§33. Secretum Secretorum
That “magicians were perhaps the first to experiment” is doubtful. But Lynn Thorndike is right to say, in his magisterial History of Magic and Experimental Science, that “magic and experimental sciences have been connected in their development” and that “the history of both magic and experimental science can be better understood by studying them together”72
Educated Romans of late antiquity tended to credit the existence of a carefully guarded, magically efficacious knowledge which, though forbidden, might be discreetly sought by those with a passion for uncovering nature’s secrets.
Discretion was required because this knowledge had the reputation of magic, which Roman law consistently condemns. Pliny, writing in the first century ce, denounces magic as vanitates and praises Romans for their effort to eradicate it. For Roman authors, magic connotes devious operations performed with malice and in solitude, an odious crime justly subject to capital penalty, as laid down in the fifth-century Theodosian Code:No person shall consult a soothsayer [haruspex], or an astrologer [mathematicus], or a diviner [hariolus]. The wicked doctrines of augers and seers [vates] shall become silent. The Chaldeans and wizards [magi] and all the rest whom the common people call magicians [malefici], because of the magnitude of their crimes, shall not attempt anything in this direction. The inquisitiveness of all men for divination shall cease forever. For if any person should deny obedience to these orders, he shall suffer capital punishment, felled by the avenging sword.73
That remained European law down to the seventeenth century. In 1327, Pope John XXII added alchemy to the forbidden mix; a papal bull of 1586 prohibited publications on astrology and divination. Many of the recipes in clandestine codices were medicinal, and magic and medicine were long associated.
Pliny claimed that magic began in medicine. Greeks remember Asclepius as a semi-divine healer, but for patristic authors he was a magician. Religious authorities consistently censure commerce in amulets and potions, the magic practitioner’s stock-in-trade.A section of Isidore of Seville’s seventh-century Etymologies entitled De magis summarized everything scholars knew of this forbidden knowledge, and it became the core of later works, whether praising or condemning magic. He explains that humanity acquired magic from evil angels; that Zoraster, king of Persia, was the first magician; and that magic promises knowledge of hidden things, whether hidden in the future, in the infernal regions, or in nature. He equates magi (magic practitioners) and malefici (witches), tainting magic with foul wickedness, though he also lays down the prototype distinction between a good, natural magic and an evil, demonic magic, contrasting the admirable disciplina of the medical arts with witchcraft’s wicked necromancy.74
Collections of magical secrets began to circulate in the thirteenth century, riding on the new interest in natural knowledge that attended the medieval reception of Aristotle. Most of these works are of Arabic origin, successfully passing as authentic works by authors like Aristotle and Albert the Great. This is also the time of the influx of alchemical works, again from Arabic sources, especially “Gerber,” prince of alchemists. Arabic secret sciences were studied by William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris, and by Grosseteste at Oxford.
A floridly magical Secretum secretorum (Secret of Secrets), which has been traced to an Arabic original of the tenth century, was successfully attributed to Aristotle and under close study in Paris during Roger Bacon's tenancy. The work purports to disclose the Philosopher's deepest secrets. “When you have studied its contents and understood its secrets you will thereby achieve your highest desires and fulfill your loftiest expectations.” The work contains recipes and experiments that supposedly reveal keys to nature's power of generation and corruption.
These secrets, tested and verified by experiments, work marvelous effects by entirely natural means.75The Secretum proved more popular than the authentic works of Aristotle, and apparently inspired Roger Bacon's scientia experimentalis. Bacon edited the Secretum, adding a long preface and supplying many clarifications. He strove to confirm the work's promises, claiming (in the Opus tertium) that he spent twenty years and two thousand pounds on secret books and the instruments and materials to test them. The cloak of Aristotelian authorship enabled him to make more sweeping claims for experimentation than the authentic writings of Aristotle would bear. “Even if nature is powerful and marvelous, art using nature as an instrument is more powerful.” One can imagine that from Hippocrates or Archimedes, but it is not to be read in Plato or Aristotle.76
More influential even than the pseudo-Aristotle Secretum is a work of the late thirteenth century called the Secreti Alberti (also Experimenta Alberti), successfully passing as a work from Albert the Great's experimental school at Cologne. Whoever compiled it was an avid student of Arabic occult sciences. The “secrets” in both of these books are recipes, a Latin word from the imperative form of “take,” as in “Take one eye of horny-toad...” These recipes are scripts for experiments, prescribing actions, means to ends, instruments for operations. The books imply a concept of nature laden with occult powers that can be exploited to great effect by anyone who knows the secret.77
With the coming of print the genre’s popularity grew, and Books of Secrets were a staple of the publishing trade down to the seventeenth century. The audience for these books also migrated from the cloistered scriptorum to the secular virtuoso’s study. The genre evolved from secret recipes for marvelous effects to realistic explanations of procedures in the industrial arts. The first age of print saw a barrage of treatises detailing the manual side of these arts, a printing phenomenon that culminates in Diderot’s Encyclopedia.
