Magic, like the Holy Roman Empire or twentieth-century cinema, is one of those historical phenomena that seems to have been a long time dying. There is, admittedly, a widely held view that it was already terminally chal-lenged by around 1500 or so, and that its last vestiges were easily extinguished by the triumphant march of the Scientific Revolution. This interpretation loses none of its persuasiveness in specifically musical contexts. Citing Gary Tomlinson's Foucauldian investigation of Music in Renaissance Magic, Daniel K. L. Chua concurs that ‘perhaps the last significant stage of [the] magical epistemology can be heard at the end of the fifteenth century’, to be silenced by the muting of (musical) nature in the materialising theories and physico-mathematical models of a new age. On the other hand, as we saw in Chapter 5, there is also a significant historiographical trend identifying the continuing presence of aspects of magic in the new philosophy itself, and emphasising magic's positive contribution to the achievement of the Scientific Revolution. In this chapter, though, I aim to show that neither of these historical models corresponds to the strand of thought I seek to portray. What marks out the role of magic here is that, in contrast to either its ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ roles in the development of science, we are not dealing with a set of practices but with a recognition of the divine presence within nature. This key distinction will be explored throughout this chapter, but I begin with some broader observations on the treatment of ‘magic’ in the literature.

One reason why so many commentators have found any tendency toward a generous interpretation of magic's historical function difficult to accept is the persistence of an essentialising view in which ‘science’ and ‘magic’ are per-ceived as fundamentally opposed and irreconcilable modes of thought. We have long been conditioned by figures of the stature of Freud, Weber or Mal-inowski to see magic as representative of an early or intermediate stage in the social and psychological development of human culture. While once a neces-sary part of mankind's search for maturity, it was something that needed to be relinquished as a prerequisite of the proper functioning of modern societies.