The Western Magical Tradition - Ronald Hutton

Good evening everybody. The concern of this talk is with learned systems of magic, defining magic AZ tech to bring about material change by uncanny means at the will of the performer. Will we ever be able to see beyond the current observable universe? Oh, it's much worse than that. The observable universe is shrinking. If you want to know what are my odds of winning the lottery, you come straight to probability. Yeah, because probability is all about how likely or not events are to happen. I think the chance of there being an undiscovered second species, very like humans out there in the world today is pretty slender. However, And these are the pictures if you haven't seen them. I mean, New York was orange. The air was orange. They said one day out in that air was like smoking a pack of cigarettes. It had the same effect on the lungs as smoking a number of cigarettes. So people who'd never smoked in their life were suddenly going to suffer some of the same health effects. Any further questions is a brand new podcast from Gresham College, a place where we ask our speakers all of your questions that went unanswered. Following their lecture, guests have included Ronald Hutton, Robin May, Chris Lin tot, Sarah Hart and Maggie snowing. Any further questions? All episodes are available wherever you listen to your podcasts And what makes these systems tonight learned is a combination of written texts, formal conation, and special equipment. Such systems are historically a feature of Europe, the Mediterranean world, and the Middle East. In particular, this lecture represents an attempt to sketch out a framework of its history. It is a history based on some of the main material of any historian, textual information, which can show a continuous transmission and development across time. Lots of manuscripts of ceremonial magic survive from all periods since the ancient world to allow the identification of key works and genres and the tracing of their passage between cultures and languages. A magic really travels. Its works were translated from Greek to Arabic and Latin. From Arabic to Latin and Greek, from Hebrew to Latin, and vice versa. And from all of these and the everyday languages of different peoples enough have now been edited and published, and enough research has been conducted upon them in particular periods of history for an overall narrative of their development to be possible. Such an enterprise, however, still awaits an author in 1997, Richard Ke Heifer, who is the lovely old man on the screen and is the foremost current scholar of medieval magic, could say that one might easily persuaded that there is a history of the uses of magic and reactions to magic, but not of magic itself. Virtually every magical technique seems timeless and perennial and Richard accordingly declined the temptation to next quote, wander endlessly through the thickets of the history of magic from the Greek magical papyri of antiquity through Arabic and Byzantine sources onto the grise, the magical texts of the early modern era. So you got your machetes ready. Tonight we're gonna cut a path through Keek heifer's, thickets along precisely the root of which he spoke, and see if any continuous tradition can be identified. So let's start where he would've started it in ancient Egypt, can't go much further back than that. Its culture was unified by the belief that the cosmos was animated and controlled by a morally neutral spiritual power. This was manipulated by the goddesses and gods to regulate and maintain the natural order, but it could be used against them and employed by human beings independently and for their own ends. The mobilization of it consisted of ritual to unite the necessary words and materials through action. As Dees were adept in magic, they were believed to sanction its use by humans who paid them the necessary respect. But aha, those humans once empowered, were also seen as capable of using it to threaten and coerce deities to do their will. And this procedure was regarded as perfectly respectable and it's attested in Egyptian texts from roundabout four and a half thousand years ago onwards. Furthermore, those texts lack any sense of a distinction between religious and magical acts. They mingle praise and threats, prayers and demands to all divine beings, and the same invocation can be used either to honor a deity or to obtain private advantage to a person. The usual authors and performers of magical acts on behalf of people in general were functionaries of the official and orthodox religion and attached to its temples. One type of official acted as both priest and magician as required by people from the neighborhood. The practice of magic was quite legal even when performed viciously against public and private enemies. The category of behavior known in English in the negative sense as witchcraft was therefore both unknown and meaningless in Egyptian culture. It's interesting to compare such attitudes with those of other civilizations of the ancients near East. The material from Mesopotamia, the great civilizations of Babylonia and Assyria shows no sign that human beings were believed to be capable of pushing deities around or even commanding lesser spirits without divine help. It also identifies deities much more with heavenly bodies and makes a practice of timing important actions in harmony with the movements of the sky. This is of course why Assyria and Babylonia became the birthplace of the later Western tradition of astrology, a tradition which can certainly be traced in continuous development From there to the present, the Mesopotamian texts also show an acute fear of witchcraft. This is displayed both in the huge number of spells designed to counteract