The ancient Egyptians were not the only ones who created art for magical purposes

Jonathan Jones - 4 November 2010

Magic is halfway between science and religion. Hear me out, secularists, hear me out. Religion is concerned with a spiritual realm beyond the visible world. Science only accepts – for practical purposes and, if you are Richard Dawkins and others, for philosophical purposes, too – the existence of that visible world, and attempts to discover its nature and how it works. But magic is the desire to use invisible forces to change the visible world.

Works of art that we look at today in museums, as if they were solely intended for mute aesthetic contemplation, were often made for magical purposes. This is clearly true of the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, but it also applies to art made thousands of years later in Europe. In Renaissance Florence, portraits of traitors were often painted on walls in public places – after one conspiracy, no less an artist than Sandro Botticelli portrayed the conspirators on the Piazza della Signoria. These were not merely “wanted” posters. They were visual curses: paintings that set out to injure their victims, to invoke malevolent magic. In a similar way, when a Venetian Doge betrayed the Republic of Venice his portrait in the Doge’s Palace was blanked out. A modern regime might simply remove his picture: by preserving it over the centuries, as a blank space, Venice did something more potent and spooky.

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Natalie Angier - Oct. 11, 2010

Excerpt:

Sir Isaac the Alchemist … was no less the fierce and uncompromising scientist than was Sir Isaac, author of the magisterial Principia Mathematica. There were plenty of theoretical and empirical reasons at the time to take the principles of alchemy seriously, to believe that compounds could be broken down into their basic constituents and those constituents then reconfigured into other, more desirable substances.

Miners were pulling up from the ground twisted bundles of copper and silver that were shaped like the stalks of a plant, suggesting that veins of metals and minerals were proliferating underground with almost florid zeal.

Pools found around other mines seemed to have extraordinary properties. Dip an iron bar into the cerulean waters of the vitriol springs of modern-day Slovakia, for example, and the artifact will emerge agleam with copper, as though the dull, dark particles of the original had been elementally reinvented. “It was perfectly reasonable for Isaac Newton to believe in alchemy,” said Dr. Newman. “Most of the experimental scientists of the 17th century did.”

Moreover, while the alchemists of the day may not have mastered the art of transmuting one element into another — an ordeal that we have since learned requires serious equipment like a particle accelerator, or the belly of a star — their work yielded a bounty of valuable spinoffs, including new drugs, brighter paints, stronger soaps and better booze. “Alchemy was synonymous with chemistry,” said Dr. Newman, “and chemistry was much bigger than transmutation.”

Books of interest, by Newman:

• Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe
• Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry
• Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature

Teresa Burns - Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition No. 16, Vol. 2. Vernal Equinox 2009

Last issue, two articles under the larger title William Shakespeare’s Green Garland explored the possibility that “Francis Garland,” a man who seems to barely exist outside of his presence in John Dee’s diary and angelic workings, but who according to Dee witnessed Edward Kelley’s grand transmutation,[1] could be a pseudonym for the man we now call William Shakespeare.

As the first of those articles noted, Dee refers to several “Garland” brothers in his diary—Francis, Edward, and Robert—and mentions a fourth “Garland,” Henry. None have ever been positively identified. No extant archival records show a payment to or letter from any of these men, yet they clearly are presented by Dee as acting as couriers. No civic record yet located lists their names. In fact, with only two or perhaps three significant exceptions which I mentioned in that essay, all of the references to a “Garland” connected to John Dee or Edward Kelley have as their source the writings of John Dee.

That article, “Francis Garland, William Shakespeare, and John Dee’s Green Language,” its timeline comparing Francis Garland’s activity to that of William Shakespeare, and a related analysis of a poem perhaps written by Edward Kelley to a “G.S.” who may have been “Gulielmus Shakespeare,” were all written to test out two clusters of hypotheses concerning John Dee, Edward Kelley, William Shakespeare, and Francis Garland.

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