Natural magick
Facsimile edition of work first published in abridged edition of 1558, and then in this full English edition in 1658. A miscellany of early scientific beliefs, observations, and experiments by della Porta and his little group of amateur scientists.
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What Hacker News says
- Of course there is such thing as magic, our clients keep asking for it. Telling them “magical experiences don’t exist” seems a bit dim. Most of the way these rationalists deal with magic is to simply define magic as something that doesn’t exist. Big win, there.
People say “Magic is just a psychological phenomenon” as though that is somehow reducing its power or purpose. Creating magic is a big part of many people’s jobs. That said, one of my favorite books is by the first president of the Royal Society, titled “Mathematicall Magick”. It deals with Natural Magick — a concept that helped transition the Renaissance to the scientific and Industrial Revolutions.
- One of the founders of the royal society, John Wilkins, wrote a popular book about magick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_Magick
Stems from the then popular interest in Natural Magick. Evolved into science and engineering.
- That link just goes to the whole book. For anyone curious: the relevant bit is on page 249, though some pages before and after provide interesting context.
"The same thing is affirmed by [long list] of Albertus Magnus; who, as the most expert, had made an entire man of the same metal[1], and had spent 30 years without any interruption in forming him under several Aspects and Constellations. [...] and being put and fastened together in the form of a Man, had the faculty to reveal to the said Albertus the solutions of all his principal difficulties. To which they add (that nothing be lost of the story of the Statue) that it was battered to pieces by St Thomas, merely because he could not bear its excess of prating. But to give a more rational account of this Androides of Albertus, as also of the miraculous heads, [...]"
[1] i.e., brass ("brazen heads" are mentioned earlier in the paragraph).
(I've modernized the spellings.)
So I think the Androides (I think this is intended as a Greek-looking singular title, not as an English plural; it's a translation of French "Androide") is meant to be a whole person, not just a talking head, although the book talks about it in the context of other things that were just talking heads.
The author declines to believe that Albertus actually made a statue that was able to talk rationally. The specific reasons he gives aren't super-convincing to a modern reader, but I suspect they're mostly rationalizations and his real reason for being unconvinced is just that the story doesn't sound plausible. (Plus, he wants to acquit Albertus of the charge of doing magic in the treating-with-the-powers-of-evil sense.)
He does say that statues able to make vaguely speech-like noises are surely possible "by the help of that part of Natural Magick which depends on the Mathematicks" :-).
