The rise of magic in early medieval Europe

The rise of magic in early medieval Europe

Pergamon History ofEuropean Ideas, Copyright Vol. 18, 0 No. 1994 2,Elscvier pp. 215-281, science1994 Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserv...

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Pergamon

History ofEuropean Ideas, Copyright Vol. 18, 0 No. 1994 2,Elscvier pp. 215-281, science1994 Ltd

Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0191-6989194 $6.00+0.00

ON THE RISE OF MAGIC IN EARLY MEDIAEVAL EUROPE The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe, Valerie I.J. Flint (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), xiii+452 pp., $35.00 cloth. BRIAN VICKERS*

In this bulky work Valerie Flint (Professor of History at the University of Auckland) surveys the fortunes of magic in the period from 500 to 1100 A.D. Her thesis, simply put, is that while magic had been vigorously condemned in the Roman Empire, and was condemned in even more explicit terms by early Christian writers, the Church gradually softened its attitude and came to see magic as a valuable force. Having first opposed it, then matched Christianity as a superior power against magic, the Church finally compromised, absorbing, encouraging, and even cherishing magic. The early medieval period can thus be seen as benign, tolerant, sensitive towards the occult arts, before the Reformation unleashed its destructive fury. That magic survived throughout the Middle Ages is, of course, not under dispute. No condemnation, however great the penalties attached, has ever managed to kill off the occult arts, which increasingly flourish in our time, and seem unlikely ever to die out. Nor does anyone dispute that many ecclesiastical beliefs and practices share assumptions and methods with the occult: holy water, saints’ relics, exorcism rituals, and much else to this day, especially in Catholicism, testify to a similarity between religious and occult attitudes. The crucial question remains, how to explain this apparent appropriation of magic? Although Flint’s book is based on wide reading of primary and secondary sources in several languages, and documents the main historical issue in unquestionable detail, it seems to me a very mixed achievement, in many respects unsatisfactory. To begin with, her view of magic expresses an enthusiastic endorsement from the standpoint of the late twentieth century, in all its anachronism. The term ‘magic’ today, she declares, is used not only abusively but also to connote ‘excitement, or wonder, or sudden delight’, without which feelings ‘life might be seriously the poorer. As such it can become a term of high praise, and one that might denote a certain spiritual elevation’, leading to ‘the enrichment of life’ (p. 3). Her accounts of magic make it seem not only innocuous but wholly positive, in a curious mixture of psychology, religion and sentiment. She attributes early mediaeval Church some sort of collective agreement about the need for ‘the furtherance of a relationship between people and the supernatural that, it was *Centre for Renaissance Switzerland.

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fervently believed, would improve human life’ (p. 4). Indeed, she believes that these mediaeval churchmen displayed ‘a good deal more enlightenment about the emotional need for that magic which sustains devotion and delight’ than their Reformation successors did. She is convinced ‘that some, at least, of the wiser spirits’-of course, not the fools- ‘within the early medieval Christian Church were alerted to the benefits of the emotional charge certain sorts of magic offered and tried hard to nourish and encourage this form of energy.. .’ (ibid.). Her book, then, is about ‘religious emotion’, it is an ‘emotional history’, studying what she describes as ‘a symbiotic [process] involving much mutual enlargement of of soul.. . on both sides of the cultural barrier set up by the condemnation magic’ (p. 4). The reader who dutifully works through the 400 pages that follow will, however, not find mediaeval churchmen describing magic in these terms. We may well wonder, indeed, whether they could even have thought about it in such concepts as ‘excitement, wonder, sudden delight, spiritual elevation, the supernatural, emotional need, devotion and delight, energy, soul’, an overwhelming collocation of modern plus-words, suggestive of New Age attitudes. The conceptual world that Flint projects backwards on to this topic sets it in a glowing light, cosmetically enhancing, that prevents us from seeing the phenomenon described with the clarity needed to form a coherent impression of it. I am not proposing any nai’ve belief in pure facts, devoid of interpretation, merely objecting that the interpretations advanced here are permeated with a warmth and indulgence towards anything defined as magical which imposes in advance a heavy evaluative load upon them. Introducing a passage from Pliny’s account of the medicinal cures attributed to the Magi (NaturalHistory, 30.18), she writes that in his work ‘all the panoply of Shakespearean enchantment is spread out for our delight’, a rather exorbitant claim. (Her style suffers from too much overkill, which soon tires.) But, having quoted the passage from Pliny, she does not find it ‘encouraging’, since the ingredients used are ‘sometimes very repellent’, such as ‘parts of animals’, chosen for ‘the supposedly sympathetic resemblance’ between the object and the cure (p. 14). There the effusive praise of magic collides with the reality of the text cited, to discordant effect. Flint often tends not to comment in detail on the passages she quotes, or to pick out only one point from many, but already here one of the weaknesses of her book is apparent, that despite its bulk and wide range over mediaeval texts, she has not attempted to understand the rationale of magic practices, and has failed to use the detailed texts and commentaries on magic in classical antiquity, from which the Western European tradition has largely descended.’ The gap between her description of Pliny in advance and the text as read is one that recurs throughout her book. She attributes remarkable virtues to all those who write favourably about magic or miracles. The wise men, magicians, or in mediaeval village communities, she ‘manipulators of the supernatural’ declares, ‘were enthusiastic, vigorous, and competitive’, proving how powerful are ‘rooted and vigorously alive custom and habit’, quite different from ‘pagan survivals’ as usually defined (p. 69). ‘They had skills that were evidently valued,. . . both recondite and impressive’ (p. 79). The ‘so-called superstitions’ of the early Middle Ages were ‘formulated with discipline, skill, and great religious and social sensibility’, being used ‘for the protection and even enhancement of

