The Years Of The Wizard Rachel Morris: The golden age of the great British magician
The Years Of The Wizard Rachel Morris (September £20, 368pp)
The man who acted as alchemist to James IV of Scotland – John Damian – had a secret laboratory in Stirling Castle. It was there that he built himself a pair of wings and attempted to fly from the castle’s ramparts. It may or may not surprise you to learn that the attempt was unsuccessful.
The experimentation of Sir Isaac Newton
Damian got away with a broken thigh. But we shouldn’t assume that everyone laughed at him – his beliefs were perfectly normal for the 16th century. In fact his efforts at alchemy (turning base metals into gold) were matched by those of the scientist Isaac Newton, right. There was also William Cecil, Elizabeth I’s chief adviser. And, crucially for Rachel Morris’s book about the era’s magicians (as in wizards rather than David Blaine), there was John Dee.
Another adviser to Elizabeth (he supplied the mathematical calculations that allowed her sailors to undertake journeys to the New World), Dee was the most famous magician of his age. As well as pursuing alchemy, he sold dream interpretations and astrological readings. His crystal ball and black obsidian mirror are now in the British Museum. He also owned the largest private library in England, some three to four thousand books.
Unusually for the time he kept them on shelves (cupboards were the norm), their spines facing inwards, as titles back then were painted on the edges of the pages. Dee liked to doodle in the margins, which in those days were left deliberately wide for that very purpose. Doodling was ‘a sign of your love for your books and a way of connecting you… to all the readers who came afterwards’.
Wizards of the Elizabethan period believed in astrology, in perpetual motion machines, in bottles planted into the walls of a house to catch witches before they could enter. Some of the magicians would base decisions on the ‘sieve and shears’ – a sieve held between the blades of a pair of scissors, which would then be allowed to turn as you asked it questions. That was the higher rank of wizard, mind you. Poorer people had to consult the ‘cunning folk’, practitioners who could provide you with potions and charms to secure love, pregnancy, protection against evil etc. Fairy stories were widely believed too.
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How could people fall for such nonsense? Various explanations crossed my mind as I read this book. One of the more charitable theories concerned the ‘celestial globe’, which was a normal globe mounted within an outer one showing the stars. You could move the latter ‘as if you were God… seeing how the constellations passed across the Earth’s surface’. That must have given a feeling of control over events, and who wouldn’t be tempted by that?
At other points, though, you can’t help but conclude that the magicians were trying it on. John Dee had a ‘scryer’ (medium) called Edward Kelley, who helped him talk to the angels, as their messages wouldn’t appear directly to Dee himself. ‘Was Kelley knowingly tricking Dee?’ asks Morris. ‘Was he taking drugs? Was he mentally deranged?’ Or, we might add, was he just earning himself a few bob?
The German magician Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa was said to have ‘paid his tavern bills with coins that, though they appeared to be made of gold, turned into horn afterwards’. You might call that proof of wizardry. Or you might call it a magic trick of the more modern sort, one involving paint. And not a particularly well-executed one at that.