magic

magic During its long history as a European and Western concept, magic has had two principal meanings. (Its use as a label to describe non-European and non-Western beliefs and practices has been seriously misleading and is now usually avoided.) Firstly, it has signified the pursuit by adepts of a highly elevated and esoteric form of wisdom based on the perceived presence in the world of mystical patterns and intelligences, possessing real efficacy in nature and in human affairs. Secondly, it has been applied as a term of disapproval by theologians and other intellectuals and professionals wishing to condemn various popular practices and techniques because of their perceived inefficacy in nature and human affairs. In the first context, important from antiquity down to the high Renaissance, magic was magia, the highest form of (natural) philosophy; in the second, important from medieval times through to the nineteenth century, it was tantamount to superstition.

In magia the human body, as material substance, was something to be transcended. Even when the Renaissance Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino talked about the health of the scholar he meant to refer to the state of his spiritus. Nevertheless, in this tradition man was thought of as a microcosm and the proportions and harmony of his body were therefore assumed to resemble those of the universe. Hence the well-known depictions of the human frame with the arms and legs outstretched to meet the circumference of a perfect circle. Another Renaissance magus, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, wrote that every part of the human body corresponded to ‘some sign, some star, some intelligence, some divine name.’ This tied medicine closely to the practice of astrology, with body parts linked to the various zodiacal signs. By correspondence too the hand or face might indicate the whole person, providing the basis for palmistry and physiognomy. A further derivation from magia was natural magic, the study of nature's most hidden and secret processes. Among the ‘occult qualities’ that, in medieval and early modern medicine, were thought to govern the workings of the body, were those to do with the spread of contagions, the effects of poisons and their antidotes, the properties of narcotics, the behaviour of allergies, and the relief of ailments by purgatives. Many diseases were thought to have ‘occult’ causes, and many other aspects of the body's behaviour could be explained in terms of the appetitive aspects of natural action known as ‘sympathies’ and ‘antipathies’. The doctrine of ‘signatures’ also provided the physician with magical remedies — substances derived from plants and minerals that had their properties and uses stamped on them by heavenly influence. In all these various contexts, however, the magical aspects of the human body and of medical practice were thought of in what were then regarded as naturalistic terms — as part of the workings of nature. Thus, for a practitioner like Paracelsus, magic represented the highest level of medical efficacy.

This was not the case with the ‘magic’ condemned by disapproving intellectuals and professionals faced with the vast array of traditional ‘folk’ practices to do with healing, protecting, and preserving the body (many of which Paracelsus himself admired). The practitioners concerned presumably did think that they worked in a straightforward causal way: that they were not magical at all, but were simply techniques. But from the time of St Augustine onwards it was usual for them to be dismissed as having no natural efficacy. As long as such judgements were tied to religion, this type of magic remained irreligious, even demonic; when they were secularized, it became bad science or just foolishness. A great many types of popular diagnosis and treatment fell into this category, as well as traditional notions of how the body worked, how it might be harmed and how that harm might be avoided. Typical instances are diagnosis by measuring a person's belt or girdle; healing by charms or other forms of words or by symbols (especially the misuse of religious words or symbols); healing by wearing amulets; the belief in the ‘evil eye’ and in illness by bewitchment or by being touched; the attribution of various powers to body parts or substances (notably blood and semen); many practices to do with determining the sex of a child during conception; the opening of chests or doors to relieve labour pains; and the curing of a wound by treating the weapon that inflicted it. Such practices were popular among all social groups in pre-modern times; it was religious doctrine, then scientific orthodoxy, together with the professional and institutional interests these served, that deemed that they should be disallowed as spurious. In this sense too, the magic of the human body has been culturally constructed, there being nothing in our attitudes to it or ways of dealing with it that is inherently magical.

Stuart Clark

Bibliography

Thomas, K. V. (1971). Religion and the decline of magic, chapter 7. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.
Wilson, S. (2000). The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-Modern Europe, parts II–III. Hambledon and London, London.