Revelation tells us it was the sorceries of Rome (Babylon the Great) which deceived all the nations. One great sorcerer of Rome is notably influential for having established natural magic as a kind of sorcery we today would call Science. Giovanni Pico della Mirandela. His writings in the 1400s possibly paved the way for Rosicrucian alchemist magicians to start a scientific cultural movement of experimentation in the 1600s which led to Modern Science and the founding of the Royal Society. Strictly speaking there grew up an understanding based on Giovanni’s writings that natural magic was distinct from ceremonial magic more commonly called sorcery. Yet no clear criteria or law forbids scientists from including ceremonial magic in their work. The two kinds of magic were normally combined by practicing alchemists, scientists and sorcerers of the times, as they had been for centuries or even for thousands of years. If you call Christian faith a ‘superstition’ you effectively suppress the main influence which keeps scientists from reverting to out and out ceremonial sorcery and even to black magic. If you look at the writings (Magia Naturalis) of another Italian philosopher-sorcerer, later than Giovanni, named Giambattista della Porta, in the 1500s, you find they understood natural magic to include exactly those topics which we find the Book of Enoch warns us were introduced by the fallen angels.
