A Magical Theory of Art is a new series exploring the parallels between art and magic. Here, I turn to Renaissance magic to uncover how artists might learn to gain mastery over their own imaginal processes.
“The Renaissance is a rebirth of the ‘occult sciences’ and not, as taught in schools, the resurrection of classical philology and a forgotten vocabulary.” — Will-Erich Peuckert
In the Renaissance, the imagination held a far more central place than it does today in the modern West. Informed by Hermetic and Neoplatonic ideas, it was understood as a legitimate mode of perception: an inner sense through which one could engage the hidden layers of reality. This elevated view of the imaginal helped create the intellectual climate in which the occult sciences of the period flourished, as these relied on the disciplined use of the imagination as a tool of inquiry into the workings of the mind of God.
However, this elevated status did not last. As religious and political pressures intensified—from the witch craze to the Reformation—the imaginal became increasingly suspicious and seen as a space of dangerous delusion and idolatry. It did not take much back then to get burned at the stake. Out of the heretics’ ashes rose mechanistic modern science, which confined the known universe to the domain of quantities. Today, a further shift has occurred, and much of our imaginative faculty has been externalized and outsourced to digital media, leaving us with fewer skills, if any, to consciously curate and create our own imaginal space, as the Renaissance magus once could.
For artists—and for anyone who desires an enchanted, possibility-rich existence— the imagination is the magical stuff of life: creative, innovative, weird, and also, illusory and deceptive. This essay explores how Renaissance magic, both as philosophy and practice, might help us relearn to operate the psychic machinery of the mind.
Renaissance thought was as much steeped in Christian theology as it was in Hermeticism and Neoplatonism. With the rediscovery and translation of key texts such as the Corpus Hermeticum and The Ennead, the figure of the Renaissance magus emerged. He was a learned practitioner and polymath, at once scientist and alchemist, who sought to understand and manipulate the forces of nature through Hermetic knowledge and philosophical insight.
The Renaissance worldview also rested on a markedly different conception of the imagination. In light of Plato’s philosophy, this faculty was referred to as phantasia, the inner sense. It was seen as a sort of psychic interface that mediates communication between body and soul, translating stimuli from one to the other, and doing so through inner images and phantasms.
In Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (1987), a peculiar book by historian of religion Ioan P. Couliano—which will inform much of this essay’s contents—the author emphasizes the central role of the inner sense in the Renaissance:
Renaissance culture was a culture of the phantasmic. It lent tremendous weight to the phantasms evoked by the inner sense and had developed the utmost human faculty of working actively upon and with phantasms. […] It had a firm belief in the power of phantasms, which were transmitted by the phantasmic apparatus of the transmitter to that of the receiver. It also believed that inner sense was preeminently the locale for manifestations of transnatural forces—demons and the gods.
As a bridge to higher knowledge but also a place of apparitions, the imagination is a treacherous space—a hall of mirrors. Those who wish to travel these strange lands must learn to discern the real from the unreal. This is why one of the first steps on any mystical, religious, or magical path involves cultivating discrimination and learning the right use of the imagination. This is also a sound approach for the artist who wishes to wander this wild phantasmagorical space through magical means. These are shifty grounds where confirmation biases abound! Still, I am all for artists indulging in a healthy dose of magical thinking. Learn how the imagination works, and use it to your advantage. The next section introduces a technique for refining and purifying the inner sense.
My favourite metaphor for understanding magic comes from Erik Davis, who describes the Western ceremonial tradition as a “ritual technology of the imagination.” The association between magic and machine is further echoed in their shared etymological ancestry: the ancient root magh, meaning “to be able, to have power.” In magic, this power is exercised primarily through images and semiotics in the broadest sense.
And if magic is a symbolic machine, then its psychic engines are the mnemonic systems of correspondences that the magus employs to restructure consciousness and cultivate an intuitive understanding of reality.
Mnemotechnics were widely practiced among Renaissance thinkers, and especially by Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), who wrote an entire treatise, Ars memoriae, on the subject. A Dominican friar with an appetite for unorthodox ideas, Bruno was fascinated by the Art of Memory. Influenced by Plato’s theory of Ideas, he believed that the eternal, archetypal realm of pure, unchanging Forms is beyond the grasp of ordinary humans, and that what we apprehend are only their shadow reflections.
For Bruno, the Hermetic adage “As above, so below” revealed a universe teeming with infinite correspondences. By encoding these webs of symbolic associations—planets, virtues, elements, seasons, hours, directions, and more—into elaborate inner images or phantasms, symbols, seals, mind palaces, and memory wheels (a device Bruno designed to train the imagination), one could strengthen and purify the inner sense, becoming better at discerning the real from the unreal. This practice also enabled the construction of a sort of artificial memory capable of producing synthetic insights.
Simply put, Bruno’s mnemonics organized the cosmos into a symbolic system through which he could internalize a representational map of the universe—much like a mandala. Contemplating and recombining these images was a means of approaching gnosis of the pure, transcendent Forms.