The authors seek out workshop methods, depicting, comparing, demystifying, popularizing a useful knowledge that escapes scholastic formality, and fostering technical literacy beyond the workshop walls. Having the experiment printed, the ingredients specified, the quantities measured, and the sequence of procedures made explicit facilitated the comparison of results and promoted constructive exchange among virtuosi. Scholars began to understand that technical effectiveness connoted no cunning or morally dubious artifice (the memory preserved of Daedalus), but was merely knowing how to do amazing things with nature.A new idea of experiment emerged from the reception of these works. Experiments like those which Grosseteste tried to marry to Aristotelian demonstration are reassigned to a new method of proof, the idea of maker’s knowledge. To know is to be capable of producing the thing you know. Natural philosophical knowledge becomes detached from the demonstrative canons of Aristotelian episteme, to enter a new alliance with the power adepts ascribe to natural magic—the power to operate, producing at will any effect of nature. Such knowledge lacks full-dress Aristotelian demonstration. Nothing about elemental earth explains the lodestone’s activity. The knowledge has to be hunted out, pursued with industry and ardor, and not in books or libraries. “Whoever wishes to explore nature must tread her books with his feet,” wrote Paracelsus, itinerant alchemist-physician. “Sell your lands, burn up your books, buy yourself stout shoes, travel to the mountains, search the valleys, the deserts, the shores of the sea, and the deepest depressions of the earth.... Purchase coal, build furnaces, watch and operate the fire. In this way and no other will you arrive at knowledge of things and their properties.”78
The demand for Books of Secrets sustained a new form of authorship, the professional divulger, publicizing jealously guarded secrets of nature. The prototype of their work is the Secreti del reverendo (1555) by Alessio Piemontese.
By 1600 it had surpassed seventy editions, with translation into most European languages. The author explains how he could not bear withholding useful secrets from humanity and therefore renounced his erstwhile promise of secrecy on the higher principle of philanthropy. The secrets he publishes have been tested and they work. “Truely, I would not sett my selfe... to write fables and lies.... There is nothing in this boke but is true and experimented.” Again, confirming experiments: “Mindying to set forth none, but soche as bee most true and proved, I have these dais past... made a collection of soche as I am certaine bee veritable, true, and experimented” He emphasizes careful observations, long experience, and extensive travel. Like Petrus Maricourt, Alessio was not too proud to solicit information from empirics, shepherds, and housewives. Most of his recipes are medical, but he does not merely repeat pharmacopoeias or classical sources, and claims no authority other than his own experience, a point he repeatedly affirms— “a thing experimented upon many times” “well tried and experimented” “proved in Venice, the year 1504” sometimes with named witnesses.79It is possible that Alessio Piemontese is a pseudonym for Girolamo Ruscelli, who was a well-known author in his own right. He studied medicine at Padua, and arranged the posthumous publication of his Secreti nuovi (1567). The work compiled more than a thousand recipes, supposedly collected and tried by an experimental academy Ruscelli founded in Naples, the Accademia Segretta, a secret society devoted to collecting, testing, and anonymously publicizing secrets for the improvement of the world. The group was inspired by the philosophy of Bernardino Telesio, a sixteenth-century Padua-trained natural philosopher whom Francis Bacon also admired. Telesio was an uncompromisingly anti-Aristotelian empiricist. “The structure of the world” he said, “and the nature and magnitude of bodies contained in it are not to be sought from reason, as the ancients did; they must be perceived from sensation and treated as being things themselves.” His constant teaching is observation, operations, and philanthropy.80
Ruscelli struck the same note in describing the work of his academy.
