickson White was one of the more influential figures of late nineteenth-century America. Despite his high church Episcopalian background, he was perhaps one of the first "secular humanists" of the modern era. He founded Cornell University as a pointedly secular institution devoted to a number of Progressive causes. In this light, White’s decision to turn Cornell into a center for witchcraft studies takes on new meaning.



In the 1880s White, assisted by the first librarian of Cornell, George Lincoln Burr, began to purchase books and manuscript collections dealing with the witch trials of the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries in Europe and America. The collection remains one of the largest of its kind in the world, with over 3,000 books and manuscripts. [1] They were aided in their quest by the political dislocation in nineteenth century Europe – quite a number of objects simply walked out of European archives into the hands of book dealers. Ultimately, however, their success owed a great deal to Burr’s vision as a scholar and White’s willingness and ability to harness the resources required for building the collection.



As a scholar, Burr had a particular interest in the subject; his collection of sources on the Salem witch trials remains one of the standard works on the subject. [2] White had other things in mind. His goal was to document the war between science and religion. From his perspective the persecuted "witches" were in fact scientists and scholars, individuals who had access to hidden knowledge which was obscured by the Church under the banner of opposing heresy and witchcraft.



White was not alone his assumption that somehow the persecuted "witches" of old were the holders of some kind of secret, scientific knowledge. The argument takes two forms. There are those who have held that witchcraft was in fact an ancient, pre-Christian religious cult, practiced by women primarily, and connected back either to the ancient cult of Diana or the Mother Goddess. This religion survived on the fringes of society for over a millennium after the "triumph of Christianity" only to be rooted out by Christian bigots, Catholic and Protestant alike, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.



Margaret Murray was the first to put forward a comprehensive theory of this sort, and although her thesis was long ago demonstrated to be, to put it kindly, bunk, it has had a long afterlife. Murray wrote the essay on "witchcraft" which appeared in the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1929 until 1967. Her historical errors stand behind the revived "Wiccan" cults and in feminist circles. In the 1970s a group of German feminists wrote about the "war on the wise women," claiming that the women who were killed as witches possessed a special knowledge about healing arts. We don’t know what they knew because they were all killed, but we know it must have been extremely insightful, otherwise Christian men wouldn’t have killed them (a good example of feminist logic, by the way). Some feminists have gone so far as to describe the witch hunts as a Holocaust directed against pagan women by Christian men inspired by "gender racism."



A much more reasonable line of thought connects magic with the development of modern science. The lines between astronomy/astrology, chemistry/alchemy, natural science/natural magic were much fuzzier in the early modern era than today, and many of the major discoveries in the fields of astronomy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and medicine were made by individuals who were much more like characters in a Harry Potter book than modern scientists. Johannes Kepler, for example, may have solved the geometrical problem of describing the orbits of planets, but although he based his work on empirical observations, his ultimate intention was to cast more accurate horoscopes.



Renaissance "natural magic" first emerged among the neo-Platonist thinkers of the late fifteenth century and reached its height around 1600. Will-Erich Peukert, a rather quirky German scholar of the early twentieth century, described the ideal of these scholars as "pansophia," the idea of an all encompassing wisdom of the natural and divine spheres. The philosophers of the high Renaissance believed that there were numerous paths to wisdom – the Bible, classical philosophy, and the natural sciences were all forms of revelation. One could "read the Book of Nature" and discover secrets about the shape of the universe not found in other places. Since these truths were hidden – "Occult" in other words – it required great skill to discover the secrets of nature. Alchemy, astrology, gematria (number magic), were among the tools through which the pansophists believed they could unlock the keys of occult wisdom.



The pansophists were driven in part by a desire to overcome the religious disputes that rocked Europe in the Reformation era. The outbreak of religious wars in Germany (1524-26, 1546-55, 1618-1648), the Netherlands (1562-1648), and France (1562-1629) led many to seek common ground between the feuding parties on the basis of natural law and "science" – Knowledge, in other words – that transcended the crabbed limits of the feuding Christian orthodoxies. They believed that the microcosm was a reflection of the macrocosm, and that through intense investigation of natural forces at one level they could comprehend how those same forces worked on another. So Astronomy informed their approach to medicine; their botany influenced their observations of the stars; alchemy, music, mathematics all piled onto one another in what, to the "uninitiated" appears to be an incoherent jumble.



Reading the works of many of the pansophists (and a number of these are still in print and popular with the "New Age" crowd) it is hard not to avoid the impression that we are dealing with a bunch of cranks. Ultimately they were hamstrung by the limits of the mathematics, their physics, and their general conception of knowledge. It took the particular genius of individuals such as Bacon, Boyle, Descartes, Newton, and Leibnitz to break the stasis of Renaissance "natural magic" and open the door to modern science. In the process the ambitious mentality of pansophism, which tried to combine all forms of inquiry in the pursuit of metaphysical enlightenment, had to be abandoned. "Science" became a much more narrow field of endeavor with much more limited goals. It was secularized, but gave up – temporarily at least – on trying to cast its discoveries as a fifth Gospel.



