Traveling showmen

Posted on July 25, 2020 by Ruth

Dancing bears, sleight of hand tricks, the latest ballads, and comic skits: medieval Europe always had its traveling musicians, actors and acrobats. Their favorite gigs were at castles, where they were guaranteed a decent place to sleep (well, it was the stable, but okay). As towns grew, they performed there as well.

We call them minstrels, but the most common word at the time seems to be “jongleurs.” They often traveled together for safety on the roads and shared their skills to create new acts. The most serious musicians spent the Lent season in France at the annual convention, where new songs were shared.

We don’t have written accounts of the skits they put on. We can guess at what they included: perennials like slapstick and fart jokes, and simple stories like Robin Hood tales. A smart jongleur would have a variety of modes, suitable for the castle or the town.

Traveling showmen taught new songs, some suitable for casual singing, others long ballad stories. They were the radio; their songs were the pop music of the time. As paper became available, there was a side trade in song lyrics. First hand-copied, then printed, the songs were often single-sheet pages sold for a penny on the street by the entrepreneurs who also did the copying. We see this trade continuing into the 19th century and providing several characters to Dickens.

Jongleurs also became the first stand-up comics. It was one possible career for a university student who couldn’t afford to buy the degree at the end, and couldn’t get a nice tutoring gig. A good education enabled the stand-up comic to mimic and parody different classes of society. Again, we have no records of what they said. But when we get to the plays we do have, we’ll see some of them have witty and satirical lines that may have borrowed from this tradition.

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Liturgical drama

Posted on July 16, 2020 by Ruth

By the 900s, we know that Easter and Christmas liturgy was usually accompanied by simple acting by the monks. They didn’t think of it as a play, nor did they call it “ludus,” the normal Latin word for dramatic plays. They were just deepening the emotional content of the service to help worshipers experience the story fully.

Bishop Ethelwold of Winchester wrote the first account of how Easter drama was to be staged, so we know that this was done in England around 950. Obviously, there was probably much more of this than we have evidence for in writing, in other times and places.

Ethelwold directed that during the reading of the 3rd lesson, four monks were to slip out quietly and put on robes. They would stage a silent pageant when the reading described how the women who knew Jesus came looking for him at the tomb but found only an angel. The monks playing the women would have incense thuribles, while the angel held a palm. When the reading came to the angel’s question “Whom do you seek?” the monk playing the angel would chant the line, with the “women” chanting the reply “Jesus of Nazareth.” The angel chants, “Non est hic,” telling them not to seek the living among the dead, and the “women” would turn to the choir, singing “Alleluia.”

The angel had one more line: calling the women’s attention back, he would tell them “Venite et vidite locum,” come and see the place. At this dramatic moment, he lifted a veil from the box or niche that was stood for the actual tomb, and he showed them that it was now empty. A cross, wrapped in cloths, had been placed there during Friday night’s service, but now only the cloths remained. The cross itself had been removed in pre-dawn darkness. The “women” would take the cloths to the basilica’s central altar, singing “The Lord has risen from the dead,” and after this, the basilica would ring its bells.

This exchange was called a “trope.” Today, the word means a figure of speech or a recurring theme. It’s derived from Greek “tropos,” which means a turn (verb trepein, to turn). “Turn” came to signify a style or manner, so the basic meaning of “trope” is something like style or manner. But its early use is very specific. It refers to the notation of these extra lines, the exchange between characters, that was implied in the text but not stated in just that way. As time went by, many more tropes were added, not just the Easter “Quem quaeritis?”

This type of dramatic pageant continued to be staged all through the Middle Ages and probably on into modern times in places where the tradition was not interrupted by the Reformation. During the Reformation in England, many of the “sepulcher” boxes were destroyed, since this acting was viewed as idolatry. One of the sources I used for the entry in All Things Medieval was a registry of all undamaged or reparable sepulcher niches in England’s oldest churches.

