We never have to go hunting for devils, as they are never in short supply. Even when the spiritual variety are nowhere to be seen in our surroundings, there are always plausible substitutes to be found among our fellow human beings: cruel, violent, and corrupt men and women; powerful, rich, and insatiably avaricious corporate and political entities; conscienceless and witless thugs equipped with lethal weapons and face masks (but not warrants) and deployed to the streets of Minneapolis; and so forth. As for angels, they are far more elusive but are a sufficiently conspicuous feature of our general religious imagination that a good number of us have some sense that they are really there and harbor some clear notion of what they are like. But there are other mysterious presences that were once plentifully present in our world but have decisively retreated from our shared reality and have become fairly nebulous even in our mental pictures of them: all those intermediate ranks of preternatural beings who are neither demonic nor angelic, neither purely corporeal nor purely ethereal, who in the past populated the natural environment and haunted its more otherworldly spaces (and who are still sometimes encountered in those few remaining lands that have not been wholly corrupted by all the prejudices of Western modernity). They come in a great many variants and have taken many shapes over the centuries and across cultures: nature spirits, minor divinities, spirits of the elements or of groves or of particular trees or wells, nymphs or sprites or djinn or manitous, terrestrial children of the gods, and so forth and so on. Each kingdom, phylum, and class has its own taxonomic character and natural history and its own native habitat and migratory patterns.

The scholar of Nordic literature Matthias Egeler has written an account of one of these distinct species, the elf or the fairy, which as it turns out has a much more circumscribed local ecology than we often appreciate, and which has an ancient lore that is much less ancient than we may realize. This is not to say that elves and fairies have not been around for a very long time or to deny that their phylogenic line stretches back into the shadows of the antediluvian past. There are and have always been fairylike beings in the legends and folk beliefs of peoples from all around the globe. But those endemic to the north and west of Europe belong to a distinct breed, one whose nature and ways went through their most dynamic and consequential metamorphoses only relatively recently, in tandem with and at roughly the same rate as the changes in the human societies nearest to its native thin places. The beings with whom Egeler is concerned constitute a very specific family of morally ambiguous creatures who originated in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England and then migrated to Iceland, Germany, and all points to which these places were connected by cultural exchange and colonization. Egeler even describes them as an “invasive species,” carried along by itinerant human communities out of their original environment into other hospitable territories, to which they had to adapt but which they of course altered in turn. The initial cause of this transposition was the circuitous route taken by Vikings on their way to establishing themselves in Iceland; the greater part of those early settlements were made up of Viking colonies that had first established themselves in Gaelic-speaking Scotland and Ireland. Having become acquainted with the otherworld of the British Isles during their extended sojourn there, they naturally took it with them when they moved on. From that point forward, the story of elves or fairies becomes one of a curious symbiotic relationship with human communities and of a kind of uncanny embassy sustaining relations between the hidden and the ordinary worlds, operating outside the jurisdictions of either religion or social hierarchy. And of course this means that as human society altered and in time became urban and detached from the natural avenues into the mystery of things, the form and function of that embassy changed as well.

In one sense, this is the familiar narrative of enchantment and disenchantment that has become so much a feature of standard cultural histories in the past century and a half and that is now such a threnodic commonplace of plaintive traditionalist and dreamy primitivist and pastel-colored neopagan discourse, not to mention angst-ridden cosmopolitan alienation. It is a story first of apprehension and reverence before a world of both abundance and danger slowly, inexorably giving way to familiarity with and partial domestication of that world, and then at last dwindling away into nostalgia, reverie, and wistful illusions about a lost dwelling place; it is also, therefore, the story of how the gigantic and ominous slowly became the miniature and dainty, and how what had once been a titanic and elemental darkness at the edges of vision shrank away to something winsome and delicate just out of sight. It is fair to say that the fairies or elves of the earliest tradition—the “good people” or “fair family”—were of a truly numinous nature, in the precise sense given the term by Rudolf Otto: something tremendum et fascinans, bewitching and dreadful. By the Victorian era, they had been thoroughly reduced to something diminutive, floral, gracile, and, well, elfin or fey. The otherworld and its secret portals had ceased to seem threatening, potent, and bountiful and had become instead the charming motifs of a kind of infantile animism or Freudian “oceanic sense” displaced into little doll-like imps, endearing rather than ensorcelling, mischievous rather than dangerous, pastoral rather than wild, and frivolous rather than perverse. In this condition, they become souvenirs of lost childhood, both personal and cultural, and a recollection of genial and protective presences, comforting as a doting mother but not as stern as an aloof father, familiar as other children but never as selfish, and flitting hither and thither on diaphanous and iridescent wings. By the time fairies had become objects of the will to believe rather than objects of uneasy conviction, they had been rendered as inoffensive as butterflies.

