Airy Demons:The Third World of Renaissance Pneumatology

The two supreme magicians of Renaissance drama, Shakespeare's Prospero and Marlowe's Faustus, contrast with one another strangely; Prospero seizes every opportunity to be hostile or belligerent, frequently picking a fight when there is none really in the offing. Faustus, in contrast, is unfailingly courteous, with what must be a heroic effort in view of the mounting anguish he feels throughout the whole twenty-four years of his contract with Lucifer. Speaking to the demure and submissive Miranda, Prospero keeps barking that she refuses to listen to him. The charge is ridiculous, as the girl points out as gently as she can (I.ii.106), but he repeats it four times.(1) When Ariel asks for his liberty four hours before he is destined to receive it--not an unreasonable request, as he is within at most two days of the end of twelve years of servitude, and Prospero himself, who dangles Ariel's liberty before him, as a reward, eight times(2), moves the release forward--the magician shrieks "Thou liest!" (I.ii.258) It is worth dwelling on the tactlessness of a master giving the lie to his own servant. The lie was the signal that verbal fighting must now proceed to the level of bloodshed (Richard II, I.i.68, 125); in Romeo and Juliet it is the starting-gun for Montague's men and Capulet's men to stop their repartee and begin the swordplay (I.i.54), and in this play Ariel himself uses it as the starting-gun for fisticuffs between Stefano and Trinculo (III. ii. 71). Hence for a magician who has an "airy spirit" (Dramatis Personae) quite intimidated and completely in his power, a magician who is capable of imprisoning him in the knotty entrails of an oak, to elevate that spirit to the hateful equality of receiving that particular insult, is taking an unfair advantage like kicking him when he is down. Then Prospero goes to Caliban, curses him, threatens him with torture, and gives him the lie in a manner seemingly designed to show that the magician makes no distinction between the creature of air and the creature of earth. Though Prospero, inwardly, rejoices in the infatuation between Ferdinand and Miranda, he sets Ferdinand an interminable and humiliating task and tells Miranda to shun him as a traitor. But, the reader may object, that is not hostility or bad manners; it is only the sort of ordeal that young lovers must endure in old romances when Redcross is in the House of Alma or Tamino in Sarastro's castle. This would be a valid objection did Prospero not spoil their betrothal, even after they have passed the ordeal, with embarrassing exhortations to save themselves for marriage. But he does more than exhort; as is his wont, he threatens them with a Lear-like curse to the effect that if Miranda loses her virginity before the wedding day, their marriage bed will be bestrewn with hate, disdain and discord (sent by whose magic spell, one wonders--V.i. 18-22). The only courtesy Prospero offers the young couple is the nuptial mask and even that contains an unsubtle reminder of their obligation to keep Miranda's virgin-knot unbroken (IV i. 94-101). A mask traditionally ends with a graceful compliment, but this one lacks both compliment and ending; Prospero, in his worst rage ever, cuts it short. When he offers to let his defeated and cowed foes spend the night in his cave, he fails to offer them a banquet to replace the one that has been snatched from them, but he assures them that time will pass swiftly by because they will be listening to him (V.i.304-310). Prospero's farewell to his art terminates, not in something seemly, but in the boast that he has reanimated corpses, a capital crime. Ferdinand's summing-up of his future father-in-law is on the mark; he is "composed of harshness"(III.i.9).

Faustus, on the other hand, seems to be the soul of courtesy. Valdes and Cornelius, apparently on very slight acquaintance, are his "dearest friends" who are to "make me blessed with your sage conference"(I.i.61,95-6).When he dreams of the profit and delight magic will bring him, he includes a generous plan to clothe Germany's university students with silk (I.i.87-8).With quite unnecessary flattery of Mephostophilis, Faustus says "for love of thee Faustus hath cut his arm"(II.i. 54; emphasis added); later he speaks docilely of "our hell,"as if his oath had put him in it already and he had become the peer of Mephostophilis (IV.i. 84). He flatters the devil as well: "Thanks mighty Lucifer...Farewell great Lucifer" (II.ii. 185, 188). To Charles V's praise for liberating Bruno, Faustus replies:

These gracious words, most royal Carolus,

Shall make poor Faustus to his utmost power

Both love and serve the German Emperor

And lay his life at holy Bruno's feet (IV.ii. 14-17).

When the Duke of Vanholt thanks Faustus for building a castle in the air, the latter answers: "I do think myself, my good lord, highly recompensed in that it pleaseth your Grace to think but well of that which Faustus hath performed." But, suspecting that the duke's pregnant wife may have a food-craving, he inquires and learns that it is for ripe grapes, which he instantly procures her (IV.vii. 6-24). Even Faustus's practical jokes have their courteous side; they divert the duke, who says "His artful sport drives all sad thoughts away" (IV.vii. 134). His farewell to his students is becoming:"If I live till morning, I'll visit you"(V.ii.92).