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Latin drama used to teach Latin

Posted on July 12, 2020 by Ruth

Christianity went west and east during the latter years of the Roman Empire. Of course, its language going west was Latin, while its language traveling east was Greek. Priests and monks needed to read Latin sounds at the minimum, so that they could speak the liturgy. Education for priests varied until the middle of the medieval period; they learned through apprenticeship in many places, and how much they could actually understand Latin depended on the teacher. Monks, however, were taught to read, write and speak good Latin. As women’s convents grew next to some monasteries, they too kept the same standards of learning.

How best to teach monks and nuns in England or Germany to read and write in fluent Latin? After learning the basics, they needed to copy and study things that demonstrated everyday language. They read Pliny’s letters, a book of 2nd century anecdotes (Attic Nights), the geography of Caesar and Tacitus, and the plays of Terence. These plays came to have an outsize role in Latin study because they used simple, direct, conversational speech. Even St. Jerome, who made the definitive translation of the Bible into Latin, studied Terence.

Terence lived in the late 2nd century, when Latin was spreading into Europe with Roman Legions. His nickname was “the African,” and he appears to have been the educated slave of a Roman Senator, so the best guess is that he was at least part Berber from Libya, which was an integrated part of the Roman world. He must have been a prodigy, because he probably died when he was 25, traveling to Greece, but before that he wrote plays and was part of a literary salon with other famous writers.

I looked up and read a play by Terence, “The Mothers-in-Law.” It’s hard to imagine monks and nuns copying and studying this play, but they surely did. It opens with a situation: a newly-married couple has split up, the bride going back to live with her mother. The fathers blame the mothers for antagonizing or coddling the bride, but as gossip flies among the families, a friend who runs messages, and some other women, we learn that the bride has secretly given birth to a son at home. This fact is kept from the fathers, who keep guessing: perhaps the young husband is just returning to the “escort” he used to “keep”? They drag her on stage and she professes complete ignorance, but when they send her to talk to the bride and her mother, the truth comes out: the escort is wearing a ring that used to belong to the bride! How did she get it? Well, the bride was raped in a dark alley and the rapist took her ring. And guess who gave the same ring to the escort, prior to his wedding? The young husband! Why, good news then: the baby is his! We all rejoice!

We can only guess how much ambivalence Terence’s Rome had about this story; did they recognize the deep hypocrisy of the husband, did they wonder how the young wife could happily share life with her rapist? But there’s no question the material was shocking for a young nun to be copying out.

One nun did something about it. Hroswitha was a high-born, well-educated Saxon lady who entered the cloister in childhood and was mentored in literature by her Abbess, the niece of Emperor Otto I. Among her many poems and stories, she wrote several plays in imitation of Terence, but hers were about martyrs. They were also about love, even the same sensual love Terence wrote about, but they ended with pious deaths. In her most comic work, a prefect during the persecution of Diocletian tries to get three Christian girls into bed, imprisoning them in a kitchen. But God strikes him with blindness and he has a slapstick scene of embracing sooty pans instead of the girls. The comedy doesn’t prevent the three girls from being killed for their faith, but for Hroswitha, it was a happy ending.

Hroswitha’s plays were not intended to be staged. They were just reading material so that convents could leave sinful Terence on the shelf, teaching Latin while not bringing guilt into a nun’s mind. They aren’t a real starting point for medieval drama as such, but they show us that when Latin plays were not staged in public, they were still mainstream literary fare for the educated.

 

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May Dramas

Posted on July 10, 2020 by Ruth

May Day may have been an idea common to the Celts and the Germanics. It was Beltane to the Celts; I don’t think I know a name for a pagan Germanic day, other than just May Day. This day marked when the cattle could go out to pasture again, with the snow and mud gone, and some new grass. But it was a festival about the wild woods, not the cattle.

We can only speculate how it might have been during pagan times. Tacitus tells us that the Germanic tribes the Romans met had an idol that went about in a cattle-drawn wagon, from town to town, until it was immersed in a hidden secret lake. Could a ritual like this have inspired a festival for going deeper into the uncleared forest? The drama for May Day is about wild men living in the forest: what was that about originally?

