ABSTRACT
The seventeenth-century English politician and fellow of the Royal Society, Elias Ashmole, was also an ambitious magician. Among the many spells that he copied out by hand was a formula for love magic. This involved finding a certain plant “on a Thursday by the rising of the sun”, kneeling beside it and reciting a charm based on the Holy Trinity. The plant then possessed the power to induce love in any person it touched. We do not know if Ashmole attempted this operation, or whether it obtained the desired result. But his belief in the procedure testified to an important aspect of pre-modern thought: the assumption that unseen exterior powers could affect the minds and hearts of individuals. The philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that the people of the medieval and Renaissance age assumed that human minds, including their own, were “open and porous and vulnerable to a world of spirits and powers”. Magicians like Ashmole sought to exploit this fact. In Taylor’s terms, pre-modern people had “unbuffered” minds. In contrast, modern-day westerners have an insulated or “buffered” sense of self, and assume that others are the same. 1
