A Remembrance of His Wonders. David I. Shyovitz

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СКАЧАТЬ the use of excrement to damage a person, Judah argues that “there must be some connection between the two which is too subtle to see.”¹⁸⁶ He draws a similar conclusion regarding various spells and charms which protect a person from being harmed by swords or fire—these result in “some barrier that prevents him from being cut or burned, even though it is too subtle to see.”¹⁸⁷ Once again, the strategy employed by the Pietists in making sense of these magical “remembrances” is functionally equivalent to the scholastics’ invention of “occult qualities.” In both instances, apparent deviations from natural causality are nevertheless subordinated to the natural world, through the positing of an innate, physical cause for phenomena whose workings are not understood. And just as there must be an invisible link that physically effectuates an array of magical processes, the Pietists argue, so too invisible spiritual entities can be said to exist. This argumentation is precisely the sort used by Christian practitioners of “natural magic,” who argued that their magical practices functioned not via maleficent means, but rather by exploiting the occult sympathies and antipathies intrinsic to the objects they utilized.

      PIETISTS, “PHILOSOPHERS,” AND POLEMICISTS

      There is reason to believe, moreover, that the Pietists came to this understanding of the workings of magic through contacts with practitioners in their surrounding culture. The Pietists refer throughout their writings to conversations with “the philosophers” (ha-filosofim). As Scholem long ago noted, the Pietists “[use] the term ‘philosophers’ in the same sense in which it is used in the medieval Latin writings on alchemy and occultism, i.e. as the designation of a scholar versed in these occult sciences.”¹⁸⁸ But it seems that their references to these philosophers reflect not merely a terminological parallel, but rather direct exposure on the part of the Pietists to the very same occultists Scholem mentioned. For the philosophers are invoked by the Pietists in reference to practices that were commonplace in the surrounding magical culture, both in scholastic universities and among priests who inhabited what Richard Kieckhefer has termed “the clerical underworld.”¹⁸⁹ For example, the Pietists frequently discuss a divinatory practice called sarei kos u-sarei bohen (“the divine beings of the cup and thumbnail”), which could reveal the whereabouts of a thief by asking a small child to interpret the images he sees reflected in a pool of oil poured into a vessel, or spread on his fingernails.¹⁹⁰ This magical practice was invested with great import by the Pietists, who invoke it repeatedly in their attempts to understand the mechanics of prophetic revelation (in which the prophet analogously sees ontologically blurred images that are “reflections” of the divine). Moreover, they repeatedly describe conversations with the “philosophers” about the workings of this phenomenon, conversations in which the Pietists and their non-Jewish contemporaries debate the workings of this practice, and its implications for comprehension of divine revelation. It is thus especially significant that the very same divinatory practices were common within the Pietists’ immediate milieu. Divination through interpretation of images on reflective surfaces (“captoptromancy”) was discussed in the abstract by such Christian thinkers as Michael Scot and William of Auvergne;¹⁹¹ others, like John of Salisbury, recorded their own firsthand experience with this practice:

      During my boyhood I was placed under the direction of a priest, to teach me psalms. As he practiced the art of crystal gazing, it chanced that he after preliminary magical rites made use of me and a boy somewhat older, as we sat at his feet, for his sacrilegious art, in order that what he was seeking by means of finger nails moistened with some sort of sacred oil or crism, or of the smooth polished surface of a basin, might be made manifest to him by information imparted by us. And so after pronouncing names which by the horror they inspired seemed to me, child though I was, to belong to demons, and after administering oaths of which, at God’s instance, I know nothing, my companion asserted that he saw certain misty figures, but dimly, while I was so blind to all this that nothing appeared to me except the nails or basin and the other objects I had seen there before. As a consequence I was adjudged useless for such purposes, and, as though I impeded the sacrilegious practices, I was condemned to have nothing to do with such things, and as often as they decided to practice their art I was banished as if an obstacle to the whole procedure. So propitious was God to me even at that early age.¹⁹²

      The Pietists might likewise have observed captoptromantic divination firsthand, but they could equally have been exposed to discussions of “natural magic” in the Hebrew translations of Christian scientific encyclopedias that circulated during their time period. Y. Tzvi Langermann, for example, has called attention to a Hebrew translation of William of Conches’s Summa Philosophica, fragments of which are still extant in two medieval Ashkenazi manuscripts.¹⁹³ Interestingly, the extant sections deal, among other topics, with “natural magic,” including various methods of divination and augury. While denigrating divination via demonic adjuration, what the Pietists would have called ov ve-yidoni, this text described matter-of-factly the mechanics of hydromancy, aeromancy, pyromancy, geomancy, and so on.¹⁹⁴ If the Pietists read texts like this one, they would have been exposed not only to specific magical techniques, but also to the same ethos of magic as a natural, though occult, sphere of inquiry that they manifest in their discussions of magical “remembrances.”

      While the precise means by which the Pietists absorbed sarei kos u-bohen thus remains open to question, we are on firmer ground when it comes to their knowledge of another divinatory method. We have seen above that the Secretum secretorum, erroneously attributed to Aristotle (“the Philosopher”), was perhaps the most important medieval “book of secrets,” and that its magical contents were consumed by clerics and university teachers alongside more mainstream scientific and philosophical writings. Given the centrality of this text to the culture inhabited by the Pietists’ “philosophers,” it is thus noteworthy that the Pietists seem to have had direct access to the Secretum secretorum, and to have incorporated some of its contents into their own theological tracts. In a section of the Secretum secretorum dealing with the ways in which a ruler can be guaranteed success in battle, the author (“Aristotle”) counsels the addressee (“Alexander the Great”):

      Know, Alexander, that this is the secret which I would perform for you whenever you went out to confront your enemies … and it is one of the divine secrets with which God has graced me. I have tested its truthfulness, and discovered its benefit, and succeeded on account of it…. [The secret is] that you should never go out to confront your enemies without first ensuring you will defeat them, by using this [method of] calculation. If the sum [you arrive at] does not favor you, calculate using your servants’ names, and send out against the [opposing] army whoever results in a winning calculation. You should calculate the name of your opponent and your own name using this system, and carefully guard the sum you arrive at for each [combatant]. Afterwards, divide the sum you have arrived at for each person by nine. Whatever remainder of less than nine is left over for each name should be … investigated according to the sums I have written for you.¹⁹⁵

      The Secretum secretorum here provides a system for calculating the names of the combatants in a battle, and hence for predicting the outcome of that battle. The alphanumerical sums arrived at for each name should be divided by nine, and the remainders should be compared with one another. This passage is followed by an extensive chart that contains every possible permutation, revealing who will succeed if a person whose name generates a certain remainder confronts a person whose name generates a different remainder—thus “one and eight, the eight will defeat the one; one and seven, the one will defeat the seven,” and so on.

      The Pietists betray their familiarity with this system several times in their oeuvre. In Hokhmat ha-Nefesh, for example, a discussion of the properties of the number nine leads Eleazar to the following aside:

      Also, in the “sums of the philosophers” (heshbonot shel filosofim), they calculate by nines, and determine the future based on the remainder. When comparing two similar things, you follow the higher remainder, and when comparing two dissimilar things, you follow the lower one…. What is meant by two similar things? Like two Jews, who have СКАЧАТЬ