In medieval times, England’s May Day was primarily a holiday for young people to gather wildflowers and walk in the forest. Girls in flower garlands and a May Pole on the green for dancing, what’s not to like? But this bowdlerized version covers the darker side of May Day: slipping off into the woods for illicit sex, just in time to conceive a crop of Christmas babies. August’s a great month for a shotgun wedding, don’t you think?

But by the High Middle Ages, May Day was also about amateur folk plays about wild men in the woods: specifically, Robin Hood. Now, Robin Hood seems to have been more like Batman than like Billy the Kid (in that Billy was real). His name emerged from a group of folk ballads about outlaws from the Norman “forest laws.” His character changed through the ages, adding complications as each age spruced him up for their values. May Day dramas about Robin wanted flowers and girls, to go with May Day, so “Marion” or “Marian” joined Little John and Friar Tuck in his cast.

Marian seems to be a blending of an older Celtic “May Queen” festival and the contemporary emphasis on the Virgin Mary, for whom she was named. She was a shepherdess in some versions, but as time went on, her status rose—as did Robin’s, until he was a nobleman in disguise, not just a yeoman with his longbow.

May Day plays were probably a combination of local productions and shows put on by traveling players. We have an early Robin and Marian play written in French from about 1282, though scholars are not sure it’s the same Robin and Marian. It emerged from the town of Arras, in France, where there was an especially strong theater tradition.

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The Mummers’ Story (such as it is)

Posted on July 6, 2020 by Ruth

We think that Mumming happened in other parts of early Germanic or Celtic Europe too, but it really hung on in England, so that’s where we go to study it. We only have written descriptions of Mumming scripts since the 18th century.

To study the story, we fall back on principles similar to principles of New Testament scholarship, because the problem is similar. In both cases, there are many copies of something, but the original is lost. You have to look at the many versions to work out what the original had looked like. You look for things that the versions have in common, things that make no sense (and therefore might be “corrected” in some versions, which would lose the original).

The versions all have in common a death, and a cure that brings the dead person back to life. They all have some kind of dance, most often including the sword used for the execution. The man who carries out the execution is virile, a champion. The victim is weak or a hated enemy. The script is a rhymed verse, and the players stop and collect money from the audience. Additionally, what all versions have in common is that they seem to incorporate change as a function of the story itself.

What did it originally look like? Perhaps at first it had a real victim, a captured enemy, and the warlord killed him with a sword to bless the spring. It might not have been so literal. Perhaps a man dressed as Tyr the Great Boar, lord of swords and fertility, mock-executed another man who represented farming (or something). But that victim was someone we needed! So perhaps a real shaman or someone dressed as one came in to raise the victim from the dead. And everyone rejoiced, giving gifts to the players (or perhaps just the shaman?). It was probably an early spring ritual, but it gradually became just the “folk drama” that could be done other times too.

In modern versions, the Narrator, who speaks in verse, is often Father Christmas. He calls out for a champion, and it’s usually St. George the Dragonslayer. The enemy became a Muslim during the Crusades, and by the 18th century, he was often “The Turk” with a turban. St. George and the Turk fight with swords, hopping and dancing. The Turk always falls, and he dies. The Narrator calls out for a Doctor! and a Doctor appears! he gives a cure to the Turk, who is restored to life. It’s likely that this has been the essential story for over 1000 years. the Turk’s being raised back to life makes no sense, so it’s probably original.

If someone wants to do a version with the basic roles relabeled to form some sort of satire, they can. Local groups go from pub to pub, putting on their little show while collecting cash in a can. Seen one Mummer story, seen them all? That’s the problem, how to freshen it up while keeping it the same.

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Early Non-Christian, Non-Roman, Non-Greek Spectacles

Posted on July 6, 2020 by Ruth

We know so little. Writing only came with Christianity, and some records of the past or of current pagan customs were jotted down at times, but it’s a wide study to find the bits. We can also see what persisted in European folk customs and make educated guesses.

