Magic

A Beginner's Guide

Robert Ralley

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781780741666
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología cultural y social

The mysterious art of magic has been a source of wonderment since before the time of Christ. Shape shifting between the supernatural practices of 'real' magic and demonstrations of dazzling illusion, magic has been used to conjure the evil eye, burn villages to the ground, slice women in half, and save men from being crushed to death by five tonnes of cement. Robert Ralley's history takes us deep into this magical underworld to reveal the astounding stories of some of the world's greatest magicians. From the astrology of the three wise men to Harry Houdini's escapology, and David Blain's endurance tests, Ralley illustrates the changing perceptions of magic and the dangerous balance between illusion, fraud, and devilry that still exists today.

1

A pact with Hell

For Christians, magic has always involved the devil. Early Christians feared the same bundle of assorted myths and beliefs as classical writers, but what linked them now was not magi but demons. Magic still involved binding people’s wills, cursing them, calling on spirits, raising storms; damaging and harming. The crucial difference was the belief that these things could only be done with the help of the devil and his servants. Those who successfully cursed others (for instance) must have demons working for them. Anyone who worshipped a non-Christian god was practising magic. Most worryingly, it was entirely possible to be relying on demonic aid and not realize it. Sometimes magic was the action of Satan’s representatives on earth; sometimes it was a way of trapping the unwary, curious or greedy. Either way it was devilish. However old the word ‘magic’ might be, and whatever classical precedents there were, it was specifically this formulation that has shaped attitudes ever since. This chapter looks at how classical views of magic were turned into this Christian doctrine. It shows how missionaries reinvented pagan charms and amulets for the Christian world, and how divination became demonic. Ancient necromancers had consulted the dead; their medieval successors consorted with devils. Meanwhile theologians debated what demons could do, and what counted as magic. Witches had once been seen as simply malicious – by the end of the Middle Ages they were Satanic. The chapter ends with the Reformation debates in which Catholics and Protestants accused one another of magic and devil-worship.

Early Christianity: inherited and new views of magic

Christian authorities, taking over the remnants of the Roman Empire from the fourth century AD onwards, inherited the classical notion of magic: a jumble of harmful and unpleasant practices supposedly linked to the Persian magi. They saw these men as outsiders, subversives, perhaps charlatans. It was easy to find examples in the Bible; early Christian writers had these caricatures in mind when they wrote of the magi who had visited the nativity, or Simon Magus and Elymas, who are described in the Acts of the Apostles as using magic to turn people against the faith (both are called ‘magoi’). They read the Old Testament account of Pharaoh’s servants using incantations to match the miracles performed by Moses. Here again, magic was an evil imitation of divine miracle.

TWO ANCIENT LATIN CURSES

Archaeologists have discovered a large number of lead tablets bearing inscribed curses that were buried – or rather, sunk, as they tend to be found in watery sites such as wells and springs – in antiquity. They are often folded or rolled up and sometimes transfixed with nails; the texts use the Latin word defigo, ‘I fix’ or ‘fasten down’, to describe what is to be done to the victim, and as a result the word came to mean ‘bewitch’ or ‘curse’. One example from the ancient city of Nomentum, near Rome, contains two curses – one on each side. The first reads: ‘Malchio son of Nico: eyes, hands, fingers, arms, nails, hair, head, feet, thigh, stomach, buttocks, navel, chest, breasts, neck, mouth, cheeks, teeth, lips, chin, eyes, forehead, eyebrows, shoulders, upper arm, sinews, bones, marrow, stomach, cock, leg, business, money, health, I curse in this document.’ On the reverse side it says: ‘Rufa the public slave: hands, teeth, eyes, arms, stomach, breasts, chest, bones, marrow, stomach … [words missing] … legs, mouth, feet, forehead, nails, fingers, stomach, navel, c––t, womb of this Rufa Publica I curse in this document.’ Such fierce imprecations have been unearthed across the Roman Empire.