magic employed secretly and maliciously by human beings, and in the law codes which prescribe penalties for such a use of it usually death. Indeed, the later notorious test for a witch of throwing the suspect into water at attributing guilt according to whether they sank or floated, is first recorded the Babylonian law Code of Hambi roundabout 1800 BCE, or bc. The Mesopotamian texts also manifest an equally considerable fear of spirits, which personified essential evil in the natural world. The Greeks were to give the name demons to these. Some witches were believed to empower themselves further by working with these as partners and generally, Mesopotamian witches were perceived to be female. What I've termed the Mesopotamian tradition seems to have obtained throughout the fertile Crescent, right round through Syria, down to Palestine, and including what became the increasingly distinctive culture of the ancient Hebrews, the emphasis that the Hebrews came to place on a single jealous tribal, God gave a particular twist to its attitudes to magic. This was to outlaw the use of arcane powers among Hebrews, which were not used by the priests of their God, but in every other respect. However, ancient Hebrew attitudes match those of Mesopotamia and Syria in general, including in the notorious prescription in the Book of Exodus. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live the situation in the ancient European world as manifested in the cultures of Greece and Rome was different again, but makes us striking a contrast with that of Egypt as the Mesopotamian one did, both Greeks and Romans made a clear theoretical distinction between religion and magic. It's the one I've been implicitly using in this talk, not least in suggesting that the Egyptians didn't have it, it has indeed remained the standard Western tool for distinguishing between the two. Ever since passing into Christian and then into modern scholarly culture, it's regarded religion as a set of respectful relationships made by human with superhuman beings. If the humans wanted something from those deities, then they had to ask them for it. And the super humans then scratch their immortal heads and decided whether or not they would oblige. Certainly set ritual formulae could assist the request, but the volition to enact a response remained with the deity. Magic by contrast, represented a range of processes and techniques by which humans could tap into supernatural or preternatural power themselves. They thereby obtained some degree of personal power in affecting the results. It's vital for an understanding of classical Greek and Roman culture and indeed of subsequent history to emphasize that official Greek and Roman attitudes since sufficient records begin in the fifth century, B, c, E, or BBC stigmatized magic as just defined as a suspicious and dangerous activity. Greeks and Romans did not like magicians. Athenian playwrights referred to them under a range of terms as shabby and disreputable characters. And by the end of the fifth century, the medical texts on the sacred disease about epilepsy made the classical distinction between religion and magic summed up above. So did Plato, the great philosopher, a generation later. And from then on, it seems standard. It may have been a product of the fifth century, b, c, e as some have suggested, but sources for the subject are so much rarer before them that it could possibly be prehistoric in Europe. In recent debates over the use of the term magic and its relationship with religion, modern scholars have sometimes assumed that a distinction between the two was the product of Victorian and Edwardian scholars, or of Protestantism or of Christianity. Instead, it goes right to the roots of European civilization. Officially, Europeans have never liked and trusted magic. It needs to be emphasized, therefore, that there isn't a single text from ancient Greece or Rome in which the author argues against the notion that to try and control or manipulate goddesses and gods is a bad thing. A general component of Greek and Roman culture is you don't try and push goddesses and gods around the way they do in Egypt because otherwise you get blitzed. As such, this distinction runs through legal cases reported from the Imperial Roman period, both the holy man apollonius of Tiana and the novelist, Aus allegedly escaped conviction and execution on charges of working magic by claiming they merely asked deities for help. Pliny the natural historian, Seneca, the politician and playwright both condemned magic as an attempt to push deities around. And the philosopher plaus attacked rival philosophers by accusing them of using incantations designed to compel higher powers to their will. And Plaus successor IUs defended himself against exactly that charge by declaring that unlike common magicians, he and his pupils used only practices prescribed and assisted by respectable deities. This hostility of magic got worse and worse and more and more systematic. As the Roman empire went on transplanted into Christian theological monotheism and dualism and reinforced by the Near East and the horror of demons, it became part of the teachings of medieval churches. Moreover, the Romans, unlike the Greeks, also appear to have been big time witch hunters in the second century, b, CE, they seem to have launched trials of people accused of harmful magic, which claimed 3000 victims in just one hunt. That's a body count bigger than anything achieved. Later in Christian witch trials. By the last century before the Christian era, the Romans were generating literary images of evil and predatory old female witches. And these were remarkably endearing. The most famous witches in English literature must be those in Shakespeare's Scottish