Magic Tales and Fairy Tale Magic

From Ancient Egypt to the Italian Renaissance

R. Bottigheimer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137380883
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

This book examines magic's generally maleficent effect on humans from ancient Egypt through the Middle Ages, including tales from classical mythology, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cultures. It shows that certain magical motifs lived on from age to age, but that it took until the Italian Renaissance for magic tales to become fairy tales.

1

Tales, Magic, and Fairy Tales

This book focuses on the narrative aspects of magic in magic tales from ancient Egypt to the Renaissance and the early modern period in Europe. In these tales magic often operates from a parallel world and affirms existing earthly and supernatural hierarchies. In the process, both magic and supernatural beings frequently pose dangers to ordinary mortals in the tales. An important component of this study is its interest in what characters in magic tales perceive to be magic and what they accept as normal manifestations, even when they appear uncanny to modern eyes. The variations in magic tale characters’ perception and experience of magic suggests a new and different prehistory for fairy tales.

In magic tales, gods in the ancient world and medieval fairy creatures inhabit a richly peopled world of their own, from which they can and do emerge to affect the lives of ordinary mortals. In sixteenth-century Venice a new sort of magic tale appeared. For the first time there began to exist a sustained tradition of magic tales in which supernaturals and fairy figures without either backstories or residence in a parallel world enter narratives in order to benefit human beings. This is fairy tale magic, and it emerges within a set of early modern problematics generated by profound social, economic, and religious shifts.

A second change marks magic tales in the millennia between ancient Egypt and the Italian Renaissance. Over the centuries the prominence of the parallel world inhabited by divinities and supernatural forces gives way to the earthly world, as human protagonists replace divinities and supernatural forces at the center of narrative focus.

A third tendency in magic tales over this long period involves the effect of magic itself on magic tale characters. In the ancient and medieval worlds, magic often posed a maleficent threat to human beings, with happy endings reserved for other-worldly bliss in a heavenly afterlife. In Renaissance magic tales, magic becomes a narrative motor that can bring about a heaven on earth happy ending for its heroes and heroines, a narrative closure that marks the fairy tale genre.

The deep and rich vein of magic in its many incarnations has been examined, assessed, re-examined, and re-assessed. In the preceding paragraphs I have offered observations; my efforts to account for these observations lie interspersed within the following chapters. In this opening chapter I will simply point out that the nature of magic in its relationship to tale protagonists in magical tales has been little regarded, as have the changes over time in the nature of magic, possibly because fairy tale magic – believed to have existed unchanged over millennia – has seemed to require little examination. In the following chapters I examine the shifting balance between magic’s maleficent and beneficent effects on mortals in the tales, the physical composition of magic, the earthly or other-worldly locus of supernaturals, and the allocation of agency among supernaturals and human beings.

What emerges is a generally unidirectional drift in the control of magic over time. In magic tales from the ancient world, divinities largely monopolized magic; in tales of the Jewish and Muslim Middle Ages, the absolute power over the universe that characterizes monotheism correlates with portrayals of a single divinity as the ultimate manipulator of magic, while in medieval Christian magic tales, magic exists within hierarchical orderings of divine agents that differ from place to place and that also change over time.

Jewish and medieval Muslim magic tales share many narrative structures, and both traditions are shaped by their monotheistically driven plots. In contrast, structural and narrative similarities link the polytheistic magic in ancient Greek and Roman magic tales with, for instance, contests between the Virgin Mary and the devil in medieval Christian magic as well as with miracle tales and early modern fairyland fictions.

Renaissance fairy tales deploy magic differently from their magic tale predecessors. Their fairy tale magic exists solely within the human universe and its results nearly always benefit the tales’ human heroes and heroines. Furthermore, in fairy tales, only the manifestly wicked suffer ill effects from magic (in contrast to fairyland fictions, which will be discussed below). Considered within a large historical continuum, fairy tale magic resembles a response to fundamental changes in the way(s) human beings understand their position both within familiar secular society and a transcendent religious universe.

The statements above run counter to contemporary assumptions about much of the world of narrative magic, but hundreds of tales bear witness to the profound shifts alluded to here. The most significant shift moves ancient and medieval magic from its (principal) service to divinities to the service of human beings. Of course, there are exceptions to this overall direction of development. How could there not be exceptions, when so many voices have told so many stories from so many differing individual perspectives? I do not argue narrowly, from single tales, but from overall tendencies, which emerge from dozens of tales in each of the cultural traditions explored in Chapters 2 to 8.

