In history or magic, seeing is believing

The Addison Independent
June 23, 2011

I believe in magic.  Do you?

I have recently returned from a weekend in Kalamazoo, MI, a town of 75,000 that sees its population augmented by 3,000 people on the second weekend of May every year.  People?  Well... medievalists, my tribe: other folks who think Peter Abelard was dreamy, Pope Boniface VIII was a villain, and jokes in Latin are funny. Every year we gather to listen to each other give papers, snatch up bargains at academic presses, sip dreadful wine while schmoozing and making friends, and dance. Yes -- dance.  The Saturday night dance is legendary. Haven’t you ever yearned to see a senior Ivy League professor rock out?

This year, I found myself frequenting a different crowd. I'm working on a man from southern France who was burned at the stake in 1329 as a heretic, but I happen to know he was practicing alchemy. So the Societas Magica was my new haunt, a group of scholars who do not cast spells themselves, but study the magicians who did.  They take the rituals and the incantations and the people who wrote and practiced them seriously.  They believe them.

Certainly, there were charlatans in the Middle Ages, just as there are charlatans now. When some people conducted rituals designed to conjure up demons or angels to help their clients with lost items or an unhappy love affair, they were just trying to make a quick buck.  And suckers have been being born every minute since well before P. T. Barnum, so there were many who were effectively deceived.  One of my students analyzed a learned manual of necromancy from the fifteenth century this spring and determined that the three most popular spells were for knowledge of the liberal arts, for procuring a horse or other means of transport, and for the love of a desired woman.  The desires of university students have changed very little since the Middle Ages:  good grades, a car, and a girlfriend.

Our modern scientific perspective insists that we see these people all as either “marks” or charlatans – but I cannot agree. Some were passionate believers, and moreover, they achieved what they were looking for! Let's take the case of an elaborate ritual found in a magical manuscript known as the Sworn Book of Honorius of Thebes that probably dates from the beginning of the thirteenth century. Its goal?  Achieving the Beatific Vision: seeing God face to face in Heaven.

The ritual is intense.  It takes 28 days of nearly full-time prayer and fasting:  reciting prayers, psalms, litanies, and the Names of God in languages ranging from Latin to Hebrew to Aramaic to gobbledygook.  Finally, on the last day, the magician must bathe, wear special clothes (including a hair shirt) and pray and sleep on a mattress of hay, with the 100 Names of God written in ashes all around.  Finally: “Then sleep and say no more, and you shall see the Celestial Palace and the Majesty of God in all his Glory.”

First question: is this magic or religion?  It bears too many resemblances to other magical rituals to be truly religious, but its goal is so religious that we can hardly call it “mere” magic.  The Church explicitly banned this ritual several times, but it circulated in samizdat for centuries and pops up in the writings of figures from the 14th-century poet John Gower to philosopher Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake in 1600.

Second question:  did it work?  Scholar Robert Mathiesen has observed that such a constant, extended period of ritual repetition on short commons could easily have neurobiological consequences, resulting in what he calls “extraordinary experiences.”  These experiences can mark the practitioner so firmly that life is never the same again. Any successful practitioner could rightfully believe that his ritual actions had brought him to the Face of God before his time. If that isn’t magic, then I don’t know what is.

Seeing is believing. For the historian, that may require a conscious leap of faith, where we take on the experience of another and see the world through another’s eyes. Nor can we stop at magic: belief systems not our own – whether from times past, or places far away, or right next door – ask us to do the very same.

Louisa A. Burnham is Associate Professor of History at Middlebury College, and author of So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke:  The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc (2008).