Timaeus, from his commentary on it, and from Macrobius’s commentary on the Somnium
Scipionis, Apuleius’s Golden Ass, and Boethius’s De consolatione Philosophiae.
Lesley J.Smith
[See also: BOETHIUS, INFLUENCE OF; CHARTRES; PLATO, INFLUENCE OF]
Macrobius. Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, ed. James Willis. Leipzig: Teubner, 1963.
——. Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William Harris Stahl. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1952.
MAGIC
. The terms magica and ars magica were used in medieval Europe primarily for
operations that explicitly or implicitly invoked the aid of demons. In the late Middle
Ages, a second type of magic, “natural magic,” came to be recognized, which relied
instead on “occult virtues” within nature; these virtues were inherent in certain herbs,
gems, animals, or verbal formulae and could be exploited by those who knew the effects
they could produce. While these latinized Greek terms were used chiefly by those with
formal education, vernacular words, such as sorcellerie, partly overlapped with them in
their significance, although the vernacular terms usually referred more unambiguously to
maleficent forms of magic.
Magical formulae occur in some medieval medical writings. Magic remedies of
antiquity were passed down to the Middle Ages in such writings as the De medicamentis
liber of Marcellus Empiricus of Bordeaux (ca. 400), a collection of medical experimenta.
The author’s epithet derives from his concern not to ground his work in medical theory
but merely to list formulae that he or others have found effective. His materia medica
includes a wide range of objects with occult virtues: herbs, gems (sometimes enhanced
with magical characters), and the bodily parts of animals (bat’s blood, mouse’s brain,
wolf’s liver). He tells how a person who has gone bald from bewitchment can restore his
hair by rubbing the bald spot with rough linen, then applying a compound of ashes from a
lizard, purple wool, and paper, mixed with oil, but in this case the affliction is more
obviously magical than the cure. Elsewhere, he recommends procedures for transferring
disease to animals; a person suffering from toothache, for example, should spit into the
mouth of a frog and implore the frog to assume the toothache. Alternatively, a toothache
may be cured by reciting the incantation Argidam, margidam, sturgidam seven times
under a waning moon, on Tuesday and Thursday. Some of his prescriptions involve ritual
observances: the goat’s blood collected to treat a stone should be collected by naked
boys, and the person who kills the goat must be chaste.
While Marcellus’s work is only partly magical in character, and of interest mainly for
its illustrative value, Marbode of Rennes’s Liber lapidum seu de gemmis was a
specifically magical compilation of considerable importance, which remained for
generations an influential source of information on the occult properties of gems.
Marbode probably composed the work in the late 11th century, before becoming bishop
of Rennes. He wrote in Latin hexameters, intending his work for a small circle of friends.
(Further publication would defile the mysteries: Nam majestatem minuit qui mystica
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