play, and most people will know Shakespeare's incantation with the jingle, double double toil and trouble fire burn and Cauldron bubble C er may realize it's based on lines from the work of the Roman poet Horace 1600 years before Shakespeare. So the obvious question to pose now perhaps is what happened when Egypt became Roman and the starkly contrasted sets of cultural attitudes crashed into each other. The answer was extremely creative. Roman rule eroded both the financial support of the Egyptian temple system and the privileges of its priests. And since the priests were now going broke, the magician priests were forced out into wider society, and the process produced a notable development in their practices recorded in the text we call the Greek and Adic magical papyri. While the attitudes, techniques, and contents of magical operations represented a continuation of previous Egyptian tradition, the scope of those operations became more elaborate and ambitious culturally, they were much more eclectic than before, importing figures, rights and ideas from all over the Roman Empire and the Middle East, but especially from Greek, Hebrew and Mesopotamian tradition. In many ways, Roman Egypt was more like modern California in its cultural exuberance, eclecticism than most societies since. And this was an obvious consequence of the presence of Alexandria as the largest and most cosmopolitan city in the entire near East. These magicians now had to have a new interest in gratifying all the desires of private clients and passing on knowledge to paying pupils and sometimes appropriated the language and atmosphere of the late Roman mystery religions. Indeed, some rights were designed to enable religious revelation, but almost always the reason why you wanna meet the gods is to fulfill individual and earthly ambitions, get rich, get popular, get a lover. In other words, just as official attitudes across the Roman Empire, were hardening further against magic as a means of manipulating divine power for selfish ends, Egypt, whilst producing and marketing an unprecedentedly sophisticated commercial tradition dedicated to doing exactly that. The unanswerable question is whether it did so alone and that exported it to the rest of the Roman world and near East, or whether Egypt represented one corner of a development occurring all over the rest of the Roman world. There are references to magical books in other parts of the empire, usually getting burned by the authorities before their owners are put to death. None, however, have survived to show whether they contained complex ritual magic. And if so, if that was influenced by the Egyptian tradition. Egypt as said, possessed an ideology which uniquely favored the employment of magic. It had become a crossroad of cultures which provided an eclectic mix of materials, and it possessed just the right social development in the privatization of the business of the magician priests. What I can say for sure is that all the essential features of the magic and the papay had long been present in Egyptian culture, and that all these features were to become the foundations of the Western magical tradition in general. So let's run down the Egyptian magical checklist. Number one, an emphasis that magicians must be physically and morally purified before working magic. Scrub up stop sex, a willingness to command and to represent deities, to invoke deities into each other's bodies. The importation of exciting foreign deities and spirits, the employment of animal, vegetable and mineral substances in rituals, the use of images as important, especially animated statues. One of the great Egyptian magical party tricks, a belief in the power of the spoken word, and of knowing the true name of an entity, you are going to summon the importance of conation in unknown and frankly, often meaningless languages. Gobbledygook, abracadabra, the importance of choosing a correct day and time and proper colors and objects for a working. Okay, my friend, you wanna love spell. So it'll be green robe and candle. Uh, do it on a Friday, do it at noon. And of course, uh, you'll be invoking one of our checklist of exciting goddesses of love and the use of human mediums to speak for deities. And finally, the collection of all this stuff in books which are then circulated or sold. It's true that many of the same traditions could be found in other ancient cultures, but only Egypt had the lot. It's not surprising that even as the magical papyri were being written, Roman literature began to make the professional Egyptian magician using books, a stock disreputable character. He's the major creep in the plot of most imperial Roman novels. He always ranges at best the shady to at worse, the downright evil. It's interesting that portraits of magicians are also found in native Egyptian texts dating back a couple of thousand years before the Roman era. But in native Egyptian texts, magicians are always shown as admirable. Moreover, one non-fictional writer of the Imperial Roman period Celsus complained of wandering magic workers who promised customers the kind of achievements which the Egyptian papyri texts offered to readers. And Kelis said they always learned their trade from the Egyptians. Still more objectively, one of the few kinds of source material for magical practices in the European lands of the Roman Empire consists of metal amulets bearing texts in Greek, many call on the power of gods and spirits. What is so striking about them is they almost never mention mainstream Greek and Roman deities, the kind of deities that European Romans, including British, are actually worshiping. What they do instead is they name the kind of spirits and deities you find in the Egyptian texts. Two examples from Britain, which