So the magician who deals with good spirits has bad manners and the magician who deals with bad spirits has good manners. Why?

One might surmise that a good spirit is really an uncommitted spirit, suffering from what is called in teenagers "lack of motivation" ("merrily shall I live... under the blossom," Tempest, V.i.95-6); while bad spirits, being in reality servants of Jehovah who uses them to carry out his eternal plan, are backed by omnipotence and, like Nature herself according to Francis Bacon, cannot be commanded except by obeying them. Thus Prospero is seen after twelve years of bullying, wheedling, blackmailing, bribing, and in general controlling his spirits by hook or by crook, with hope but no certainty of success ("My charms crack not; my spirits obey,"V.i.2-3),and his nerves are frayed. But Faustus, confronted by the diabolic hierarchy leading up to Lucifer as its head, is in a position like that of a courtier, completely dependent on the favor of his superiors to gain his ends, and develops his innate tendency to courtesy in this court "where it first was nam'd, And yet is most pretended"(Comus, ll.325-26).

By means of a historical survey of the kinds of demons Ariel and Mephostophilis are, I hope to make these introductory remarks more clear and convincing.

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Plato and his disciple Apuleius, reacting against the crudity of the Olympian gods among whom, for example, Aphrodite could fornicate with Ares and be caught with him in the iron net of Hephaestus, removed these gods to the starry heaven (ouranos), above the sphere of the moon, where all is immutablity, brightness, and perfection, and stated dogmatically that they never talk to men. Between them and the race of men clinging to the face of the earth are the demons (daimones), whose element is the air, thought of as extending 240,000 miles from the earth to the moon. Since the air, or at least its lower regions, begets clouds, destructive winds, rain, thunder, lightning and hail, the demons take on the characteristics of their environment and are thought of as animo passiva, "in soul subject to passion"(3). Like the gods, the demons are immortal; like humans, they suffer from, and succumb to, passion. Diotima tells Socrates that the world of the demonic possesses the power of interpreting and communicating

human affairs to the gods and divine matters to men--the prayers and sacrifices of men, and the commands and responses of the gods.... Through this intermediary all divination proceeds, and practices involving sacrifices, mystery rites, magical incantations, all enchantments and sorcery.(4)

The airy demon was thus a buffer to create a certain remoteness in the gods, a hiatus between them and men. But, an absolute rule was laid down for magi in ancient Greece and Renaissance Europe; to do white magic is to invoke airy demons. That the airy demons were the source of all divination points to their possession of superior, perhaps almost infinite, knowledge. Plato derived daimon, "demon," from daemon, "knowledge."(5) That the demons were to be controlled in so many ways (divinations, sacrifices, mystery rites, incantations...)points to their passivity, to their being blown about by winds of passion and interest:

For they are capable, just as we are, of being affected by all that soothes, as well as all that moves the mind; so as to be stimulated by anger, influenced by pity, moved by indignation, racked with vexation, elated with joy, and are subject to all the affections of the human mind...

These are all emotions, but Apuleius also mentions causes of emotion, which are even more anthropomorphic. The demons are "allured by gifts... exasperated by affronts...swayed by all other circumstances."(6)

Saint Augustine, in his account of airy demons, goes farther: "They resemble in character, though not in bodily appearance, wicked and foolish men."(7)

These are strange notions, then or now, to have of an immortal being. Bearing them in mind, let us look at Ariel's quarrel (of "Thou liest!" fame) with Prospero:

PROSPERO: What is't thou canst demand?

ARIEL: My liberty (I. ii. 246).

That shows mettle. When A asks an angry rhetorical question, and B returns an answer that is calm, brief, and on the topic, B wins a point. But all Ariel's moral courage melts away before the tremendous verbal onslaught that Prospero now unleashes on him. Soon, as determined to placate Prospero as he formerly was to challenge him, he cries: "What shall I do? Say what, what shall I do?" (I.ii.303) Even in a child, this would be embarrassingly sycophantic, much more in a being who can dispose of thunder, lightning and hurricanes.