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this life’, and for truly ‘humane’ purposes (p. 84). ‘Non-Christian magic contained commodities both delicate and deeply valuable’, which some churchmen naturally wanted to appropriate (p. 116). The ‘belief in, and fear of demons’, for instance, could be ‘profitably, even joyously. . . manipulated. . .’ (p. 157). The recurring words used to describe magicians and the churchmen who supposedly encourage them include ‘adroitness’, ‘exceptionally skillful’, ‘sensitivities’ (p. 242), ‘delicate social sensitivity’ (p. 395), ‘liveliness and energy’ (p. 397), ‘remarkably aware compilers.. . of magico-medical remedies’, ‘skilled hagiographers’, with an ‘artistry. . . of a very high order indeed’ (p. 398). Hagiography as a whole genre displays ‘social sensitivity at its most refined, and one which manifests artistic dexterity of a remarkable kind’ (pp. 398-399). The whole conclusion is pitched at such a high level of celebrating lifeenhancing, richly-repaying spiritual activities that it comes as a shock, four pages from the end, to read that ‘In the last event, it has to be said that the hypotheses I have here advanced cannot be conclusively proved’ (p. 404). I admire Flint’s candour, but still feel that this final, modest and conciliatory description of her ‘evidence’ as ‘primarily analogous, cumulative, and suggestive-not definitive’ (ibid.), actually runs counter to the effusive, indeed exorbitant value-enhancing terms in which it has been presented. Having read the Christian hagiographers whom she quotes, I can only say that her evaluation of them seems unjustifiably high. As for those writers who explicitly attack the magical tradition that she rates so highly, her account of them, by contrast, seems to be slanted in the opposite direction, explaining their criticism as the result of personal animus, or as expressing fear or anxiety, rather than having any seriously defendable rational case. The thirteenth-century saga writers ‘had as their object the discrediting of earlier ways with the supernatural, and, in the service of this discredit, perhaps the exaggeration of some of these ways’ (p. 48). The Christian opponents of magic, such as Augustine or Isidore, display ‘fierceness’ or ‘ferocity’ towards their subject, are ‘hostile’ towards it-as if that somehow lessened their criticisms (pp. 9,11,13,31-32,54,244, etc.); Rabanus is ‘even more fanatical’ about magicians in a later book (p. 55). Those who pour scorn on magic actually fear it (pp. 60-61, 66, etc.), while the agreement in ‘both ecclesiastical and secular’ sources ‘condemning soothsayers, seers, diviners, enchanters, lot casters and the like’ has ‘a sonority and a consistency which almost deafen us to their true significance by the very weight of repetition’ (p. 66).

II What is the ‘true significance’ of these attacks on magic and its practitioners? Mainly, it would seem, in proving that such practices actually existed. The author announces early on that if ‘scientific texts’ are used ‘upside down’ they can be ‘extremely helpful as a means of showing us just how strong [the] opposing pressures’ between science and magic were. So Christian texts attacking magic can provide ‘indicators.. . of the presence of that powerful and oppressive magical opposition. . .’ (p. 49). She mentions that Isidore’s account of malefici includes the accusation of necromancy and adds: ‘surely Isidore is calling upon direct observation here’ (p. 52). Rabanus’ violent attacks, she believes, reveal the