We think Celtic religion had not only secret rites involving animal and human sacrifice, but that sometimes they included public show. Julius Caesar tells us that the original “Wicker Man” custom had real people stuffed inside the wicker. In a much less gory vein, the fall festival of Samhain seems to have included masks and faces blackened with ash, perhaps from the sacred bonfire, and people going door to door reciting verses or singing.

Early English country custom continued to have some kind of mock creature burnt in the fall, sometimes a straw man (the Harvest King), and of course in modern times, the “Guy,” who was made of straw and old clothes. The head from the straw man was sometimes cut off and kept for later use as a ball to kick around in the spring festival. So from all this, there seems to have been a custom of burning something symbolizing the old year, the summer, or something, with perhaps a parade of the mannequin first.

The Germanic side of English custom suggests that in the spring, an old ritual involved staging a rite that showed something like the old year being killed by the new, or the earth having been “killed” by winter and now returning to life. What we do know is that as early as we have any records, a ritual they called “mumming” staged a play in which someone was killed with a sword, and then brought back to life.

Celtic Beltane, the celebration of driving the cattle out to pasture, was around May 1. Bonfires were part of Beltane, but so was what’s now called a “pantomime horse.” The Celts seem to have used a horse’s skull and a white sheet to costume a man to be the “White Horse.” Medieval records of mummers show some of them with mock animal-heads on their own heads, such as donkeys or dogs.

The Mummers’ Play tradition was extremely strong in England, so much that it persisted all through the Middle Ages and into the present. Old-style Mummers still act out the traditional story, but the custom has also transitioned to stage productions called Pantomimes, or Panto for short. These have little to do with the traditional story, but they retain some of its spirit or style.

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Origins of Medieval European Theater

Posted on July 6, 2020 by Ruth

Medieval Europe was the product of three branches of Indo-European culture colliding and blending. I’ve sometimes defined it as the time it took for the Barbarians who felled Rome to learn and surpass Rome’s greatness (at least in some ways). In France and England, a third branch was involved: the Celts, who were perhaps the first emigration of Indo-Europeans, settling along the Atlantic coast.

Medieval theater is distinguished by its blend of Latin and native folk traditions, returned in new form to the common people. We know how medieval theater ended, because it was the precursor to Shakespeare. But where did it start?

Both the Celts and the Germans had elements of their old religion that involved costumes and acting. They had a seasonal repertoire as religious holidays came with seasonal events. We don’t know much about it, since writing only came with the Latins. More about what we do know, next.

Greek and Roman theater also traced some seasonal religious holidays; the great plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus were written for festivals honoring Bacchus, god of wine (also called Dionysus). There were four Bacchanalia festivals that may have been held before the golden age of Athens, but they certainly were being held from the 500s BC, forward. Rome adopted them, too.

Some of the Bacchanalia did not involve public theater, but instead had secret rites and drinking festivals. But the Great Festival was the one we focus on, in which tragedies and comedies were staged. The Greek dramatic tradition was picked up and carried on by Rome, until finally Rome’s culture died off under pressure of Barbarian and Muslim invasions.

We see the same elements in all four cultures: seasonal religious festivals with secret rites that nobody wrote down for us modern Peeping Toms, and often with rites acted out dramatically, or with fully staged public drama. Northern Europe had no amphitheaters apart from the few Roman ones, but there’s no question that northern pagan plays were public, mostly repeated every year the same, but eventually with a tradition of changes.

In this series, we’ll start with the northern non-Christian drama customs, then go back to late Classical Latin plays and the role they played in shaping European intellectual life. Then we’ll move to the drama created by and for the church, and eventually to the publicly staged plays that blended elements from all of these branches and began developing ways to break the 4th wall and create special effects, things we’re still interested in today.

