MEDIEVAL MAGIC - 3/14/2022

The medieval world saw the emergence of a new paradigm for magic. What was once only a loose conglomerate of legends and folk traditions was now a loose conglomerate of legends, folk traditions, and meticulously systemized knowledge. And like most important things in the medieval era, this new paradigm was born from catholic priestess getting into fights.

This was a scrappy era for the church. The latin-speaking Catholic church had spent most of its history sharing power in the roman empire with the greek-speaking orthodox church. The collapse of the eastern roman empire resulted in a Catholic church which suddenly no longer had to share power, and with a lovely buffer state between them and their increasingly rowdy neighbor: The Abbasid Caliphate. The tides of history had thrown them the ball, and by god were they going to run with it. (cut down, work into next paragraph)

The medieval world was inexorably dominated by the rising catholic church. Like any rising power, the catholic church had its share of enemies. Roger Bacon once wrote “Christendom had two major rivals: philosophy and magic.” It is here, in the church’s desire to defeat these rivals, that we can see the core, the engine driving the machine which transforms magic.

To understand medieval magic, we have to understand the core pieces on the Christian side of the board. The Priest, and the Scholar. The Priest is fairly simple. The Church looked out on a Europe increasingly isolated by unmaintained roman roads and irrigation, and saw a world dreadfully lacking in christendom. Barbarian kings looked out on a Europe severely lacking in cool roman goods, and found conversion to be a quick fix for their problems. Where a centurion conquers with a sword, a priest conquers with a litany, and sometimes also a sword. The Scholar, however, wields a subler tool: a new form of critical organic method called Scholasticism, and sometimes also a sword.

Magic changed because knowledge itself changed. Generally, if an ancient thinker wanted some knowledge, they would take their bucket down to one of two wells: The well of Tradition (things people have been doing or saying for a long time) or the well of  Legendary Teachers, (Socrates said so.) This was a bit inconvenient for Catholicism, as tradition often did not match up with the bible, and Socrates was a pagan with the gall to die 322 years before the birth of christ. While problems with traditional wisdom could be solved with a declaration of heresy or the careful application of a sword to the neck, philosophy proved a bit trickier. This is where Scholasticism comes in.

Scholasticism is a method of learning characterized by:

• Commitment to catholicism
• Dialectical reasoning
• Rigorous conceptual analysis
• Careful drawing of distinctions
• Formal debate and disputation

To summarize, Scholasticism is a specifically catholic method of analyzing a text, finding contradictions, and resolving those contradictions logically. It can be thought of as a method for the church to organize and stitch together bodies of knowledge. Most importantly for our purposes, it is a method of analysis that involves priests getting into detailed and well written philosophical slap fights about magic.

First into the ring is St. Augustine, who sets the pace with the one-two combo of On the City of God and On the Divination of Demons. Here he summarizes much of the classical conception of magic set down by writers like Iamblicus and Porphyry, but most notably, he rejects the classical distinction of Goetia, (evil magic) and Theurgia (good or divine magic.) Augustine argues that they differ in name only, that both are “Entangled in the rites of demons who masquerade as good angels.” To Augustine, all magic is simply the actions of demons. Demons who are conscious beings with ethereal bodies similar to fine smoke that allows them to move at incredible speeds and enter the bodies of the possessed. Additionally, he also introduces the idea that lesser demons can be bullied into submission via the control of a more powerful demon, an idea that continued through solomonic magic, and is to this day broadly held by modern occultists. All of this raises an important question: Why are demons doing any of this?

St. Augustine believes that magic itself is a trap for humanity, that demons are attempting to delude humans into believing they have more power than they actually do. To St. Augustine,  demons are simply playing along until the opportune moment to drop their spiritual snare.

Following quick at St. Augustine’s heels is Isadore of Seville, whose text The Etymologies served as a central informational text in the middle ages. His proposed origin of magic is confident and strangely specific: Magic was invented by Zoroaster, and expanded by Democritus. He mirrors Augsutine’s scorn for magicians, writing “this foolery of the magic arts held sway

over the entire world for many centuries through the instruction of the evil angels.” Given that, he divides practitioners of magic into several sub-types that give us an interesting snapshot of the type of people who practiced non-church-sanctioned magic at the time.

Isidore’s Taxonomy of Magicians:

• Aruspicium, (Literally “bird watcher” a form of divination based in observing the flight patterns of flocks of birds.)
• Auguratio, (augurs, those who read the entrails of birds)
• Oraculum, (oracles)
• Necromantium (necromancers)
• Maga (Mages, Isidore uses this term specifically to refer to the mythical Circe)
• Maleficus (Literally translates as “evil doer” but is often translated as “witch”, Isidore describes them as “They agitate the elements, disturb the minds of people, and slay without any drinking of poison, using the violence of spells alone.”)
• Divinus, (Elemental diviners, divided into four sub-categories based on their elemental medium of choice.)
  • Hydromantia
  • Geomantia
  • Aeromantia
  • Pyromantia
• Incantator (enchanter, those who accomplish the craft of divination by chanting.)
• Arioli (lit “open spaces, interstice” described as those who “utter abominable prayers around the ‘altars of idols’ (ara idolorum), and offer pernicious sacrifices, and in these rites receive the answers of demons.)
• Mathematicus (a type of roman astrology, described as superstitious.)
• Magus (As in the magi, the wise men who oversaw the birth of christ. Isidore describes them as being interpreters of the stars. This draws a crucial distinction between “superstitious” astrology, and “non-superstitious” astrology. Isidore does not actually describe what the difference is, leaving astrology in a curious state of ambiguity in church law.)

