Things Fall Apart

The sixteenth century was a period that reveled in cosmic harmony, and music was at the heart of this magic. The occult force of musical modes reflected and reinforced the natural harmonies of the planets; it was a terrestrial manifestation of the stars and the perfection of the entire cosmic system. Agrippa carefully related the musical scale to the planets and the elements in De Occulta Philosophia, crafting a design of expanding circles that would later be pictorialized by Robert Fludd as the harmony of the world. Everything interconnected, and the poetic furor of melancholy made it all accessible, radiating from the innermost depths of the soul out to the ultimate sphere of the universe and reflecting that harmony back into it. The system was in perfect resonance. But that resonance ultimately vibrated the system apart as it encouraged the quest for the Nous.

The brooding, inspired Platonism had discovered a new key--empiricism--which opened a magical door to experiments beyond mere logical exercises. There was no single, seminal proposal of this doctrine, but Bolognese scholar Pietro Pomponazzi at the very beginning of the Sixteenth Century and then Neapolitan friar and agitator Tomasso Campanella toward the very end both wrote of the immutability of universal principles and the reliability of sensory knowledge, if well enough trained, to see the true Hermetic forms of things. "God was transcendent in nature and for this reason, magi, through ecstatic fervor, shared intellectual divinity as they plumbed the depths of dynamic natural laws." [Mani, p.97] This was powerful stuff. It was a time when it was thought possible to be able to know everything, and many a magus set out to do just that, the grand cosmological order was so compelling. Those who observed that order more carefully, however, found subtle but ultimately unbearable discrepancies.

What concerned astronomer Nicholas Copernicus, leading to his publication of De revolutionibus orbium coelestrum libri VI in 1543, was not so much the now Byzantine complexity of the Ptolemaic system of epicycles used to compute planetary orbits as its use of equants to account for their variable proper motion. These were lines which radiated not from the exact centers of the planets but instead had to be skewed slightly to one side or the other. With a sun-centered system the orbits could be reduced to simple and perfect circles, which were much more pleasing to Hermetic sensibilities. These circular orbits still could not predict planetary positions accurately, and the end result was a system of computations as complicated in aggregate as the Ptolemaic one, but the elegance of orbital circles and the clear geometrical explanation for retrograde planetary motion led to the quick acceptance of this view by most Hermetic scholars. Both Giordano Bruno and Campanella embraced the sun-centered Copernican theory as a vindication of Hermes Trismegistus's foretelling in the Asclepius of the sun as the visible manifestation of God [Yat1, p.238]. And Copernicus, though he never considered himself a Hermeticist, explicitly associated Hermes with his discovery of heliocentrism [Yat1, p.168].

Further rips in the universal fabric came, ironically, from the universe itself. On August 21, 1560 the weather was clear in Denmark, and there was a partial eclipse of the sun--exactly as predicted. It was not an especially rare nor spectacular sight, but the accuracy of the prediction so captivated a young law student that he decided to give up that field entirely and study astronomy. The lad was Tycho Brahe, who as an astronomer viewing the heavens on a November night twelve years later noticed a star in the constellation of Cassiopeia that had never been there before. He made careful observations and published them in his 1573 treatise De nova stella, but he could not come up with an explanation. (It would be more than 300 years before models of stellar evolution would be proposed, but Brahe's label "nova" immediately stuck and is still used.) By all Classical epistemology, Platonic or Aristotelian, the stars were immutable.

Brahe's precise planetary observations were picked up by Johannes Kepler, who used those data in his quintessentially Hermetic attempt to prove that the orbits of the six Copernican planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, the moon having been shown to orbit the earth) were circles etched upon spheres that were spaced one from the other by each of the five Platonic solids in turn. He failed, but while working on this grand taxonomy he observed in November 1604 in the constellation Ophiucus another supernova, this one so bright it remained visible to the naked eye for 17 months. Kepler, well-versed in Hermetic doctrine, had delayed publication of his Harmonice Mundi for decades as he struggled to accept the meaning of the elliptical quality of planetary orbits which he had proven instead of his desired, nested spheres, but the birth of another new star convinced him that there was truly a new order, and in 1607 he published it. Still the Renaissance magus, however, he came to the conclusion that even though planetary orbits were not circular, they were nevertheless clearly describable, and that in the mathematical simplicity of his descriptive equations he had found the music of the spheres.

Thus did orthodox neo-Platonism give way to Mannerism, in which empirical methods were at the command of the inspired Nous, not simply in the pursuit of logos but of gnosis--the divine search for truth--and this new-found power now enabled the aspiring magus, scientist and artist alike, to see the cosmos from new perspectives. This new world of science was still very much a world of magic, and now the magic had become exceedingly charged; Mannerist philosophers as separated as Pico della Mirandola, Paracelsus, and Bruno all took great pains to create elaborate taxonomies of the magic at their disposal. But if they were powerful, they were also dangerous. The Church had tolerated the Renaissance Hermeticists: there weren't many of them, but more importantly their inward-directed, melancholic belief system was essentially meditative. Now, however, they were becoming both gnostic and cocky, traveling widely and declaiming their discoveries. And it didn't matter whether they were popular or not--the idea that even a single mystic could through his inspired Nous attain the universal truth was intolerable to a religious institution that already had a tough fight on its hands.

