Umberto Eco's L'Isola Del Giorno Prima (which William Weaver translated as The Island of the Day Before) was first published in Italy by the Milan publisher Bompiani in September 1994; it is a novel that has always fascinated me, despite the apparent consensus that it represents a falling off from Eco's previous novels. Part of the fascination I have for this book derives from my interest in Renaissance magical thinking, in the sense Sir James Frazer would use the term magic, which is an important part of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thought even though more scientific and materialist ideas were emerging in the period.
I am in a minority these days, as most Renaissance scholars are focused on material modes of thinking, and when they discuss magic at all, they are interested in that which debunks superstitious ideas, though books like Charles Webster's From Paracelsus to Newton (1982) have been reprinted since the turn of the century to remind me that some people out there share my interest, indeed share my conviction that magical thinking is important to the period precisely because it is entwined with the modes of thinking that would replace it.
Eco also seems to share the conviction. The Island of the Day Before, which is set in the mid-seventeenth century, captures that element of the period's thought through a discussion of the powder of sympathy. The main character Roberto della Griva learns of the nature of that powder from an Englishman, Monsieur D'Igby. The powder, which is used to cure one of Roberto's acquaintances, is a variation of that famed ointment that Sir James Frazer points out in
The Golden Bough some Renaissance thinkers believed could be applied to a sword to heal a wound made by that sword, an idea Roberto had heard from his tutor when he was a boy. D'Igby discounts the theory behind what Roberto had learned but maintains the practice is valuable. He, however, treats a cloth stained with the patient's blood instead of a sword, noting that a controversy over whether a sword or a bandage is more valuable exists, a controversy which he regards as pointless. "[A] weapon that has wounded and a cloth that has bound the wound," he points out, "are the same thing, because the powder must be applied where there are traces of the blood." Eco weaves three theories of how the powder works into his account of it, one that his reader is likely to accept, one that D'Igby fears superstitious people will believe, and one that those inhabiting the world of Eco's novel are meant to accept as truth.
Eco's narrator, who is skeptical of the powder's efficacy altogether, "believe[s] that, in a time when disinfection was perfunctory, the mere fact of washing the wound daily [an element of the cure that is meant to improve the intercourse between the treated cloth and the wound] was itself sufficient cause of healing." Here we have a modern voice trying to explain away the superstition. D'Igby warns Roberto not to ascribe the powder's effectiveness to the causes that thinkers like the sixteenth-century natural/occult philosopher Cornelius Agrippa would. "[T]he name itself," he notes, "could be misleading. Many have spoken of a conformity or sympathy that connects things among themselves. Agrippa says that to excite the power of a star, you must recur to things similar to it, which therefore receive its influence" because the sun is sympathetic to those things to which it is similar. D'Igby discounts the "mutual attraction," or sympathy, posited by Agrippa as the false elements of a magical, or analogical, belief system, and warns Roberto not to mistake the sympathy of which he speaks with the sympathy of which Agrippa speaks. His powder works by principles that he considers scientific: sympathy is a product of the movement of atoms, or atomies, which he also calls spirits and corpuscles.
"First of all, the sun and the moon, from a great distance, attracted the spirits of the blood found on the bandage, thanks to the heat of the room, and the spirits of vitriol with the blood could not avoid following the same path. On the other hand, the wound continued to expel a great abundance of hot and igneous spirits, thus attracting the circumambient air. This air attracted more air and this attracted still more, until the spirits of the blood and the vitriol, dispersed at a great distance, were finally conjoined with that air, which carried with it other atomies of the same blood. Thus the atomies of the blood coming from the cloth met those coming from the wound, expelling the air as useless encumbrance, and they were attracted to their prime seat, the wound, and, united to them, the spirits of the vitriol penetrated the flesh."
Despite his denigration of magical thought, D'Igby's view of the cosmos remains somewhat magical. It is imbued with elements of the belief system that Agrippa gave voice to in the
Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1531), and D'Igby finds himself obliged to rely on Agrippa's vocabulary to explain himself--hence his need to differentiate his thought from that of Agrippa. Indeed, his view of the cosmos remains more magical than scientific, something signaled by Eco when he has his narrator refer to the effects D'Igby's art promises to produce as "occult miracles."
D'Igby himself is somewhat disingenuous about the way he sets out to differentiate his views from those of Agrippa, for while discussing Agrippa's thought, he focuses on what Frazer calls imitative, or homeopathic, magic, whereas the sword salve is an example of contagious, or sympathetic, magic. The assumptions validating the art that D'Igby teaches are, nonetheless, significantly different from those giving force to Agrippa's. He could have, without contradiction, differentiated his ideas from Agrippa's with reference to an example of contagious magic from The Three Books of Occult Philosophy, for D'Igby's magic is grounded upon a material base, an atomic mechanism. Atoms are released from the salve and the blood on the cloth and become mixed with atoms being released from the wound; the mixture of salve-and-blood atoms then returns to the wound so that the salve can heal it.
D'Igby's occult miracles are grounded in a material understanding of his universe, but differentiating magic from science becomes next to impossible, even though D'Igny discounts Agrippa's superstition. One of the most imaginative elements of the book is actually how the powder of sympathy is employed in an attempt to solve the problem of the longitude, a hilarious solution that I'm sad to say, except for the sake of the dog, no one seems to have actually attempted, though wacky solutions were offered by the magically minded. You'll have to read the book to find out what mistreating a dog has to do with figuring out the longitude with the help of Eco's extraordinary powder.
