The Cult of Tara

90 MAGIC AND RITUAL IN TIBET
duced only at a very short distance and in suitably receptive material."
Daniel Walker (from whose excellent work I have borrowed
this discussion) summarizes Pico's attack by saying: "From the
weakness of his arguments one can see that his rejection of natural
magic is based, not on disbelief in its possibility, but on the feeling
that it is somehow threatening to Christianity." 136
Cornelius Agrippa, perhaps the greatest encyclopedist of Renaissance
magic, gives in his De occulta philosophia many instances of
the magic power of the imagination: 13
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Our soul causes much through faith: a firm confidence, an intent
vigilance, and a resolute devotion , . . lend strength to the Work
which we would accomplish. We must, therefore, for every work,
for each application to any object, express a powerful desire, flex
our imagination, and have the most confident trust and the
firmest belief, for this contributes immensely to success.
Agrippa quotes the Muslim philosopher Avicenna as believing that
"a man could fell a camel, if he but demanded it with his imagination";
and Marsilio Ficino—leader of the Florentine Academy,
translator of Plato, and one of the founders of the Renaissance
magical tradition—expressed a similar idea in his Tractatus de viribus
imaginationis: "... through the active imagination a distant
rider can be made to fall from his horse and tumble into a well." 138
And again, Fabio Paolini borrowed this Agrippan notion and explained
it in Renaissance terminology: "Some people assert that the
feelings and conceptions of our souls can by the force of our imagination
be rendered volatile and corporeal. . . and will obey us in
whatever we want." 139
This concept of the omnipotence of the imagination occupies a
central place even in the writings of those thinkers who attacked the
entire magical tradition. Thomas Erastus gives a detailed refutation
of "the possibility of producing transitive effects by the power of the
imagination conveyed in emissions of spirit." Like Freud he accepts
the reality of subjective effects, both psychological ones and the more
ordinary psychosomatic ones. But, as he says, "certainly no man in
his right mind will think that an image fashioned in the spirit of my
fantasy can go out of my brain and get into the head of another
man." 140
Yet even so outspoken a critic as Francis Bacon believed in
some of the magic of the imagination, and he suggested an experiment
to prove it, described by Daniel Walker as follows: "If, f° r
example, you wish to cure a sick gentleman by faith, first pick out