"The doctrine of divine inspiration as the source for intellectual virtuosity in effect merges Aristotelian and neoplatonic systems, and this merger becomes a powerful weapon for apologists of Mannerism. Patrizi devotes an entire treatise to the subject of furor poeticus, a subject eagerly taken up by many other theorists. The experience of furor raises the poet to the rank of genius and provides the justification for every iconoclastic invention. Giovanni Maria Verdizotti has chosen an apt title for his poem of 1575: Genius sive de furore poetico. If poetic furor is a sign of genius, and genius a sign of great wit, then the more pedestrian meaning of maniera as external elegance and novel style now emerges as the philosophical manifesto of avant-garde sublimity." [Mani, p.32]

The difference between the Hermetic and Mannerist world views was subtle, but the result was earth-shaking--the new system was as exuberant as it was unstable. In an appendix to the fifth volume of Hamonice Mundi (1619) Kepler attacked English Hermeticist Robert Fludd, who responded in 1621 with a treatise in his Utriusque Cosmi Historia. Kepler answered with an Apologia (1622) to which Fludd again followed up the same year with Monochordum Mundi. It was a long and public battle; the argument was about the meaning of numbers. Kepler had had no trouble with heliocentricity, since it was supportable in Hermetic writings, and he came not only to accept but to embrace his discovery about planetary orbits as a confirmation of the grand design. But to do that was both to lose the elegant symmetry of the macrocosm and microcosm and to adopt an entirely new vision of mathematics: "The root of the difference between himself and Fludd lay in their differing attitude toward number, his own being mathematical and quantitative whilst that of Fludd was Pythagorean and Hermetic." [Yat1, p.441] With this view Kepler placed mathematics, as a tool, separate from and outside of the harmonic unity. Number was no longer a reflection of the cosmos but a method for understanding and describing it. It was the beginning of the decoupling of nomos and logos, of things and the names of things.

"Neo-Platonic hermeticism had fulfilled its purpose; it had fostered the genuine and experimental sciences. Once their techniques were established, they produced a natural philosophy of their own. The pantheist universe gave way to an idea of nature as a machine, an arrangement of parts in perpetual motion. Ancient metaphysical notions about the cosmos had literally lost their magic. The circle was indeed broken, and the mannerist magus had become the baroque scientist. But the foundation of what historians consider to be modern science was laid by the perverse experiments and intellectual convolutions of Mannerist thinkers. The character, style, and some of the content found in their works are explicable only in terms of a mannerist ambiance, and as such died with the waning of the Age of Mannerism. But hidden in their radical games were the seeds of modern technological science." [Mani, p.100]

"This fracture between the world and signs brought with it profound consequences. In the first place, signs and language no longer existed as given ontological entities anterior to knowledge. Instead they were now seen to be made along with knowledge itself... This is not to say that natural signs could not exist alongside conventional, man-made signs, but rather they came to function as signs, to signify, only in human acts of knowing. Second, signs no longer functioned to conflate things across time and space according to their resemblances. Instead signs, like knowing itself, dispersed things across the field of analysis. Third, and most important, the sign took on a new function of representing the reality that was now separated from it." [Tom2, p.192]

Proclaiming this paradigm shift at the close of the 16th Century marched magician-philosophers Campanella and Bruno. Both journeyed extensively throughout Europe, boldly announcing the new Copernican theory as a harbinger of Hermes's utopian City of the Sun. Both ran afoul of the authorities for their recusant pantheism much more than their anti-Ptolemaic sentiments, and they were silenced. Campanella was jailed in 1599 and would not be released for more than twenty years. Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600, a fate that is metaphoric of the entire Hermetic epistemology. Galileo's discovery in 1610 with the newly-invented telescope of satellites of Jupiter served merely as Hermes's obituary--the order had already crumbled. Galileo was silenced too, of course, but the new epistemology could not be, it simply moved away; on Christmas day of 1642, the year Galileo died still under house arrest, Isaac Newton was born.

What remains of poetic furor when nomos is cleaved from logos?

"Resemblances were no longer the form assumed by the world and knowledge; they were liminal experiences... They remained central only for two figures, whose relations to knowledge of signs in the new epistemological order needed, as a result, to be reformulated: the madman and the poet. Both of these figures were vestiges, so to speak, of the magical episteme... The madman in the analytic age saw only resemblances... The poet, on the other hand, saw through the new order of knowledge to the earlier one and found there something that retained a certain reality, albeit one almost overwhelmed by the analysis of difference and the chasm between the world and language." [Tom2, p.193]

The nature of poetic furor was intensely debated around the turn of the seventeenth century; few writers dismissed the notion outright. Francesco Patrizi's 1586 De furor poetico described it as an intermediary between the soul and higher beings, a divine light that is the source of prophecy as well as poetry. Girolamo Franchetta's 1581 Dialogo del furore poetico is also rooted in magical thought, but contains a more Aristotelian mechanistic conception, wherein the poetic furor results "from the melancholic temperament ruled by black bile rendered clear by abundant spirits" [Tom2, p.215], thus harking back to Problem XXX. There was not much difference between the Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of poetic furor at this point--the Platonists claimed that ideas were directly infused into the poet by celestial beings; the Aristotelians limited and defined the process to be the actions of natural forces, such as light, on the poet's bodily humors. But now overlain on these conceptions was the new epistemological notion of representation. And so the purpose of poetry became dynamic, literally forceful, as the new epistemology came to understand the cosmos in terms of forces. Poetry, though still considered of divine origin, was no longer important as a cosmological connector; it was, like Kepler's mathematics, a tool. And thus did Aristotle's Poetics gain ascendancy, not as the cause of the paradigm shift but as the result of its need for a new methodology.