is after all at the opposite end of the empire from Egypt, may make the case because they're found in marginal context, not in the homes of governors, not in places where rich merchants hang out, not where foreign soldiers are quartered, one is from the forte Cavan right on the brink of the Roman world facing the Irish Sea, which calls on the Egyptian God th God of wisdom with Hebrew words and magical figures of exactly the sort found in the magical papyri. Another comes from a temple at wood Eaton in Oxfordshire used by local pilgrims, and it uses a Hebrew divine name again found in the Egyptian texts. Moreover, we can go a lot further in establishing the later influence of the Egyptian tradition. You see in these Roman period papyri elsewhere in the Roman world, we have these papyri In Egypt, we have the texts because of the dryness of the Egyptian climate, which preserves these texts well in tombs. That is why we can turn to the Egyptian sources so readily. But by the end of the ancient world, the kind of magic found in the papyri was getting full blown into other cultures as the Greeks, the Romans, Jewish communities, and Christians began to develop their own versions of the Egyptian magic. At the end of the third century of the Roman Christian, the Roman imperial period, a branch of Greek philosophy appeared Neo Platonism, which explicitly drew on Egyptian magical techniques to provide direct contact with deities. The techniques concerned became known as Ji. Jewish and Christian magical books were now written, which used the same Egyptian techniques for a range of practical purposes in the same manner as the Egyptian texts themselves. The most famous of the Hebrew texts was the , the Book of the Mysteries. And the most famous Christian one was the Testament of Solomon. They embedded the Egyptian technology in rituals and texts of their own, but it's recognizably the same. And both of these key Jewish and Christian works might actually have been composed in Egypt, and occasionally you can trace texts directly from there across millennia. The Es essentially a textbook on medical amulets ambulances to cure diseases existed in fourth century Egypt. It then passed into the use of medieval western Europe through an Arabic and then a Byzantine Greek translation. Sometimes also living fossils can be found in texts which signal a transmission from Egypt. Perhaps the most amazing is the invocation of the rather homely Egyptian God best found in one of the Greek magical papyri, compiled maybe around two or 300 of the Imperial Roman period, which is also found in an English magical gir of the 16th century without any trace of it. In between. The most popular and frequently copied of the magical handbooks of the late middle Ages and the early modern period usually include garbled references to Egyptian deities, including a Cyrus, therapists Horace, ISIS F, and even the sacred bull, the apu. Even though by the Middle Ages those copying the name had no idea it had been a bull. They also constantly contained directions for the making of reed pens for ritual. Now, why read pens in the middle ages? People are writing on parchment or veem read pens are pretty useless for that, or at least scratchy, but they are perfectly suited to writing on papyrus, indicating an Egyptian provenance for the technique. And you can play the same game. So I shall with other relics of ancient Mediterranean rights in northern texts, such as the use of an olive oil lamp in a spell copied in England in 1622, or the presence of the hoop ho bird in other texts written there, the huo indeed makes a perfect little case study of the continuous development of the magical tradition. I dunno how many of you here have come across HUBOs abroad. They're really cute little things. They have this brilliant orange ory pinky color, uh, with barred black and white wings and crest. They're, they're cute, they're colorful, they're bright. And as one of the most striking wor birds found in the Mediterranean, it colorful and prominent became colorful and prominent in magic. It features in the magical papyri where its body parts poor thing, and especially its heart were used in spells. Arabic magical texts based in Egypt subsequently inflated its status into that of the most important bird in Arabic magic and fans out across the Muslim world. As such, the influence of Arabic manuals on medieval European magic was such that the whoo retained this status in handbooks of European magic right into the early modern period on the continent. This matches the natural history because the bird is and was found in some parts of Europe in England, however, it isn't it's at best a rare summer visitor and would've been even rarer in the cooler climate of the late mid ages and early modern period than it is now. Bird watchers hardly ever see a huo in England, even with global warming. Therefore, when you find huo hearts as vital ingredients in spells copied in England between the 14th and 16th centuries, you are seeing another living fossil of ancient Egyptian tradition. All this however, is detail. It's more productive to establish the endearing techniques for western ritual magic, which first appear together in the magical papyri. I would propose that there are eight of these. First and most obvious are complicated magical rights, which unite actions, materials, and words. Second is an emphasis on words in foreign or unknown languages. Again, hence Abracadabra. Third is one on the purification of the magician before the right, including fasting, chastity and clean clothes. Fourth is an emphasis on the making of special equipment. For the right magic is uphill work among learned magicians. Uh, but uh, presumably you have leisure time on your hands to make your swords