What it is
Natural magic is the use of the hidden but natural properties of things. A magnet draws iron, the torpedo fish numbs the hand that touches it, and the peony was believed to ward off the falling sickness. Nobody could see why. The old philosophers called such powers occult qualities and explained them by sympathy and antipathy, the friendships and enmities that run through nature. To work with them required no spirits and no prayers, only knowledge, and for that reason many Renaissance writers called natural magic the noblest part of natural philosophy. Its experiments fed directly into the new science of the seventeenth century.
Folk magic is older and humbler. It is the everyday practice of charmers, healers, and the people the English called cunning folk: words to stop bleeding, a cure for warts, a prayer over a sick cow, a way to find a thief. It lived mostly in speech, and it reaches us through household manuscripts, cheap print, court records, and the notebooks of folklorists.
The two literatures meet in the books of secrets, the recipe collections of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which put a cure for toothache, a method of dyeing silk, and a trick with a lodestone on the same page.
Where to begin
Read the first book of Della Porta's Natural Magick for the theory and the second for the fun. Then turn a few pages of the Book of Secrets that went under the name of Albertus Magnus, and finish with Hohman's Long Lost Friend for the charm book of a working healer. Our essay The Long Lost Friend introduces the last of these.
Ancient and medieval foundations
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Natural History (Naturalis Historia) Pliny the Elder. Latin. Dedicated in 77 CE. L 6
Thirty-seven books on everything in the world, of which books 20 to 32 collect thousands of remedies from plants and animals. Book 30 opens with a history of magic that calls it the most fraudulent of the arts, and Pliny goes on recording its prescriptions anyway. The quarry from which nearly every later writer on natural virtues dug.
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Kyranides Greek. Compiled about the fourth century CE from older material. Latin translation 1169. L 6
A Hermetic book of natural virtues arranged by the letters of the alphabet: for each letter a plant, a bird, a fish, and a stone whose names begin with it, combined into remedies and amulets. Technical Hermetica of this kind are shelved with their subjects, not with the philosophical dialogues.
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Liber lapidum (The Book of Stones) Marbode of Rennes. Latin verse. About 1090. L 6
Sixty precious stones and their powers, in hexameters written by a cathedral schoolmaster who later became a bishop. One of the most widely copied of all medieval books, and the model for the vernacular lapidaries that followed.
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Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England Old English texts of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Edited and translated by Oswald Cockayne, 1864 to 1866. L 6
The Old English medical books, among them Bald's Leechbook and the collection called the Lacnunga, with its Nine Herbs Charm and its charm against a sudden stitch caused by the shot of elves. Christian prayer and older formula sit side by side. Cockayne's title is worth the price of admission.
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The Merseburg Charms Old High German. Written down in the tenth century. Found in 1841. L 6
Two short spells, the only ones in Old High German that name the Pagan gods. In the second, Wodan heals the sprained foot of Balder's horse: bone to bone, blood to blood, limb to limb, as if they were glued. Variants of the same formula, with Christ in place of Wodan, were still being recited in the nineteenth century.
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The Book of Secrets of Albertus Magnus (Liber aggregationis) Latin. Late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. English translation about 1560. L 6
The virtues of herbs, stones, and beasts, with a short treatise on the marvels of the world. Albertus Magnus, the great Dominican naturalist, did not write it, but his name sold it for four hundred years, from the incunabula to the chapbooks.
The books of secrets
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The Secrets of Alessio Piemontese (Secreti) Italian. Venice, 1555. English translation 1558. L 6
The best seller that founded the genre: medicines, perfumes, dyes, cosmetics, and household arts, introduced by the story of an old man who once withheld a recipe and let a patient die, and now publishes everything in penance. The book is usually attributed to the humanist editor Girolamo Ruscelli. It went through dozens of editions in half a dozen languages.
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Magia Naturalis (Natural Magick) Giambattista della Porta. Latin. Naples, 1558, in four books. Enlarged to twenty books, 1589. English translation 1658. L 6
Magnets, lenses, and the camera obscura; distillation, perfumes, and cosmetics; invisible inks, cookery, and the breeding of strange animals. Della Porta defined natural magic as the practical part of natural philosophy and filled his book with things a reader could try. His circle of experimenters in Naples was closed down on suspicion of something darker.
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Occulta naturae miracula (The Secret Miracles of Nature) Levinus Lemnius. Latin. Antwerp, 1559. English translation 1658. L 6
A physician of Zeeland explains monsters, dreams, cravings, and odd customs by natural causes. A book of secrets written to dispel superstition rather than to sell it.