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Occult magic

Posted on February 13, 2020 by Ruth

Obviously, the origin of “occult” magic was the pre-Christian practice of calling directly on the old gods with prayers and charms. In a sense, the “occult” stage of magic in the medieval period represents a time in which the old gods were no longer relevant and the worldview of the magicians was entirely Christian. The Bible stated that prayers to God might or might not prevail, but faith to keep believing when things ran against your interests was too much to ask of some. These people wanted a way to make things turn out right: heal the sick, stop the drought, win back love. Natural magic went only so far. When the outcome counted most, it was time to turn to something forbidden that really worked.

That’s always been the main pitch for occult magic: hey, it works. You may not approve of using blood to call on spirits, but if you really want your child’s fever to break, get off your high horse and find someone who knows the ritual. It’s hard to believe that it really always worked; it probably didn’t. But since it was not used routinely, there was no averaging of results. Anything that we turn to in an extremity usually seems more effective.

The prevailing charms we read about were to induce love or pregnancy, or to inflict death on an enemy. For saving life in times of sickness, or for carrying a baby to term, occult magic’s boundary with natural magic—that is, early science—was shaky. For inflicting death for revenge, or to steal a man’s affection from another woman, the boundary was quite clear. This type of magic was a sin, even in the eyes of those who sought it. We read of some using wax images of their victims, which of course was right in line with natural magic’s principle of “like affects like,” but in an aggressive way. Similarly, a knife stuck into the wooden wall of a dairy barn could resemble the cow’s teat and therefore steal milk by magic.

Another type of medieval magic was the practice of divination: using objects and events to tell the future. Of course, this practice went way back into antiquity. Specialists in divination used to tell the future by seeing omens in flocks of birds, or in the entrails oozing out of a dead animal. Medieval diviners listened to thunder and bird calls. There were also significant patterns in oil or water, especially when it was holy and placed on someone’s fingernail. We have some vestiges of medieval divination that survive in customs of divining whether an unborn baby is male or female. Have you heard that your wedding ring, suspended on a red thread, will swing one or another direction based on the baby’s sex? Astrology was also part of divination, since the thunder meant something different on an “Egyptian Day” of bad luck or under certain signs. This was probably high-class divination for the rich, since it involved some learning.

The worst kind of magic was necromancy, and here we have another root of modern fantasy about magic. Necromancy was the fancy-pants college boy among other magic branches; it was not your old herb-woman’s charm or the wandering divination quack’s pronouncements for a penny. Necromancy was theology, turned inside out. It required Latin and books. It was made up of rituals and prayers done in a very wrong way.

Basically, there were two career paths for failed university students: stand-up comic and necromancer. All that education could lend itself to some thigh-slapping mimicry and satire, and castles were paying for that. But it could also bring in much higher fees if it were turned to support the desires of wealthy broken hearts or vengeful siblings. Necromancers did all the stuff we see in vampire movies: they had hoary old books, they drew circles and lit candles, they recited prayers backwards. They were more likely to have read the esoteric alchemists, too, so they might peddle “secrets” that could make the magic more powerful. They could use demons’ names or even invert the exorcism rites to call, not expel, demons. Some of this material came from orthodox Christian books and manuals that were available in any cathedral town, and could be invented by any priest who wanted to slip off the path of truth. Other material was specialized and not well known.

The official hierarchy was against occult magic. We have a decree of Charlemagne that anyone found practicing sorcery would become a slave on an estate owned by the church. Much of what we know about daily practice of occult magic comes from the church’s manuals for priests that listed sins with suggested penances. We also have records of the Inquisition among the Cathars in southern France. This Inquisition was more of a forensic investigation and mass-scale interview program than a witch-burning spree. They asked the peasants if they knew anyone who practiced magic, then investigated these reports. The church itself did not condemn witches to death, but imposed penance on them. Local barons and kings, however, often took it a step farther.