In Christian doctrine, magic could only be effective if it involved demons. ‘Demons’ (Greek: daimones; Latin: daemones) already had a long history in various forms: to Romans and Greeks they were neutral spirits, lower than the gods but higher than humans and free to do good or ill. In ancient Greece they might be lesser gods or ghosts of the dead. Centuries ago, Hesiod had written that the men of the world’s Golden Age had been changed into daimones by Zeus to act as guardians to mortals. People secured the help and protection of a daimon by paying respects at its shrine. According to Plato, Socrates had claimed to be aided by a small daimon that warned him of mistakes, and the later Greek rulers (from Alexander the Great on) were believed to have guiding daimones. By late antiquity, Greek and Roman gods were increasingly seen as distant from the affairs of the world, impassive and motionless; daimones remained on earth, subject to the same physical and spiritual forces as people. There were good eudaimones who watched over people, and evil kakodaimones who deceived and caused harm.

Christian writers, in contrast, made all demons evil. They were fallen angels. One third-century treatise explained that they were ‘impure and wandering spirits’ that sought people’s ruin. They hid in statues and supposedly sacred images; they interfered with the motion of birds, fire, spilled entrails – anything used by seers to predict the future; they deceived people by mixing truth and falsehoods, and caused diseases which they could then appear to cure. One of the early Church’s most influential authors, St Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430), wrote that demons had invented magic and taught it to people, and that it was those same demons that actually carried out what practitioners wanted. Even in the cases of apparently innocent natural phenomena, such as the ability of certain rocks to attract iron, demons might be involved: if spirits were not directly participating, they might still have provided guidance and instruction. In one way or another, magic implied demons. When the archbishop and encyclopaedist Isidore of Seville (c.AD 560–636) rehearsed the familiar list of arts that constituted magic, he included many forms of divination, plus enchantment (the magical use of words) and ligatures (binding magical items to someone to cure an illness). ‘All such things involve the art of demons’, he claimed. Magic was demonic, and consulting demons was magic.

Non-Christian religions were also magical, as their false gods must be demons. This attitude was a classical survival: in the ancient world, the term mageia had often been used as a convenient way of abusing others’ religious practices. Ancient Greece’s civic elites had called the religion of rural outsiders ‘magic’, though they were no less likely to lay curses on people (an activity that contemporaries clearly defined as magic). The distinction between religious activity and ‘magic’ had never been totally clear: magical practices sometimes involved appealing for divine aid. The magical papyri of Roman Egypt invoked higher gods such as Helios, to gain power over the daemones whose help was needed. Further north, Germanic mythology associated the god Woden (Odin) with the runic alphabet and held that he could use its magical powers to accomplish wonderful things; his aid is often requested in charms that have survived.

Many classical writers had reckoned that religion became magic when it was carried out in secret, for evil ends. (Some modern anthropologists have agreed: see chapter 5 on this.) Christians painted the issue with broader strokes. Christianity was religion, anything else was magic. A verbal formula seeking the aid of the Christian deity was probably a prayer; if it mentioned some other divinity then it was a spell, addressed to a demon. As with Moses and the Pharaoh, any wondrous deed performed by a Christian in God’s name was a miracle, but any performed in the name of some other religion was magic. Again, Simon Magus was a key example: the Acts of the Apostles depicted him fooling the inhabitants of Samaria into believing that his magical powers were actually divine. These men were dangerous imposters, conspiring with demons; they were to be rooted out.

As magic’s definition shifted from secret, maleficent religion to non-Christian ritual (and to consorting with demons), so the legal strictures surrounding it changed. Roman laws had prosecuted people who harmed others; who stole crops, raised storms, called up the dead. How they did any of these things was a secondary issue. Later amendments forbidding love magic, divination, and healing magic received little attention. After the emperors’ conversion to Christianity, magic itself was made an offence – regardless of intent or effect. From AD 357, those in the empire caught engaging in magic or divination were to be beheaded. Ammianus Marcellinus (c.AD 330–398), a pagan writer, complained of the fierceness of the new laws, pointing out that anyone who sought help from a soothsayer, or used ‘some old wife’s charm’ to ease an ache, could legally be executed. Magic involved demons, was reprehensible, and was now explicitly banned.