It is interesting that Apuleius's and Augustine's favorite metaphor for the emotionalism of airy demons is a storm or tempest. They elaborate on this resemblance four times:

1. The demons' minds are "agitated with tempestuous emotions" (procellosis perturbationibus agitari).(8)

2. Their minds are "tossed with passion like a stormy sea" (velut procellosum salum...passionum tempestate turbari). (9)

3.Their minds are "a sea tossed with tempest, having no rallying point of truth or virtue in their soul from which they can resist their turbulent and depraved emotions"(ipsius quoque mentis, ut iste appellavit, salo fluctuarit, nec in veritate atque virtute qua turbulentis et pravis affectionibus repugnatur, ex ulla animi parte consistunt).(10)

4. "Pity, indignation, grief, joy, every human emotion is experienced by the demons, with the same mental disturbance, and the same tide of feeling and thought. These turmoils and tempests banish them far from the tranquillity of the celestial gods." (per omnes cogitationum aestus fluctuare, quae omnes turbelae tempestatesque procul a deorum caelestium tranquillitate exulant).(11)

Clearly, Shakespeare has three motives for his title: the tempest raised by Ariel, the metaphoric tempest of conspiracy and usurpation in Milan and Naples, and the tempest of conflicting emotions traditionally supposed to rage in the minds of airy demons.

The success of the Neoplatonists' campaign to supplant prayer and sacrifice to the Olympians with prayer and sacrifice to the airy demons is attested by two Christian documents:the Book of Acts and Augustine's De Civitate Dei. Acts 17:19 narrates Paul's visit to the Athenian Areopagus, where he saw an altar inscribed agnostoi theoi, "To the Unknown God," and said in response, "Oh you Athenians, I see that in all things you are demon-worshippers (or, in dread of demons, deisidaimonesterous)." Saint Jerome, unable to connect the inscription with Paul's response, or confusing airy demons with Christian hellish fiends, and concerned for the courtesy of Paul's sermon, translated deisidaimonesterous as quasi superstitiosiores, "somewhat superstitious"; Lancelot Andrewes, "too superstitious," and other, more recent translators, "very religious," or "in too great dread of the divine power."But if we remember what Plato said--that the gods never speak to human beings; and what Diotima said--that the demons are the only link between the human and the divine--we can follow Paul's train of thought.Finding the Athenians worshipping the Unknown God, he inferred that their religion had become so focussed on the airy demons, the messengers between themselves and the ouranos , that they had become literally agnostics with regard to the divine inhabitants of that place. Hence the logical inference leading from the mysterious altar to the accusation of worshipping, or dreading, demons.

The other evidence of the success of Plato's concept is the eighth and ninth books of Augustine's City of God, in which the saint attacks the airy demons. He warns Christians to pray only to God, and not to seek the truth from airy demons who can only mislead them. A person who does so "would thus be ensnared in the toils of wicked spirits, and would wander far from the true God, with whom alone...the human soul...is blessed."(12)At first sight this might seem to be the plot of Doctor Faustus in one sentence. But it lacks essential details of the true Christian concept of the soldier of Satan, the devil from hell. "Wander far" does not necessarily mean wander to hell. Nor does Augustine anticipate by a word or phrase Doctor Faustus I.iii.39-40 where Mephostophilis explains that no devil can do anything without an express command from Lucifer. This whole denunciation of the airy demons is strangely gentle and mild. With what would appear a fabulous understatement if he were speaking of Satan's legions, Augustine says that the airy demons "are not better than men because of their aerial bodies, or on account of their superior place of abode."(13)He quotes Apuleius to the effect that the airy demons travel at a dizzying speed (as Ariel can cross Prospero's island "or ere your pulse twice beat," V.i. 105), and demurs gently that that is no reason why we should worship them. He keeps quoting Apuleius verbatim until he has reproduced virtually his entire book, and Augustine agrees with almost everything Apuleius says about the airy demons except that it can be beneficial to offer them prayer and sacrifice.Of all the reasons one might have for abhorring these demons, here are the ones Augustine derives from Apuleius, and which he trumpets: their emotionalism and their "delight in... the blasphemous fictions of poets, theatrical exhibitions, and magical arts."(14) Now we know why Prospero presented a mask.

Lastly, though Augustine warns that airy demons are all bad, contradicting a tradition that had developed to the effect that some were bad and some good, he has no theory of how they came to be so. There is no talk of angels fallen from grace. He simply forgets his creationism and reverts to the Platonic idea that the universe and all its inhabitants, celestial, aerial and terrestrial, has always existed.

The context of Augustine's strangely gentle performance is that in the first half of Book VIII he has praised Plato as the greatest of the pre-Christian philosophers and the one who came nearest to the truth of Christianity. Hence it would be confusing at best, and self-contradictory at worst, to excoriate him and his disciple Apuleius for their concept of airy demons, and to portray the latter as infernal fiends.