“We devoted ourselves equally to the benefit of the world in general and in particular,” he says, “reducing to certainty and true knowledge so many most useful and important secrets of all kinds for all sorts of people, be they rich or poor, learned or ignorant, male or female, young or old.” This may be the earliest account of a scientific society, anticipating a movement that culminates in the founding of the Royal Society of London, the first publicly acclaimed scientific society, in 1666. “During all those years,” Ruscelli explains, “we continually experimented on all secrets that we could recover from books, whether printed or written, be they ancient or modern. And in doing such experiments, we adopted an order and method, one better than which cannot be found or imagined... those secrets we found to be true by doing three experiments on each.”81The most prominent of the sixteenth-century collectors of secrets was Giambattista Della Porta, a Neapolitan aristocrat and author, the quintessential virtuoso, Europe’s foremost authority on natural magic, and Italy’s most distinguished natural philosopher, dominating Italian science in the generation before Galileo. By the end of the seventeenth century his treatise Magia naturalis (1558) had appeared in fifty editions. He dedicated his life to establishing natural magic as a science. As Isidore explained a thousand years earlier, magic is called natural to distinguish it from conjuring with demons. Demonic magic is blasphemous, heretical, and properly a crime, but natural magic is different, as Pico della Mirandola also explained. “This name ‘magic’ is an ambiguous term, and means either necromancy, in which one acts through pacts and agreements with demons, or the practical part of the science of nature, which only teaches us to achieve admirable works by means of natural forces, connecting one with the other, and making them act on passive natures.” This is magic “rightly pursued,” and is “the absolute consummation of natural philosophy.”82
Della Porta takes exactly this line. Natural magic uses natural causality to produce effects that look unnatural only to those who do not know the secret. Nature teems with hidden forces that can be imitated, amplified, and exploited to advantage. Find these secrets and one can work at will any effect nature works randomly. “For a diligent searcher of Natures workes, as he seeth how Nature doth generate and corrupt all things, so doth he also learn to do.” Della Porta emphasizes the experimental method of his work, which does not just copy what a scholar can find in books. What he reports he has tested with methodical experiments. “In our method I shall observe what our Ancestors have said, then I shall show by my own experience whether they be true or false.”83
He actually tested the well-known fact that garlic destroys the power of a magnet, to a negative result: “But when it [a lodestone] was all anoynted over with the juice of Garlic, it did perform its office as well as if it had never been touched with it.” He also investigated Albert the Great’s widely repeated claim that iron is strengthened by quenching in a juice of radish and earthworm. “It becomes so hard that it scratches gems and cuts any other iron like lead.” Della Porta tried it. “I found it always softer... and it was false, as the rest of his Receipts [sic] are.” He claims more success with other esoteric quenches, especially “the foul moysture of the serpent, Python”84
Della Porta may have witnessed the experimental activity of Ruscelli's group, and he organized his own experimental academy in Naples, the Accademia dei Secreti. However, his activities and prominence became increasingly dangerous. By the end of the sixteenth century, magic had replaced heresy as the most common charge before the Holy Office. Della Porta was twice brought up on charges of “having written about the marvels and secrets of nature” and was compelled to disband his academy. Later he was associated with the most important scientific society prior to the Royal Society of London, the Accademia dei Lincei, or Academy of Lynxes, founded in 1603 by Frederico Cesi. The group was dedicated to natural philosophy, vowing not to engage in disputes of religion or politics, or to quarrel among themselves, or make vain boasts. The academy began with only four members, sworn to secrecy. Della Porta was fifth, Galileo sixth.
In 1604 the founder, Cesi, visited Della Porta. The group had taken their name from a passage in his book where he describes the natural philosopher as “examining with lynx-like eyes those things which manifest themselves, so that having observed them, he may zealously put them into operation.” When Cesi became duke of Aquasparta in 1610 he invited Della Porta to join the group and head a newly formed Neapolitan branch. In 1611, hard on the publication of Siderius nuncius (1610), the suddenly prominent Galileo was invited to join. The telescope seemed a perfect symbol of keen vision. Thereafter Della Porta was sidelined, as the group became devoted to Galileo's ideas and methods. Galileo clearly felt honored by the association, adopting Galileo Galilei Linceo as his signature. The academy published his works and supported him throughout his dispute with the Holy Office. A member of the founding group coined the name “telescope” for the instrument (then usually called a perspicillum or, in Italian, occhiale) that Galileo presented to the fellows at a banquet honoring his induction in 1611.85