Part 4

Footnote 6:

Plotinus on The Nature and Origin of Evil (Taylor’s Translation).

Footnote 7:

I.e., prior in the sense that cause precedes effect.

Footnote 8:

The Indian conception of the inbreathing and outbreathing of Brahma may help us here, but it does not entirely get over the difficulty.

Footnote 9:

Shelley, “Prometheus Unbound.”

III MICHAEL SCOT

The name of Michael Scot is principally familiar to English readers through Sir Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel. Shakespeare’s Tempest and Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel are probably the two, best-known works among English classics which breathe throughout the weird and fascinating atmosphere of mediæval magic. Prospero is a magician, and the whole plot of the Tempest is based upon his magical practices and their consequences. The Lady of Branksome in the Lay of the Last Minstrel has also learned from her father the “forbidden art.”

Her father was a clerk of fame Of Bethune’s line of Picardie: He learned the art that none may name, In Padua, far beyond the sea. Men said, he changed his mortal frame By feat of magic mystery; For when, in studious mood, he paced St Andrew’s cloistered hall, His form no darkening shadow traced Upon the sunny wall! And of his skill, as bards avow, He taught that Ladye fair, Till to her bidding she could bow The viewless forms of air.

In order the more effectually to accomplish her purposes, she dispatches her staunch henchman, William of Deloraine, to Melrose Abbey, where lies buried the wizard, Michael Scot, and buried with him, the Book of Might, which contains those potent spells whereby the great wizard had achieved his world-wide celebrity. “The Monk of St Mary’s Aisle,” now an ecclesiastical veteran of some hundred summers, had in earlier days fought the Moslem on the fields of Spain, and had there met and become an intimate friend of the much dreaded wizard. He had attended him at his death-bed, and had himself buried him in Melrose Abbey, receiving injunctions from him in his last hours never to allow the Book of Might to be disinterred “save at his chief of Branksome’s need.” For Michael Scot himself was a native of Teviot Dale, though his life had been spent in Italy, in Spain, and at Palermo in Sicily in attendance at the court of the Emperor Frederick II., whose fame became in a curious way linked with his own. The date of Michael Scot’s departure from Sicily for Spain was approximately 1210 A.D., and coincided with the turning-point of that long war of centuries which ended in the ejection of the Moorish conquerors from the Spanish peninsula. 1212 A.D. was the date of the decisive battle of Las Navas, which resulted in a crushing defeat for the Moorish forces, and led within fifty years to their retirement from all parts of Spain with the exception of the province of Granada. Scot was at this time in Spain pursuing his studies in Alchemy, Astrology, and the forbidden arts generally, and translating the works of the learned Arabians, Avicenna, Averroes, and Geber, and rewriting their paraphrases of Aristotle in the Latin tongue, which was then the universal medium for the dissemination of all scientific and philosophic knowledge throughout Europe.

We may imagine the monk of St Mary’s Aisle in his early days fighting the Moorish hosts in Spain and engaged, perhaps, in the great battle of Las Navas, which sealed their doom. Here he is represented by the poet as striking up a firm friendship with the student and philosopher, Michael Scot, and learning from him the secret of his magical practices. The monk is represented as telling William of Deloraine:

“In those far climes it was my lot To meet the wondrous Michael Scot, A wizard, of such dreaded fame, That when, in Salamanca’s cave, Him listed his magic wand to wave, The bells would ring in Notre Dame! Some of his skill he taught to me; And, Warrior, I could say to thee The words that cleft Eildon hills in three, And bridled the Tweed with a curb of stone: But to speak them were a deadly sin; And for having but thought them my heart within, A treble penance must be done.”

These achievements, according to the legend, were attributed to Michael Scot’s “familiar,” to whom he entrusted first one task and then another, but finding his energies too tireless, and fearing he might engage in some mischief which would react detrimentally on himself, finally sent him to spin ropes of sand at the mouth of the Tweed. This operation being an unending one, is said to be still in progress, and as his biographer relates, the successive attempts and failures of the spirit are pointed out as every tide casts up or, receding, uncovers the ever-shifting sands of Berwick bar. The reference to bridling the Tweed with a curb of stone, is an allusion to the basaltic dyke which crosses the bed of the river near Ednam. Michael, according to the tale, enjoyed that complete mastery of words of power which in the traditions of ancient magic is so potent a force in the working of wonders. As the monk records in his conversation with the knight of Branksome:

“The words may not again be said That he spoke to me, on death-bed laid; They would rend this Abbaye’s massy nave And pile it in heaps above his grave.”

