Medieval Magic Sample: Shout at the Devil

Earlier this week, Z and I sat down in the studio to discuss medieval magic, and specifically summoning.

And much to my surprise, it looks like a lot of the summoning involved summoning angels.

Here's a little sample: there's a basic understanding of angels that I think we this still kind of pretty much canon right now, like God's messengers, basically.

Yeah, it, but also, like sometimes seven faces and, you know, telling you to kill your kid and things like that.

Okay, if you go back to the Bible, the actual like official talking about the description of angels.

So there's this joke around biblically accurate angels and it's more about eyes and

feathers circling those eyes.

Genesis Evangelion stuff.

I will say there is almost no discussion of that kind of angel in medieval world.

Okay.

This is something that gets even now you reference it and no one wants to reference it because it's frankly it seems too weird for everybody.

No, we're talking about this reality of like middle beings.

So, Saint Augustine is probably the guy that gives sort of the definitive, most simple approach to these middle beings, that between human and God.

And he gives the sort of, there are unfallen angels and fallen angels.

Fallen angels are those who have turned their will away from God.

So they don't do the will of God.

They've decided he's not the boss of me, actually.

And they fall from heaven, fall from grace we go and join team Lightbringer.

Yeah, yeah, their head honcho is Satan Lucifer loads of lore on this guy might have heard of him the unfallen angels are those who

in this simple Saint Augustine story those who have not turned their will away from God.

They still work with God and in his estimation they stay actually very like physically close to God and

he sees them as being arranged in sort of a hierarchy of what he

called choirs of angels.

So there's a seraphim, the cherubim, and then like lesser angels, which are the ones that come down and act as messengers to humans.

Angel meaning messenger.

It's the original concept.

Where do the archangels fit into this?

Or are they part of this yet?

They're in there.

I believe they are the seraphim.

Okay.

But I'm mostly presenting St.

Augustine's little cosmology to say is this is one of many that actually exists during the medieval era.

Not everyone's approaching angels in that simplified way.

There's way more complex ways of conceiving angels.

And it's here where like angel magic comes in.

And angel magic was pretty big amongst magical circles and magical practitioners in the medieval era.

So this more complicated picture of angels suggests that there are angels of nature that are potentially even morally neutral moving about in the world who maybe aren't fallen angel demon types, but aren't necessarily doing the exact work of God when you see them or work with them.

So like Nicholas Cage type angels.

I guess.

Get hit by a bus, real bummer.

Fall in love.

Yeah.

I mean, honestly,

that's not a bad picture to bring in

because it is just sort of like, oh, there's this much more complicated picture.

God can't be on top of everybody all the time.

If you want to leave God out of this one, just work with an angel and we can move forward with our magic.

Right.

And so the sort of cosmology that is suggested here is that there's these angel beings, some kind of neutral elemental, tied more to nature, and they reside sort of in lower levels of the atmosphere, often is when they're described as where they're coming from.

So if you look up

there, there's angels, and you can maybe chat with one.

So, like, the stratosphere would have like your higher-ranked angels?

This is not that.

This is more like there's this concept of a royaling, much more

diverse caste of these middle beings.

All right.

Okay.

But there is sort of a general, there's often the way they're being spoken of has this sort of concept of them residing in the atmosphere above us physically, but not all the way up in heaven.

Again, it sort of really just illustrates this concept of a middle being.

The biggest ones seem to be this concept of

angels that are assigned to the planets.

And this all actually goes all the way back to Aristotle, weirdly.

So Aristotle and his writings saw the planets.

The planets for pre-modern astrology are these weird dots in the sky that looks pretty much like stars, but move completely differently from stars.

They move on from night to night, year to year, whereas the stars are always in relation to each other in exactly the same place.

This is assumed to be very important.

Aristotle suggested because they're moving up around there, there must be some sort of intelligence associated with them, some sort of of consciousness.

These are conscious stars, basically, or something, some conscious body up in the atmosphere.

This goes on to Muslim writers and Christian writers after they revive Aristotlean writing and start translating it.

And their assumption is, therefore, this must be angels.

And so it's a big concept at the time, the 12th century, that each of the planets are being moved around and guided over

by angels.

So there are planetary angels.

And so there are specific angels then associated with the seven planets that they could see.

And that includes the moon and the sun.

Okay, so what's the last one they could see then?

At this point?

Saturn.

This is the last visible planet.

Uranus is not discovered until the 1700s.

Yeah.

But it's these kind of angels that are at the center of angel magic.

And so one book from the 1400s is.

Do those planetary angels have specific names?

Sometimes, yes, it's different in a lot of books.

So names kind of change, and then they're often given characteristics.

A lot of times it feels very much like you would have the Greek gods.

Like

the angels of Venus have

a certain preponderance towards beauty.

And

there's kind of a movement from...

those old concepts that were like Greek pagan and they move forward into angels.

Right.

They're just adding it to the sausage.

Yeah.

Right.

Okay.

So there's a book of angel magic from the 1400s called The Book of Angels, Rings, Characters, and Images of the Planets that gives a good idea of what this kind of looks like.

And to call upon the angels of the seven planets, a magician makes rings.

either on the floor or on a piece of paper and inscribes the names and magical characters of the angels on the parchment.

Like in a circle around

the rings?

Rings, yeah.

Okay, so you've got the ring, but then around the ring, you've got in Latin, various names.

Okay.

And multiple rings sometimes.

Those rings can get kind of really intricate.

Intricacy in this type of magic seems to be kind of the point.

I mean, this sounds very much like classic D and D summoning or like full metal alchemy.

Both are actually referencing this.

So a lot of our concepts of magic, like old school magic, D and D was looking back to these very texts to recreate something that felt very old.

Cool.

But here's the thing.

So you got your rings and you got your names to summon angels.

And then you want to offer birds or other animals as sacrifices.

Oh, that's just proper old school magic.

Yeah.

And so once you've got your angel to come down, they can do things for you like get you a ride on a black horse,

create an illusion of soldiers or a castle.

So in case you don't want to go down to the dude ranch, you could just summon an angel?

Apparently.

I assume it's like,

I keep imagining it as like a getaway horse, right?

Which begs other questions.

You can also turn a drink into a poison.

Remember, this is explicitly angel magic.

You can make two people be enemies.

You can obtain the love of a woman.

Or you can destroy anything.

I mean, obviously, I know which one I want to do.

Make two people enemies?

You're such a...

Destroy anything?

I've got some student loans.

But,

okay.

Even with the scary version of angels in the Bible, these do not feel like particularly angelic things.

Are the angels, you bring them down, you make the sacrifice, and then the angel has to do it?

Is that the way that goes?

It's unclear in the way they're writing.

Because that sounds like binding to me.

Right.

Let's go back to who's doing this and how we're getting this information real quick.

Now, this discussion goes on for about an hour and a half.

In total, I think we have around two and a half hours of medieval magic discussions thus far.

I don't know if you're going to be able to actually summon a black horse at the end of this, but you will definitely learn a few things.

So, if you'd like to listen to the rest of this episode and all the other members' episodes, you can sign up for membership at thebritishhistorypodcast.com.

Thanks for listening.