What scholars were in need of, however, to prove their point and actively begin this transformation was a principle that could bridge the spiritual and physical world. What was needed was a prove. The sacred gate had stayed locked for centuries, the bridge that had been crossed by the saviour and the saints alone needed to be re-opened to the masses. What was needed was a set of techniques that promised to merge the promised blessings of the afterlife with the grim reality of the Medieval physical world. Whatever this principle was, from the viewpoint of the Medieval scholar it needed to make the impossible possible. Quickly it turned out only one word fit such daring exploit, and that was magic.

Now, at the advent of the 16th century the problem with research into magic was that it could still land you quickly in prison or on the pyre. Writing under patronage of royal families wasn't an option if you wanted to dig into the actual subject matter rather than skimming the surface. Hell, even premising your grimoire with a public statement that you denounced all magic and only published this book as a deterrent didn't help a lot. Inquisitors and city authorities really tried to keep a stable boat - and were prepared to throw out anyone who rocked it. What was needed was a much more radical transformation, a complete re-branding of the term magic as well as of all the ideas behind it. And within a few decades this is exactly what late Medieval and early Renaissance scholars attempted to do.

Let's return to what we had found about the state of magic at the beginning of the 16th century: On the one hand people on the outside perceived magic to be in a highly fractured and disfigured state, a shadow at best of its once glorious past. People on the inside, at whom we will look later on and who still knew the living philosophy and principles of magic from their own practice, on the other hand, had retreated even further into silence and closed circles. So in the absence of their living voices, the early Renaissance scholars had an easy game plundering the carcass of Medieval magic.

I’d like to think of the ‘rebirth’ Renaissance brought to magic a little bit like this: Imagine a world where for some reason all carpenters have been wiped out. Their workshops are empty and have been since centuries - at least that is how it seems to the public. Their craft has been forgotten and people’s quality of life deteriorated without anyone realising its cause. Everybody just accepted that that old wooden houses, chairs, tables and window-frames fell apart and couldn’t be replaced. Instead all things now needed to be made from stone. Stone houses, stone tables, stone chairs… You can imagine the scene - the masons had a blast and only the riches enough money to pay them. Of course the common folk rebelled every now then - they too wanted houses from stone or a table or chair to sit on. Yet, they simple couldn’t afford to pay for the expensive process of making one. Ultimately wars were fought over quarries and large parts of Europe’s useless forests were burned down in search for more raw stone to build the most basic things in life for the few people who could afford.

Then, centuries later, a group of scholars rediscovered manuscripts written in a foreign language on a craft called ‘woodwork’. It promised to solve all of people’s needs and everyday problems almost immediately. Yet, unfortunately it was written in code. The code was extremely hard to crack and yet strangely consistent. All of the authors on the matter had used the same cryptic approach to writing their manuscripts: they used the metaphor of creating things of daily life not from stone, but from plain wood. Of course the use of wood was a cipher, a symbol only - as no one would ever be able to do such things they described from wood alone. Their imagination seemed abundant: they had invented so many symbols in forms of ‘woodwork’ tools, traditions, practices, guilds, etc. The scholars knew it would take centuries to break through this code.

Unfortunately while none of the scholar actually broke the tricky code, they still all began publishing books on the craft of woodworking. Much to their pleasure the reaction of the public was astounding! Within a few years only a whole cult had formed around this secret craft, its mythical founding fathers, its tools of practice and the occult philosophy that lay hidden in their cyphered writings. Almost nothing was known about what these books really tried to convey or how one would apply their instructions - and yet its occult nature just seemed to increase people’s appetite for it…

The religious orthodoxy of course wasn’t pleased at all seeing such seed of a possible new religion spreading so quickly amongst its most educated men. So they decided to consider anything remotely connected to ‘woodworking’ a heresy and burned all of its public advocates. On pyres made from wood.

See, the funny thing is, once we have grown accustomed to a world of stone, the idea of doing woodwork will sound so ridiculous to us, we simply wouldn’t believe it. Solutions to problems that have been around for centuries, cost millions of people’s lives and led to the fall of whole nations, just need to be more complex than that. We’d rather create a new religion, throw all our faith and hope against a completely unproven theory, then to get out a knife, grab a piece of wood and try out for ourselves. Man is a funny species. And magic - once practiced as a craft and not adorned as a cult - much more practical, powerful and potent than most of us would ever dare to dream.

In their attempt to make magic legit - or at least sub-sections of it - our Renaissance forefathers leveraged the lack of expert voices on the matter as well as the huge amount of ambiguity that had marked this topic for centuries in the public eye. As radical philosophical reformers they set out to reinvent the notion of magic - and make it fit their bill of overcoming the intellectual stalemate the Medieval worldview had brought upon the academic world. Now, I do assume Ficino, Pico and many others at the time did everything they did with the most positive intent, trying to be true to the spirit of magic while making it relevant to the climate of their own times. The same happened again in the late 19th century when self-proclaimed spiritual scholars mixed up Buddhist concepts with the accelerating Western sciences and claimed that magic could be explained through the newly discovered electro-magnetic forces. They probably did everything they did with positive intent as well. Ruining a tradition doesn’t mean anybody has to act with malicious intent, lacking integrity or playing for their own gain alone. In most cases it simply means people involved weren’t sufficiently grounded in the actual practices of a craft. Instead they approached things from a theoretic perspective predominantly: While we know Ficino read the Picatrix and ‘squeezed out all of its juice’ for his own works (Zambelli, p.9), we don’t know how much of it he actually practiced? Look, people who believe woodworking is a new religion, aren’t bad people. They simply might have benefitted more from building a chair first, rather than re-inventing the secret philosophy of woodworks straight away?

“Ficino and Pico brought to light a number of ideas that were already to be found in patristic and scholastic times, but had received limited attention from professional philosophers. From the end of the fifteenth century these had become dominant among the elites and soon spread abroad among academic and literary circles. The Neoplatonic and Hermetic theories of the two Florentines on the cosmos, the ‘spirit’ and the forces of nature had given rise to a new idea of magic.” (Zambelli, p.2)

So what exactly did this new idea of magic consist of?

“Thus the universe is a machine ruled by imagination in the general picture of sympathy between astral bodies and elementary bodies with the boundless automatism of the astral movers. But these must not be considered either anthropomorphic or modified by human agency. They are pure intelligences, neither demons nor angels. (…) The magic which Ficino defined as natural promised to make men capable of working many wonders, but it claimed to exclude the invocation of demons.” (Zambelli, p.6/7)

Let’s step back and simplify. Here is the genius trick our Renaissance forefathers applied to magic: To them magic was nothing but a forgotten set of tools for exploration. What these tools were applied to, was a matter of each practitioner’s choice and ultimately would decide whether one’s magic was ‘black’ or ‘white’. The path they attempted to establish as a legitimate and safe one was to apply these tools on the exploration of the natural world - on stones, herbs, plants, animals, or even on humans for healing. The opposite path led into self-guided exploration of the spiritual world - and that was where the smell of a burning pyre remained just around the corner.