You may find this absurd. The Chinese who invented compass, which was called SiNan(“what’s in charge of south”), believe stone is the mother of iron(magnetics), and some stone is so motherly that the iron consistently try to find it.

Kind of cute.

————– Source:

1. “石，铁之母也。以有慈石，故能引其子；石之不慈也，亦不能引也” Annotations to Lvshi ChunQiu, by Gao You, East Han dynasty(around 200 AD)

2. The Chinese text first mentioned magnets is GuanZi, Chapter of the earth, “上有兹石者，其下有铜金”（where there are magnets, there are copper and gold underneath), around 400 BC.

Please note that all translations are rough.

Firstly, writers in antiquity often thought in terms of natural 'sympathies' and 'antipathies' between various materials and indeed creatures. Some things were attracted to each other, and others were repelled - e.g., one belief was that man and wolf had antipathies, and would avoid each other.

One specific set of these sympathies and antipathies that writers in antiquity discussed, unsurprisingly, was magnets. It was believed that rubbing garlic on a magnet would stop it from working, while rubbing lambs' blood would make it work again. Remember that this is before Newton and/or the the modern acceptance of atoms - before the 'Scientific Revolution', educated people lived in a world where things were mysterious, where everything in the world felt purposeful. In this world, magnets moved, seemingly, because of hidden, magical forces. And, I mean, magnets have also seemed quite magical to more recent scholars of metaphysics.

These beliefs about antipathy and sympathy lasted a long time amongst the educated; even Rene Descartes - who famously thought that animals were mechanical - believed there were antipathies between wolf skin and lamb skin. To give an example, Wootton discusses a 1589 edition of a then-popular book by Giambattista della Porta called Natural Magick, where della Porta complains that neither garlic or lambs' blood actually had any effect on magnets despite what the ancients said (della Porta probably plagiarised this from a manuscript by Garzoni, but that's another story). The della Porta book is famous for his complaint about magnets being an early example of someone complaining about writers from antiquity getting things wrong. But in general Natural Magick is otherwise a pretty good clue to how people in the 16th century thought magnets worked: we're talking about a book with the word 'Magic' in the title here. For della Porta, magnetism was still a mysterious, magical force that worked via sympathies and antipathies. So the obvious belief about compasses that would have been held by many was that compasses felt a sympathy for the north pole of the Earth.

However, writers in antiquity hadn't written much about magnets and how they work, and so magnets were a topic that late Medieval writers felt it was worth trying to add new knowledge to. So in 1269 you get Pierre de Maricourt, relatively shortly after the introduction of compasses to Europe, writing about the principles of the poles of magnets and how to magnetise metal; de Maricourt seems to have been the first person in Europe, at least, to discuss such things in extant writing.

Sebastian Cabot in 1522 discovered that compasses do not point to true north and that the point they do point to varies somewhat, which was problematic for the idea that compasses worked by sympathy to the north pole; the inaccuracy there suggested a less cosmic solution. In 1581 William Gilbert, after replicating the observations of della Porta and de Maricourt, argued that compasses worked on the same principles as regular magnets, and that the Earth was a big magnet (i.e., that it had a magnetic field).

In terms of societal resistance, Jesuits certainly argued against Gilbert from a pre-Copernican point of view, because Gilbert's work on magnets and compasses had a worldview fundamentally different to the traditional Ptolemaic model of the heavens that they taught. In fact, the only reason we have still have a copy of the Garzoni manuscript that della Porta apparently plagiarised is that the manuscript was kept in the archive of Jesuits trying to argue against Gilbert. Of course, Jesuit disapproval wouldn't have hurt Gilbert - after all, he was the personal physician to Elizabeth I, who perhaps wasn't the greatest fan of Jesuits what with her being head of a church that wasn't the Catholic one. There were certainly also English people who disagreed with Gilbert about magnets - Francis Bacon thought Gilbert was making way too much of his evidence, and the dons of Cambridge and Oxford generally ignored the new natural philosophy of the likes of Gilbert for centuries in favour of traditional ways of thinking about the world. But clearly the societal resistance to Gilbert certainly didn't stop him from having a pretty prominent place in Elizabethan society.

Source: Thomas Wootton's 2015 book The Invention Of Science.