Medieval Magic Sample: We Read the Latin

Hey everyone, so over on the members feed, we've been covering a lot of cultural matters and right now, Z and I have been talking a lot about magic.

And I thought you'd like to hear a little bit of it.

So here's a 10-minute clip of our most recent over an hour long episode on the subject of magic.

There is probably some direct superstition involved, but there's also, I think probably a lot of it is like the Marioloid in Wales or the hobby horse in Cornwall, where you have these practices that happen every year.

They're very pagan looking.

They're very sort of magical looking.

They're associated with things like luck for the next year.

But they're not necessarily attached to any broader cosmology.

There's no story about, well, the...

the Marieloid is the horse of God or the horse that, the donkey that brought Jesus to the manger or something.

No, it's a blinged out skull.

When it comes in, you cheers it and drink.

Yeah, or bad luck.

And there's like, no one asks questions, but you do it very diligently every year.

And one, obviously, because it's fun and awesome looking.

And why would you leave it?

But there's a, you could really see that as kind of a magical practice.

But again, it's, it's not attached to anything.

I think that's where a lot of sort of the remnant magic, the weirder like recipes that we have in some documents sit is they're diligently doing them.

They very much believe in the power of these rituals and recipes, but you don't necessarily then take the next next leap to say, oh, they're still secretly worshiping pagan gods behind it.

There's not really a lot of evidence for that.

They're just continuing on very old traditions or things that look very much like old traditions and ways of understanding the worlds that were probably formerly pagan, but those are so far back at this point, no one's bothering or remembers how to reattach to that.

Right.

Okay, so like we talk about the eulologue during Christmas and no one's thinking about Odin when that gets mentioned.

Exactly right.

Yeah.

So it sits like that.

One of the better documents for this, for how a lot of the sort of day-to-day magic is happening, is, again, it's an older document.

It's from the 1400s, and it's from Germany.

So again, the specifics, you can't just say, oh, they were doing exactly these same like recipes or whatever in Britain.

But the sort of vibe you get from it is probably about right for day-to-day living.

And it's called the Wolfstern Handbook.

It's kind of cool.

It's actually a manual for managing the Wolfstern castle.

So this was like something that was getting passed down year to year.

And there was a main author originally, someone who was just the man, I don't know, the steward or whatever, who was in charge of the day-to-day running this castle, not the Lord, like the person who made stuff happen, was writing down everything, like how to peel potatoes, how to get rats from the cellar, how to make soap and ink.

This is my kind of guy.

It's an awesome, yeah,

awesome document for a lot of that kind of thing.

But also within it, magic is just shot all the way through.

There's all sorts of magical recipes.

And so there are magical medical prescriptions for humans and animals because you would have had livestock and

dogs and cats and you'd want to heal them if they're sick.

And a lot of these were clearly magical.

There's also wards against evil

like coming into your crops, that sort of thing.

Okay, so that one makes more sense.

But for the healing, we've already gotten burned by this before, where we talked about medicine and

made fun of horse dung, and then it turned turned out there was a kind of fungus that grows on horse dung that actually is antibiotic.

Absolutely.

Let me give you the recipe, and you can see for yourself why this trends into magic.

And it seems to be both.

So written down in this thing for a fever of all sorts, you're supposed to take the leaves of a particular plant, write certain Latin words on those leaves to invoke the Holy Trinity, and then recite the Lord's Prayer over the leaves before sunrise on three consecutive mornings.

Do you do anything with those leaves?

Well,

then you give them as medicine.

Okay.

What are the leaves?

I don't actually know.

It was like, because this is a translation from German, the translator I was working with did not bother to give me the leaves.

So I was like, well, cheers.

Yeah.

Okay.

And it might be because it's like a defunct plant.

I don't know.

That's where I think it would probably cross over to like the leech book, where it's like, it's probably

you've added a bunch of stuff on top of it, but those leaves are actually anti-inflammatory.

So it will help with your fever.

Yeah, I'm not, the idea that magic here is therefore like a non-serious practice is not something we're proposing.

It's that clearly reciting the Lord's Prayer over three consecutive mornings is a magical practice that's happening.

And it's all over that manuscript.

And so there's this belief

of these additional hidden properties, spiritual properties, that help you get things done, even in the most day-to-day mundane sense.

And the Lord's Prayer part is interesting because this is where we are, where a lot of Christian ideas, names, things are getting incorporated into probably older practices like three consecutive mornings.

There's nothing in Christianity that says do things three times and in the morning.

That's all about the Trinity, I guarantee.

Probably, but also

there's an agency magic to it that's probably also older.

And we see a lot of other things like the seven is also very important or 12 in a lot of these recipes.

Again, it's sort of a Christianized Christian magic, but there's a sense that there's probably some old remnants to it.

But in day-to-day magic, this is what we're looking at.

Would the 12 be related to the disciples, you know, not including Judas, because, you know, no one wanted to include Judas.

Very possibly.

Unfortunately, because a lot of these things are written like in the margins of books and stuff, this magical practice was a little...