The monk was not unnaturally alarmed at the power that this archworker of spells might have given to the fiends of darkness, and took precaution to bury him

... On St Michael’s night, When the bell tolled one, and the moon was bright,

so that the cross of his patron saint reflected by the light of the moon from the emblazoned window pane might fall on the spot which was chosen for his grave. Once again on this fateful night the Red Cross was reflected on the sepulchral stone, and the opportunity which this offered to take possession of the Book of Might undisturbed by the hosts of darkness, must be taken without delay. Within the grave was one of those ever-burning lamps, for the existence of which there seems to be some historical evidence, and which was to serve in the present instance as a further protection for the wizard against the fiends of night. Deloraine’s task achieved “by dint of passing strength” with the aid of a bar of iron handed him by the monk, the light

Streamed upward to the chancel roof And through the galleries far aloof. No earthly flame blazed e’er so bright; It shone like Heaven’s own blessed light. Before their eyes the Wizard lay As if he had not been dead a day, His hoary beard in silver roll’d, He seem’d some seventy winters old; A palmer’s amice wrapp’d him round, With a wrought Spanish baldric bound, Like a pilgrim from beyond the sea: His left hand held his Book of Might; A silver cross was in his right; The lamp was placed beside his knee. High and majestic was his look, At which the fellest fiends had shook, And all unruffled was his face; They trusted his soul had gotten grace.

William of Deloraine hesitated to perform what seemed very like an act of sacrilege. He was used to battlefields, but panic seized him in this strange scene, and the monk was eventually compelled to warn him that delay in such circumstances was dangerous.

“Now speed thee what thou hast to do, Or, warrior, we may dearly rue; For those thou may’st not look upon Are gathering fast round the yawning stone!” Then Deloraine, in terror, took From the cold hand the Mighty Book, With iron clasped and with iron bound: He thought, as he took it, the dead man frowned; But the glare of the sepulchral light, Perchance, had dazzled the warrior’s sight.

How the knight and priest withdrew from the chapel after the tombstone had been replaced, in the redoubled gloom of the night, “with wavering steps and with dizzy brain,” imagining the walls of the chapel echoing with fiendish laughter as they retreated, is recounted dramatically enough by the bard of the Scottish border. We are, perhaps, more interested to know what manner of man this Michael Scot was, and how far these records of his magical powers are based on anything more than unauthenticated tradition. The facts we possess with regard to Michael Scot’s career convince us indeed that he was a man of the greatest erudition and learning, and far in advance of his contemporaries in these respects. He was a noted mathematician, and not content with gaining the highest honours in the schools of Paris of that day, he subsequently pursued his studies at the fountain-head of mathematical and alchemical research at Toledo in Spain. For it must be remembered that we owe the basis of our mathematical knowledge primarily to the Arabs who introduced to Europe not only the Arabic numerals in place of the cumbrous Roman figures, but also the study of Algebra, itself an Arabic word. To the Arabs, too, we owe the basis of our Chemistry—a word that is, of course, synonymous with Alchemy, which again bears the stamp of its Arabian origin. It is curious indeed to note how far the civilisation of the Arab was in advance of that of the greater part of Europe in those days. Five hundred years before Michael Scot took ship from Sicily for Spain, the Arabs had advanced across the whole of Northern Africa, conquering Egypt, Tripoli, Algeria, and Morocco in turn, and finally crossing to Spain and there establishing a separate kaliphate in the eighth century of the Christian era. The invasion of Spain by the Arabs introduced into the Iberian peninsula a literary culture of a kind till then quite unknown. Under the sway of the Moorish sovereigns the arts and architecture flourished, and science found a welcome which it met with nowhere else in Christianised Europe.