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De secretis libri XVII Johann Jacob Wecker. Latin. Basel, 1582. English translation 1660, as Eighteen Books of the Secrets of Art and Nature. L 6
A Basel physician's digest of the whole secrets literature, arranged by subject. The handiest way to see what the genre contained, and much borrowed from by later compilers.
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A Late Discourse Touching the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy Sir Kenelm Digby. Delivered in French at Montpellier, 1657. English, 1658. L 6
Treat the weapon and the wound will heal: Digby explains the famous cure by streams of tiny particles carried through the air. The weapon-salve had already set Robert Fludd and the parson William Foster against each other in a pamphlet war of 1631. Digby's books of medical and kitchen recipes were published after his death.
Herbals and astrological medicine
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The English Physitian, later known as the Complete Herbal Nicholas Culpeper. English. 1652, enlarged 1653. L 6
Every English plant with its virtues and the planet that governs it, written in plain English by a London astrologer and apothecary who believed that ordinary people should be able to treat themselves without paying a physician. It has never been out of print. Ebenezer Sibly's edition of 1789, with colored plates, carried it into a new century.
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The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes John Gerard. English. 1597. Revised by Thomas Johnson, 1633. L 6
The great English herbal, much of it borrowed from a Flemish predecessor without acknowledgment, and corrected after its author's death. It has little magic in it, but it records the names and uses that the charmers also knew.
Folk magic and the cunning trades
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The Secret Commonwealth Robert Kirk. Written in 1691 and 1692. First printed in 1815. B 3
A Highland minister's sober account of the fairy people and of the second sight, written as natural philosophy and offered as evidence against atheism. Kirk was said by his parishioners to have been taken by the fairies himself. Shelved with fairy lore at the West Gate.
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Albertus Magnus' Egyptian Secrets German. Printed in many editions from the early nineteenth century. English versions from the later nineteenth century. L 6
A chapbook of charms for people and cattle, borrowing the names of Albertus and of Egypt for authority. It traveled to North America beside the next entry and was used alongside it.
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The Long Lost Friend (Der lange verborgene Freund) John George Hohman. German. Reading, Pennsylvania, 1820. English translations 1846 and 1856. L 6
Charms, prayers, and remedies gathered by a German immigrant for the healers of Pennsylvania German country, whose practice is called Braucherei or powwow. The book promises that whoever carries it cannot be harmed by enemies. It is probably the most often reprinted charm book in America.
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Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland John Gregorson Campbell. Published after his death, 1902. B 3
A parish minister's careful record of charms, the evil eye, protective customs, and the second sight in Tiree and the western Highlands, set down from his parishioners over thirty years.
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Folk-Medicine: A Chapter in the History of Culture William George Black. 1883. B 3
An early comparative survey of transference, sympathetic cures, charms, and amulets in Britain and beyond. Dated in method, rich in examples.
For the Gaelic prayers and charms of the Carmina Gadelica, see the guide to Witchcraft and Modern Paganism. For the peddlers' grimoires such as the Petit Albert, see Grimoires and Ceremonial Magic.
Older studies
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Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution Agnes Arber. 1912. L 6
A botanist's history of the printed herbal from 1470 to 1670, with an eye for the woodcuts. Still the place to begin.
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The Golden Bough James George Frazer. 1890, enlarged 1906 to 1915. T 3
Frazer divided magic into the homeopathic, in which like produces like, and the contagious, in which things once in contact act on each other at a distance. The scheme was meant to prove magic a primitive error. Its two terms describe the books in this guide rather well.
Things to watch for
- Do not try this. The remedies call for mercury, henbane, mandrake, lead, and worse. "Natural" never meant safe. These are records of past practice and nothing here is medical advice.
- Sympathy was a theory. To a reader of 1630 the weapon-salve was a scientific question, argued by physicians in print. Read it as the period did before deciding what to make of it.
- Old is not the same as Pagan. Most recorded charms are Christian in form, and a charm collected in 1900 may be a prayer of 1600. A few, like the Merseburg Charms, really do reach back further. The burden of proof is on the claim.
- Borrowed names. Albertus Magnus wrote none of the books of secrets that bear his name, and the "Egyptian" secrets are German.
- The collector's hand. Folklorists, clergy, and printers corrected, censored, and improved what they gathered. Ask who wrote a charm down, and why.
- Living practice. Some of these traditions are still practiced, and some practitioners pass charms only to particular persons. Our collection policy applies.
On the shelves
Natural magic, books of secrets, herbals, lapidaries, and charm books are shelved at the South Gate in class L 6. Agrippa's first book, on natural magic, stands with the grimoires at L 2, and fairy lore and the folklore collections stand at the West Gate in B 3. Related guides: Grimoires and Ceremonial Magic, Alchemy, and Astrology.