Although pansophism ultimately failed as a philosophic system, its influence was profound. It dominated the thinking of educated elites in the late sixteenth and early sixteenth-centuries. No princely or aristocratic court was without its astrologers, necromancers, alchemists, prognosticators, and purveyors of occult sciences. The court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1576-1612) was ground-zero for the studies of magic and the occult, but he was far from the only one. Late Renaissance art, music, even gardening is replete with references to the occult. In English literatures, the works of Sidney and Spencer contain numerous allusions to astrology and alchemy. It seems that much of popular magic – "witchcraft" proper – was merely a denuded form of educated magic, a sort of "Popular Mechanics" version of learned alchemy and astrology. And while the authorities cast a suspicious eye at yokels who fiddled around with magic, they had no problem with the elites engaging in similar pursuits. And few theologians were bothered either. A number of churchmen dappled in alchemy and astrology. Indeed, the most ardent supporters of the pansophist movement saw themselves as religious reformers.



All of this came crashing down after 1600. The mood changed. Recondite wisdom went out of fashion as it became increasingly recondite. As the European economy collapsed, the vast sums of surplus wealth that had supported magicians and sorcerers dissipated. Moreover, the whole concept of magic became increasingly suspicious as some began to see the origins of the sorcerer’s art as demonic rather than divine.



In The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972) Frances Yates argued that Renaissance society was a victim of the witch hunts that intensified after 1590. The original "Rosicrucians" were, according to her, an informal group of natural philosophers and pansophists from England, Germany, and (to a lesser extent) France. Although the Rosicrucian order as such did not exist, the idea of such an organization uniting the great minds of the pansophic movement was itself attractive and steps were made to create a kind of secret scientific society. But the reaction of religious authorities was quick and decisive. According to Yates, the "Rosicrucians," a term she uses to describe the leading exemplars of "a phase in the history of European culture which is intermediate between the Renaissance and the so-called scientific revolution," were persecuted as part of the larger attack on popular magic and witchcraft:

The Invisible Rosicrucians are becoming objects of a witch hunt, and some of their characteristics, particularly their deep learning through which they attract the ‘curious,’ do not fit with those of the general run of witches, who were usually poor ignorant women. Nevertheless, it seems that [the opponents of the Rosicrucians] are really working up a witch-craze against the ‘invisible’ Rosicrucians, using the manifestos as their material and reading diabolical meanings into the supposed movements and activities of the [Rosicrucian] Brothers. The scare crates "the Rosicrucians’ as real witch-like characters, belonging to a diabolical secret society. [pp. 141-142]

Students of mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, medicine, and the natural sciences now faced persecution and possibly death as their arts had now, in the popular imagination, been branded as demonic. Since the pansophists themselves tried to avoid religious controversy and promised a new Reformation which would resolve the old crises, they were branded as heretics and demonic agents by the religious extremists – Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists alike. Scholars had to limit themselves to discussing natural phenomena and give up on metaphysical speculation. The result was the work of Bacon and Descartes, the founders of modern science, which was "safe" on account of avoiding larger questions of God, Religion, and Philosophic Truth.



Yates’s account of the persecution of the "Rosicrucians" is, in many respects, part of a piece with White’s "war" between science and religion. Though Yates is much more realistic and less openly hostile to religion, there is in this line of argument a similar temptation to identify traditional Christianity as a force of repression and intolerance, identifying the occult with open-mindedness, toleration and, ultimately, progress.



It is true that there were connections between the occult sciences of the late Renaissance and modern science. The astrologers, alchemists, and other pansophists did make a number of advances. Still, as Lynn Thorndike pointed out, modern experimental science owes much more to the Scholastic theologians of the High Middle Ages – folks like St. Thomas Aquinas – than to the Renaissance Magi. Nevertheless, Progressive-minded thinkers have long been attracted to the occult thinkers of the late Renaissance. This fascination can be seen in the passion for "New Age" spirituality among liberal social elites as well as in the new pansophic ideas of modern Scientism.



At the core of this fascination is the assumption that Christianity, in a violent and conspiratorial way, has attempted to suppress certain forms of knowledge, specifically the sorts of thinking which pave the way for scientific knowledge and secular explanations of natural phenomena. This belief has become the Epistles of Paul to those who would see science as the Gospel – the good news of knowledge that will liberate us from the chains of repressive religious ignorance. Paradoxically, such an attitude has led to a revival of schemes of "occult knowledge" which are patently absurd and seem to require a complete rejection of common sense and formal logic.



Perhaps this is because all of these tendencies are rooted in the same source: Humanism.



(To be continued some more)

[1] http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/collections/witchcraft.html

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Narratives-England-Witchcraft-Cases-1648-1706/dp/0486420558/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217873100&sr=8-3