This argument is strange enough it got me to drag myself out of my long posting torpor, just to make a post. I need to clarify something first: I do not find 2e Thaumaturgy particularly interesting and I think it's mostly lauded so much because it is remembered better in contrast to 3e Thaumaturgy. I don't think either are particularly interesting, but the former has more than like, two pages dedicated to itself. I am solely here to defend ancient and historical magicians against the charge of "frauds", not out of some interest in defending the efficacy of folk magic—for every functional rite, one might find something non-functional or harmful—but out of an interest in defending the systems of thought and understanding that the ancients put immense amounts of work into. I must emphasize that I find, "But is it like, real magic?" the least interesting possible question to ask, and by the same token find this discussion of how real or fraud-like ancient magic was totally uninteresting. My sources for this discussion will be A. Azafar Moin's The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship & Sainthood in Islam and Tara Nummendal's Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire.
Astrology is an oft-cited example of the influence of historical magic, and alchemy an oft-cited example of its uses (and lacks of uses), so I figured that these two would serve as useful points to begin a discussion about this. So let's start by discussing Mughal kingship. At the height of his reign, Akbar I of the Mughal Empire was accused of turning against Islam itself, and of fashioning himself as a prophet. Fashioning himself a spiritual guide to all his subjects across the Indian subcontinent, regardless of caste or creed, he unveiled a spiritual order in which all his nobles and officers were encouraged to enroll as disciples. The consequences of his Din-e Elahi (the Divine Religion) institution of imperial discipleship were global in proportion and reports of the Padeshah's turn against Islam were followed with interest from Iran to Spain. Akbar's experiment was assumed by modern scholars to have had no comparison all across the Islamic world.
This does not hold up to scrutiny.
In fact, Akbar's experiment was deeply rooted in Sufi conceptions of sainthood and mysticism, ideas which three centuries earlier had taken root in Iran in the form of a new kind of mass-based Sufism structured around hereditary spiritual leadership of cults to popular saints. These practices were immensely successful in shaping the experience of lived Islam, and the worldviews of ordinary Muslims. And it's this tradition we need to see Akbar's experiment in. What is an Emperor—a Padeshah—if not a hereditary spiritual leader on a very large scale? And what is his favoured subjects, if not his disciples? What I am saying is that to the average Iranian or Indian Muslim, the idea of sacred authority was in no way abstract or textual, it was concrete, real and experienced. Mediated through the intercession of holy men—and women—and the graves of saints, apparent in dreams, rituals that emphasized holiness and set-apart-ness and theological innovations, this new Islam was in every sense very, very real. We might say that by certain modern and overly limiting empirical categories, it was not "truly" real, because we cannot be sure if these holy figures truly did perform miracles, and that Shah Esmail was most certainly not Ali reincarnated as he claimed to be. But I think that's near-useless. For all practical purposes, the holy kingship of Akbar I was very real.
So how does this relate to astrology?
As anyone who has ever studied Christianity might know, the term "millenarianism" refers to the incoming total change—or apocalypse—of society and the world. The term comes from the Latin millenarius with the greek suffix ismos, referring to something "containing a thousand" of something. The idea, of course, is the impending societal change at the turn of the millennium, and Islam is in no sense a stranger to this idea. To put it as clearly as possible, the idea was that the saviour was expected to appear at the end of a thousand-year cycle, or at the beginning of another one. Sometimes, this cycle would be linked to the end of the world, other times as the penultimate time before the aforementioned. Key to it all was that time was perceived, to some degree, as fundamentally cyclical. And the keys to that cycle lie in the regular rotation of the heavenly bodies, and as a result was informed by the sciences of astronomy and astrology. These sciences were part of the everyday lives of all classes of people, and also served the useful function that they allowed the adjustment of the beginning and end of what exactly this cycle was. The thousand could be subdivided into auspicious subsets and fractions as needed. This was not just the result of superstition or people "knowing less", but the result of a lively and engaged dialogue stretching all across Eurasia between philosophers and astrologers, nor was it in any sense a result of hucksters and frauds setting increasingly ridiculous dates for the apocalypse where this time it will surely happen (5th attempt).