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was fervently believed, would improve human life’ (p. 4). Indeed, she believes that dead’ (p. 55), while Hincmar’s additions to Isidore’s text ‘must surely come from contemporary observation’ (pp. 56-56). The many mediaeval stories of the superior power of saints over magicians convey ‘a single message’: not the superior power of Christianity, as their authors obviously intended, but Flint’s thesis that ‘the Christians are faced with a strong and numerous opposition’, showing ‘the prevalence, and sometimes the fear, of witch doctors in Merovingian France’ (p. 61). I feel most unhappy about such arguments, as if the fact that something is condemned proves that it existed, or was important. ‘I cannot sufficiently emphasize’, Flint writes, ‘the importance, in sheer prevalence and numbers and in the range of their activities, of the opposing magicians’ (p. 79). How many? Who were they? What did they do? Flint is evidently taking as factual historical evidence of magical practices condemnations which derive from the patristic tradition and which doubtless embody a wide range of motives. If law codes repeat and elaborate earlier statutes condemning magical practices (e.g. p. 62), that does not prove that they were growing. Promulgators of such codes have to at least equal, if not improve on their predecessors, and seldom conduct village-to-village enquiries about the numbers of ‘mafeficos, veneficos, tempestarios, strigas, phitonnisas’ actually practising today, compared to a generation earlier. The motives of individuals describing occult practices are also no nearer to providing an objective report on their society. If Paschasius Radbert, in the ninth century, says that at the emperor’s court ‘there was witchcraft everywhere’, or Adam of Bremen ‘found witches everywhere’ in the eleventh century (pp. 62-63), such statements could mean almost anything. They may be used to justify hiring more clergy, or more police, or be presented as a rhetorically-loaded contrast to the advent of some saintly figure. Historians must surely consider the context and purpose of speech acts. The fact that the Visigoths’ law codes legislate against the devil or others who invoke tempests, or that the Bavarians’ laws ‘do not speak merely of pretending to raise tempests, but of actually doing so’, may be ‘a testimony to profound conviction’ (pp. 110-111) but may also be a way of covering all eventualities. Professor Flint seems to have no way of evaluating such material in terms of intention or motive. The fact that the monastic writer, Peter Cassian, described at length the ‘supreme capacity of demons’, including their ‘ready ability to impregnate a thick and heavy mass, like the flesh’ (pp. 105-106), may tell us something about Cassian’s psyche, or about the pressures of monastic life (in which accidie could be allegorised as ‘the noon-tide demon’), but is difficult to place in any other evidential category. In this area, above all others, one might since a belief in the devil brings out the worst in man-a historian must imagineat least consider the possibility of abnormal or excessive reactions such as hysteria or paranoia. Cassian’s attacks have a further significance, however, in that they ‘did a very great deal to perpetuate beliefs in wicked demons’, and so ‘helped the survival of demons greatly’ (p. 105). One of the strangest features of Flint’s book is her treatment of the extremely familiar phenomenon of cultural continuity or the working of tradition, by which occult practices have survived over the last two millennia. Rather than giving a neutral, or factual account of these survivals, Flint loads them with rhetorical emphasis. Chapter 6 is entitled The Magic That

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Was Needed: Rescued Means of Magicallntervention (127ff), in which she claims that the belief in comets as omens helped ‘to reinforce the mounting enthusiasm for the rescue of astrology’ (p. 137)-as if any widespread, shared ‘enthusiasm’ could be documented, as if there existed some collective desire to ‘save’ that subject, one of various ‘pressures building toward the rehabilitation of astrology’ (p. 138). In her dramatic style, elements of the occult tradition are ‘carried over’, as if across some great divide, or ‘brought through’, having negotiated a blockade or heavy siege. (As if the occult arts might say to each other, in the title of Auden’s poem, “Look, we have come through!“) Such writing attributes purpose, agency, and value-added significance to enigmatic cultural survivals. Indeed, even someone who attacks magical beliefs like demons, can be said to ‘rescue’ them. Augustine’s On the Divination ofDemons, with its blistering attack, was copied by Rabanus and again by Burchard, so all three ‘rescued demons with the greatest of vigor and associated them most firmly with the magical arts’ (p. 147). It may be true that if no one had ever mentioned demons, belief in them might have faded, but it seems perverse to describe these attacks on the evil and destructive malice of demonic agents (in terms very similar to Macbeth’s disillusioned denunciation of the witches) as constituting an ‘energetic rescue of demons’ (pp. 147-149), when the writers’ explicit intent was to discredit them. The reasoning behind such statements is often muddled. If Caesarius preaches a sermon against forbidden magical practices it is strangely elliptic to say that ‘the devil and his demons helped him to illuminate’ them (p. 149): who is helping whom? If Martin of Braga also attacks demonic magic in a sermon it seems strange to deduce that ‘he launches the demons into the Christian world with him as he charges them specifically with the magical practices he abhors’, and I find it very odd to describe all those who condemned demonic magic as ‘bringing demons through’ (p. 152; my italics). Flint’s conclusion to this sequence typifies both her strangely inverted form of argument and the clumsy, repetitive style in which it is often clothed: Other heavenlyagencies and other forms of Christianheavenlymagic would become as important as the demons, and the rescue of the demons would lead to the rescue and elaboration of these agencies and practices in their turn, Thus, lastly and perhaps joyously too, the abettedpersistence of the demons and the need to resist them would spawn many other rescues, rescues we might also with justice term risen Christianmagic. (p. 157; my italics)

These dramatic terms are continually repeated (e.g. pp. 184, 185,193,239,240, 242, 397, etc.), but with repetition lose, rather than gain assent. III Certainly one way in which the Christian Church opposed magic was to claim that its own powers were superior. As modern scholars have argued, many of the miraculous deeds ascribed to Christ by the four evangelists are couched in the same terms, down to precise linguistic details, as contemporary Hellenistic (Greco-Roman-Egyptian) magic.* Flint never refers to this important

