Pragmatick Schoolmen, men made up of pride,
And rayling Arguments, who truth deride,
And scern all else but what your selves devise,
And think these high-learned Tracts to be but lies,
Do not presume, unless with hallowed hand
To touch these books who with the world shall stand;
They are indeed mysterious, rare and rich,
And far transcend the ordinary pitch.
- Io. Booker.
Religion and science, a partition in worldviews that, for many, is indelible. But it wasn’t always that way; in fact, for most of human history, the two have been intimately intertwined. Science intends to reckon with the physical world, and, for many a religious person, God/Gods are the world, both physically and not.
When we think of magic, we often think of metaphysical things: crystals, energy (in the vaguest sense of the word possible), spells—all things that enable one to harness natural and unnatural powers. Our modern conception of magic is utterly influenced by our media: movies, video games, TV shows, and books containing wizards and witches, cauldrons and potions, and all other forms of magical paraphernalia. But, historically, magic has taken a much more… pragmatic form. “Magick”, as practiced throughout the ages, is the fusion of theology and science, the turning of one onto the other.
Hermeticism is one such example of a doctrine of magick, an ancient attempt at the union of science and religion. Though our modern conception (with much thanks to the church) of the “occult” is rather insidious (witches, sacrifice, the devil), the origin of the word is far less heretical. Occult—derived from the Latin “occultus”—means “concealed”, or “hidden”. Hermetic science, evolving from early, esoteric forms of Gnosticism, would eventually become the medieval practices of alchemy, numerology, astrology, etc., all disciplines designed to capture a glimpse of Divine Truth and power.
The purpose of medieval and renaissance hermeticism was to try and apply the new (and unquestionably successful) scientific method to religion. The logic and methodology of science, of experimentation, was turned towards the heavens in order to glean knowledge of the Divine.
A common historical narrative: The Enlightenment followed the renaissance, and begot a time of human entitlement—the world and its phenomena, its mysteries, merely mountains to be conquered, dominated, and exploited. It was a new age of heroics; an insatiable, voracious hunger for knowledge quilts much of that time period. The Romantic era to follow, with its conception of the Sublime (reverence for the Chthonic, powerful, untamable forces of the natural world) can be seen as a reaction to it.
Interestingly, the inception of science fiction was the consequence of this insistence of pushing science beyond its means. This is exemplified perfectly by the very first work of science fiction: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. What else is the monster but a punishment, a cosmic reckoning for Dr. Frankenstein’s betrayal of natural laws? The book even mentions Dr. Frankenstein studied the works of Henry Cornelius Agrippa in his youth, one of the most significant 16th century scholars of the occult.
Frankenstein, emblematic of the genre it spawned, echoes Zhuangzi’s sentiments,
To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.
Science, pushed beyond natural boundaries, get’s corrected by Nature. That is the lesson of Frankenstein, a romantic work critical of the humanism of the Enlightenment; an era where Reason reigned supreme, and humanity was second only to God.
Though certainly interesting, all of the above is contextual. The locus of this post, as implied in the title, was instigated by a passage near the beginning of Cal Flyn’s book Islands of Abandonment.
Flyn writes of a clandestine island called Inchkeith, found off the coast of Scotland in the Firth of Forth (a few miles from Edinburgh).
Flyn’s purpose for visiting the abandoned isle—the purpose of her book—was to view how nature can re-colonize spaces deserted by humans, in order to glean what a post-human world would be like.
She describes the history of Inchkeith as turbulent, being used as an
early Christian ‘school of the prophets,’ later a quarantine island for those stricken with syphilis (banished there ‘till God provided for their health’), then a plague hospital and even an island prison, with water for walls. (Flyn, 2)
The island—isolated, yet alluringly in view from the Scottish capital—was said to “capture the imagination of King James IV of Scotland” (Flyn, 2).
A brief background:
King James IV, ruled Scotland from 1488-1513, killed by the English at the battle of Flodden. He is often described as a “polymath”; a man of many interests, with affinities for literature, the arts, and science. He is praised for bringing the printing press to Scotland, opening the university of Aberdeen, and mandating compulsory schooling for Scottish citizens. (King James IV)
James IV, who had a particular interest in language (speaking several himself), would prove to push his curiosities to the threshold, and beyond. The “forbidden experiment” is a notorious illustration of the drive for knowledge overstepping its means, with Inchkeith being James’ respite of hermetic potential.
The story goes that near the turn of the 15th century, he commissioned an experiment to be played out on Inchkeith involving two babies and a mute nurse. The purpose of the inquiry was to answer once and for all a question that still plagues the minds of scholars today: Nature vs. Nurture. James IV hypothesized that, left unmolested by society, humans would develop the innate language of God—Hebrew.
Flyn writes that,
“James sank huge sums into research into alchemy, human flight, and […] transporting to Inchkeith two newborn infants in the care of a deaf nursemaid, in the hope that the children, sequestered from the corrupting influence of society, would grow up to speak the prelapsarian ‘language of God’. (Flyn, 3)
“Prelapsarian” is a fascinating word. It means to refer to a time before the fall of man, which—biblically—occurred when Adam and Eve—following the temptation of the serpent—consumed the apple containing the knowledge of good and evil. This allusion to Genesis is apt; a supposed age of purity where a divine form of logic, knowledge, and language prevailed, before being wrested from humanity by God as punishment, and thrust into scattered vestiges.
James IV was almost certainly reaching for a taste of this knowledge, of this Truth, with his experiment—parsing through the tarnished influences of human history in order to reach through time, to even before our conception of time itself, and indulge in the congenital understandings of Eden.
As one could imagine, the results of this experiment were more than likely unfruitful. Unfortunately, what we know of the destiny of these children comes from speculative chroniclings made some centuries later,
(‘Some sayes they spak guid Hebrew,’ reported the chronicler, slyly, ‘but I knaw not.’ Others evoked a ‘brutish babble.’) I suppose it depends what sort of God they were looking for. (Flyn, 3)
The moral of the story is perhaps morality itself. Nietzsche famously said that “God is dead”, but the rest of this popular quote is often omitted:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
With the metaphorical death of God, humanity has sought His shadows to take His place: things that too can be appraised as unequivocally valuable—monoliths. Science is certainly one such shadow of God, especially in our STEM oriented, capitalist society.
Though modern science is not typically conducted for religious reasons, there are still times when it has been used in the name of a God. Napalm, atomic bombs, missile drones; all things concieved in the name of science but offered up to a corrupted deity of monitization.
Science is only as good as those who make use of it, and in the wrong hands can be brought to disastrous limits, with disastrous ends—as shown by James IV, throughout history, and made centrally thematic to science fiction. Science needs regulation, a corrective force like that found in science fiction—people that can guide it morally; otherwise, it can, and will, be domineered for macabre machinations in the name of profit.
Flyn, Cal. Islands of Abandonment. Penguin Books, 2022.
https://ramblinghistory.co.uk/2021/12/22/inchkeith-language-experiment/