In the words of A. Azafar Moin, "for the people of that era the future was as important as the past, divination as important as genealogy, and astrology as valuable as history. Indeed as far as practices of sacred kingship were concerned, history and astrology were sister disciplines. Astrologers worked as annalists, and historians served as oracles." Astrology was, just like history remains today, a deeply and fundamentally political science. Astrology was used to ascertain the health of realms and to determine remaining lifespans; it is certainly no accident that monarchs often issued new calendars with their accessions. In other words, what we saw as Akbar's "experiment" was in fact the newest and most radical move in a long tradition of millennial sovereignty (title drop, vine boom, explosion effect) that was hardly bound to any given religious tradition but stretched all across Western and Southern Eurasia with roots in the sciences of preislamic Iran, India, Mesopotiamia and Greece.
Of course, today, astrology is a joke. Discussion of ancient astrology is more likely to lead to anecdotes about Nancy Reagan's penchant for the divinatory arts, or references to strange, Christian hucksters in the States and their absurd attempts to divine the apocalypse, something medieval Islamic astrologers themselves regarded as a pointless exercise. What I am discussing here, of course, is as much a science as a tool to legitimize certain regimes, so it is no surprise that it is deeply formalized and systematized; legitimacy and monarchy are bound to discover what works and what does not, and astrology served an important role in that.
So let's talk about alchemy.
Alchemy today gets a sad reputation. It is relegated to the historical equivalent of those bowling halls your family takes you to when they don't really want to shell out, but the occasion is a celebration after all; denuded of people except strange characters you don't really want to talk to, the bowling screens full of low-quality and surreal effects and having little purpose except serving as a precursor to eating together later. Alchemy is permitted to be the ancestor of chemistry; a time of would-be geniuses united in the dream of spinning gold from air at best and a long litany of fraudsters at worst. It is far from the imagination of modern man that the hollowed out and empty husk that we call by the name of alchemy was once a lively field of its own, respected in its own right. Such understanding usually comes with assurances that people did not know better in those times. They couldn't help it.
So let's talk about a historical anecdote; an alchemist and his associates that would be right at home in Creation.
Phillip Sömmering arrived at the north German court of Duke Julius of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel in 1571. Like many other alchemists at his time, he claimed to know how to transmute base metals into noble silver and royal gold. However, that was hardly all Phillip had to offer. To the Duke, he offered suggestions on how to improve productivity in the local mines, and his designs for a gun barrel that would shoot bullets absolutely straight intrigued the military minds at the court. He could claim a heady intellectual lineage too; as a former pastor, he had been trained by the close friend of Martin Luther, Melanchthon, and offered to help guide the Duke's court through the winds of the Reformation. He was promptly accepted as an advisor at the court at Wolfenbüttel. He and his associates had come to Wolfenbüttel from Gotha where they had experienced the chaos of the Reformation firsthand, but found that their stay at Wolfenbüttel was more fragile than they had first understood. Duke Julius' consort, the Duchess Hedwig, was suspicious of the alchemists, and especially opposed to the female alchemist Anna Maria Zieglerin, who seemed threatening to the dominant women of the court. The duke's sister, Margravess Katharina of Brandenburg, also came to dislike the alchemists when she visited in November. In the fall of 1573, the advisor Jobst Kettwig moved against the alchemists. He himself had obtained his powerful position as Military and Chamber Counselor through his connections to Phillip Sömmering, but his criminal past as a bandit and disturber of the peace in the territories of the Dano-Norwegian Crown caught up with him when Sömmering had him imprisoned in response to a warrant issued against him. Kettwig responded by alleging that the alchemists had presented themselves under false names, that they were frauds and that they "knew nothing of alchemy's secrets". Sömmering made a mistake that proved fatal. He assisted Kettwig in escaping from the prison, just as Julius received a letter from the elector of Brandenburg that further impugned the honesty of the alchemists. They were locked in the palace dungeons and interrogated over a year. The alchemists were executed in 1575. And all this because they hate to see an alchemist girlboss winning.
Alchemists in the 16th century Holy Roman Empire were far from figments of literary imagination, but "very real purveyors of practical techniques, inventions and cures". The alchemist was almost a central European constant and he could be found everywhere in princely laboratories, mining towns, urban centres, advising on mining projects, experimenting with medicines, making pearls or gemstones, selling recipes and writing books. Some practiced their art successfully and made their living and careers off it, others like Sömmering and Zieglerin found themselves meeting grisly ends at the accusation of being Betrüger: frauds, imposters, liars.