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background, which explains so much of the imitatio practised by later writers. It goes without saying that the saints’ lives abound with instances where Christian miracles defeat pagan magic, and Flint quotes many such stories, albeit characteristically turning them round to prove that the opposition was real and powerful (e.g. pp. 46-47, 60-61, 252-255, 270-271, 295). The well-known apocryphal accounts of how Saint Peter defeated Simon Magus are cited here (pp. 338-340), yet in a piece of special pleading Flint argues that Simon was ‘disqualified from a role in Christian society’ not by ‘his magic as such’ but by other moral failings, including blasphemy, ‘selfish arrogance’ and ‘a dissolute sexual life’ (p. 343). She is unwilling to see that magic was often traditionally identified with such failings. The superiority of Christian powers was the common denominator in this whole tradition. Many anecdotes showed that God’s powers were greater (pp. 72-73); according to Augustine and Caesarius, the angels could always defeat the demons (p. 166); the symbolism of the cross raised high was in itself enough to quell demonic powers (pp. 173-179); the superior power of prayer, or sacred objects, were stock beliefs (pp. 186-189); Christian miracle could turn even birds of prey into servants (pp. 197-198). As Gregory wrote, ‘God’s servants can do more through miracles than the powers of this earth can do with anger’ (p. 388). Flint’s comment on the rivalry between Christian miracles and pagan magic is that the miracles were a ‘means of reordering, instead of eliminating’, magical powers (p. 80), which seems correct. But a lot depends on how you define ‘reordering’. Saint Peter, she says, had ‘skills that were superior, yet similar’ (p. 81)-yet also, we must counter, ‘different’, put to fundamentally different purposes, To make a simple model, we could say that magic consists of a set of practices, invoking intermediate means, to achieve specific goals. Flint rightly brings out similarities between pagan magic and Christian miracles in terms of practices and means, including a very debased Christian Sortes Biblicae and Sortes Sanctorum, the random use of sacred texts to generate predictions or answer queries (pp. 273-281). But she never gives enough attention to the question of goals, the fact that the overwhelming motivation for using magic has been the acquiring of personal benefits. These can be relatively innocuous, such as good health or longevity, and they can also be shared with others, as with a nation’s victory in war or a community’s fruitfulness in harvest. But many magical acts are designed to produce personal benefit at whatever costs, including the winning of a desired person in love, often against their will, or harming a rival or enemy. The major documents recording this use of magic for personal gain are the surviving corpus of Greek magical papyri, edited by Preisendanz in the 192Os, and currently appearing in English under the editorship of Hans Dieter Betz.’ Flint does refer to this corpus, but relatively late in the book (pp. 207, 212, 214,225,231,233,312-314), and without fully seeing its value in defining the common goals of magic.4 The author’s enthusiastic recommendation of magic in terms of delight, devotion, and life-enhancement makes her unwilling to acknowledge that magic used to benefit the self can often harm others. Commenting on Pliny and Apuleius as recording the traditional associations of magic with malice, night, and incantations, she writes that ‘clearly here magic is maliciously manipulative’ (p. 15), as if that were proof of some special antipathy on the part of those writers.

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But the texts that she herself cites (very selectively) condemning magic leave no doubt about the long-standing association of magic with malice. The Roman Twelve Tables were very specific about harm-magic being used maliciously to damage someone else’s crops (p. 14, 109); the Theodosian code condemned magicians who ‘have worked against the safety of men or have turned virtuous minds to lust’ (p. 25); and Gregory of Tours was one of many mediaevals aware that love-magic could be fatal (pp. 69-70). The many texts that Flint cites associating magic with harm (e.g. pp. 52,61,148,169,183,189, etc.), and the vast literature on this topic elsewhere,5 might have qualified her unstinting endorsement of it. Failure to recognise that the achieving of personal gain was a fundamental element in magic puts her discussion of CondemnedLove A4ugic (pp. 231-239) off balance. As she shows, many of the mediaeval condemnations of love magic blame women, not men, and she rightly sees this as another sign of misogynistic elements within Christianity. But in so doing she does not fully register the ego-based nature of love magic,6 whichever sex uses it, even though she quotes the Clementine Homilies, which unequivocally say that ‘he who constrains an unwilling woman by the force of magic subjects himself to the most terrible punishment.. .’ (p. 234). The truth is that in this period, as in others, Christianity differed from magic in many fundamental ways, and expressed its condemnation as unmistakable opposition. Since Flint does not discuss mediaeval theology, church government, the distinction between institutions and individuals, confessional practices, or the changing patterns of worship, she cannot judge what place the miraculous or magical held in the total Christian scheme. Her real interest is in finding similarities between the occult arts and the church, so it is not surprising that she should believe that ‘this vilification’ of love magic by the church was not ‘repressive of every type of love magic’, but, ‘on the contrary, it in fact supported a Christianised love magic’ (p. 238). The common denominator here turns out to be the practice of ‘binding’, which she first mentions in a section on Lot Casting and Conjuring (pp. 217-226), and takes in the literal sense as referring to the binding of captives (pp. 220,228). Happily, in the following section on Weaving and Binding (pp. 226-23 l), she does recognise the symbolism of ‘magical knots’ in connection with the dejixio, and even quotes from the Greek magical papyri (pp. 228, 231). But it is typical of her approach that she should jump on a tiny detail, the fact that one of these magical recipes ‘has a Christian interpolation’ (p. 228 n.) but ignore what these spells are used for. Reference to Betz’s edition (p. 44) shows that this text offers a ‘Wondrous spell for binding a lover’, which instructs the user to make two wax figurines. a male and a female. Make the male in the form of Ares fully armed, holding a sword in his left hand and threatening to plunge it into the right side of her neck. And make her with her arms behind her back and down on her knees. And you are to fasten the magical material on her head or neck The user must then stick 13 copper nails in the female figure, ‘2 in the ears and 2 in