For the next thousand years, an unearthly being might be known from his place of origin. If he came from underneath the earth, his only aim was to wreak havoc or drag a Christian soul down to the infernal regions that were his home. But if he came from the air, and was himself made of it, he might prove a hard-working, if skittish, servant,and Prospero's apostrophe to Ariel, "thou which art but air,"(V.i.21) saves his honesty as a magician as much as it does that of Ariel as a spirit.Devotees of natural magic in the Sixteenth Century "insisted that they addressed only angels, or, more ambiguously, the good demons of Neoplatonic cosmology"(D.P.Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, London: Warburg Institute, 1958: p.220). The poets are in haste to identify their demons with air. Milton's Attendant Spirit lives "In regions mild of calm and serene Air" among "aerial Spirits"(Comus,ll.3-4). Marsilio Ficino labors to rescue the airy demons from Apuleius's charge of emotionalism:"Airy demons favor the rational faculty and separate it from the vegetal and sensitive nature."(15)The seven demons conjured by Facio Cardano on 15 August, 1491, at Milan, being asked who they were, said they were men of air (homines esse quasi aereos), treating that self-identification as the indispensible preface to their talk, and Facio would probably have been in serious trouble if they had said anything else(16). Airy demons make a strange cameo appearance in Paradise Lost:

...For spirits when they please

Can either sex assume, or both; so soft

And uncompounded is their Essence pure...

...but in what shape they choose

Dilated or condens't, bright or obscure,

Can execute their aery purposes,

And works of love or enmity fulfil (I.423-31).

These are not fallen angels, for some of the works are of love. They are not elect angels, for some are of enmity; besides, Jehovah's commands are not to be ligtly dismissed as aery purposes, much less fathered on his own servants. Milton does not specify why an airy demon might want to be a hermaphrodite but if we knew, it might shed light on the earthy and abhorred commands that Ariel was too delicate to act for Sycorax (I.ii.275).The Lady in Comus, like Stefano, worries unnecessarily about "airy tongues that syllable men's names...[in] desert wildernesses"(Comus, 208-209). If the tongues are airy, they can devise but little mischief, as the Lady herself notices in the next line. When Faustus associates the apparition of Helen with the air ("O thou art fairer than the evening's air..."V.i.109)it may be wishful thinking, trying to believe that for once he is not talking with a fiend.

The airy spirits became, in the Renaissance, the elemental spirits, occupying earth, water and fire as well as air. This followed from a Platonic and Apuleian premise, "the principle of plenitude."(17) As Plato had divided the universe into heavens, air and earth, each with its own inhabitants, so Aristotle had divided the sphere of the cosmos below the moon into earth, air, fire and water, and because it was counter-intuitive to think any element uninhabited, the airy spirits invaded the other three elements; Ariel offers "to fly, to swim, to dive into the fire," (I.ii.192) while Prospero bids him "do my business in the veins o'th'earth"(256).The demons studied by Milton's Il Penseroso are "found In fire, air, flood or underground" (ll.93-94). So, in Paradise Regained, II. 124, are the Christian devils. To complicate matters yet more, in Ephesians 2:2 Paul called Satan "the prince of the power of the air." This led to a popular notion that the lower air with its clouds and storms was the proper domain of Satan and that it was thronged with infernal fiends causing hurricanes and the like. In fact, the devastating windstorm that swept over south England on Sept.3, 1658, was popularly attributed to such fiends coming to remove the soul of Oliver Cromwell and bear it away to hell.

In this confusion of demons getting into one another's domain, Neoplatonic demons beneath the earth and Christian infernal fiends in clouds in the air, we may wonder how to sort them out. One principle is clear:the Christian fiends are employed and the Neoplatonic demons are unemployed. Mephostophilis tells Faustus:

I am a servant to great Lucifer

And may not follow thee without his leave.

No more than he commands must we perform (I.iii.39-41).

When Milton's Satan, using a legitimate privilege resulting from his triumph over Adam and Eve, meets with his General Staff, not in Pandaemonium, but in "the middle Region of thick Air"(II.117), serious matters are debated and, a conclusion once reached, Satan takes a few trusty companions to begin the temptation of Christ. But Comus's perception of the brothers as airy demons is a picture of leisure and ease:

I took it for a faery vision

Of some gay creatures of the element(="the atmosphere." OED, Sense 10)

That in the colors of the Rainbow live

And play i'th'plighted clouds (ll.298-301).

The versified series of saints' lives called the South English Legendary, ca. 1285, makes an interesting and ingenious attempt to integrate the airy demons into the Christian cosmology and pneumatology and to locate them physically and morally halfway between the angels above them and the devils beneath them. This follows:

For as soon as God made heaven and earth and hell, he made Lucifer and his fellows first, as I may tell you. And he, as soon as he was made, began to rage in pride, and wanted to be placed as high as our Lord,... Many angels held firmly to his side and not all for the same reason; some delighted in his deed, some less and some more; some feared, so that they recked neither of one [God] nor of the other [Lucifer]; not one of these believed in heaven nor in his master either.