It was to the Moorish capital that students of the medical art repaired who desired to master the latest discoveries and most modern methods in the treatment of the human body. Irrigation with the Moors had become an applied science, and was employed extensively throughout the Iberian peninsula with the most advantageous results in enhancing the fertility of the soil. Nowhere else in Europe did the land yield such rich harvests, and nowhere else was the science of agriculture so fully understood. The fertile fields of those days are in many cases replaced by barren deserts and the towns with teeming populations by ruins and uninhabited wastes. The ignorant peasantry that has taken the place of the cultivated sons of Arabia are still in the matter of civilisation and commercial activity hundreds of years behind the busy and intelligent population whom in the latter part of the fifteenth century they finally drove over the seas after subjecting them to the most cruel persecution for adhering to the faith of their fathers. Three million Moors are said to have been ejected from Spanish soil at the bidding of the civil power, instigated by ecclesiastical tyranny. Civilisation has not yet rallied from the so-called “triumph of the Cross” in Spain. This ejection of the Moors from the west of Europe coincided, as it happened, with the advent of the Turk at Constantinople; but here, by a curious contradiction, the Turk as the champion of Mohammedanism represented not progress but the triumph of the sword. The case was inverted, but in each instance it represented the victory of barbarism over civilisation, whether the Mohammedan made headway in the east or the Christian in the west. In the east the effete remnant of the Eastern Empire was swept away before the advancing hosts of Islam. In the west a far more highly developed and industrial population was wiped out at the bidding of the myrmidons of the Papal See.

For five hundred years the Moors had ruled all but the northernmost portion of Spain, and for another 250 they retained the province of Granada. Countless examples of their ornate and characteristic semi-oriental architecture remain behind as a record of their artistic culture, and much also of their language intermingled with that of the race which they at first conquered and which in the days of their luxury and decadence reconquered them in turn. But the intellectual life of Moorish Spain, which was for so long like a beacon light in the darkness of Mediæval Europe, has passed, never to return. The Inquisition marked the high-water mark of the reaction of Christian bigotry against the tolerant and broad-minded intellectuality which had flourished under the fostering dominion of a race whose glories to-day are but a memory of the far-distant past.

Scot as a mathematician, alchemist, and astrologer, had this been his sole life’s work, would have merited no insignificant niche in the temple of Science; but in addition to this, he exercised, though in an entirely indirect manner, a marked influence on the history of Europe. His talents and learning commended him for the position of tutor to Frederick II., at that time king only of Sicily, but afterwards “Emperor of the Romans.” Frederick was an orphan, having lost both his parents in early childhood, and the receptive mind of the ardent boy responded sympathetically to the instructions of his broad-minded and accomplished tutor, who was destined subsequently to become his confidant and friend.

Michael Scot’s first efforts as an author had for their aim the education of his royal pupil. For this purpose he first wrote the Liber Introductorius, and afterwards the Liber Particularis and the Physionomia. The first two of these books dealt with astronomy and astrology, and the latter with physiognomy and the reading of character from the physical appearance.

Marriages were arranged early in those days, and Frederick, when a boy of but fourteen, was united in wedlock, at the Pope’s desire, with Constance, daughter of the King of Aragon, and widow of the King of Hungary, who was some ten years his senior. This brought the attendance of Michael Scot at the court at Palermo, temporarily at least, to an end, and led to his setting sail, as already narrated, for the coasts of Spain. It appears that the Physionomia was his parting gift on his marriage to his illustrious pupil. On his arrival in Spain, Scot betook himself to the headquarters of the scientific activities of those days, the renowned city of Toledo. Here, towards the middle of the twelfth century, a regular school for translations from the Arabic had been established, and it was work of this kind on which Scot himself embarked. Here he translated the Abbreviatio Avicennæ with a dedication to the Emperor Frederick in the following terms: “O! Frederick, Lord of the World, and Emperor, receive with devotion this book of Michael Scot, that it may be a grace unto thy head and a chain about thy neck”—no empty compliment as such phrases generally are, nor one unappreciated by its distinguished recipient. Here, too, he pursued his studies in alchemy, chemistry, medicine, and astrology. Alchemy in those days was a special bone of contention, one school maintaining its feasibility, and the other denouncing it, after the manner of nineteenth century scientists, as a mere will-o’-the-wisp. The belief in it which later on took hold of Mediæval Europe had not yet met with any general sort of acceptance, though the Arabian school in the main adopted it, and there seems little doubt that it was held by Michael Scot himself. One book indeed on this particular subject, De Alchimia, is attributed to his pen. The book is contained in a manuscript in possession of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. If, however, the main part of the work is genuine, which is somewhat uncertain, the dedication to Theophilus, King of the Scots, is certainly not so. We have in this book a curious formula for turning lead into gold, which runs as follows: