As discussed in earlier entries, natural magic and “magical” magic were very much blurred in early times, when every principle of nature seemed like magic. Magnetic stones were magic, and so was garlic’s power against infections. The stars had magic as they influenced the world: after all, the moon controlled tides, so why might not Jupiter control destiny? It was all one. Only with time and the gradual post-medieval development of science did the two untangle. Before 1500, alchemy and chemistry were the same, and so were astrology and astronomy.
One way that we can distinguish “natural magic” from what we’d now consider scientific property is that the basic principles of magic were not what we recognize as science. We know that something like garlic fights infection because it has some compounds in the presence of which bacteria in a petri dish dies. Sometimes we can explain it one step further, sometimes we can’t. But we are always looking for an internal, atom-based explanation that we consider scientific. Even when we can’t explain something, we consider it scientific if it’s replicable: can someone else do this 50 times and get the same result? And was the result greater than chance? Did anything else influence the results?
But natural magic worked on entirely different principles. To the people then, these seemed “scientific.” There must have been some natural skeptics, but skepticism was not taught in school or discussed in public forums. So most people bought in. The Four Humors framework was a kind of natural magic that separated everything by temperature and wetness, the way we separate things by gas-liquid-solid states. Reasoning from inside that framework, they could form very logical links between pepper and fever.
- “Like cures like, or sometimes, unlike.” The shape of a plant suggested which organ it could cure, or the “hair of the dog that bit you” would literally be able to cure the infection caused by the bite. A preparation including the body part of an animal that was the same part you were afflicted in could cure it, too. This belief is found all over the world; Michael Ondaatje reports that in Sri Lankan traditional medicine, making a child eat the tongue of a certain lizard would cure the child of being shy and tongue-tied. Many, many herbs were prescribed on this basis: the leaf or flower or seed looked like something in the condition.
- “Herbs or animal parts must be obtained under the right conditions.” Some things had to be picked at dawn, others at midnight. Sometimes it mattered not to speak for hours prior to picking or administering it. Sometimes it mattered that the herbalist or the patient did not have sex for a period of time. There was a very strong prohibition against cutting herbs with an iron knife, and it doesn’t seem to have been a consideration of how the element Fe interacts with the compounds. Rather, it was an echo of the Bronze Age, when iron was the new metal on the block.
- “Letters are powerful.” This feeling seems to be common to any newly literate society, since literacy begins with the elite who have special uses for letters. We call Egypt’s letters “hieroglyphs” because they were the letters used by priests (hiero-). Ordinary people often see these letters only during ceremonies, or when buying written charms. Coptic writing came about first when the Egyptian priests realized nobody could read/purchase their charms unless they used Greek letters. In Norse society, runes remained the letters of magical writing for a long time, and especially when Latin letters quickly moved from priestly use to writing the vulgar tongue to send messages. So in medieval European magic, both runes and Latin letters used like runes were key parts of magic. A medical recipe might direct the preparer to stir the herbs only with a stick that had “MATTHEW MARK LUKE JOHN” carved on it. Another form of letters as magic was in making a square of letters, sort of a Sudoku-like chart that could be read in any direction. We would see it as nonsense, but they saw it as powerful because even moving in the wrong direction, the reader could produce a “word.”
- “Spoken words as charms are powerful.” Incantations in the medieval period usually involved Latin, both real and fake. Our idea that you can summon a demon with Latin comes straight from that source, though the medievals were not into demon-summoning. You saw in some of the charms in the Lacnunga and Bald’s Leechbook that charms could also be stories about Jesus or the saints; the story had to be told just so, and it often had some real and fake Latin to close it out. Muslim charms, by contrast, were only passages from the Quran.
- “Things can transfer power or blessing if you touch them.” We moderns believe that heat and an electrical shock can be transferred by touching some things, but nothing else. If you touch Hitler’s shoe, you do not become evil. But that’s not how the ancient world saw it at all. Holiness and evil were inherent in the materials, and you could get them by touch or proximity. In magic, this meant the use of amulets, little prepared objects that you carried on your person. The pre-Christian North Germans (including the Franks, in earlier centuries) had used a lot of amulets for the gods: Wodin, Thor, Tiu, Frey, and so on. Thor’s iron hammers can be found in many archeological sites. Iron was often part of an amulet, even if it wasn’t Thor’s hammer: the most obvious baptized version of the hammer would be an iron cross, or an iron nail said to be used on Jesus’ cross. Amulets tended to be very conservative and more often still used pagan forms than Christian ones, which may be part of why the Church elevated relics—clearly not pagan, but filling the same niche—-so prominently. The amulets that persist even into our time are the rabbit’s foot and the iron horseshoe, although we no longer believe that coral protects against lightning.