Nevertheless, pagan attitudes persisted; of particular importance to the later history of magic was a school of philosophers in late antiquity who followed Plato’s teachings – later called the ‘Neoplatonists’. These men developed a philosophical religion which centred on practices they considered magical. The first of the Neoplatonists was Plotinus (c.AD 205–70), who wrote that magic and prayer both worked by harnessing the cosmos’s natural links and hidden sympathies: in fact, he claimed, ‘every action has magic as its source’. In other words, the way in which spells and prayers worked was natural – but obscure. Prayer to gods or to heavenly bodies had an automatic effect, just as plucking one end of a string on a musical instrument would make the other end move too. Magic could be used to attack people, but it could also be used to defend: by developing the mind’s higher powers of contemplation, Plotinus claimed, it was possible to guard against magical offensives. They might still cause disease or suffering, but the victim’s true self would be unscathed. Plotinus’ student and biographer Porphyry (c.AD 233–304) reported that Plotinus had indeed rebounded one spell back onto its originator.

Porphyry’s student Iamblichus (d. c.AD 330) focused on ‘theurgy’, which involved rites for men to commune with gods. Porphyry and successive other critics rejected these rituals as coercive and therefore magical rather than properly religious: one should not presume to order the gods around. Iamblichus disagreed: a theurgic invocation, he wrote, ‘makes the intelligence of men fit to participate in the gods, elevates it to the gods, and harmonizes it with them’. Theurgy brought men to the level of gods. Its exponents saw themselves as being in harmony with the gods and with cosmic sympathies; they contrasted theurgy with sorcery (goeteia), whose practitioners drew on those same natural sympathies to more nefarious ends. As distant as all of this was from orthodox Christianity, the positioning of magic was exactly parallel: Neoplatonists distinguished between (good) religious practice and (evil) sorcery. Few in ancient and medieval Europe believed that magic was a positive activity, few saw themselves as practising it. For the most part magic remained a slur rather than a practice.

Charms, amulets, and talismans

Many of the activities that ancient writers considered magical involved using magical objects, writings, and charms. They believed that certain items had powers that might protect, heal, or harm. There is little consistency in the terminology used, but we can loosely characterize three groups: amulets (whose power derived from their substance), charms (which involved magic words, as invocations or inscriptions), and talismans (where characters and figures were inscribed on objects, such as rings or stones). Amulets were made from stones, plants, or animal parts, materials often explicitly linked to magic – by critics if not by exponents. In a few lines on gems in Pliny’s Natural History, for instance, we find a claim attributed to Zoroaster that a precious stone called ‘astriotes’ was useful for the ‘magical arts’, alongside Pliny’s own note that a particular form of another stone, a variety of ‘ceraunia’ only found on the site of lightning strikes, was ‘sought after for the studies of the magoi’.

Charms, in contrast, were often simply written down. ‘Ananizapta’ was one example, deployed in charms against various medical complaints and problems. A protective charm recorded by Reginald Scot in the sixteenth century went (in the English translation he provided):

Ananizapta smiteth death,

whiles harme intendeth he,

This word Ananizapta say,

and death shall captiue be,

Ananizapta ô of God,

haue mercie now on me.

Where writing or symbols were engraved onto an object, the result was a talisman. One perhaps surprising example of this type was the coin: made from metal and bearing the ruler’s image, coins were considered powerful items and were often used as amulets. John Chrysostom, the Archbishop of Constantinople, complained in the fourth century AD about people ‘who bind bronze coins of Alexander of Macedon around their heads and feet’, and considerable archaeological evidence attests to the wearing of coins throughout late antiquity. Christians regarded these practices with considerable suspicion. Verbal formulas that appealed to pagan gods were clearly in veneration of demons, as were the observances and rites demanded when preparing certain charms, while the makers of naturally effective amulets might have begun under demonic instruction. In the eyes of the early Christians, all of this was certainly superstitious (involved a misuse or abuse of religion) and was probably magical.

