Ceremonial magicians and alchemists

Ceremonial magicians and alchemists work from books, orders and systems. They include the Hellenistic theurgists, the medieval Arabic and Jewish writers on talismans, Renaissance figures such as Marsilio Ficino, Agrippa and John Dee, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, and today's lodges and online groups. This page covers who they were, what they studied and why their work was both revered and condemned. Their work is often private and written in code.

Learned magic

Learned magic drew on astrology, Kabbalah, Hermetic philosophy, alchemy and the grimoires. It required reading in Latin, Greek, Hebrew or Arabic, and thus drew on the educated. Practitioners often framed their work as a spiritual path, a study of nature or a way to approach the divine. Isaac Newton wrote at length on alchemy, a fact that shows how mixed the intellectual world once was. They worked with talismans, seals, lamens, ritual tools, astrology and invocations, and followed long preparations of prayer and fasting.

Orders and secret societies

From the nineteenth century, groups arose with graded degrees, robes and oaths. The Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, included women as full members, which was unusual at the time. Rosicrucian and Masonic ideas, theosophy and later Thelema carried the tradition forward. Some groups have been accused of cultish control or abuse of members, and others are more like study circles. Alchemists were also early experimenters, and some made real discoveries in metallurgy, distillation and medicine, while others were swindlers who promised gold for a price.

Church, state and the learned

The Church condemned demon-conjuring, but tolerated natural magic and astrology in many periods. Mages were protected by patrons, as Dee was by Elizabeth I, or hounded, as Giordano Bruno was, burned in 1600 for heresy and other charges. In the Islamic world, writers such as al-Buni wrote on letters and names, and some jurists condemned the work. Women were barred from most universities and many orders until the nineteenth century, so female mages worked as healers, writers or visionaries, or were accused of witchcraft instead.

Appropriation and reading

Modern ceremonial magic borrows from Egypt, India, Kabbalah and Indigenous traditions, which raises a question of respect and accuracy. Historians such as Frances Yates traced the influence of Hermeticism on the Renaissance. Scholars of Western esotericism now study it as a part of intellectual history, and sceptics treat claims of power as untested. Practitioners claim lineages that run back to Egypt or Solomon, which historians find hard to support, and scholars call such claims invented tradition.