“I hope it won’t be taken as defensiveness if I raise an objection to what Professor Richards has said here today, though I found his remarks quite useful indeed…”

These politic words were among the last I ever heard from Theodore Banner, the American philosopher and occultist who died—under rather mysterious circumstances, as you’ve probably heard—just last month. The words were spoken at a conference on the theme of “Magic in Literature,” held at the University of Virginia some twenty years ago; I can no longer recall the precise point of contention that had been raised, but somehow I remember Banner’s next sentences exactly: “The intellectual movement that I am affiliated with, or what some well– meaning souls have dubbed ‘magical hyperrealism,’ does not submit to the idea of ‘the supernatural’ at all. In spite of what some of our detractors have said, here and elsewhere, we’re not mystics. We’re logicians.”

Readers of Banner’s Dialectic and the Occult may smile at this, and be reminded of the thunderclap found on the very first page of that masterwork: “Magic and logic are the same.”

Magic is the discovery of secret necessities, and in exactly the

same way that a complex syllogism may reveal a bond between a

premise and some distant or otherwise disjointed conclusion. All

reality, as Wittgenstein understood in the Tractatus, is but a list of

facts; logic is what binds them. The force that is harnessed by

logic, in other words, is not only that which fixes thoughts

together; it is also that which binds thoughts to objects, and one

object to another, and objects to events, and so forth. Sorcery is

only Idealism; all magic is that of the Concept. Logic, as Hegel

knew, is but a stairway to new and hidden places. (Dialectic and

the Occult, New York: 1989, p. 2.)

I cannot pretend to be an expert on Banner’s theories (or on dialectics or magic, for that matter), and I shall not attempt to expound them here. (I should add that Banner and I were only ever distant acquaintances.) I’ve made my own name, I hope humbly, as but a reader and translator of antique Latin; abstruse philosophy lies beyond my paygrade. Nevertheless, my specialized expertise, if I may use that word, is the reason why, when the body of Theodore Banner was discovered in a New York City apartment looking almost mummified and clutching to its chest an old book written in Latin, I was asked to help out with the investigation.

(In case it would otherwise be unclear in what follows, permit me to state unambiguously that the knowledge I happen to possess of the crime scene—for that is indeed what the police have called it—and more specifically of the strange state of Banner’s corpse, and also of the unruly disarray found in his apartment, is a result of the work I did in cooperation with the Detective Bureau of the N.Y.P.D. I trust I violate no protocols by preparing this present summary.)

If I may then cut to the chase: the book that was in Banner’s arms when he was murdered—yes, I say murdered; I’ve seen the photographs of his body, whatever was done to him he could not have done to himself—was none other than Blustrode’s Ars Magica Profanorum (often rendered in English as Magic of the Ungodly, following Wholff’s somewhat mannered translation). It is an exceedingly rare and valuable text composed in Latin, and first printed at some point in the early seventeenth century (no publisher or city or year was ever listed in the front matter). The book, long gossiped-about by bibliophiles, and existing today almost exclusively in facsimile editions (most of which are fraudulent), has an unmistakable aura of mystery about it. The name, “Blustrode,” for starters, was no doubt a fabrication. It is generally believed that the author wrote pseudonymously and in Latin to conceal his/her true nationality. Pope Innocent XI famously condemned the book. Robert Burton, author of Anatomy of Melancholy, is rumored to have cherished his copy of it (some even opine he was its true author). Banner’s copy of the book, meanwhile, which I’ve had the opportunity to inspect, is no doubt authentic, and is particularly well preserved. It is probably priceless.

The book’s subject matter deals with so–called “natural” or “profane” enchantments (“profane” in the sense not of the blasphemous, but of the earthly and the creaturely). Its object of study is the magical significance of mundane life; its chapters bear such titles as “Spells for Farmwork,” “How Certain Minerals Repel Trolls,” “Secret Uses for Votive Candles and Other Religious Articles,” “On Making Amulets,” “How to Interpret Birdsong,” and so forth. Yet it was the chapter dealing with so-called “Simple Objects” which, if Banner’s marginalia is any indication, consumed the deceased most intensely. It is only my conjecture, but I would guess that Banner held little interest in spirits or angels or demons; instead, he sought to delve into the various ways that magic circulates through the world of things.

Of inanimate objects, for example, and other things in the world, which contain magical properties, not as a result of sorcery but by virtue of their mere existence or form, the Magica Profanorum offers an unusual and desultory list of categories: Objects that look back at you (statues, for instance, or mirrors); objects subsumed in the obscure Latin phrase, Contrarium sine opposito, or opposites without opposite (i.e., things or forces “that are naturally unnatural, like giants, or magnetism, or the orchids that spread suddenly about the quarries of Proconnesus, or healing springs, or wolfsbane”); anything that cannot be remembered for very long, such as dreams, or the names of sprites and witches; lustrous opal; tulips; any soil that bears brambles and thistles but “suffers not the sown seed;” doorways and staircases; certain tinctures sold by Cingaris, as well as their metalwork and charms (especially when these last are “sacrilegious or otherwise deplorable”); mushrooms, when they grow indoors upon floors and walls; salamanders and camels and other creatures that can survive in fire or in deserts without water; fire; all manner of naturally-occurring spheres (celestial orbs and eyeballs in particular); the milk of hairy lizards, or the eggs of feathered ones; animals that glow (eels, fireflies); pomegranates; the lapis aquosus occultus.*

Following this haphazard catalog—in which, we may infer, nothing is truly accidental, since, as Banner himself once put it, “magic hides its necessity in the form of the random”—the reader proceeds to a lengthy “Supplementum” where Blustrode writes, now and then sublimely, about a class of objects he designates as Res quae attentissime visae novas et insolitas cogitationes incendunt, or objects which, when looked upon carefully, ignite unusual and foreign thoughts:

Certain artworks, for example, or frightening cliffs and crags and

other formations that are redolentia mortem or show the smallness

of man, or fearsome trees in dark woods, or any ruins of once-great

structures, or pointless extravagance as found in palaces, or a

solitary human skull, or the arabesques of faded religions, or

fattened spiders waiting in webs, or the maledictions of devil

worshippers, or young children with sickly pale complexions, or

any setting where bloody murder has recently taken place, or the

utensils used in such crimes, or whitened eyes, or graveyards

untended and overgrown, or deformities and aberrations in nature,

or the moon at its brightest or when it is colored the hue of blood…