Saint Michael the Archangel had the mastery to drive him down from heaven. That was the battle that he waged with the evil dragon, the master dragon Lucifer, and every one of his cowardly comrades that stood firmly by his pride. He drove them quickly to hell; and those that took a hesitant stand with him, and not such a foolishly determined one, he drove those out of heaven and cast them into the air, down in this lower region close to the earth (and into the lift hom caste Al here bynethe toward eorthe). There occur the greatest number of tempests, and there they shall dwell in pain to await Judgment Day. And as their guilt was greater, so much greater is their pain, and the worse the place they occupy to do their penance. But they are not to go to hell until the day of judgment comes. But then they must, afterwards, be abandoned eternally. There were other angels who were somewhat mistaken, but nevertheless, inclined more to God's side and scarcely refrained from joining it. They, too, went forth from heaven, and are above the other [air-dwelling angels] high up under the celestial sphere, by God's will, since then, and so shall suffer mild pains until the end of the world, but at Judgment Day, they shall make their way again to Heaven. Also some of them are in the earthly paradise [the Garden of Eden] and in other places on earth, to do their penance, through our Lord's grace, for their default in Heaven.(18)

Oh for the tongue of a Milton to turn into blank verse The Decline, but Not Quite Fall, of the Uncommitted Angels! As for example:

...Them the Almighty Power

Nudg'd sidelong shuffling from th'ethereal sky

With gradual sinking and evasions down

To suboptimal conditions, there to dwell...

This narrative is interesting for the distinction it makes between the calm upper air, the habitation of airy demons more good than bad, and the tempestuous lower air, close to the earth, the habitation of airy demons more bad than good. Milton makes this distinction in Comus when he places the habitation of the Attendant Spirit directly under the ouranos, "Before the starry threshold of Jove's court,"where the air is "calm and serene," and contrasts it with "the smoke and stir of this dim spot" (ll. 1, 4, 5). The fatal mistake of the airy demons, if the South English Legendary is correct, was indecision. Ariel's inability to decide whether he wants to rebel against Prospero (I.ii.246), serve him (I.ii.303), win his love (IV.i.48) or escape from him (V.i.88) is consistent with his having been one of those angels "not one of [whom] believed in heaven nor in his master either." Here I anticipate an objection that Shakespeare never read The South English Legendary. But, he may have heard its lore. The ms. may be the incidental writing-down of a centuries-old oral tradition;such traditions being frequent in magic whose written books suffered a great mortality, destroyed not only by the ecclesiastical authorities but by the magicians themselves (Tempest , V.i.57;Faustus, V.ii.197). Sir Francis Bacon complains of magicians "referring themselves to auricular traditions...to save the credit of impostures"(Advancement of Learning, Book I, in Sidney Warhaft, ed., Francis Bacon: A Selection, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1965, p.229). The South English Legendary myth answers the question, How can you do magic (as opposed to merely praying) without getting involved with hellish fiends?The expelled angels, turned Neoplatonic demons, doubtless retain many of their prelapsarian powers (specially their knowledge).Religious conservatives, however, maintained that any deployment of supernatural powers, except prayer to Jehovah and his saints, was fraught with danger.The book against diviners and dreamers by Agostino Trionfo of Ancona (1243-1328) to Pope Clement V contains "the usual ecclesiastical attitude that no one should employ divination by demons no matter how truly they predict or persuade to good deeds."(19)Thus we learn that even the opponents of white magic were forced to admit that often the airy demons gave accurate predictions and good advice. Apuleius had claimed no more, for he said that some demons were good and some bad. But a dread of offending Jehovah by whoring after other supernatural beings still made the ecclesiastics warn against these demons. Doubtless, some such scruple is in Prospero's mind as he proposes to live, in Milan, a life of such incessant repentance that "Every third thought shall be my grave" (V.i.314). He has done nothing wrong; rather he has done much good, but the disrepute of the airy demon, deriving ultimately from Apuleius himself, still haunts him.

Because of the undignified and embarrassing nature of their conduct, the Olympian gods had needed the airy demons as a buffer. The Christian God now needed them as a buffer because he was so ghastly, so appalling. Moreover, it was futile to rebel against him by allying oneself with Satan and his hordes. They were nothing but the agents appointed by Jehovah to carry out his more repellent assignments. Milton's Beelzebub suspected as much:

But what if he our conqueror...

Have left us this our spirit and strength entire...

[To] do him mightier services as his thralls

By right of War, whate'er his business be

Here in the heart of Hell to work in Fire,

Or do his Errands in the gloomy Deep...(I.143-52)

Later, when he sees his peers trying to organize hell into an independent kingdom, he jeers at them, telling them they still serve Jehovah whether they know it or not:

...he, be sure,

In highth or depth, still first and last will Reign

Sole King, and of his Kingdom lose no part

By our revolt, but over Hell extend

His Empire, and with Iron Sceptre rule

Us here, as with his Golden those in Heav'n (II.323-28).

