Natural Magic in Renaissance Science

Abstract

Natural magic (magia naturalis), understood within the learned traditions of Renaissance Europe, referred to active endeavors that were reliant upon or directed toward forces or mechanisms in nature whose causation or manner of operation were occult (occultus) – that is, hidden, or distinctly obscured from an empirical understanding of nature. Natural magic may be distinguished from magic in general by its emphasis on strictly natural objects and operations, crucially distinct from the power of spiritual intelligences identified with demonic magic. Thus natural magic was also characterized variously as the manipulation or application of higher (celestial) influences in the terrestrial world or as the active or applied aspect of natural philosophy, involving the knowledge and manipulation of occult properties, especially sympathetic correspondences in nature. Understood in this sense, natural magic can be seen to inform many diverse ideas and practices including chemistry, medicine, and mechanics.

Within the multivalent magical tradition that flourished in the Renaissance, natural magic received heightened rhetorical attention in the face of mounting condemnation as a tolerated – if not licit – category of magical theory and practice closely associated with natural philosophy and its academic milieu. Within learned discourse, natural magic became part of epistemological debates through its engagement with the knowledge and manipulation of imperceptible phenomena. This emphasis on occult operations in nature demanded a constant reevaluation of the boundaries of nature and, by extension, the limitations of human influence over nature that would be crucial to the development of scientific thought in the late Renaissance.