As for how exactly all of this was accomplished, Isidore holds the party line, explaining that all magic was the result of a “pestilential alliance between humans and demons.” A position that would be repeated by church founders, essentially establishing it as the defacto church position.

Isidore paints quite the cast of magical characters, but the question remains: who was actually practicing magic during the middle ages? Turns out a lot of catholic priests were practitioners of the arcane. This may seem surprising, given everything we’ve been talking about so far, but I am sure even the most devout catholic can recognize that though the church may condemn something, it is also made of people, and may have a history of condemning with one hand while practicing with another.

John of Salisbury provides our evidence in the form of his text Policraticus, a work of political theory. John details an experience he had with a teacher, another catholic priest, who taught him to perform a fingernail-based form of divination called Onychomancy. John says that he was unable to see anything, but that his fellow student was able to see “certain airy figures.” This is important for two reasons: One, it is eyewitness evidence of catholic priests practicing magic, a practice so common that modern scholarship has deemed it worthy of the delightful term “The Clerical Necromantic Underground.” Two, it seems to imply that there was a common understanding of what magic was. Additionally, things that fall into the category of magic for us are not necessarily classified as magic for John. After an entire chapter discussing magic and its tricks, John moves on to Omens. From ants bringing grains of wheat to the infant midas to indicate that he would one day be wealthy, to six swans flying overhead to announce the return of Aneas’s fleet, these signs were seemingly considered a strange if mundane element of the world, and entirely permissible within christendom.

(find that citation about how John felt magic was worthy of study, which was controversial. Build up his engagement with magic to the point where it seems like he considers it permissible, then drop the bomb that he was a whole ass archbishop.)

The ambiguity around astrology set up by Isadore would eventually become a large source of controversy around later church writers with an occult bent, and when it comes to church writers with controversial opinions on the occult, Michael Scot sits at the top of the pyramid.

As “Science Advisor and Court Astrologer” read: “court wizard” to Fredrick II, Scot enjoyed significant resources in his pursuit of the occult, writing about everything from divination, to alchemy, to astrology, to the occult in general. The tone of his writing differs significantly, taking on a tone akin to “Demonology is highly highly forbidden by the church, but here is a list of demons and how to summon them, you know, for research purposes.” Scot’s tone was notably unsubtle, even for the time, and while his works would later be censured by the likes of Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon, his boldness is indicative of a shift in towards acknowledgement if not acceptance of magic.

This is the fight that characterizes magic in the middle ages, this internal struggle within the church of just what to do with all these wizards, that forms the gears and cogs of medieval magic. That said, It is important to remember that magic was not solely owned by people with the resources to write books, no the medieval world was a complex tapestry of people and ideas for the Catholic Church to get into fights with. For while the court wizards of history were busy systemizing magic, the folk practitioners and itinerant mystics of Europe were busy with good-old straightforward salt-of-the-earth no-nonsense heresy.

By the 13th century, Christianity had become the dominant religion of europe, but dominant does not necessarily mean “ideologically stable.” Quietism, Autotheism, and Antinomianism were all on the rise, and all arguably a prelude to the coming protestant reformation. Metaphysical frameworks are a lot like songs: when they get popular, people start to remix them. Of the innumerable MC’s to rock the tables of christendom in the 13th century, few did so with more underappreciated skill than the Beguines. Often called the Grey Sisters, the Beguines were a group of christain women who took self-imposed vows of piety, chastity, and community service. They would generally live communally in cities where they would work odd jobs as transcribers and nurses. They quickly became known for their effective and charismatic preaching, and for providing free education to children.

Beguine occult works were often literary, taking the form of divinely inspired poetry. Hadewijch of Antwerp wrote in the style of the courtly love poem, a popular form for the time, in which Hadewijch describes the process through which one achieves oneness with divinity via the metaphor of divine pining. However, Hadewijch cleverly inverts the common tropes, with herself taking the role of the pining noble or knight, and god or jesus taking the role of the beloved. The effect is a radical feminization of the divine that frames the authors transcendental experiences through erotic, and often homoerotic, language. Reactions from the rest of Christendom could be described as “mixed.” For while some communities welcomed the Beguines as examples of righteous and pious women, others saw them shunned, imprisoned, and even executed.

[we should talk about st guinefort here]

There are two ways that the medieval relationship to magic could end: Christendom could subtly develop a framework that allows magic to exist under purview of the church, syncretizing as it did for so many other cultures and beliefs, or the protestant reformers could criticize the church for being “magical” prompting a bloody centuries long crackdown on deviation from explicit canon.

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Magical history does not easily conform to standard historical narratives. The medieval era of magic and the renaissance era of magic blend together. It can be more useful to think of magical history in terms of a period where magic is attempting to systemize, followed by a period where magic has been successfully systemized, followed by magic running facefirst into Issac Newton, and having to pick all its books up off the floor.

But what does it mean for magic to become “systemized?” How do we go from encyclopedias of spirits and plants to