He recommends Satan's expedition to earth, to seduce Adam and Eve, as an escape from this universal and eternal domination by Jehovah;but the expedition is in fact a signal instance of that manipulated state into which Jehovah forces Satan (the supralapsarian view) or entices him (the sublapsarian view; see "John Milton: Supralapsarians, Sublapsarians, and the Incompetence of God" in this website).

A Renaissance magician who sought to escape the domination of Jehovah by conjuring a hellish fiend may be compared to Winston and Julia in 1984, when they join the secret organization called the Brotherhood only to discover that it is run by Big Brother and functions to keep them under his surveillance and set them up for arrest and torture. Mephostophilis informs Faustus what his real loyalties are:

Think'st thou that I who saw the face of God

And tasted the eternal joys of heaven

Am not tormented with ten thousand hells

In being deprived of everlasting bliss?(I.iii.76-79)

So airy demons were the pneumatological Third World, offering an escape from and perhaps resistance to Jehovah and his stooge Lucifer; this doubtless accounts for their popularity with medieval and Renaissance intellectuals, with Pietro d'Abano, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim "Whose shadows made all Europe honor him"(Faustus I.i.112), and Girolamo Cardano whose book On the Subtlety of Things contains the following narrative:

To all these stories I will add this more wonderful one, which I heard, not once only, or a few times, from my father, Facio Cardano, who admitted he had a familiar demon nearly thirty years. At length when I asked him to put in writing what I had often heard, I found the written record agreed with my memory of what had been said. On the 15th of August, 1491, when the sacred hour of 8 pm. had arrived, there appeared in the customary manner (20) seven men, dressed in silken clothing, their cloaks of a Greek cut, their boots (so it appeared) purple, their tunics shining and red on their chests, so that they would seem to be from Chermesino (21).Their beauty was greater than is common, and striking in the extreme. Nor were they all dressed the same; there were two whom my father believed to be more noble than the others.Of these, one, who was taller, was followed by two attendants; the other, who was paler and shorter, was followed by three; thus they totalled seven. Whether their heads were covered or bare, the written record does not state. Their age was close to 40 years, at least over 30. (22) Being asked who they were, they answered that they were men of air, who, like other men, were born and died, though their lives were much longer than ours, lasting 300 years. Being questioned about the immortality of our souls, they declared that nothing remains of what is particular to each individual. (23) They are much closer to the divine beings (divis)than to the human race, yet an almost infinitely wide interval stands between them [between the airy demons and the divine beings]. They are neither happier nor wretcheder with respect to us than we are to the beasts. No secret thing is concealed from them, as for example book-learning, or riches; the lowest scum among them is to the talent of the noblest of humans no otherwise than the vilest of men training the finest dog or horse. Because their bodies are rarefied, they can bring us neither harm nor benefit besides apparitions and terrors, besides, of course, their knowledge. One of them, a short demon, had 300 students, another 200 in the University of Milan; both of them held professorships (Erant alteri, qui minore erat corpore, 300.discipuli, alteri 200. in publica academica. Vterque enim eorum publice profitebatur.) When my father asked them why, if they knew the hiding-places of treasures, they did not reveal them to humans, they answered that under their law it was punishable by the greatest penalties for anyone to communicate these matters to them. They stayed with my father more than three hours; they spent them in disputes, asking him about the origin of the world; the one of higher rank than the rest denied that God had created the world from all eternity.(24) Another, on the other side, developed the topic by maintaining that God creates the world every minute, so that if he were to desist for even one minute, the world would vanish. The first one then quoted some things out of a book by Averroes which had not yet been published, and he mentioned the names of some books, part of which had been published, and part of which are unknown till this day. The first were by Averroes; the second were Averroistic. Be this fact, or be it fable, that is what he told me.(25)

This is so fantastic as to suggest a joke. The airy demons wear purple boots. They are mortal (a drastic revision of Plato's concept). Two of them teach in the University of Milan. Abdicating their supernatural knowledge, and forgetting that they surpass humans as humans do beasts, they eagerly read a human philosopher, Averroes; and they avail themselves of this same supernatural knowledge to read books of his that are yet unpublished. Yet it is against the grain to think that Cardano is joking. De Subtilitate is a serious book and he was a serious man. He created Cardan's Theorem, an important milestone in the history of algebra. He invented the Cardan Joint, later named the universal joint. "Jerome Cardan and the Horoscope of Christ," a chapter of Professor Wayne Schumaker's Renaissance Curiosa, shows how carefully and judiciously Cardan sorted out religious doctrine, the traditional lore of astrology, and empiricism. (26) However Cardan may have embroidered on his father's tall tale, he must have a good reason for including it in his book. Julius Caesar Scaliger, in his attack on De Subtilitate, writes:

You bring forth many fables, originating from your father, no less, and deserving of laughter, about the nature of demons. Who will not applaud such a drama, in which a demon becomes an adherent of Averroes? But Averroes denies that demons exist.