and wands and goblets and the other equipment required. Fifth is one on the selection of an appropriate time for the operation. I've already run through the classic love spell sequence. Sixth are measures to protect the magician against the forces raised. Uh, this is stuff you are trying at home folks as a learned magician. And if you are summering a really, really powerful deity or spirit, if this entity arrives in your living room, you better be in charge otherwise you toast. So magical defenses are essential. The seventh is a quest for a csor spirit to carry out. The magician's will in many ways, traditional ceremonial magic is just a glorified form of room service. And to have a supernatural handmaiden or butler, uh, forever on call costing you nothing except a bit of revocation to do whatever you want is the ultimate employer's dream. And the eighth characteristic is, you've probably guessed it, an eclectic and multicultural range of source material. It should be clear that all of these characteristics are by no means present in all works of ceremonial magic compiled between the fourth and the 19th centuries. Rather, there a list of actions and artifacts from which magicians could choose according to will tradition and what they could practically do, nor is there an equal provision of such material across that long period. Unsurprisingly, more magical texts survive as you go on from the later middle ages to towards the modern period. And nor does magic get steadily more sophisticated over time on the contrary, for example, the operations in Christian magical papyri from Egypt are generally less elaborate and less cosmopolitan than those in their pagan predecessors. The handbooks of magicians in Renaissance Europe were only as ornate and ambitious as those in Roman Egypt. Nonetheless, those Egyptian texts and those handbooks were still compiled by drawing upon the collection of techniques listed above, and so did all the subsequent European magical texts. It's also striking that just as the complex magic and those proprie developed in clear oppositions the values and laws of the Roman state. So it often survived as a self-conscious and explicit European counterculture, in many ways learned magic in the Middle ages and early modern periods. But like drugs in late modernity, uh, officially totally illegal, good people never touched them. But somehow everybody knew where to get it if you wanted it, and an awful lot of people consistently did. And there's something shamelessly in your face about a lot of the magician's persona in these texts. One of the most notorious magical handbooks of the later Middle Ages, the sworn book of Hano, was written as a direct response to a papal campaign to repress ceremonial magic. It claimed that the Pope and his cardinals were possessed by demons, and that the magicians were the true servants of God. Other grim wars insisted that they'd been dictated by an angel sent by the Almighty to instruct humanity, or that magic was not in itself inherently bad, but a neutral force which could be used for human benefit. This was a position, needless to say, directly counter to Christian orthodoxy as maintained throughout the medieval period. So magicians are constantly and consciously fighting back against orthodoxy. Moreover, just as some of the magical papyri had offered readers a chance to make a direct relationship with a deity, and the neo platonic art of JE was formed around just the same objective, meet the gods. Medieval Christians also used magic to this end clandestinely. Some of magical texts promised purchasers the Butte vision of God in his glory to readers who not only enacted the prescribed rights, but used in them some of the established liturgy of the church, while leading lives of exemplary Christian austerity and piety to make sure that God is in a good mood where you get to meet him. If these are the fundamentals of tradition from the fourth century to the 21st, it's worth asking again what particular ethnic and religious forms have subsequently contributed to it. And I would suggest three such contributions each one made by the major western faith traditions, the Abrahamic faiths. First, as others have suggested from Joshua Trachtenberg to Richard Keek heifer, the Jewish contribution was the stress on the invocation of angels as magical helpers and the power of the name or names of the one God. Both were rooted in ancient magic, the magical papyri having already embodied a full sense of the importance of enlisting spiritual assistance, and of knowing the true names of spirits and deities. Both were also, however, neatly dovetailed with major features of Judaism. Its interest in angelic beings. Its preoccupation with the power and sanctity of language rather than a visual imagery. And its intense monotheism. Neither of them was acceptable to orthodox Christianity ever, which condemned the invocation of angels as wrong and thought that the idea of special names, which compelled attention from the one true God detracted from his majesty. Nonetheless, medieval Christian magic eagerly laptop both. Second, I would follow David Penry in identifying the distinctive Islamic contribution as astral magic writes, design designed to harness the powers of heavenly bodies by drawing them down from the heavens into material objects to which Islam gave the Arabic name talismans. This tradition seems to have developed in Mesopotamia in the ninth century. That region was the heart of the Arab Empire with its capital at Baghdad. So Islam is going to develop in the Islamic world, it probably will develop there, but of course, it's right smack in the middle of ancient Mesopotamia, as it was with its intense preoccupation with astrology. And the powers of heavenly