And so up pops a delightful article by Eileen Reeves, who Cipher Mysteries regulars may remember as the author of “Galileo’s Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror”. Her paper, called “Of Language and the Lodestone”, covers a peculiarly Renaissance phenomenon: baptizing magnets with holy water and unholy words (nomina barbara, which Reeves summarizes as “foreign utterances whose force lay in sound rather than in semantic sense”) in order to induce a very human kind of magnetism – love.
To most people back then, magnets were occult objects imbued with an unknown power: and looking at perpetual energy machines/scams half a millennium later, nothing much seems to have changed since. By comparison, the Renaissance fringe notion that a quasi-religiously treated magnet could perform some kind of low-key sympathetic magic (conceptually not so very different from the rationalizations of astrologers throughout the ages) seems, dare I say it, almost reasonable.
Curiously, Jesuit mathematicians/astronomers circa 1610 believed that they could somehow use “the hidden force of the magnet” to communicate at a great distance, via the great magnet that is the earth – some would no doubt hear pre-echoes of Tesla there. These pairs of communicating magnets, too, were to be anointed and “baptized with cabalistic names”, just as love-magnets were. However, by 1640 our friend Athanasius Kircher was happy to denounce this “stupid little machine” as “stupid and absurd”, even though he claimed that an unknown kind of solar magnetism apparently powered his own heliotropic plant. Oh well!
Enjoy! 🙂
Among the Bedu tribemen, personal magnetism is still called Magan-Nt.
i.e. the shield of Neith. How’s that for tradition?