As charming as this final eclosion from the chrysalis was, fairy lore by this point was pervaded by elegiac echoes and a mood of bereavement. And this is probably about the last we would have heard of the elves and fairies, no doubt, had it not been for J. R. R. Tolkien, who occupies an unexpectedly crucial place in the story Egeler tells. These beings had adapted to changing circumstances with remarkable evolutionary ingenuity over the centuries, but had arrived at a condition as remote from their origins as modern dragonflies are from the gigantic insects of prehistory. They seemed to have exhausted their phylogenic possibilities, especially in a culture whose centers of gravity had become predominantly urban, whose vision of nature was mechanistic rather than animist, and whose magic had become technological rather than sympathetic. Strange to say, however—and utterly contrary to anything he could possibly have intended or desired—it was Tolkien who apparently did the most to create a causeway in the cultural imagination between the premodern and late modern in fairy lore. The elves of his Middle-earth were at once his own invention, with a nature and a history pervaded by a quality at once festive, mystical, and sadly beautiful, and a recovery of the graver, more sublime, more mysterious character of the Northern European originals. He even recast the cultural history of European fairy lore as a mythic narrative of a grandeur and loveliness either driven from or cruelly diminished within our world. In this way, he made it possible for a darker and more menacing aspect to emerge in the common understanding of the hidden realm. At this point, a more perverse, dangerous, and even urban offshoot of the species began to appear.

I am skipping from the beginning to the end of the tale rather hastily, though. As I say, Egeler’s book is to a great degree a fascinating cultural and social history that traces the development of a particular, regionally distinctive lore in relation to the history of diverse peoples passing through changes of social, economic, cultural, and intellectual conditions. Much of what makes it so engrossing is how well it chronicles the parallel but also often contrapuntal narratives of certain European peoples and their close, if elusive, neighbors. Whereas the elves or fairies of the deepest rural past were strange and enigmatic and those of the urban present are as often as not somewhat louche and decadent, there was also an intermediate phase of development, which one might call the fairy lore of civilization. As the peoples who were aware of them progressively tamed the wilds and became villagers, more and more the realm of Faerie was transformed from a truly unknown otherworld into something more like a bordering country, whose ways were at once strange and familiar, or like a land on the other side of the mirror, at once a reflection and a fantastic inversion of our own. Between that realm and this, encounters might be rare and always a little perilous, but both realms lived according to many of the same principles of husbandry and social custom, and it was frequently possible for each to exchange coin, drink, food, or cattle (and, of course, the occasional baby) with the other. Milk, butter, and cake proved to be the most potent currencies of all for a while. As the culture of our world altered, so did the culture of theirs. In the Middle Ages the customs of the court began to show themselves in Faerie, as did the more precisely articulated social hierarchy of nobles, townsfolk, and peasants. Literary invention began to interweave itself with folk belief. The otherworldly beings of French poetic inspiration, having been assimilated on the continent as a result of the Norman conquest, then journeyed farther afield into Italy only to return in the chivalric garb provided them by Pulci, Boiardo, and Ariosto. So, too, they acquired all sorts of new manners and titles back in their native Britain from Spenser and Shakespeare (the latter having essentially invented the fairy culture that we often mistakenly assume he merely harvested from folk traditions). Perrault gave them a good aristocratic polish. In Blake, they became joyous guardians of the last open corridor to a living world of nature spirits. They acquired other social habits, and a few occult preoccupations, during the Celtic Twilight, from Lady Gregory and Yeats and others. The Brothers Grimm had a huge influence, first in Germanic lands but then well beyond, in bringing them intact but altered from peasant into bourgeois society, in part by recovering the old stories told about them, but also by helping to transform those stories into a national ethnic anthology. One crucial threshold was crossed in early modernity, when a long-standing conflict between two opposed understandings of the denizens of Faerie came to a head: on the one hand, an old dogmatic prejudice to the effect that elemental spirits are only demons under an assumed guise and, on the other, an equally old folk wisdom that placed them outside the continuum of the holy and unholy altogether. The fairy court in A Midsummer Night’s Dream made its first theatrical royal progress around 1596, at about the same time that King James I was ranking the “fair family” among the fauna of Hell in his Daemonologie. About a century later, Robert Kirk penned The Secret Commonwealth to defend the Scottish peasantry against the charge that by communing with the fairies they were consorting with the devil. In the end, the natural fairies of Shakespeare and Kirk outlived the diabolical fairies of King James, but perhaps at the cost of further diminishment and a more inoffensive nature.