Positioning fairy tales within historical and intellectual movements may seem grandiose for so humble a genre, but it is defensible and it is foundational for the following chapters. Equally present is a thesis put forward in Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and Fairy Tale Tradition in 2002 about magically mediated weddings that produce fairy tales’ happy endings. Here and there one encounters such plots before the Renaissance, but the story-line didn’t take hold in medieval Christian Europe. First of all, the centrality of magic that characterizes fairy tales contradicted the anti-magic literary requirements for the European novella tradition in the medieval and early modern period, and second, magic as a functional narrative element seems to have run counter to popular expectations, as exemplified in Liom/nbruno in Chapter 6. Furthermore, the fewness of magically mediated weddings that produce happy endings in Jewish and Muslim medieval narrative traditions shows that it was equally atypical there.

Historical magic practice and confrontations between magic practice and overarching intellectual developments such as Renaissance humanism, the scientific revolution, and Enlightenment rationalism have been well studied, and form only a small part of this book’s purview. Here the emphasis is on magic as it functions narratively in magic tales as a whole and in fairy tales in particular. My teaching of Greek and Roman mythology proved invaluable for thinking about mythic metamorphoses in ancient storytelling, while a decades-long fascination with medieval European brief narratives provided a foundation for exploring medieval Jewish, Christian, and Muslim tales of magic and miracles.¹

Terminology

Scholars and lay commentators alike understand the terms used in the following chapters in different ways, and so I would like to define the terms that will be used in Magic Tales and Fairy Tale Magic before discussion proceeds. Each narrative considered here is a tale in terms of its length. In general, this means that each can be told or performed at a single sitting. The Thousand and One Nights, or the Arabian Nights as it is commonly referred to, consists of longer narratives, but they are divided into brief nightly tellings that Shahrazad’s sister Dinarzad refers to as “what has been said”² (an Arabic turn of phrase that is usually translated as “story” or “tale”). The publicly performed Liom/nbruno analyzed in Chapter 6 consists of two parts, each of which requires about half an hour to present.

Tale plots are linear, as Max Lüthi classically described them in The European Folktale: Form and Nature, typically lacking subplots that would retard their forward motion. Tale content, similarly simple or simplified, rarely provides any explanation of characters’ motivations, while tale prose calls on a narrow range of adjectives. Heroines are “beautiful,” with readers’ or listeners’ imaginations supplying details. In Thousand and One Nights, heroes and heroines are stereotypically “like the moon,” with occasional additional details such as swaying hips or eyebrows meeting above the nose.

In tales, both syntax and style are suitable for oral delivery and aural comprehension. Many of the medieval texts treated in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 were read or presented to a listening audience, in the same way that reading entertaining narratives aloud remained a customary practice for all social classes well into the modern period, beginning to die out only when individual private reading became habitual among middle- and upper-class print consumers.

Formal and historico-critical aspects of the tale as a genre have been well treated recently by Patricia Eichel-Lojkine in Contes en Réseaux (2013). Of particular importance is her discussion of the tale (conte) as “processual,” a term she adopted from J.-M. Schaeffer (2007: 37). Her observations about tales’ oicotypal diffraction in Christian and Jewish European cultures (43) expand the concept of local variants (oicotypes) to larger cultural constructs, while the examples she offers demonstrate ever-changing intersections of generic constraints with cultural and religious possibilities (“L’identité pluriel du conte,” 39–63).

In this study I utilize a psycho-social approach I developed nearly 30 years ago to analyze the corpus of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s tale collection, Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Genres lengthier than tales – such as novellas, novels, and dramas – incorporate particularizations about characters and situations, but tales – with their elisions, tropes, and stereotypes – rely on shared assumptions for listeners’ comprehension of their fast moving plots and shorthand character descriptions. Such tales inevitably leave blank spaces in the text, precisely because certain explanations were unnecessary for the original audiences, who lived in the same historical and geographical spaces and had been exposed to the same socio-cultural values, tropes, and expectations. Those blanks, however, remain in place for modern readers, who must somehow fill them in to understand the stories that contain them. In other words, how do we come to understand the nature of an implied but unarticulated content? To avoid explicating ancient texts in contemporary terms, caution is required, precisely because tales give voice to the cultural context within which they come into being. My own strategy for filling in the psycho-social blanks of tales from a distant past is to assemble multiple points of confirmation before speculating about the content that historical tellers/writers and listeners/reader shared.

Thinking about a tale’s resolution is simpler, because magic tales’ verbal resolutions are easily recognized, a gratifying violent punishment for wicked characters with the wish-fulfilling rewards granted to heroes and heroines. Few in number, they clearly signal a story’s end.

The tales discussed here may be freestanding or framed, like Shahrazad’s tales in Thousand and One Nights or Giovan Francesco Straparola’s tales told by a merry assembly in The Pleasant Nights. Straparola’s stories could be read by an individual, such as a merchant on his travels (the reader so often alluded to in other sixteenth-century tale collections). Authors often built an audience into the frametale, an audience that could be understood as a fictively shared social context for its reader. If the same tales were told aloud, they would be listened to within a group, that is, within an actually shared social context that incorporated everything appropriate to that situation: food, wine, jolly spirits, and joshing wordplay much like that depicted within Straparola’s frametale.