In response, Christian missionaries (often monks) produced Christian versions of pagan charms, replacing the names of pagan gods with those of Christ and the saints. To guarantee effectiveness, the user would accompany these either with rituals and observances (such as fasting) or with peculiarly Christian symbols, such as the cross or (for instance) images of the nails from Christ’s crucifixion. The resulting charms resembled prayers, blessings, or exorcisms and, whatever the theological niceties of using them to heal or protect, they were more recognizably Christian than their predecessors. This solution did not satisfy everyone; St Augustine warned that those ‘who seduce through amulets, through spells, and through the machinations of the enemy, may mingle the name of Christ in their spells’. According to this hard-line view, the simple Christianization of charms was not enough to make them acceptable; that said, nor was Augustine’s opposition sufficient to curtail their use. In the surviving books that list charms, the word ‘magic’ is seldom used.

ABRACADABRA

One magic word in particular has become famous since its use in charms: ‘abracadabra’. It was employed in the Mediterranean region from ancient times, and is mentioned as late as 1722 by Daniel Defoe in A Journal of the Plague Year. The word was written out repeatedly, each time removing a letter, to form an inverted pyramid:

A B R A C A D A B R A

A B R A C A D A B R

A B R A C A D A B

A B R A C A D A

A B R A C A D

A B R A C A

A B R A C

A B R A

A B R

A B

A

The paper on which it was written would be rolled up and worn round the neck. Other magical words, some much longer, were used in the same way.

By the later Middle Ages, charms routinely referred to Christ, saints, relics, and the other paraphernalia of Christian devotion. One common example found across Europe claimed that it was possible to avoid sudden death, illness, or tribulation by evil spirits (among other unpleasant experiences) by looking at or carrying a one-fifteenth scale illustration of Christ’s body. Another made similar claims for someone who bore a measure of the length of the nails used on the cross: Pope Innocent VIII, one Middle English version implausibly claimed, had granted gifts such as invulnerability to poison or sword and the certainty of an honest living to whoever carried this and ‘worshipith devoutly the iij naylis’ by saying daily the Lord’s Prayer five times, five Hail Marys, and the Creed. Some charms employed Christian names and terms within unfamiliar formulas. The Dominican John Bromyard (d. c.1352) criticized one that went: ‘Holy Mary enchanted her Son from the bite of elves and the bite of men, and joined mouth to mouth, blood to blood and joint to joint, and so the child recovered.’ If historians sometimes think they detect in such formulations the remnants of pagan practices, there were some surprisingly physical survivals from pre-Christian times. One charm, bestowed as a gift by Charles V in the mid-fourteenth century, was originally Roman and dated back to the first century AD. A cameo made from agate, this had Jupiter, crowned with laurel, holding a thunderbolt and leaning on a lance with an eagle at his feet. By 1367, when Charles gave it to Chartres Cathedral, the figure was taken to be St John the Evangelist, and around that time two inscriptions were added, reading (in Latin): ‘But Jesus passing through the midst of them’ (a reference to Luke 4:30), and the opening of John’s Gospel, ‘In the beginning was the word’. The first of these was believed to guard against dangers during travel, the second to ward off demons and protect against lightning.

During this period, works composed in or translated into Latin confronted the issue of astrological talismans, items believed to attract astral influences. In one sense, using these was simply the other side of astrology: those people who understood what effects the heavens had on earth could use those effects to their own purposes. The celestial bodies (especially the planets) ruled over particular substances and images, and by manipulating the substances and images those bodies’ powers could be harnessed.

One of the most notorious of the magical works circulating in late medieval Europe was an Arabic manual of astral magic known to the West as Picatrix, translated from Arabic to Spanish in the thirteenth century and subsequently reproduced in Latin. It provided a manual of magical techniques, a catalogue of examples by which assorted ends could be achieved, from creating love between enemies or enmity between friends, to razing ci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Illustrations
• Introduction: Magic and the magi
• 1 A pact with Hell
• 2 Harnessing nature’s hidden powers
• 3 Tricks and illusions
• 4 The occult
• 5 Analysing magic
• Epilogue: Magic today
• Further reading
• Index