What, I suppose, becomes most obvious about the role of elves or fairies among the peoples that had any kind of commerce with them is that they always tended to occupy liminal spaces—the real thin places where lines of division become porous, where strict structures of hierarchy become confused and so negotiable, or where a stultifying uncertainty that might thwart the needs of life becomes instead a place of vital interaction. They have always inhabited the strange intervals between village and wilderness, culture and nature, upper class and lower, nostalgia and disenchantment, and—now as never before—the whole realm of spiritual life and mystery and the quotidian reality of a demystified and mechanized world. They occupy, that is, the irreducible and always undefinable interval of the magical.

Anthony Grafton appreciates how essential to our understanding of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the West the category of magic is, as well as how far the connotations of the term differed in that age from our understanding of it today. In Magus, he shows that before the concept of the magical had been reduced—or perhaps clarified—in the late modern imagination and had become just a name for a supernatural or paranormal technique for accomplishing physically impossible things, it comprehended an enormous range of practices and pursuits, not only in the realm of gramarye and the casting of spells but also in those of herbal medicines and folk remedies, poisons and abortifacients, love philtres, demonology, religion, mysticism, biblical hermeneutics, hermetic philosophy, arcana, alchemy, secret etymologies, Platonic metaphysics, dabblings in Kabbalah, and theurgy, along with sciences such as optics, chemistry, engineering, medicine, and even cryptography. And while this might strike us as simply a confusion of categories or an indifference to real distinctions among different kinds of knowledge, the truly fascinating thing about early modernity’s special interest in magic is the rich expression it gave to both modernity’s deep continuities with and violent ruptures from antiquity and the Middle Ages. Even in antiquity, the category of mageia—or the two categories of mageia and goetia, benign magic and sorcery—had encompassed a vast spectrum of “wisdoms,” vulgar and learned, profane and sacred, pragmatic and sacramental, malicious and benevolent, “sympathetical” and “scientific.” What differentiated respectable magic from the sinister variety was not merely the purposes toward which magical techniques were directed—whether one was attempting to call down a divinity by ritual worship or curse an enemy by the marshaling of dark forces—but also the class and sex of the magician. This was even more the case in the early modern period, at the end of a millennium and a half of Christianity, when it was especially necessary to draw a firm line of demarcation between angelic and demonic familiars, pious scholarship and malevolent cunning, the mysteries of God’s creation and the intrigues of the devil’s minions. In the wake of the late Middle Ages, the concept of magic became even more capacious. It held together in itself any number of divergent impulses and contested territories while also signifying a deeper connection between orders of knowledge that we now hold strictly apart. Not only did it span the divisions between the pagan and Christian ages under the elaborate fiction that it was a recovery of a more original and esoteric Christian tradition from centuries of oblivion; it also created a rationale for a new era of scientific exploration and speculation, now presented as the restoration of a suppressed ancient wisdom.

Magus is narrated episodically rather than continuously in a series of exemplary portraits of those magicians (or students of mageia) who negotiated the transition from the Renaissance to modernity. This is a peculiar strength of the book. Rather than a historical overview of its subject matter, proceeding year by year and flitting fitfully between different countries, sanctuaries, abbeys, cells, garrets, and laboratories, it is a close examination of the lives and beliefs of individual figures, as both distinct from and wholly immersed within the larger currents of the times. This produces a deep and subtle picture of all the contending social, intellectual, and spiritual curiosities and aspirations of an age of radical transformation. It is especially appropriate that the story begins with the shadowy figure of Faustus, an itinerant sage or rogue or thaumaturge who wandered at large through the Holy Roman Empire and who (as best we can tell) had been originally a schoolteacher named Georg of Helmstadt, dismissed from his post on charges of sodomy and, as a result, more or less forced into his picaresque career as a purveyor of the occult and the marvelous. He may have been only a plausible charlatan, as he was said to be by the more reputable sage Johannes Trithemius (who gets his own chapter in this book), but he certainly seems to have convinced a great many people of the reality of his unnatural powers. When the elders of Ingolstadt expelled him from their territory, they refused to set him free until he had sworn a sacred oath not to employ sorcery to avenge himself against the city. And it is just as appropriate that the book concludes with a treatment of Cornelius Agrippa, a far more elevated and respectable magus, and certainly more of a scholar and thinker than Faustus, but also a man engaged in many of the same recondite studies and exotic practices. He certainly excited many of the same suspicions and attracted similar condemnation. But it is what is laid out in the pages filling up the space between these two paradigmatic figures that gives the reader a real sense of how the philosophy, religion, technology, science, and magic of the time interfused with and strained against and cross-pollinated one another. Especially enlightening are the treatments of Ficino and Pico and of the deeply theological motives animating their bold syncretisms and their free use of Platonic, occult, Jewish, Islamic, and hermetic sources to produce what they regarded as an authentically Christian synthesis.