Since phantasms are inner images charged with emotional and symbolic meaning, Bruno’s method often employed images that carried violent, absurd, sexual, or divine connotations to help stimulate memory and more effectively encode knowledge. Doing so was a way of seducing one’s own imagination so that the “lower” passions would be directed “upward” toward intellectual pursuits. Externalized, the same mechanism becomes a core principle of Renaissance magic, which is, as we shall see, fundamentally erotic. It also has a darker application, as the next section will show.
Because artists also work directly with images, Bruno’s system takes on particular relevance. First, such mnemonic tools help one develop symbolic thinking and understand images as multilayered carriers of meaning held together by association and resonance, rather than as literal representations. Next, by working within a specific symbolic register—be it a traditional system like astrology or the tarot, or a more personal vocabulary of iconographies—artists can use it as a generative creative constraint, opening new pathways and unexpected combinations. Finally, Bruno’s mnemonic practices were contemplative. Artists can also engage image-making as a way to attune the inner sense, allowing soul and body, conscious and unconscious, to communicate through the language of images and move toward greater coherence and synergy. Art, too, can be a contemplative practice.
If magic is a machine, then Eros is its fuel, the binding agent. Originating in ancient Greece, where it is articulated in both mythic dramas and philosophical terms, Eros refers to the evolutionary and creative force of love, desire, and libido, which also finds expression in the heart’s yearning for the realm of ideal Forms. Eros sustains the push–pull dynamic between body and soul, keeping opposites locked in a state of attraction and longing. It is the living fabric of reciprocity that permeates natural ecosystems, just as it binds the whole universe into one pulsating web of correspondences—the Great Chain of Being.
How humans experience Eros is intimately linked to the imagination, for, as Couliano notes in Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, “desire is the pursuit of a phantasm, and phantasm itself belongs to the imaginary world.” What we desire—and what we recoil from—are acts of imagination: movements toward or away from an inner image.
This idea forms the core of Renaissance magic, in which erotic processes blend completely with magical ones. Turned outward, Bruno’s mnemotechnics make one a manipulator of phantasms who can shape and direct the desires, motivations, and fears of others by utilizing their erotic charge to bind them to a particular image and outcome. Bruno is the first to push the application of magic to its ultimate conclusion: psychological influence. Far from offering a sociological critique, he exposes the psychic mechanisms of religion—with its enthusiastic proliferation of moralistic imagery—as a tool for mass manipulation. Couliano writes:
“By using effective techniques, the founders of religion were able, in a lasting way, to influence the imagination of the ignorant masses, to channel their emotions and make use of them to arouse feelings of abnegation and self-sacrifice they would not have experienced naturally.”
As such, Couliano argues that Bruno’s manipulator of phantasms—the erotic magician—is an early “prototype of the impersonal systems of mass media, indirect censorship, global manipulation, and brain trusts that exercise their occult control over the Western masses.” In this sense, because of the ambiguous power of imagination, Bruno sees that everything and everyone is manipulable, including the manipulator. Indeed, in magic, as with any technology, there is always the risk of becoming the tool of our tools.
Pioneering Marshall McLuhan by a few centuries, Bruno warns the memory artist: “Be careful not to change yourself from manipulator into the tool of phantasms”, the most dangerous pitfall for those who tamper with the imagination. His solution: cut all erotic ties, become immune to desire, learn everything there is to know about love, and escape love’s chains!
While extreme, Bruno’s aescetic—and even borderline sociopathic—remedy finds its perfected expression in today’s algorithmic systems of manipulation, all of which are specifically designed to predict and influence our behavior by serving us erotically charged images tailored to our unique phantasmic profile.
There is great power in defining the narrative of reality, and the imagination has long been the battlefield. Today, popular culture and media icons populate our imaginal realm, shaping how we perceive, interpret, and imagine most of what we encounter online and in life. Most alarmingly, at least to me, our image-making faculty has largely been externalized onto devices designed to capture human attention for all kinds of extractive, deceitful, and nefarious aims.
Creativity, like magic and mass manipulation, is driven by erotic energy. Reverse-engineering Bruno’s system of erotic magic offers artists a way to reclaim the imagination by re-internalizing its processes. Against Bruno’s advice to resist Eros, I believe that learning to tap our desire is essential—it is the force that motivates us to act, create, and connect with others through self-expression. Becoming familiar with our inner phantasmic landscape enables us to engineer it to our liking. Likewise, understanding how desire is engineered makes us more immune to manipulation in all its forms.
It is useful to gather inspiration outside ourselves and to utilize the tools and technologies at our disposal, but we can also easily develop a dependency and lose creative autonomy. We risk losing touch with our inner sense and becoming desensitized to the feel and texture of our own creative impulse, as we continue to reproduce and amplify the often contradictory phantasms that have been implanted in us by countless actors. Sometimes a detox is needed to turn inward. Purification is often a prerequisite to magical rituals. Once the lens of perception is cleansed, what strange images bubble up from the void?
I assume that for many, Renaissance magic may seem rooted in an obsolete worldview. The concepts of machine and technology are, of course, only metaphors for understanding the mechanism of magic as a psychology of desire, fueled by memory and Eros, but it remains a mysterious thing. Still, I hope this essay has shown how some of its core principles remain practical and useful for reclaiming the imagination, the inner sense, and the phantasms that shape our perception and creative life.
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