Aquinas cites the passages from the Asclepius, together with Augustine’s condemnation, as signal proof that demonic collaboration is invited by such practices. Words and figurations are meant to be heard and read, and demons are always listening and ready to intercept the messages and begin their work of delusion. To control which way it would go, and the risks were great. The images carved on talismans and the invocations cannot of themselves produce a magical effect-they do so only insofar as they are addressed to intelligent beings, namely, good demons (angels) or bad demons. However, when characters or images are inscribed on the stones, or when incantations are used with the herbs, then the user is making signs and so is engaged in a form of magical activity. Aquinas allowed that natural herbs and gems-which had long been believed to carry certain inherent powers due to their astrological influences-could be legitimately used for medicinal purposes. Thomas Aquinas repeated Augustine’s condemnation, with a few significant clarifications. And yet he could not help but admire the author for having described the practices so clearly and for having prophesied their demise in a future time-which Augustine took to mean his own Christian era. Augustine condemned all of this as nothing but the grossest idolatry. Thus the statues are entertained with constant sacrifices, hymns, praises, and sweet sounds “in tune with heaven’s harmony,” so as to call up the souls of demons or angels and implant them into the statues “through holy and divine mysteries.” Ĭommenting on these passages in his City of God, St. The text explains that such statues were made of a mixture of plants, stones, and spices, elements that are invested with “a natural power of divinity.” But to attain full powers, they needed something more: a soul. The Asclepius celebrates humankind for having learned the magical art of “god-making”-making statues come alive by drawing divine powers into them. The text is now believed to have been written not much earlier than the third century CE, but until the early seventeenth century it was attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary Egyptian magus, theologian, and quasi-deity thought to have been a contemporary of Moses. And when it came to the animation of effigies, two passages from the Hermetic text known as Asclepius (23-4, 37-8) dominated thinking on the question in the West until the Scientific Revolution. The most dramatic form of image magic was the one that most directly mimicked divine creativity: the artificial creation of living beings. Practical magic was usually conceived in technological and Promethean terms: certain expert practitioners were believed capable of manipulatingĪnd rerouting numinous powers to achieve certain desired effects. Images have been both the objects and the exponents of anthropologies of the image. They have also offered commentaries on these expectations, representing image-magic practices and beliefs as if from a distance. Long, images have been caught in the double position of being both material object and sign: on the one hand, they have been asked to perform magical functions, and, on the other hand, and even at the same time, Is it the image’s material makeup or the figure “in” the image that effects the magic? How is the image invested with magical power? Long before modern anthropologists tried to tackle these questions, philosophers, doctors, and theologians in the pagan and Christian traditions described and explained magical beliefs in image-making and image-use. For millennia, writers have been trying to describe and explain magical beliefs and their relation to image-making and image-use. In his great compendium The Golden Bough, the early twentieth-century anthropologist James Frazer outlined his theory of the two forms of what he called Sympathetic Magic: magic of contact, or contagious magic, in which “things that have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed,” and magic of imitation, or image magic, based on the idea “that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause.” Frazer’s theory, though much disputed, is still the basis for the anthropological discussion of magic today, but it has a long history of antecedents.
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