the eyes and.. .2 in the pudena . . . saying each time, “I am piercing such and such a member of her, NN, so that she may remember no one but me, NN, alone”. And take a lead tablet and write the same spell and recite it’, invoking ‘all daimons in

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this place to.. . arouse yourself for me, . . . and attract and bind her. . . Let her be in love with me. . .‘. Reading just one page of this should make the question of the purposes behind magic practices an unavoidable issue. We can distinguish two main functions of binding in magic. One involves the belief in the contagious effect of magic objects, as in the wearing of phylacteries, amulets, or other specially treated objects deemed to have a curative, protective, or generally beneficial effect on the wearer, a practice that the Church vigorously condemned (e.g. pp. 242-250). This function benefits the self on its own, independent of its relations to the rest of society. The other function of binding symbolism in magic concerns relations between the self and others, frequently involving questions of power and desire. In the defixio,’ those leaden tablets inscribed with curses on rivals or enemies, buried in the earth, in tombs, clefts in rocks, or by rivers (to achieve contact with the under/otherworld) with appropriate incantations, the binding symbolised the completion of the spell and the unbroken extension of its power, with all its hoped-for destructive effects. In love magic the same symbolised binding powers were projected on to the man or woman desired, with an intent to bring them in the flesh, as soon as possible, to the person performing the magic practices, for sexual consummation. They are used against the will of the other, often without their knowledge, and for the gratification of the self. Whether successful or not, they can be endlessly repeated, given that the magician has a sufficient stock of the materia magica needed for his ceremonies: small birds or animals to be sacrificed, the appropriate herbs, drugs, unguents, water, incense. (Incidentally, Flint makes no attempt to understand the rationale behind such use of substances or creatures in magic ceremonies, just dismissing them as ‘repellent’ or ‘execrable’.) Given the ego-satisfying, other-binding intent of magic knots, it comes as a shock to find Flint subsequently arguing that certain of the gospel supports for binding of a magical kind, not at all papyri. The passages declaring that part (Matt. 19:6, Mark 10:9) seem to be used to enforce it. (p. 290)

Christian marriage can be said to impose a unlike that to be found in the Greek magical what God has joined together no man might denote a power of this sort and could certainly

But the differences between God as the ultimate blessing on Christian marriage and the magician attempting to bind a woman (or man) to himself are so vast that phrases like ‘not at all unlike’ or ‘seem to denote’ are quite inadequate. Flint bases her argument on two short treatises by Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims, one on marriage, the other on divorce (pp. 290-298). She faithfully records H&mar’s orthodox belief that ‘the original Christian marriage contract depended for its validity upon the free will of both contracting parties’ (p. 292), without recognising that this fundamental point shows the incompatibility of magical practices and Christian marriage. She turns, rather, to his discussion of the grounds which would allow a marriage to be legally dissolved, one of which was the man’s impotence, which could have been ‘inflicted by witches (with diabolical assistance)‘. Now Flint begins to introduce her own terminology, saying that in recommending attempting to cure the impotence, Hincmar specifies ‘the loosing powers of confession, exorcism, and other kinds of priestly

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help’ (p. 294; my italics). But the metaphor interpreting these ministrations as ‘loosing’ is entirely her own, and even though she repeats it by describing Hincmar’s emphasis on ‘the ritual bindingpower of Christian marriage’ and ‘the power [that] the ecclesiastical counter-magic he prescribes can wield against the magical ‘knot’ of impotence’ (p. 295; my italics), it is clear that these terms have been introduced into the text by the modern historian. She pushes another of her theses in describing Hincmar’s ruling that love maleficium ‘sprang not from human capacities, but wholly from the devil’, as showing that ‘once more, we have the rescued demons of the old magic invoked rather to save than to condemn.. .’ (p. 296). Once more, rather, we have a present-based interpretative scheme imposing its own categories on distinctly different material. Her discussion does not, in fact, prove the existence of ‘supernatural Christian binding-and-loosing powers and Christianised magical means of judgment’ (pp. 296-297), but merely obscures fundamental differences. Not many people will want to take the reference to blood-sacrifices in Exodus and Leviticus as offering ‘a loophole whereby the priest might be seen as a Christian magician’ (p. 356).

