After Yates: the debate on Hermetic magic and the scientific revolution

In 1967 Frances Yates published an essay entitled The Hermetic Tradition in Renaissance Science, in which she proposed an ambitious idea: the active attitude of the Renaissance magician, determined to operate upon nature and not merely to contemplate it, had prepared the mentality of modern science. The proposal, known as the «Yates thesis», sparked a debate that has lasted for more than half a century and has changed the way Agrippa and his contemporaries are studied.

Casaubon and the end of Hermes

One fixed point, recognised by Yates herself, concerns the dating of the Hermetic texts. In 1614 the Genevan philologist Isaac Casaubon, in his Exercitationes on the Annales ecclesiastici of Cardinal Baronius, demonstrated on linguistic and historical grounds that the Corpus Hermeticum was not the work of a very ancient Egyptian sage, but dated from the first centuries of the Christian era.

According to Yates, that discovery marked the beginning of the end of the prestige of Hermetic magic. Later scholars have specified that Casaubon's reception was slow and that many authors went on reading Hermes as an ancient prophet even after 1614, but the value of his philological work is not in question.

Critiques of the thesis

The best-known objections came at the end of the 1970s. In 1977 Robert Westman and J. E. McGuire published a volume entitled Hermeticism and the Scientific Revolution, in which Westman showed, with regard to Copernicus and Kepler, that references to Hermes were marginal and did not explain their astronomical choices. Kepler, in particular, had openly argued against the Hermetic symbolism of Robert Fludd.

In 1984 the English scholar Brian Vickers edited the collection Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, arguing that the magical mentality, founded on analogy and correspondence, and the scientific one, founded on the distinction between word and thing, were profoundly different. Other historians observed that the category of «Hermetic tradition» lumped together very different phenomena, such as Neoplatonism, Christian Kabbalah, Paracelsianism and alchemy.

A new discipline

The debate did not erase Yates's work but transformed it. In recent decades the study of Western esotericism has become an autonomous academic field, with dedicated chairs in Paris, at the École pratique des hautes études, and since 1999 in Amsterdam. The French historian Antoine Faivre proposed defining esotericism as a form of thought characterised, among other things, by the idea of correspondences and that of a living nature.

Within this framework Agrippa is no longer regarded as a forerunner of science nor as a mere magician, but as an author to be studied in his context: a humanist who reworked ancient, medieval and Kabbalistic sources, and who also wrote a book on the vanity of all the sciences. The Dutch historian Wouter Hanegraaff has likewise insisted on the need to rescue this tradition from both apologetics and contempt.

The most important result of the debate is perhaps greater caution. Today historians avoid both seeing Renaissance magic as the mother of science and dismissing it as superstition. They prefer to reconstruct, case by case, how ideas, texts and practices circulated between fields that were not then separated as they are for us.