The inescapability of the Internet of Things.

Arthur C. Clarke said that any advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

A new book argues this is nothing new. Only back in the day, it was tinged with xenophobia.

According to Truitt, the more powerful mystery surrounding automata lay less in how they worked (though their operation was a marvel to behold) than how they were made. The makers of these objects might rely on disciplines like “astral science, enchantment, augury, or even necromancy,” those fields of study where the liberal arts blurred into magic. The “disembodied intelligences” of demons could be harnessed in fashioning automata, as could the “natural magic” of gemstones and other physical substances, or the correspondence of the “celestial and sublunary spheres.” A 14th-century account of the 13th-century priest Albertus Magnus affords him the ability to make an oracular talking head by consulting the stars: “He made a metal statue according to the courses of the planets, and gave it such reason that it spoke.” The head answered questions and made predictions, like a medieval magic 8 ball, before it was smashed by an alarmed young monk. Albertus Magnus had to explain to the monk that he had forged the head through the power of the stars — not with demonic assistance — and that it could not be remade for another 30,000 years, when the heavens would again be in the right alignment.

Broadly speaking, the medieval Western European mind had two ways of comprehending the incomprehensible. There were miracles and there were marvels. Miracles were divine in origin, willed by God or his holy representatives. Marvels, on the other hand, were produced by the meddling of demons, or by the work of nature or man.

A large chunk of Truitt’s survey is devoted to the way Western Europeans associated marvels and automata with remote places, with various exotic “others.” And yet because her survey is so parochially limited to Western Europe, she doesn’t explore how the knowledge and folklore of automata actually travelled across cultural borders. Instead, the automata of the East and of the Islamic world are merely presented as tropes in the imagination of the West. 

Marvels like automata were thought to happen in far away, un-Christian lands. In part, this belief drew on the general notion that strange things occurred more often at the edges of the earth. “For sometimes tired, as it were, of the true and serious, [Nature] draws aside and goes away,” wrote the 12th-century priest Gerald of Wales, “and in these remote parts indulges herself in these shy and hidden excesses.” The apocryphal letters of Alexander the Great to Aristotle that spread from the fourth century onward into numerous languages conjured the wonders of India, Babylon, and Ethiopia. William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris in the 13th century, credited “the many experimenters […] and people who make marvelous things” for the profusion of “natural magic” to be found in India. A fanciful 14th-century travelogue recorded “richely wrought and enameled” gold peacocks and other birds that danced and sang in the grand court of the Mongol khan.