Volume 20, Number 15 · October 4, 1973
III: Seeing the Invisible
By Christopher Hill
The Rosicrucian Enlightenment
by Frances A. Yates
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 286, 31 plates pp., $15.00
Historians are slowly learning to cope with the difficult task of understanding those intellectual movements of the past which appear to lead nowhere, which conflict with modern assumptions, and yet which undoubtedly stirred the imaginations of earlier generations. Thanks to the work of many researchers we are beginning to appreciate that the revival of serious intellectual interest in magic in the sixteenth century was an important movement of thought—as influential in the early history of science as Baconianism. Isaac Newton first took up mathematics in order to study astrology, and alchemy fascinated him throughout his life. His insistence that his great discoveries had been anticipated by the ancients picks up the idea of the Hermetic philosophers that there had been a prisca theologia, an esoteric wisdom handed down from magus to magus. Dr. Frances Yates has done more than any other scholar writing in English to make us aware of this European movement. In Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition she studied one of the great figures in this tradition. Others include John Dee, the great English mathematician, and Johann Kepler, the great astronomer. All three are important in the history of science as well as of magic. In this book Dr. Yates turns her attention to the Rosicrucian movement.
Review, 2620 words
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