Why did the concept of natural or lawful magic develop in the christian western Middle Ages but not in the christian east?Was it due to the cultural influence of converted germanic pagans, as can be seen with Hildegard of Bingen talking about magical herbs and natural energies in stones and gems, or perhaps due to the arabic texts translated by the scholastics? Not enough people know that Albert the Great, the mentor of Thomas Aquinas, thought that natural magic, alchemy and astrology are legit.
>>18363260idk
>>18363260>Albert the Great…thought that natural magic, alchemy and astrology are legitHe was partially right if you consider that a lot of physical phenomena that are commonplace for us today were considered magic back then. The many effects of different herbs on the body, the optical properties of glasses and different rocks, stones and crystals, things like effervescence in chemistry, and the prediction of seasons with the stars and so on.
>>18363651The thing is that these were also known in the east without people feeling the need to label them magic, for example I remember reading about how a group of varangians who arrived at the Hippodrome in Constantinople saw fireworks for the first time and they thought it was magic lol.
>>18363260The return of Toledo back into the hands of the natives.Greek translations (made in the 8th century ad) of natural philosophy into arabic and persian were filtering over around 10th century ad. Baghdad was seeing a lot of research then too, so presumably people just turned to their works, but the Abbasids were also strangling a lot of that stuff so it went over to Spain too. After the fall of Toledo in 1085 all these muslim works were now available in Spain. I don't remember why the greek stuff didn't go originally, I think it's something to do with the translation of daimon/demon. Anyway. All of that now had a very heavy triple double translation weirdness layer and islamic mysticism and spurred on development of things that had previously been lost from the west or never present. The easterners always had some access to this but never really needed to or had any impetus for it.
>>18364044Oh! And there was a philosopher/wizard/cleric who was convinced demons were only useful for their speed and knowledge -a demon wasn't scrying, it was in a dead sprint to do whst it was commanded according to its knowledge of the natural world. As such people were recommended to learn the natural magic themselves. The name escapes me, but he was quite influential.
>>18364044where did you read about this?
>>18364094And it wasn't Paracelsus. I believe that this one thought they moved swiftly through Ether.
>>18364100Initially in Haanegraaf's works, then I started chasing down his bibliographies. It's the best way for esotericism, but you will eventually run up against a wall of foreign language or absursly expensive publishers. Faivre is pretty good too. I think there's some Toledo specific stuff in Lang's "unlocked books: manuscripts of learned magic in medieval europe" too, but I'm not getting out of bed to check.