What the book does not provide, however, is a simplistic tale of modernity and “enlightenment” struggling free from the prisons of superstition and ignorance. The capacity of the early modern concept of magic to contain within itself so many of what seem to us utterly heterogeneous categories, it becomes clear in this book, was not merely a matter of confusion and imprecision but also a logical and probably necessary alignment of diverse investigations and projects within a single practical grammar of scholarly and technical skills. It is not the case that magical thinking was merely a residue of ignorance that had to be progressively purged away as the more rigorous principles of modern scientific thinking were becoming ever clearer. Rather, the sciences as we know them were also in many respects born out of the new passion for magic. It was a single project in the most important of ways: a desire to understand and to use the deepest forces and principles of nature in order to realize the full spiritual possibilities of the human. One might almost say that early modern magic represented a “paradigm shift” in the Kuhnian sense, intermediate between the premodern and late modern scientific organons.

Nor, moreover, can this history be reduced to a simple moral tale about enchantment and disenchantment, as if the former were the characteristically innocent state of the premodern world and the latter the mood uniquely produced by the destructive dynamisms of modern technology. So much of the current rhetoric of re-enchantment, emanating as it does from prophets of dyspeptic traditionalism, is simply a series of jeremiads against technology and modernity as such, and a call back to the spiritual sanity of tales by the fire, small villages, good beer, simple piety, and the growing of turnips. But every age is one of enchantment and disenchantment, and the human impulse to long at once for a lost paradisal past and an unattained ideal future is not one that can be resolved simply by choosing to believe in one rather than the other. And we are technological beings; whether we like it or not, part of our very essence as the creatures we are, with whatever special spiritual destiny or promise may reside within us, is the making and using of tools, the crafting of new means of interaction and communication, and the transformation of local environments into habitations.

Obviously, this comes at great peril to both us and our world. We should never forget that the great early modern fascination with magic was itself a search for enchantment precisely by way of a certain kind of technology. It was in many ways an unconscious struggle over what that technology should be and whether the emerging scientific culture of the time would understand itself as a search for a deeper harmony with nature or as a method for mastering and conquering nature. And while we may be disposed to think that only the latter vision prevailed with the triumph of the Baconian ideology of research and the mechanistic philosophy—and to a great degree this is so—even that is only a partial truth. The story Magus tells, as opposed to the simple mythology of some simultaneously dolorous and idyllic primitivism, is far richer and far more unsettling. It illuminates an epoch when two different possibilities for two different modernities lay open, when magic and scientific innovation were still one thing, but it was magic that came in two very different forms.

As it turns out, the real stress of that age lay not between the pre-technological and technological worlds or between an enchanted past and a disenchanted future, but rather, as in antiquity, between mageia and goetia. And it is a stress that continued in full force, arguably, right up to the threshold of the twentieth century, as technique (in Jacques Ellul’s sense of the word) became ever more fully and irrevocably detached from the contemplative, poetic, and moral impulses of craft and cultivation. The sciences as we know them are in one sense the hypertrophy of one sort of magic, but they might just as well have been informed by another. One way of thinking of the difference between the magical and the goetic is to think of two realms in which the principle of contradiction (or non-contradiction) does not hold: the supereminent coincidence of opposites in the celestial realm or in the divine nature, on the one hand, and the abysmal depths of unformed matter or of pure material potency, on the other. Mageia seeks to summon down form from above by invocation and liturgy and theurgy in order to quicken matter into newer, more radiant life, while goetia seeks to wrest power out of chaos by coercion and amoral striving in order to create something false, monstrous, and destructive. The one is participation in the divine and in the light of creation, the other a quest for godlike supremacy over nature. Not that the effects can always be told apart. Every creative use of language, for instance, that produces something true or beautiful is a theurgic feat; what, say, an L.L.M. does in generating a text, however uncannily similar it may seem to language, is nothing but a prodigy of brute force, a mining at preposterous scale of a meaningless wasteland of language’s “tokens” by way of sheer accumulation and statistical sorting, which produces only the appearance of an integrated act of meaning. The difference, though, is often indiscernible at the level of results (and perhaps, at that level, even the latter can be turned to good ends).

In any event, ours may be a disenchanted world in many respects, but it need not have been, and it certainly will not become less so as the result of a pathetic pining for an unfallen pre-technological paradise. Certainly our inventiveness has produced unimaginable horrors, just as it has also produced a great many extraordinary blessings. It was nothing intrinsic to the demands of science that caused the mechanistic to triumph over the liturgical in our understanding either of nature or of our technology; it was, rather, an imperative written into the economics of the modern epoch and into the titanic appetites and antinomianism of emerging capitalism. Overcoming what at present seems to be the invincible power of that economics and averting the catastrophe it is continuously and progressively visiting upon the world requires something more than a nostalgia for a lost good place never corrupted by electric light or penicillin. Instead, it requires an entirely different understanding of electric light or penicillin. It requires an entirely different kind of magic than the one we have adopted as a culture (and, of course, socialism).