divinities Arabic astral magic, however, may also have drawn on ideas from Egypt where the magical papyri contained several recipes for charging material objects, especially rings with occult power. The Egyptian hermetic texts from the same period as the papyri made the sun, moon, and planets, the immediate agents of the all powerful divine creator, whatever its ultimate origin. There's no doubt that the Arabic tradition of astral magic was conveyed to Europe by a mass translation of Arabic text there in the 12th century. And again, European magicians just loved it. Third, I'd suggest that the distinctive Christian European edition has been geometric. Okay, I agree that sounds boring, but it gives us some of the classic instant recognition symbols of Western magic. And that's the use of the consecrated circle as the normal venue for a magical operation with special significance given to the four cardinal directions east, then south, then west, then north, and the identification of the pentagram, the five pointed star as the most potent symbol of magic. All of these figures undoubtedly had ancient roots. Magic circles appear in Assyrian and Babylonian rites of exorcism. Moreover, processions around the sacred space in a circle before using it were a regular feature of Egyptian religion from the opening of history. Nonetheless, circles feature only occasionally in actual ancient magic rights or stories about them, whether Mesopotamian, Egyptian or Jewish. And they're rare and early medieval handbooks of magic like the Anglo-Saxon, which are quite plentiful. Likewise, significance have been attached to the cardinal points of the compass since the dawn of history in Mesopotamia, when the kings of the Sumerian city states four and a half thousand years ago styled themselves lords of the four quarters. However, like the circle, the cardinal points only feature in a small minority of actual magical recipes in the ancient and medieval worlds in any European nor near Eastern culture. As for the pentagram, five pointed stars are found in ancient Egyptian Mesopotamian, Greek and Roman art, or on coins, and also in the early Middle Ages. But they have no single tradition of significance. In many contexts, they may just have been decorative. They have no particular association with magic. One ancient Greek satire claim. The followers of Pythagoras, uh, whom the writer was mocking, used the pentagram as a sign of recognition, meaning the wishing of health. But if this story is true, and it may be a satire, it doesn't prove the pentagram had no had any special association with magic in the ancient world. By contrast, as soon as the Western Europeans acquired complex ceremonial magic, which was in the 12th century, when they began a mass translation of Greek Hebrew, an Arabic texts, they showed a preference for the courted circle and the pentagram, the circle with cardinal points marked, became the classic setting for magical workings. And the five pointed star, the most potent symbol used by magicians. The circle now represented either a protection for magicians or a vessel for the power raised in them. And the quarters were the powerful gateways in the circle. The pentagram was credited above all with the power to control spirits and in particular, to control or banish demons. This belief got into popular culture as by the later Middle Ages. The pentagram is carved all over Christian Europe on houses cradles, bedsteads, and church porches as a protective device. It reflected the belief promoted by 12th century Christian intellectuals, that the human body was constructed on a base provided by the number five limbs, digits, and senses. If humans were made in the divine image, then this was the shape of God. It was supercharged by becoming associated with the five wounds of Christ as well. Likewise, the concept that the universe was based on a series of spheres, general from the 12th century onwards, may account for the interest among Christians in circles as units of magic. The courted circle and pentagram may be regarded as preoccupations of a distinctively western or Latin Christian tradition. There's no certain evidence as yet they're known in the Greek Christian, the Byzantine East. What may emerge from this sequence of suggestions is actually how small the European contribution to ritual magic was, even though some Europeans took it up with such enthusiasm in all centuries since the 12th, whatever the relative priority of Egypt th I've suggested, it's massive. This magic was essentially a product of the fertile crescent of the Near East, which has made three huge contributions to European views of the supernatural in successive waves. The first affected European paganism teaching European pagans to treat their goddesses gods as a squabbling and badly behaved family with individual and collective stories attached to its members. The second great gift was of course, Christianity as the dominant religious system of medieval and later Europe. The third was the provision of complex ritual magic as an ideology and practice compatible with most religions, including Christianity. At the same time, it represented a way of dealing with the cosmos, which was totally at odds with Christian Jewish and Islamic orthodoxy, and with ancient European tradition, despite which it has endeared to the present as a clandestine practice and underwent a notable revival in the West at the end of the 19th century, which still continues. And it seems that across Europe and the Near East, religion and magic have been bound up with each other. Whenever spirituality in general has gone through a period of intense creativity development and renewal, magic has entered another spurt of its history in that sense. Although the European tradition