IV The cumulative effect of unease that I felt in reading this book, my sense that the texts cited and the contexts in which they are discussed have been biased or warped by the historian’s interpretative scheme in more ways than I could possibly estimate (scholars more familiar with the mediaeval church must help here), this unease unsettles my acceptance of Flint’s main thesis, that the Church not only absorbed but encouraged magic as a force genuinely-by right, or by nature-‘ belonging to human society’ (p. 12). Her argument, stated in its final formulation, is that ‘Christian leaders actively invited non-Christian magic of certain sorts into the medieval Christian community’ for several reasons, ‘all of them positive’, and that ‘Magic was allowed to rise in importance in the early medieval West as a result of profound and careful thought, and for the good it could do’ (p. 397). That suggestion reads to me like modern wishful thinking, unjustified by any concrete evidence cited here. That some magical practices were common to the mentality ofthe age, whether secular or sacred, is undeniable, but that these were ‘taken over’ by a positive act of will, based on a rational decision that it was better to have them on your side than the other, seems to me not properly established in this book. Flint’s mode of arguing relies heavily on suggestion and speculation, of the ‘may be’ and ‘could have’ kind, at times producing a self-supporting speculative structure that has no link with historical evidence (e.g. pp. 362-363). In this process of winks and nudges the ‘definite suggestion’ (that formulation, combining the insistent and the hesitant, typifies her procedure) is made that ‘the Church’, as some reified entity with a conscience collective, decided that magic was a good thing, and gradually softened its condemnation. The early opposition, she suggests-not knowing that ecclesiastical material, I cannot say whether such opposition continued to be expressed-was violent, showing again (did we doubt it?) ‘how very effective in fact were the forces they purported to overcome’ (p. 73). But the Church, she

Reviews surmises, must have realised that such violent methods are dangerous, and that ‘the wholesale destruction of places and discomfiture of persons once revered’ may not make their replacement more respected, indeed, ‘such forcefulness’, by ‘destroying so very many of the sanctions that hold a society together,. . . might very easily recoil upon its perpetrator’s head’. Thus-thesis repeated!-‘given the numbers and scope of that non-Christian opposition. . . in early medieval Europe’, the Church (must have realised that it) ‘needed’ to employ subtler and ‘more gentle methods of approach’ (p. 74). One obvious response to this argument is that Christianity was not just ‘destroying. . . the sanctions that hold a society together’, but replacing them with a completely different, and coherent set of sanctions, including both models to be imitated and practices to be avoided, and that it did so very successfully, if we were to follow (as Flint does not) the spread of Christianity through mediaeval Europe. Setting aside that wider, but it seems to me crucial issue, I find the evidence Flint cites for this ‘more gentle’ approach unsatisfactory, depending as it too often does on a blurring of fundamental differences between pagan and Christian beliefs and practices. One of her key documents, exploration of which, we are told, ‘will form the substance of much of this book’, is the ‘famous letter’ from Pope Gregory the Great to Abbot Mellitus, ‘then on his way to barbarian England’, on how to treat the pagan idolators (pp. 76-77). Do not destroy their ‘idol temples’, Gregory advises, ‘but only the idols in them. Take holy water and sprinkle it in these shrines, build altars and place relics in them. For if the shrines are well built, it is essential that they should be changed from the worship of devils to the service of the true God’. This advice is (to me, at least) an amusing mixture of religious belief, with the rituals and relics transforming the profane into the sacred, and practicality, saving the Church the bother and expense of erecting new buildings if the existing ones are ‘well built’. Flint quotes this passage at length, but, typically, does not comment on it in detail, merely seeing it as showing that such ‘substitutions under the direction of the church’ are ‘almost, But while preserving a building’s fabric, Gregory’s main indeed, imitations’. purpose is to argue that its function ‘be changed from the worship of devils to the service of the true God’. The psychology involved, he suggests, is that when the people ‘see that their shrines are not destroyed they will be able to banish error from their hearts and be more ready to come to the places they are familiar with, but now recognising and worshipping the true God’ (my italics). Stop the people ‘slaughtering much cattle as sacrifices to devils’, Gregory continues, ‘but let them slaughter animals for their own food to the praise of God, and let them give thanks to the Giver of all things. . .’ (ibid.). These are momentous changes of attitude and purposes, not just ‘imitations’. Flint continues to reiterate her thesis that the Church collectively agreed that too much ferocity was harmful, and that ‘sensitivity’ was needed, occult beliefs having to be ‘cherished’ rather than ‘set aside’, and even ‘encouraged’ *(e.g. pp. 83-84, 114, 115, 124, 127, 128, 145), and only returns to the question of re-using pagan buildings or sites in a later discussion of Christian Places and Objects (pp. 254-273). This forms part of Chapter 9, entitled EncouragedMagic: The Process ofRehabilitation, and we see at once the use to which the material will be put. Where the mediaeval churchmen emphasised that in re-using pagan structures or building materials they were transforming them, Flint wishes to