Before the 14th century, there were not many trials of witches. Most of the records we have (outside of the Cathar region) are about high-profile cases. One Frankish king died suddenly, while another remained childless, and people suspected the malign hand of dark magic in both cases. The Templar Knights were accused of witchcraft, and that was one of the chief charges used to condemn its last leaders to death in 1314.

This all changed after the Black Death years. When half the population is suddenly dead, the surviving half becomes very interested in life after death, contacting the dead, and influencing life and death. Immediately after the plague ended, most areas experienced a time of great sexual freedom. It seemed like the old order was dead, and they also needed to repopulate! In this context, there was a great demand for charms to use against the fathers of babies who had absconded or chosen a different baby-mother. That’s one way that the female form of the “witch” became prevalent. Men were the victims, women were controlling them. In one charming anecdote, a witch supposedly charmed away men’s penises if they abandoned the girl, and then she kept them in a box. They were still alive and could be returned for a fee, or for repentance. (What did the witch feed them? Guess.)

The old medieval view had been that spiritual things were for others, especially for the monasteries. The priests and monks prayed, while the rest of us farmed. But after the plague years, and during repeat visitations of the plague, the lay people wanted to participate in spiritual things. Orders of Friars preached to the common people, and educated people began owning and reading the Bible in Latin or Greek. On the other side, the intense interest in spirits and the dead was also turned in the occult direction. Everything about magic became more developed and common. In 1431, the English accusation that Joan of Arc was a ‘witch,” with her public burning, made witchcraft even more famous, but that’s near the end of the medieval period. Most of the witch-hunts we think of as medieval were actually from the Renaissance-Reformation period, when chronic war and charges of heresy made executions seem appropriate. The peak of witchcraft trials, at Salem, were in the 1690s, 250 years after the official close of the Middle Ages.

 

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Astrology and alchemy: magic as the mother of science

Posted on February 12, 2020 by Ruth

Astrology and alchemy were the two medieval magical sciences, but both led to real science. We have a number of mathematical and scientific words that start with “A” because they are from Arabic’s definite article “al.” Astrology, of course, is of Greek derivation: the study of the stars. Alchemy is an odd blended word, since Arabic “al” prefaces a Greek word, “chemia.” (The Greek word is obscure, with some suggesting it’s from Egyptian “kemet,” black earth, although there’s a similar native word for combining things.)

Astrology came to us from Arabic sources, despite its Greek name. People had tracked the stars since our earliest written records (Babylonian and Egyptian), but the new Arabic “science” consisted of working out how the stars did natural magic, not just where they would be an hour from now. Astrology meant everything about the stars, though: their positions, how to use them for navigation, how to tell time, and how to avoid unlucky constellations.

On the scientific side, a Greek device for tracking star positions was much improved to create the Arabic astrolabe. It was made of brass and consisted of several flat plates and some arms and pointers. It divided the day/night time period into 24 units before mechanical clocks were in use. Most astrolabes were marked in Arabic, so most science students had to learn at least some Arabic, the way students today must learn English. Many of our modern star names are either Persian or Arabic, or some garbled medieval version of a name that used to be Persian or Arabic, probably written into Latin letters during those years.

On the magic side, they believed strongly that stars and planets looked down on earth and exerted influences, good and malign. The stars were not good or evil, they just took part in a celestial weather system that wise men took into account, just as they might not start a journey in storm season. The most scientific European king, Frederick II of Germany, paid a royal astrologer to give him reports on the influence of the stars! The astrologer may well have also kept an observatory with accurate records of stars’ time of rising. Frederick II would have been astonished to learn that his descendants would consider astrology superstition. The separation of astronomy and astrology came about mainly after the Galilean-Copernican revolution that transferred the stars from a “fixed sphere” with the earth at its center to the universe we envision today, in which our sun is merely one of trillions of other stars.