of a fundamental distinction between the two may well still have its utility, despite a clear overlap, the accompanying European tradition of an inherent hostility between them does not. The history of religion is bound up with that of magic. And to study the one is to make a contribution to the other, which is why I make my final suggestion of this talk, that the history of magic so long avoided by mainstream scholarship, and even now neglected as a totality, really matters to the understanding of western divinity. And that's why this evening you get a professor of divinity for the first time dealing with it. Ronald, you will be unsurprised to hear that. We have a lot of fantastic questions already on Slido. Um, the first of which comes from Janice, and it is, when did magic become just s slight of hand tricks? It's always been that way. Uh, but there's always been a distinction in ancient Egypt. There were conjures jugglers and they were famous as such. And just occasionally the two traditions nudged together. For example, in the talmuds, the early medieval collection of Jewish writing, it said that dealing in magic is bad. Leave it to rabbis. But dealing in stage magic is fine, providing you're not trying to pass it off as real magic And provided you're good enough, presumably. Yeah, it's, it's audience related. Right. But unfortunately, perhaps for the rabbi is so is real magic. Yes. In inverse quotes. So we also have a couple of questions about the methods. So some of the items on your Egyptian checklist. So I with, uh, apologies to our online, uh, questioners. I'm gonna condense some of those in the interest of time. Yep. The first one is, um, did any of the ancient magic include potions with which later magic becomes so preoccupied? Yes. Yes, it did. But only as an ingredient with other things. In other words, uh, you don't have a potion as the end game. A potion is associated with other objects and rituals and words. So the the animal vegetable mineral aspect that you mentioned in relation to the substances. Yeah, I mean the, the classic Egyptian papyrus spell really is something like, uh, take the skull of a baboon and write on it in ink taken from the blood of a black Ibis bird, the following character, and then speak the following conation. Right. So we also have a, a really great question, I think, um, from anonymous, um, specifically about the destruction of objects. So what do we know about that? And is there consistency over the eras that you've covered this evening around the destruction of objects in rituals, By whom? Oh, well, they don't specify, but for magical purposes, Uh, very, very seldom, uh, the, the, you've taken trouble and expense getting all this magical bricker back together, you rarely destroyed. The obvious thing you destroy is images of enemies. Mm-Hmm.<affirmative> or images representing disease. And in different forms since, uh, history began. Those are classic techniques of magical healing. You destroy something to take it out, but usually in magic, you are trying to create something to bring something about rather than to remove it. Right. And in terms of artifacts, you've got me thinking about Roman votive tablets. Yeah. Very much that fine line between religion and magic. It seems to me that with votive tablets, um, it's religion. If you're asking a deity for something nice to happen to you, it's magic. If you are asking, if you've written a curse down and you're asking for something terrible to happen to somebody else, You're spot on. Do we see that persist as well through time? Yes, we certainly do. Uh, you can ask, uh, right in Wales right down to the 18th century, there were cursing wells where you could go along to a holy well and write a plea to the saint or the spirit, uh, in charge or to the almighty at the holy well, to take out somebody who'd offended you, Presumably undercover of darkness. No, no. Or it was quite Openly done Openly and paying a fee to the person who looked after the well, who'd then affect the ritual for you. I Mean, there's a whole other conversation to be had about, you know, the, the condoning of magic despite its official prohibition. Yes. Although to the practitioners, that would not be magic. Of course. It's a yes, A judicial prayer, gosh. Right. A prayer for divine action. I'm very conscious that we have lots of very patient people in the audience. Do we have any questions from anyone here in the audience this evening, gentlemen and the third rose there? Thank you. Uh, thank you for your talk. It was fantastic. Um, I wanna know mainly, um, given that magic seems to be a, the offer it makes is a fundamentally practical one, do these things get this result? And given that, at least as far as I can tell, it also patently doesn't work. How did it maintain such high prestige in sophisticated size societies for so long? And I also just wonder if you know anything about voodoo. Well, the answer is that, uh, magic can appear to work, uh, quite a lot of the time. It's also tremendous therapy in that just for a lot of people, it seems, uh, a magician would listen to them and their problems. And that in itself was, was something worth having. Uh, but also there is, uh, an element of the uncanny in this. Uh, we know that, uh, there is a tremendous placebo effect in medicine, uh, which is medically authenticated mind over body, particularly in certain categories of ailment is very powerful. And there's stuff we simply don't understand. The 1950s, there's a famous case of an American anesthetist who saw somebody suffering from, uh, I theosis a horrific and rare skin ailment in which the skin naturally turns black and scaly and hard and painful, and the regular medics couldn't do anything for this man. But the anesthetist was a