Medieval Magic: Draft - 2/23/2022

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.)