In the last decades interest in the »marginal« subjects of renaissance thinking has intensified; consequently, ideas about magic and astrology could not be avoided. This interest is first and foremost a result of understanding the need using two basic ally different historiographic approaches in studying renaissance intellectual life. One approach is for those processes that led to radical changes in the structure of thinking and acting characteristic of the old view of the world, in which only hints of what is to come can be percieved. The latter makes it impossible to percieve the riches of renaissance spiritual life and their relation to the new natural science and the fact that it would be impossible to talk exclusively about a single linear development which progressed simply through the denial of all that was »primitive« and irrational when a new natural science was born. We have tried to take a different approach taking magic as an example of an aspect of the »old« picture of the world that a »one-sided« approach neglected, considering it a »primitive« way of thinking and acting that was to be »overcome«. Therefore we favour those historians of philosophy and science (C. Vasoli, E. Garin, P. Rossi, F. Yates, E. Cassirir, D. P. Walker and others) who tried to rehabilitate interest in long neglected fields of study, by discovering evidence for their theses that the changes in the way of thinking did not happen overnight in the texts of the renaissance authors. Even in the works of the most outstanding renaissance thinkers the co-existance of »superstition« and »reason« is evident. The old picture of the world, built on the hypo thesis that the simpathy and antipathy present the essential type of relation between the things in this world could not vanish all of a sudden. This reationship came from »virtutes occulte« which established the animistic perception of the world in which the belief that the supralunar world signifficantly influenced occurrences in the sublunar world had an important place. Some complex processes contributed to its gradual »vanishing« - first a separation between the attitudes that remained within the »old interpretation and the magic-astrological conception, and then criticism based on an empirical testing of individual cases that were purported to uphold the general theses about such a conception of connections in the world. Rationally established modern thinking, which was born out of opposition to the results of the »old« way of testing phenomena in the world, had its impetus right in the sphere of the magician watchword »Knowledge is power.« This paper on the problem of rennaisance magic deals with how a new ideal was inaugurated. It could happen only because magic was rehabilitated in the Rennaisance and a new type of man was emphasised, the active, »divine« man, the man magus to whom insight into the regularity of relations among phenomena had opened an infinite field of action. This new ideal was to establish a different approach to the world.