Sympathy and antipathy: the friendships and enmities of nature

The vine loves the elm and shuns the cabbage, the lion fears the cock, the wolf is the enemy of the sheep. These images, which today sound like fables, were for Agrippa examples of a universal law. In the first book he devotes entire chapters to the friendships and enmities between things, maintaining that everything that exists is drawn to what resembles it and repelled by what is contrary to it. Sympathy and antipathy thus become the hidden engine of natural magic.

A long philosophical tradition

The idea has very ancient roots. Empedocles, in the fifth century BC, had explained the world through two cosmic forces, Love and Strife, which unite and separate the elements. The Stoics spoke of sympatheia, the solidarity that binds all the parts of a universe conceived as a single living being. Plotinus, in the Enneads, saw in this very universal sympathy the reason why magic seems to work: the cosmos is an organism, and what touches one part has repercussions on the others.

In the Renaissance these doctrines returned to the foreground thanks to the translations of Ficino, who made Plato, Plotinus and many Neoplatonic texts available in Latin. Agrippa combined them with the naturalist tradition, turning a philosophical intuition into a vast repertory of concrete cases, arranged according to the planets and elements to which each thing was traced back.

The catalogue of examples

Much of the material comes from the Naturalis historia of Pliny the Elder, the encyclopaedia completed in AD 77. From Pliny and other ancient authors Agrippa takes the friendship between the vine and the elm, to which Roman farmers wedded their vines, the vine's aversion to cabbage, the fear the lion was said to feel before the cock, the enmity between the elephant and the mouse. These are reports gathered without verification, as was customary in encyclopaedic literature.

Particularly famous is the case of the magnet. Besides its attraction for iron, the Plinian tradition held that the diamond could hinder its force, and Agrippa reports this belief as an example of an antipathy overcoming a sympathy. The same pattern extends to the heavens: the planets too are said to be friends or enemies of one another, and earthly things inherit the relationships of their stars.

From things to planets

Sympathy is not a chance relation between two objects, but the reflection of a higher kinship. Solar things love each other because they depend on the same Sun, saturnine things resemble each other because they share the influence of Saturn. Hence Agrippa's long chains of correspondences uniting metals, stones, plants and animals under each planet, which prepare the tables of the second book. To the Sun belong gold, the lion and the cock, to the Moon silver and the creatures believed to follow its rhythm. Proclus, followed by Agrippa, used this to explain even the lion's fear of the cock: both are solar, but the cock in a higher degree.

The doctrine of sympathies outlived Agrippa and nourished, in the sixteenth century, the natural magic of Giambattista Della Porta, who in 1558 published at Naples a Magia naturalis that went through many editions. Only with the new science of the seventeenth century was this vision of a nature driven by loves and hatreds gradually abandoned, though it left deep traces in European language and imagination.