hypnotherapist, and so tried hypnosis on him, and the osis fell away from the whole of one arm and healthy skin regrew. And the anesthetist showed this to the regular medics, and they say, this is actually a miracle because in medical terms, there is no way this can happen. There's no mechanism. And the shocked anesthetist then tried to treat the mad again and nothing worked. And that is a classic case of the uncanny in action that is documented in medical records. So talking of the uncanny, we have actually had a, a specific question online, um, about the distinction between medicine and magic, but particularly in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, how distinguished are they? How much of there is an overlap? There's a, there's a considerable overlap, uh, because people do not know how the world works. Astrology is easy. When you see the moon move, the tides, heavens are controlling the earth. Believing in demons is easy if you don't have another word for viruses and basi, right? Beings that occupy your body and the night they're invisible and they mess you around. So there is a continuum, uh, between the two. Uh, we know that St. John's wart produces a tincture that, uh, fights depression. And medieval people knew that too. But they'd often hang the herb around your neck rather than make a texture, a tincture out of it, because they assume that the plant and the tincture had the same properties. Do we have any other questions from the audience? I think I saw, um, let's, goodness, let's come to the lady at the front here. Sorry, I I'm neglecting this side. Apologies. Okay, Thank you very much. Um, so obviously you kept referring to, um, Egypt and uh, uh, Greece and Rome. Uh, what was the impact of Celtic beliefs and Celtic magic and also other pagan beliefs such as Slavic in Eastern Europe, um, on the history of magic in Europe? The answer is there are huge magical traditions and all these places, but they are in the realm of what we'd call folk magic. That is simple charms and spells, which a lot of people would know and at which some people would be particularly adept. What you don't find in these cultures are the checklist of learned ceremonial magic, which I've run down a couple of slides there. These are an alien, an exotic, I think ultimately an Egyptian importation. Um, so we have another question online, which takes us very much to the modern day, I guess, but I would be interested in any historical intersections here as well. Why do you think that today witchcraft has a feminist section of practitioners? Because the witch is one of the very few independent images of female power, which traditionally European culture bequeathed to the present because for prehistoric reasons that there's a long explanation behind this. Most Europeans have thought that women are the more magical sex and therefore, witches, I using the term the negative sense of those who are going to employ magic for their own ends are likely to be women because they are those who just have the power in them, or as men have to learn magic. And therefore, because of this, the witch is, I think, a natural feminist symbol. So it's just, uh, another iteration, if you like, or another manifestation of the divine feminine that we see in established religions in the ancient world, but also survivals of it a little bit in Christianity. I don't think it's the divine feminine that'ss, uh, in witches. I think it's the empowered human. Oh, Okay. Uh, to what degree is medieval magic, sort of the domain of the, uh, sort of, uh, clerics, ecclesiastical people Learned? Ceremonial magic by definition is the magic of the elite because it depends on books on literacy, but a lot of it filters down, especially in towns and cities, to regular folk magicians who even if they can't read, have some of the, the learned ceremonial spells and conation taught to them. So it goes quite far down in society. But, uh, the, a lot of it is pushed by what I call the clerical underground dodgy clerics who are smart enough to do the religious stuff by day, but fancy, uh, pushing the spiritual envelope by night. And they network, they pass books to each other, so, and maintain the tradition generation by generation. Uh, it's actually a follow up question on the power, um, that was, um, invested in women. Um, and from what I learned is also because a lot of women knew how to use herbs and they knew how to cure people and Christianity didn't like them having that knowledge. But I've just, what I wanted to ask you, if you concern more about why it seems that magicians have a benign, um, image whilst witches have a really, Uh, involved, okay. Uh, the answer is this, um, it's a logical if, uh, very slippery distinction made by the elites who had to prosecute people that those, they increasingly labeled witches as the Middle Ages went on when witchcraft became more and more feared and produced the later witch hunts. Witches are people who make a pact with the devil and become the devil's servants worshiping him. This is irrespective of sex.'cause there are male witches as well learned magicians are under the illusion, the heretical illusion that they can control demons. They don't submit to Satan. They think they can actually round up some of Satan's ims and, uh, minor demons and turn them into servants of higher causes. But of course, any Orthodox Christian will say, this is a no no, no, not to be tried because it never works. They say, Now we're going to close with a question that's been asked online. It's a very personal question, but I'm gonna risk it anyway. So Professor Ton, do you believe in magic? I believe in the power of the human mind to accomplish all sorts of extraordinary things. That's a fantastic answer. Thank you very much indeed. Professor.