Alchemy began as an Arabic project to translate some Greek philosophy; we know that the first Abbasid Caliphs who built Baghdad provided a generous budget to translate all of the world’s literature into Arabic, which was a fairly new written script. Some of the philosophy came from mystical sects like the Hermetics and Gnostics, who pondered the unity of all matter and spirit, and things like that. The translators became interested and wrote their own books, fusing these Greek ideas with Muslim monotheistic theology. In Baghdad’s center of learning, alchemists not only suggested ways that matter and spirit interacted, but also experimented with how specific forms of matter, such as spices or metals, interacted.

In 1144, an Englishman named Robert translated some important scientific texts into Latin. He was living and working in Spain, where Arabic books flowed freely, on the frontier of the Latin-scholarship region of the north. He translated both al-Khwarismi’s book about mathematics and an important alchemical text by Jabir ibn Hayyan, a doctor and philosopher. Jabir’s works were deliberately written in an obscure way, so that your best shot at understanding him was to have been his student, that is, to learn his code. Reading them years later in Latin, they were certainly mysterious enough.

Yet Jabir’s works mixed esoteric mysteries with basic scientific advances, such as basic classification of substances. He explained how to extract an inorganic substance, like ammonia, from an organic one, like urine, using another chemical agent. Europe already had a layer of budding chemists in its art industry, since mixing paint was a type of experiment. Perhaps leaning on Jabir’s work in Latin, European artists extracted chemicals by exposing metals to ammonia, producing salts that made uniquely strong and stable blues and greens.

During the 12th century, there was a boom of translation into Latin from Arabic. It’s when we received Ptolemy, Euclid, and much of Aristotle back into Western knowledge. With the fall of Rome and the destruction of Alexandria’s library, the only Greek texts that came back to us had either been stored successfully in Constantinople or sold to Baghdad for translation. The medieval time was a succession of book transfers just in time, as each leading city was crushed by a conqueror and its library burnt or scattered.

Two leading European scholars wrote prominent encyclopedias or commentaries on the new knowledge bases. Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon, who were Dominican and Franciscan friars, both wrote books that were, in turn, copied and distributed around Northern Europe. Bacon composed a giant textbook at the Pope’s request, so that European universities would have the most up to date scientific discoveries.

The esoteric spiritualism of these early texts came to dominate the tone of early European alchemy. One could only learn their secrets by studying long hours without divulging the esoteric, secret knowledge. We can see both the magical wizard legends and modern chemistry developing: the initiated practiced combining substances, trying to purify both the soul and gold. Man could learn how the universe was put together while uniting mankind with God’s truth.

Meanwhile, mineral deposits were found in Hungary and Germany that began to change industrial history. Alchemists had a real role to play there, working out how to use new minerals in alloys or to purify other minerals from their natural state. Gunpowder began to be used in Europe around 1350, and then the arms race was on. Every king wanted to produce the metals and chemicals needed to create stronger and better firearms. Making gunpowder was itself a skilled art of alchemy, since each element had to be made from other materials and then combined just right. The charcoal in it, for example, was often made from obscure plants like grapevines, not from the sturdy oaks used in iron-making. Why grapevine charcoal? It was a mystery of natural magic.

And so chemistry began to pull away from alchemy as it moved in a pragmatic direction. Pure alchemy continued to exist as a sort of philosophical blend of magic and chemistry. Its basis in esoteric mysteries of the soul kept some focused on higher goals, often in the purifying soul/or/gold direction. One of its famous searches was for the “Philosopher’s Stone,” which could transform one thing into another, like a Google Translate of matter. We get our word “elixir” from this search: like alchemy, it’s a Greek word borrowed into Arabic, so it’s el-ixir (kserion, in Greek). Legends and rumors flew about saying that Albertus Magnus or Roger Bacon had discovered the Philopher’s Stone but had encoded the knowledge in a mystical text. The elixir, if it existed, could bring life to the dead or it could translate one substance of no value into another of great value. From this, of course, we get the lasting modern rumor that alchemy was the practice of turning lead into gold.

 

 

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Medieval principles of magic

Posted on December 8, 2019 by Ruth

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.

  1. “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.
  2. “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.
  3. “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.”
  4. “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.
  5. “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.
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