Secret Beasts: Chapter 14
Thank you for listening...we are excited to have a new episode discussing Chapter 14 of the epic novel BLOOD MERIDIAN. We actually began this idea of this podcast a year ago, in November 2024. It's hard to believe we have been recording our podcast for a year but there eit is. And here you are too!!!! Thank you!
This episode we discuss mules, dead dogs, Apuleius's The Golden Ass" as well as mercury, Boehme, alchemy, and the tone of the novels narrator. And of course a bunch of other stuff. Please let us know what you think, are thinking or ideas you are thinking about. You can email us at:
[email protected]
An excerpt from Science Historian John Henry in THE LANCET...
"Without the tradition of European magic, science and scientific medicine could hardly have developed as successfully as they have. The historical evidence for the crucial role of magic in the origins of modem science is totally compelling. But to recognise this evidence we have to become historically aware that magic was once rather different from what it has become. Barely understood today, natural magic was, for the first 700 years of this millennium, the predominant kind of magic. It was based upon the assumption that God had created the world as a continuous “Great Chain of Being”, and that all the individual elements in creation were not only linked to one another through this unbroken chain, but that there were correspondences by which a creature in one part of the chain might resonate with, or somehow correspond to, a creature in another part of the chain. Underlying all this was a pervasive belief in purpose. God, or Nature, did nothing in vain, so there must be a reason for everything. Clues left by God, suggested the correspondences– eg, the flesh of the walnut in its shell and the human brain. Corresponding things were assumed to have occult powers or forces by which they could affect one another. The magician's role was to discover the correspondences and their precise occult effects in order to put them to use.
The discovery of such occult knowledge was difficult and the only sure way to discover, say, the healing powers of herbs or minerals was by empirical experiment, or trial and error. The “signatures” sometimes helped, but often they didn't. Just how is one meant to use the walnut to the benefit of the head? Is it a treatment for headache, or for mental disturbance? But if the adept failed to discover the secrets of nature empirically, he could summon a demon for help. Before the 17th century, nobody believed in the supernatural powers of demons, because only God could perform the supematural. Demons were thus God's creatures and so part of nature, but had greater knowledge of occult powers. Demonology was, therefore, inferior to natural magic. Consulting a demon was a means of taking a short-cut to the knowledge of natural magic. For us, the conjuring of demons is the essence of old magic, but this is a mistaken view since the secret powers of magic lay in the natural world.
The natural-magic tradition had a profound influence on the origins of modem science. All the leading thinkers of the so-called Scientific Revolution in late 16th and 17th century turned away from the kind of study of nature that was being pursued in the universities, known as natural philosophy, and embraced an empirical approach closer to that of the natural-magic tradition. Natural philosophy did not seek to exploit natural phenomena for pragmatic purposes, and did not recognise the experimental method as a fully valid way of gaining knowledge of the world. The leaders of the Scientific Revolution, however, like the magicians, developed and the experimental method to make it one of fruitful means of investigating nature. The new philosophers recognised the validity of experimentally defined occult qualities. The fact that this approach led to phenomenal success is best exemplified by Isaac Newton's treatment of gravity. In response to G W Leibniz's disparagement of his concept of gravity as an occult force, Newton did not deny it. Newton simply maintained that one should not make up hypothetical explanations of phenomena, but rather rely on the experimentally established facts and the mathematical analysis of the behaviour of objects. Any magician from the preceding 700 years would have agreed with him. By Newton's time, however, this empirical way of thinking was beginning to be regarded as “scientific”, not “magical” and the new philosophers wanted to distance themselves from the natural-magic tradition. Having appropriated what they wanted from this tradition, they joined in the chorus of disapproval of magic and disparaged what they had left behind in a distorted travesty of what magic had once been.
So history reveals that modem science was able to make such rapid gains in the 17th century only by plundering natural magic. Although Newton's work on gravity provides the most striking single example of the fruitfulness of notions of “occult” qualities, many medical men contributed to this story. Indeed, it was the newly discovered medical remedies whose efficacy defied understanding in terms of natural philosophical or medical theory, which stimulated reassessments of occult qualities and powers. It was this new work in medicine that led many intellectuals away from natural philosophy and back to the magical tradition. Although the real benefits of such reassessments were felt first in the physical sciences, the debt to medicine was later paid back with interest as medicine benefited from the advance of science. Both science and medicine, however, remain indebted to magic."