Scaliger's skepticism, however, extends only to Cardan's narration, not to the concept of airy demons as such, concerning which he says:

There are three kinds of demons.... The second type are aerial:they cause the effectiveness of magic, and the sibyls' power to answer questions in an inspired manner....In the deserts of Arabia, demons are not only heard, but seen, and that as a routine event, every day (27)

Among Renaissance humanists, however one might deny this or that account of airy demons, no one could deny the concept itself. Perhaps the "deserts of Arabia" are the "desert wildernesses" of Comus, l.209.

In the ancient world, we saw the cult of airy demons allied to agnosticism (agnostoi theoi); in the Renaissance, we find it allied to Averroism, which is akin to agnosticism.

As it was interpreted during its vogue at the University of Paris in the 13th Century, the philosophy of the Arabian, Averroes, consisted of three tenets:

(1)Monopsychism, the doctrine that all human beings share one mind; and consequently, that there is no personal immortality, since the individual traits of the mind, such as memory and the sense of personal identity, vanish at death.

(2)The doctrine that the universe had no temporal beginning (hence that the Christian idea of Creation is false).

(3)The doctrine that complete happiness is attainable in this world.

By Averroism, Christianity was de-fanged of its most dreadful threat against the individual, that for heresy or other sins he would be tortured forever in hell fire; for "monopsychism...left no individual rational soul to carry responsibility for a deceased person's acts."(28) Jehovah's omnipotence was removed to a comfortable distance, as the world had enjoyed an independent existence forever. The loss of beatitude in heaven, in case the ex-Christian missed that, was compensated by happiness on earth. No wonder that the Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, in 1277 accused the Sorbonists of paying more attention to heathen philosophers than to Christian revelation. The students defensively espoused the doctrine that Truth took two forms, truths of philosophy and truths of faith.

Dr. Faustus, at midnight, wishes the Monopsychist doctrine were true:

You stars...

Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist

Into the entrails of yon laboring cloud...

O soul, be changed into small water-drops

And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found (V.ii.164-193).

But Prospero goes beyond him, asserting that it is true:

...the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve ;

And like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind (IV.i. 153-56; emphasis added).

Perhaps Ariel had studied at the Sorbonne. Certainly Prospero had been in Milan where 500 university students had imbibed Averroism from two airy demons. The Resurrection of the Body is asserted in the Apostles' Creed, in the Anglican prayerbook, in the church that Shakespeare had to attend whether he wanted to or not; it was bold of him to put into the mouth of a sympathetic character the statement that all the inhabitants of the earth should leave not a rack behind. The airy demons had said to Facio, "about the immortality of our souls... that nothing remains of what is particular to each individual"(de animae immortalitate nostrae, nihil quod cuique proprium esset, superesse). Shakespeare seems to turn this doctrine into poetry.

That white magic, consisting of the manipulation of airy demons, was to the Renaissance a Third World, offering escape from the complementary horrors of heaven and hell, may shed light on its appearance, sudden disappearance, and faint reappearance in Doctor Faustus.

When Faustus cries, "' Tis magic, magic, that hath ravished me," (I.i.104) he has not yet set foot on the left-hand path. He wants to practice white magic, like Prospero, and become, like him, a "studious artisan"(I.i.53). The "airy brows" (I.i. 122) of the demons he proposes to conjure signify that they are the harmless kind. Cornelius assures Faustus,

He that is grounded in astrology,

Enriched with tongues, well seen in minerals,

Hath all the principles magic doth require (I.i.132-34).

If these things are all one needs to practice magic, it is an art "lawful as eating"as Shakespeare says in another context (The Winter's Tale, V.iii.111). Valdes and Cornelius also support the idea of the innocence of their magic when they insist that they need Faustus's superior intelligence and erudition (I.i.113). Prospero, too, is "for the liberal arts Without a parallel" (I.ii.73-4), and the connection between humanistic learning and white magic should be clear from the preceding narrative. Robert Burton states that magic was actually taught "in former times" in the universities of Salamanca and Cracow.(29) Erudite, too, is the Latin charm Faustus recites,and in the vein of white magic are the spirits he names, identified with the elements of fire, air and water. Consistently with what I have said about hell being a mere outpost of heaven, Christian piety is incongruously mingled with Satanism: Faustus uses Jehovah's name, the names of holy saints, holy water, and the sign of the cross; but, on the other hand, he calls on the gods of the underworld (Acheron), Beelzebub, Demogorgon and Mephostophilis (I.iii.16-24). But all this dream and vain pretense of learning is swept away as soon as Mephostophilis appears. He comes because he hears Faustus "rack the name of God [and] Abjure...his savior Christ"(I.iii.46-47). This makes the fiend"fly in hope to get his glorious soul" (I.iii.48). Any ignorant peasant woman could get a hellish fiend to come flying if that is all that is involved, and indeed in common belief thousands of ignorant peasant women were doing so. Faustus might well explain that he was trying to enslave an airy demon, not be enslaved by a hellish one, but with strange lack of confidence in his own knowledge and skill, he signs Mephostophilis's contract.