If you go back to the early days of Christianity when Christianity was in a very direct ideological battle with pagan religions, the idea was that magic was separate from what Christians did.

So magic has kind of this negative connotation.

You're not supposed to have that much agency in a Christian understanding of the world.

And in particular, there's this belief that not that magic didn't work, magic worked in this idea.

It's just that the power you were tapping into was the power of demons.

Okay, so it's Jedi versus Seth stuff.

Kind of, yeah.

And the idea, a lot of the conversion arguments were about, well, Odin absolutely exists.

He's a powerful being, but he's not a god, he is a demon.

And so, all of these magics that you have around you that totally work, we totally believe they work, but it's demonic magic.

So, by the time we're getting to the 12th century, later medieval ages, there's still a sort of like very

weird approach to what magic is and whether magic is good or not.

And there's a lot of people in the clergy arguing against anything that looks like this.

Um, like that, what's in that Wolf Stern handbook.

But the people practicing practicing it didn't actually think it was, didn't seem to think that it was anti-Christian.

They're appealing to the God, the holy God, His Saints, that sort of thing.

It's clear that there's some belief that things like this didn't work at all, not just that they're accidentally conjuring demons, and that even in the margins of the manuscript, because this thing had clearly several users and owners, there's things like written in the margin, which is stuff like, this would be great if it actually worked.

And

so, when I say this magic again, this is not like, this is not a consistent belief across everybody.

There are some people who very much use magic on a day-to-day level.

It's probably a more magical society than ours is right now, but there's also people clearly arguing against it.

I just love the semantics of the whole thing where it's like, oh, yeah, I was totally doing magic.

We all know magic exists.

It super works.

But don't worry, I wasn't talking to Beelzebub.

I was talking to St.

Bridget.

It's fine.

Well, and this is why magic, I think, is a really interesting thing to

study, is because it gives us insight into how cultures see themselves and how humans see themselves in relation to that broader culture and to this like spiritual cosmological system that they're living in, just as much as the rise of neo-paganism and New Age philosophies in our age tell us a lot about ours.

But on the topic of the church and magic, again, it's a fraught relationship, but at the same time,

Men of the cloth were absolutely practicing magic.

And part of the reason why we have as many magical recipes and records as we do is because we're finding them in monasteries.

Very lovingly preserved.

The library of the monastery of St.

Augustine in Canterbury in particular has an absolute trove of medieval books on magic.

And historian Sophie Page really went into this and she thinks that in particular this huge collection was brought in particularly by three monks who were interested in this topic before they got in and then continued to develop it afterwards.

And not all of it is particularly holy.

A lot of it has to do with things that we'll get on to later, like the conjuring of maybe

not so holy creatures to do your bidding.

So St.

Augustine's is like heart-time hogwarts where they also have like the death curse in the back.

Kind of, yeah, there's not supposed to look at it.

There's some of this like forbidden knowledge type thing.

And there's definitely monks in there at the height of this.

Being like, avada gadabra.

Essentially.

Not that, but they're fascinated with magic.

They're working with magic.

They're finding books and recording them of magic to try to become more magical.

And this is not a rare case.

We're finding this in many monasteries.

These are why we have the records that we do, because the folk practitioners were writing things down much less frequently.

So again, one of the...

most frequent sort of everyday practitioners of magic would have been healers and barber surgeons later on.

Barber surgeons were the type that were these very hands-on medical practitioners.

I didn't talk about them a lot in the medical series because we're not there yet.

They're not that common in the 12th century.

But later, you have, if you need to get bled, you go to your barber and they will bleed you.

But they also had some magical recipes associated with their workings.

Included in a lot of medical works that we find are things like magical cures that are clearly magical, like charms that drive away the elves, which are causing magic, and elf shot.

it's like a i'm guessing it's going to involve cold iron they they're very like involved charms in some cases they they're like rosemary turn three times bury it for three because it's like those kind of like i didn't want to go i the recipes can get so long and involved okay i don't want to just read them over and over again but there's many many charms but the the point is that they are against elves that are causing the illness.

So it's not any sort of direct application to the wound or sickness or whatever.

It's you are being attacked by an elf.

Here is the ward against the elf.

Now it will treat the rest of the illness.

Awesome.

One of my favorite ones that I found is that smearing leek juice on your penis will keep your wife from cheating.

I'm assuming this one's Welsh.

I'm not sure.

Are people just really into leeks?

And there's like, no, you just can't

turn down the smell of leeks.

This is what I'm saying.

This is a magical logic.

There is some probably

sympathetic magic is the idea, is a magic understanding that you take the properties of one things and somehow transmute them to another object or to yourself.

And so there's some sort of property assumed in leeks that when directly applied to the penis, keep that, I don't know what it was.

We just have the recipe, unfortunately.

This is what makes it hard is that if there is a broader

cosmology, it is so

shared in the region where this was written down that they don't bother to explain it, or it's one of these things where they're just doing it and I've always done it, and they don't remember why.

Okay, as I said before, this episode goes on for more than an hour, and we've actually got another one coming very soon.

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.

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