Pietro Pomponazzi and De incantationibus: Wonders without Demons

Not all the great names of Renaissance magic were magicians or defenders of magic. Pietro Pomponazzi, born in Mantua in 1462 and died in Bologna in 1525, was an Aristotelian philosopher who taught at Padua, Ferrara and finally Bologna. Short of stature, so that students called him Peretto, he was a master feared for the rigour of his reasoning. His work on incantations is among the most important of the period precisely because it tries to explain the marvellous without resorting to spirits.

The Scandal of the Mortal Soul

Pomponazzi became famous in 1516 with his Tractatus de immortalitate animae. In it he argued that, according to Aristotle's principles, the immortality of the soul cannot be proved by reason alone and must be accepted by faith. The book caused a storm: in Venice it was publicly burned and many theologians wrote refutations. Pomponazzi replied with an Apologia and a Defensorium, maintaining the distinction between what philosophy teaches and what faith teaches.

The same method guided his later research. For an Aristotelian philosopher nature is explained by natural causes, and spiritual substances such as angels and demons do not act directly on bodies. It was a risky position at a time when belief in demons was upheld by theology and by the courts.

A Natural Explanation of Wonders

In 1520 Pomponazzi completed De naturalium effectuum causis sive de incantationibus, “On the Causes of Natural Effects, or On Incantations”. The treatise starts from cases contemporaries regarded as miraculous or magical, such as sudden cures, apparitions and prodigies, and tries to show that they can be traced back to natural causes. These include the hidden properties of herbs and stones, the influence of the heavenly bodies and the power of imagination.

Particularly bold was the role he gave to imagination and trust. According to Pomponazzi, some effects held to be prodigious might depend on the strong imagination of the one acting and the faith of the one receiving, rather than on the virtues of an object or the intervention of spirits. Applied to relics and shrines, this hypothesis touched a raw nerve of popular devotion.

The Fate of Religions

In De incantationibus Pomponazzi also sets out an astrological theory of history. Like all things beneath the Moon, laws and religions too are born, grow and decline according to the rhythm of the heavens, and great religious changes coincide with particular planetary conjunctions. The idea was not new, going back to Arab and medieval astrologers, but in his context it sounded like a provocation.

For these reasons the work was not published in his lifetime. It appeared only in 1556, in Basel, edited by the physician Guglielmo Gratarolo, who had taken refuge in Switzerland for religious reasons. The same happened to De fato, written in the same years and printed in 1567, in which Pomponazzi tackles the difficult relationship between divine providence, fate and human freedom. Both texts later circulated above all in freethinking circles.

The comparison with Agrippa is instructive. Both rejected demonic magic, but while Agrippa built a learned magic founded on correspondences between the worlds, Pomponazzi reduced the marvellous to nature. Reading the two authors together shows how lively the Renaissance debate on occult forces was, and how the very word nature could take on different meanings depending on who used it.