Jewish or Christian sermon tales entail situational contexts far different from the secular merriment of private or social readings. In a shared religious space, listening to a magic tale ensures a conscious awareness of a transcendent moral, ethical, or religious framework for a magic tale’s reception, with neither wine-bibbing, rib-tickling, nor eye-winking. Authors must have borne in mind the social effect that a literary, social, or religious framing might have had on readers’ and listeners’ responses, and it is enticing to consider the effect their awareness might have had on individual authors’ organization, presentation, and composition of their tales.

Learned magic rarely appears in the tales discussed in Magic Tales and Fairy Tale Magic. Hints of astrology occasionally surface, usually as a proverb that could be understood in multiple ways. A lapidary assertion that marriages are made in heaven could, for instance, refer to the effect of a heavenly constellation’s alignment on the course of a tale protagonist’s life, could affirm the centrality of divinely ordained predestination, or could reflect cultural wisdom. Alchemy is equally absent from magic tales, and so is ritual magic. There is no Hermes Tresmegithus or Paracelsus to be found in these tales, for most magical procedures as described in handbooks of magic take more time and exactitude in ingredient preparation than is possible to recount in magic tales, which are by definition brief. Instead, such tales favor the instantaneous, such as sudden transformations, immediate travel across vast distances, and swiftly won victories. The prime counter examples for these observations are to be found in Medea’s utilization of occult knowledge in Chapter 2 and Straparola’s description of invoking a demon’s assistance in Chapter 7.

Popular magic practice is as absent as learned magic in these tales. Nowhere are the relics and blessed objects described by Richard Kieckhefer, the historian of medieval magic, to be found in magic tales or fairy tales (2000: 78). As for the Arabian Nights, their magic seems to have come latterly, for in the fifteenth-century Alf Layla wa-Layla there are neither magic lamps nor flying carpets. In fact, the great majority of the entries for “magic” in The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia (2004) pertain to stories that wouldn’t join the Nights canon until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In one exception to the general rule outlined above, an Egyptian gains magic powers by ingestion, when he soaks the pages of a magic book in beer and drinks the resulting brew (Chapter 2).

The tales discussed here were originally composed in languages other than English, and I have used English translations for their ancient hieroglyphic, Greek, Hebrew, or Arabic voicings. Because translations inevitably absorb something of the age in which they were translated, I have tried to get as close as I could to the sense of original wordings by referring to at least two different translations, whenever that was possible. Despite my best efforts, my own translations will necessarily bear the marks of the twenty-first century.

All of the tales discussed here offer perceived magic, in the particular sense of what the stories’ characters and sometimes the stories’ authors perceive to break natural law or to exist above natural law and therefore to belong to the realm of what they understand as supernatural. Similarly, magical agents who are perceived within the contexts of the tales themselves to be extraordinary (demons, fairies, sorcerers and sorceresses) are understood to produce magical results. Their supernatural identities are a kind of shorthand for the magic often absent from the page. Implicit in many Jewish, Christian and Muslim magic tales is an assumption that God is the supreme magic-producing agent. It was surprising to me to find that another class of events, those that are extranatural and improbable and that are perceived to be implausible, elicit the same kind of amazement from fictive characters and frametale listeners as does magic itself.

What we today call fairy tales were a new genre when they appeared in print in the early 1550s. Their fabricator, Giovan Francesco Straparola, often used existing motifs and characters to fashion tales in which magic brought about a happy ending, which in his tales consists of marriage to a royal personage, subsequent progeny, and a long and comfortable life. Among Straparola’s many magic tales, it is the happy ending that distinguishes his “fairy tales” from the magic tales in his collection, a subject discussed in Chapter 7.

Fairy tales are brief, structurally linear, stylistically and syntactically simple, or “compact,” to use Elizabeth Harries’ term (2001:16–18). Fairy tales differ in several ways from fairyland fictions (Bottigheimer, 2010: 462–3), which play no role in the following discussions. Fairyland fictions are generally “complex” (Harries, 2001:16–18), which means that they are structurally and syntactically complex, lengthy, and stylistically rich. Fairyland fictions are often existentially doubled, with a fairy world paralleling the human world, into and out of which both fairies and humans move. A literary continuation into the early modern world of the medieval matière de Bretagne,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Tales, Magic, and Fairy Tales
• 2 Egyptian, Greek, and Roman Magic Tales
• 3 Jewish Magic Tales
• 4 Magic Tales in Medieval Christian Europe
• 5 Magic Tales in the Muslim Middle Ages
• 6 Magic at Court and on the Piazza
• 7 The Problematics of Magic on the Threshold of Fairy Tale Magic: Straparola’s Early Modern Pleasant Nights
• 8 The Evolution of Fairy Tale Magic from Straparola to Basile and Perrault
• 9 Afterword
• Works Cited and Referenced
• Index