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argue that they were merely transferring the magic properties already existing, to their own purposes. The ‘old shrines and objects were. . . already impregnated with sources of supernatural power’, and rather than being ‘simply incorporated into the Christian system, they dictated, for many of the wise, the placing, the contents, and sometimes even the shape and environs of the new places of recourse’ (p. 256; my italics). Thus the pagan oratories, shrines, wells were ‘brought actively into the system of communication with the supernatural espoused by Christianity, precisely because’ they played such an ‘important. .. part in the competing system’ (p. 257). It is a well-accepted principle in the recent theory of history and anthropology that the modern researcher should take into account the agent’s own categories explaining or justifying their beliefs and practices. Professor Flint has no evidence of a mediaeval ruler or churchman thinking or saying something like ‘this is a good building, already imbued with the supernatural: let’s use its magic for our magic’. All she does is to take mediaeval Christian practices and say that they are ‘similar to’, or indistinguishable from magical ones. Thus King Ostwald’s erecting a large wooden cross as an omen of victory before battle is ‘a procedure not too greatly removed from the seeking of omens before battle at a sacred oak’ (pp. 257-258): but no, it is rather different. ‘The fact that, in The Dream of the Rood, the healing message to Christians comes in a dream’ recalls to her ‘very many features of the ancient and contemporary magical world’, in the practice of ‘incubation at temples’ (p. 259). But it represents, rather, a literary convention (the dream as a narrative frame), not classical oneiromancy. The cross in that dream ‘is described also as soaked with blood’, which may point to the familiar ‘association of blood with magic’ (ibid.): or just (just!) to the crucifixion. The representation, on the Ruthwell cross, of Mary drying Christ’s feet with her hair, is, she admits, ‘scrupulously in accord . . . with the biblical passage’ (Luke 7:37-38), but to Flint it is also ‘an arrestingly different form of “watching the foot” and of that conjuring with hair attributed by Hincmar to witches’ (p. 260). Such arguments seem to me to weaken, rather than sustain her thesis that although ‘they condemn such shrines and sources and objects of devotion,. . . Christian pastors recognise that they have power and are persistent, and so the churchmen try to incorporate their strength’ (p. 262). I cannot believe that Christian baptism, ‘in its concentration upon the element of water, . . . was an attractive method of invoking the supernatural’, since the symbolic use of water in so many religions for cathartic purposes prevents us from wanting to see ‘condemned magic’ and the ‘special grace’ of baptism ‘as direct counters one to the other’ (p. 265). Flint’s thesis relies on making constant oppositions between Christianity and magic as the first step towards identifying them, or at least suggesting a process of ‘transference’ (p. 270) from one to the other, or ‘realignment’ (p. 320), proposing many instances (‘I am sure that there are many similar examples of Christianised magical inventions of this kind to be found . . .‘: @. 300)) of what she describes as ‘deliverately Christianised magical compromises’ (p. 320). I am not convinced that these two huge and varied traditions can be so confidently identified. The other large body of human experience that she juxtaposes with magic (and religion) is science, going back to Hegel and Frazer in conceiving of a triadic relationship between them. This is a venerable tradition, but no longer very

Reviews helpful. The unexamined assumptions behind it, for instance, can be seen in her references to ‘the borderline between magic and science’, and the ‘most formidable’ borderline ‘which divides both magic and science from religion. Sometimes such a borderline may amount to an impassable frontier. . .’ (p. 7). This spatial metaphor of contiguity, as if the three subjects were like Holland, France, and Belgium on some map of Europe, begs the whole question of whether they occupy the same ‘plane’, or ‘coincide’ in treating the same issues in terms that can be simply ‘translated’ from one to the other. The way in which Flint conceives the three is also anachronistic, as in her comment that ‘magic in some of its forms’ may ‘be seen as a corrective to the excessive rationalism of science’ (ibid.). This is evidently a twentieth-century comment, which has forgotten that magic precisely claimed to be rational. (Elsewhere she sees it as ‘an alternative liturgy’ (p. 66 n.), or an ‘alternative world of intercession’ @. 69).) Equally anachronistic is her account of magic in Roman times (her chronology is distressingly vague) as ‘a countercurrent’ that, in relying on oracles and ‘divinatory prediction’, in caring for crops and in its zealous pursuit of cures,. . . has begun also to edge (though tentatively and, through sympathetic magic, dangerously) toward experimental science. It has penetrated, in short, that no-man’s land between magic, science, and religion in which all three can come together and in which much magic might be salvaged and valued. (p. 27)

