John Napier's Wizard Roots
Unraveling the Scottish mathematician's secret hobby
Okay, sure, lots of people have hobbies. Musician Rod Stewart builds model railways in his spare time. George R. Dekle, the attorney who prosecuted Ted Bundy, also invented triangular chess. This blog is not my full-time job. And John Napier, the Scottish mathematician who invented logarithms, apparently spent his free time doing wizard shit.
At least, that’s what the Scotsman, one of the biggest newspapers in Scotland, published in 2005. They say several members of Napier’s family “were commonly known to be wizards or sorcerers” and that their powers were “feared” by nobles and peasants alike.
Go to Napier’s Wikipedia page and you find an entire section listing wizardly things he’s done. He studied necromancy. His pet black rooster was apparently his familiar, and he used the rooster to catch a thief. He traveled with a pet spider in a box (not actually wizard-like, just weird, but sure okay). One time Napier wanted to get a flock of pigeons out of his field, so he laced grain with alcohol and threw it into the field. The pigeons got drunk, making it easy for Napier to catch the pigeons. His neighbors evidently thought Napier put the birds under some magic spell.
Of course, we need sources that run deeper than a Scottish daily newspaper. Where did this idea of John Napier as a wizard come from? Did he actually try to learn the dark arts? Are these tall tales, or true stories from the life of a famous mathematician?
Scotland in the 1500s
Let’s get this out of the way first: when Napier was alive, practicing witchcraft was very, very illegal in Scotland. The King of Scotland, King James VI, hated witches so much he published an 80-page book on witchcraft in 1597, Dæmonologie, where he described a plague of witches conspiring to take down the entire kingdom of Scotland. He believed witchcraft was punishable by death, and then personally oversaw some of the witchcraft trials, I guess just to make sure they actually died.
It doesn’t matter that Napier was high status. Napier would’ve been killed for practicing wizardry, but there’s nothing suggesting Napier died from James VI personally burning him at the stake (he died of gout). That already makes me doubt how Napier was “commonly known” as a wizard since that should have, you know, gotten him killed. And it’s not like James VI didn’t know who John Napier was, considering Napier’s son Archibald worked in James VI’s household.
In The Life and Works of John Napier, the authors do note a diary entry from a royal secretary named Claude Nau, written in 1567 or 1568. The entry mentions in passing that Napier’s father, Sir Archibald, “had the reputation of being a great wizard.” As far as I can tell, this is the only known primary source from the 1500s that mentions wizardry and the Napier family.
There was another source from 1795, almost 200 years after John Napier died. In the thrillingly-titled The statistical account of Scotland drawn up from the communications of the ministers of the different parishes, Vol. 16, Reverend David Ure recites the local folklore of the Scottish parish of Killearn, where Napier lived for some time. Ure mentions that Napier used to walk around the town in a cap and nightgown, which weirded out the locals. He explains:
“This, with some things which to the vulgar appeared rather odd, fixed on him [Napier] the character of a warlock. It was firmly believed, and currently reported that he was in compact with the devil; and that the time he spent in study was spent in learning the black art.”
These are two of the only direct sources that claim Napier’s family practiced wizardry. One diary entry from a secretary, and one recitement of folklore centuries after John Napier’s death. But there is one more key source, and it’s probably where Napier’s wizard reputation came from in the first place.
Where did the legend come from?
The idea of John Napier as a cunning wizard mostly came from one guy named Mark.
Mark Napier (1798-1879) was a descendant of John Napier who had access to the Napier family’s charter chest, and published Memoirs of John Napier in 1834. It’s hard to find a lot of primary sources about John Napier’s life. 300 years after John Napier’s death, Mark Napier, presumably, had access to almost all the surviving sources, and then proceeded to cite barely any of them.
Here’s Mark Napier introducing his ancestor’s warlock hobby in Memoirs:
“There is this remarkable circumstance in his history, that while he [John Napier] possessed the respect and confidence of the most able and Christian pastors of the Reformed Church, and while he was looked up to and consulted by the General Assembly, of which he was for years a member, he was at the same time regarded, and not merely by the vulgar, as one who possessed certain powers of darkness, the very character of which was in those days dangerous to the possessor.”
Mark then re-tells the story of the black rooster, the story of Napier catching a thief, and the story of Napier drugging all those pigeons. He says all of this without citing any source, which makes me feel like this.
Mark Napier did tremendous work by putting together Memoirs. Most of John Napier’s manuscripts were lost in a fire in 1801, so Memoirs is still the single best source of facts about his life. But it’s not… a great source. Mark Napier was not a historian by profession—he was a lawyer. Historical research was something he did in his free time. The authors of Life and Works of John Napier describe Mark Napier’s bad research habits as so:
“Mark Napier frequently promoted Napier’s actions further than the available evidence allowed. He was also good at wording his speculations as facts, a trait which has had an insidious effect on the work of subsequent historians.”
So the stories are embellished, and the guesses are written as facts. Combine this with a dearth of citations, and you have a book where it’s nearly impossible to untangle the facts from John Napier’s life and the ideas from Mark Napier’s head.
As for the wizard stuff, the authors of Life and Works of John Napier note that “the view of Napier as an academic recluse with overtones of sorcery originates with Mark Napier, not helped by the portraits of John Napier dressed in a black cloak with a long beard.” It will probably never be clear whether John Napier’s interest in wizardry was real, or just a part of Napier family mythology. It’s possible Mark essentially wrote wizard fanfiction of his own ancestor.
The lives of many mathematicians were filled with oddities, including (but not limited to) dying in a duel at age 20 after a prison stint (Galois), starting a cult where you think beans contain the souls of the dead (Pythagoras), or publishing an anonymous defense of yourself that fooled no one (Leibniz). John Napier practicing the dark arts might be one of those oddities, or it might not be. Even without Mark Napier’s flaws as a researcher, it’s tough to separate fact from myth when discussing a man from the 1500s.
But as a final note, I have no idea where the idea came from that John Napier carried around a black spider in a box. Mark Napier never mentions it in Memoirs. And there’s no mention of it in Life and Works of John Napier either. So who knows, maybe John Napier had a thing for spiders. Maybe he was weird after all.