The 16th century was truly a golden age of alchemy. Such figures could be found everywhere, and as a result, there was a truly new interest not just in the practice, but in its discussion. Defining alchemy, defining the alchemist, defining goals and setting expectations through innumerable discussions, was a key interest of the time, and as a result the category of the fraudulent alchemist, the Betrüger was born. Of course, to us modern people, the idea of a fraudulent alchemist probably seems laughable at best; by definition, alchemy is a fraud that simply does not work. So are all alchemists not frauds? Not in the sixteenth century Holy Roman Empire. There was little doubt then, that fraudulent alchemists existed, and that they prospered by beguiling those ignorant of the true secrets of the alchemical art. There was a clear distinction between the art's true practitioners, proper alchemists, and those who merely lied, and maintaining this border was a matter of serious import. Let's devote a bit more time to thinking about this; is it not significant that at the time of their execution, not only did most of Sömmering's associates credit Zieglerin as the source of most of their ideas, likely to make her a scapegoat, but the authorities in question found it perfectly believable that a woman could be an alchemist, and an accomplished one at that?
For princes like Duke Julius, or Landgrave Moritz of Hessen-Kassel or Emperor Rudolf II of the Holy Roman Empire, the patronage of alchemy was an avenue, not just to alchemical secrets, but to gaining a certain image. Such men were seen as religiously tolerant, learned men who sought to master and hold dominion over the natural world in accordance with divine design, or as clever investors who hedged their bets on inventions and ingenuity. Alchemists, to the average urban inhabitant of the Holy Roman Empire, were not men like Newton and Boyle, but men like Sömmering and women like Zieglerin; self-taught entrepeneurs and workaday practitioners who studied not for the intellectual satisfaction but for the practical and material benefits that alchemy could provide. They were apothecaries, pastors, urban consumers of vernacular books, court ladies and gentlemen. Only rarely were they literate, Latinate scholars who could see their works into print. By numbers alone, such figures had a significant enough presence in German cities that it was notable. Alchemists did not exist at the margins of society, rather they lived at its very centre. Indeed, the practice of alchemy could be a very lucrative career, and a way to climb the social hierarchy and cross boundaries thought previously unthinkable. We might say, as Nummendal does, that the alchemist forms a recognizably modern figure; the self-taught entrepeneur whose social status depended on skill and talent. While noble courts formed important centres of the accumulation of knowledge, they were never sources for it. Alchemists found their skills elsewhere.
Alchemy, it seems, was always a secretive art. As a mid-sixteenth century alchemist put it, alchemy is "well-hidden because the old masters who found the art did not want to teach it to either their children or their friends; therefore he who finds this art is lucky, because it is not easily found." Despite this, and despite alchemical texts describing it as "the great gemstone and most noble pearl", alchemy seems to have been everywhere. Alchemists were never organized into guilds, as other professions were, and it was not present at universities or at the scholastic curriculum. The alchemist was warned to be "secretive and silent and should reveal his secret to no one." But nonetheless, in 1617, a cynical observer commented "Look and you will find the alchemist's primary transmutation to be of himself: A goldsmith becomes a goldmaker, an apothecary a chemical physician, a barber a Paracelsian, one who wastes his own patrimony turns into one who spends the gold and goods of others". Despite the secrecy of alchemy, the art was readily available to many. We find natural philosophers, Paracelsian physicians, court ladies, pastors, apothecaries, Jews and many others listed as alchemists when we look.
If we look at this sixteenth century alchemy, we find multiple distinct traditions. Alchemia medica aimed at medicines, alchemia transmutatoria took pride of place with its goal of turning metals into gold, alchemia technica aimed at achieving certain practical effects and alchemia mysticae encompassed a more mystical-christological understanding of the world, aiming to understand God through His creation. And to the practitioners and observers at the time, transmuting metals into gold through alchemia transmutatoria was indeed possible. Perhaps they lied, perhaps they misidentified events, perhaps they really could create gold, we don't really know and I'm not interested in the answer regardless of how impossible it probably is. History is full of anecdotes such as a Fugger banking record that the alchemist Marco Bragandino "changed a pound of quicksilver into gold some days ago". In their eyes, he did indeed transform quicksilver into gold.
Of course, we know (do we?) in modern terms that astrology does not work, and neither does alchemy. But I think the sheer intellectual effort and interest applied to either in the past justifies that they deserve a bit more of a treatment in Creation than a split between frauds who ultimately pretend for their own enrichment and a few who are gifted with a natural ability they have no control over. I do not think genetic, or accidental, thaumaturgy is more magical. This post turned into a bit, by which I mean a few two thousand words, more than I had initially planned, so I suppose coming after the entire discussion I reacted to had already ended has the advantage you can pretend that it is an inspirational post for various magical traditions found in Creation. I spent the entire morning writing this. I am going to be late for university and it is all your fault.
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