It ought not to be necessary still to make this point, but the earliest stage where we can recognise ‘experimental science’ is the late seventeenth century, and then only with specific qualifications. To invoke ‘science, as we would define it’ (p, 184), in the context of classical and mediaeval occult beliefs, is an obvious error of intellectual history, frequently repeated (e.g. pp. 29,38,99, 101, 121,122, 132, 145, 163, 171, 199,251, etc.). Flint reveals the formative influence on her in praising Lynn Thorndike’s History of Magic and Experimental Science, ‘that magisterial work which stands at the basis of so much else’, and in which the author ‘named and numbered’ the works that ‘stand on the borders between magic and’ science ‘with a deftness which even now has no peer’ (p. 49). But the deficiencies of Thorndike’s work have long been obvious to historians of science, at least, a catalogue rather than a history, a huge and repetitive survey that increasingly ignored all contrary evidence in its desire to show that science grew out of magic. On Thorndike’s ground no sound edifices can be built.

V I hope that this lengthy review has succeeded in communicating and justifying my unease with The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe. As I have said, there may be much historical substance in its thesis, but it is overlaid with such a strong present-based enthusiasm for magic, and underpinned with so many questionable interpretations of the texts cited, that it is hard to know which parts are sound, which hollow, and which purely imaginary. I suspect that the whole subject needs to be studied afresh, by historians less partipris, who can see (they

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don’t have to share) the predominantly negative attitude towards magic in this period, and the reasons which people then had for believing it to be evil and destructive. Future historians, having a less biased attitude towards magic, and a wider interest in the beliefs and actions of the Christian Church, may produce a rather different picture. Brian Vickers Centre for Renaissance Studies, ETH Ztirich

NOTES 1. For a compendium of citations from classical authors on magical practices see T. Hopfner, Griechisch-dgyptischerOffenbarungszauber, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1921, 1924). This notoriously awkward handwritten text has finally been reissued in typescript form, ed. R. Merkelbach (Amsterdam, 1974-1990). 2. For varying evaluations of the role of magic in the Christian tradition see, e.g. Morton Smith, Clement ofAlexandriaanda Secret Gospelof Mark (Cambridge, MA, 1973), and Jesus the Magician (San Francisco, 1981); J.M. Aune, ‘Magic in early Christianity’, Aufstieg und Niedergang der riimischen Welt 23.2 (1980), 1507-1557; and J.M. Hull, Hellenistic Magic and the Synoptic Tradition (London, 1974). 3. Karl Preisendanz (ed.), Papyri Graecae Magicae. Die Griechischen Zauberpapyri, 2 vols, 2nd edn rev. A. Henrichs (Stuttgart, 1973-1974); Hans Dieter Betz (ed.), The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, including the Demotic Spells, Vol. 1 (Chicago and London, 1986; rev. ed. 1993). See also R.W. Daniel and F. Maltomini, Supplementum Magicum, 2 vols, (Opladen, 1990-1992). 4. See, e.g. Brian Vickers, ‘On the goal of the occult sciences in the Renaissance’, in G. Kauffmann (ed.), Die Renaissance im Blick der Nationen Europas (Wiesbaden, 1991), pp. 51-93. 5. See, e.g. R. Ganschinietz, Hippolytos’ Capital gegen die Magier (Leipzig, I9I3); C. Bonner, ‘Witchcraft in the Lecture Room of Libanus’, TAPA 63 (1932), pp. 34-44; C. Pharr, ‘The Interdiction of Magic in Roman Law’, TAPA 63 (1932), pp. 269-295; E. Massonneau, La Magie dans I’antiquite romaine (Paris, 1934); R. MacMullen, Enemies of the Roman Order (Cambridge, MA, 1966); C.R. Phillips III, ‘Nullum Crimen sine Lege: Socioreligious Sanctions on Magic’, in C.A. Faraone and D. Obbink (eds), Magika Hiera. Ancient Greek Magic and Religion (New York, 1991), pp. 260-276. 6. See Vickers, op. cit., n. 4, pp. 70-73,77-88; J.J. Winkler, ‘The Constraints of Desire: Erotic Magical Spells’, in J.J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire. The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (London, 1990), pp. 71-98; and in Faraone and Obbink, op. cit., pp. 214-243; and C.A. Faraone, ‘The Agonistic Context of Early Greek Binding Spells’, in Faraone and Obbink, op. cit., pp. 3-32. 7. See, e.g. R. Wiinsch, Defixionum Tabeilae Atticae (Berlin, 1897); A. Audollent, Dejixionum Tabelloe (Paris, 1904); Heikki Solin, Eine neue Fluchtafel aus Ostia (Helsinki, 1968); D.R. Jordan, ‘Contributions to the study of Greek defixiones’, Ph.D.Diss. (Brown University, 1982); ‘A Survey of Greek Defwiones Not Included in the Special Corpora’, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 26 (1985), pp. 151-197; J.G. Gager (ed.), Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World (Oxford, 1992).