Faustus's futile attempt to conjure an airy demon is not in the English Faustbook, but is Marlowe's contribution to the myth. It can be read as a warning that when seeking supernatural aid,one should have confidence in his humanistic learning and insist on an airy demon, stoutly rejecting the hellish fiends who are as utterly disastrous as they are easily accessible. Valdes and Cornelius disappear from the play, though the plan had been for them to go partners with Faustus in his huge schemes of profit and delight. Then follows the seemingly pointless clowning of the middle section, and at length Act V with its thunder and torrents of pity and fear. The Chorus's summation requires comment; he exhorts intellectuals "Only to wonder at unlawful things, Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits To practice more than heavenly power permits"(V.iii. 6-8). Where is this deepness? Faustus has actually done something extremely shallow, within the range of the poorest intelligence. Compare his crying for mercy with Prospero's boast listing all the feats of his rough magic(V.i.33-50).This word deepness, joined to the opening scenes of the play, seems to enforce the point that when making magic, one must carefully avoid hellish fiends. But that is entirely consistent with recommending the magic made with airy demons.

Notes

1. "Dost thou attend me?...Thou attend'st not!... I pray thee mark me...Dost thou hear?"--I.ii.78, 87, 88, 106.

2. I. ii. 424, 446, 502;IV.i.261-2, V.i.87, 98, 244, 322.

3. Augustine, The City of God, tr. Marcus Dods, D.D.,New York: Modern Library, 1950, p. 287, quoting Apuleius.

4. Plato, Symposium, 202 D-203 B, tr. Suzy Q. Groden, U. of Mass. Press, n.p., 1970, p. 80.

5. Cratylus, 398 B.

6. The Works of Apuleius, tr. anon.,London: H.G. Bohn, 1853, p. 361.

7. The City of God, p.282.

8. Apuleius, Works, pp. 361, 362.

9. The City of God, p.282.

10. Ibid., p. 282, quoting Apuleius.

11. Ibid, pp. 281-2, quoting Apuleius.

12. The City of God, p.281.

13. Ibid, page 260.

14. Page 243.

15. Omnia D. Platonis Opera Tralatione Marsilii Ficini... Venetiis, Apud Hieronymum Scotum, 1571: p.269.

16. Hieronymi Cardani Mediolanensis...Operum ...Lugduni, Sumptibus Ioannis Antonii Huguetan & Marci Antonii Ravaud, 1663, Vol. III, p. 656, col.1.

17. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, Cambridge U.P., 1964, p.44.

18.Ed. Charlotte D'Evelyn and Anna Mill, London: EETS, 1956, Vol. II, pp. 407- 08.

19. Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, New York; Columbia U.P., 1934, Vol. III, p.10.

20. De more. The men appeared near a circle, inside of which Facio was standing; there were incantations and, probably, music played on invisible instruments.

21. This would make sense if a village named Chermesino, famous for its inhabitants' colorful clothing, existed near Milan in the 16th Century. Unfortunately, no Chermesino appears in the atlases.

22. Meaning what Milton calls their "semblance"(Sonnet VII); their chronological age is presumably much greater.

23. That is, at death the individual soul merges with the universal soul of which it had always been a part, and loses all the traits of its individuality. This is a doctrine of Averroism, the philosophical school favored by these men of air.

24. Denying another Averroistic doctrine.

25. Operum, Vol. III, p.656, cols.1-2.

26. This is a convenient place to apologize for saying, in "The Horoscope of Christ," Milton Studies, Vol. XII, 1978, p.225, that Cardan never cast the horoscope of Christ, and for jeering at Bishop Thomas Newton for saying that he had. I was misled by the absence of the horoscope and commentary from Cardan's 1663 Operum ; the Inquisition had seized them. I would have apologized at the time but the editor of Milton Studies said he didn't publish short notes.

27. Iulii Caesaris Scaligeri Exotericarum Exercitationum Liber XV. De Subtilitate, ad Hieronymum Cardanum, Frankfort, Claude Marnius, 1612, pp. 1088-1092.

28. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. "Averroism," Internet.

29. Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson, Random House, New York, 1977: I, 203.