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Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England

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Indeed the debate over magic was often a class issue. This is especially true of witchcraft (as Reginald Scot put it, the Pope ‘canonizeth the rich for saints and banneth the poor for witches’). When it came to accusations of witchcraft, Thomas makes the intriguing observation that, paradoxically, ‘it tended to be the witch who was morally in the right and the victim who was in the wrong’. Victims of witchcraft, in other words, often lodged formal complaints in situations where they were feeling guilty about something and considered that in some sense they'd had it coming. Thomas heavily footnotes his sources, and this is wonderful. Additionally, he disabuses or challenges the beliefs we have today about some of the beliefs current in Tudor or Stuart times. This is particularly helpful when considering facts about Shakespeare, witches, and people in general.

What is the difference between religion and magic, anyway? It's not easy, even for believers, to give a satisfying answer. Theologians liked to say that prayers and religious ceremonies, unlike spells, were ‘propitiatory, not constraining’ – one asked god for help, one did not compel him to act in a certain way. But this was a distinction made by the educated thinkers at the top: for ordinary people (much of the clergy not excluded) it just didn't exist. So if not science, might we turn to other forms of knowledge to explain the ‘decline’ of magic? Perhaps not. It’s one of the arguments of Hunter’s book that “the Enlightenment did not reject magic for good reasons but for bad ones” (p. vii). Hunter muses over a situation in which “people just made up their minds and then grasped at arguments to substantiate their preconceived ideas”. “It is almost as if intellectual change does not really occur through argument at all” (p. 46). Hunter’s reflections seem to dovetail with social science research that’s grappling with post-truth politics. This research has suggested that, despite what we might like to think, people change their minds for the ‘wrong’ reasons all the time. It seems ‘bare facts’ are not enough to persuade the vaccine hesitant , for example. Alex Ryrie’s Unbelievers (2019) takes these insights to the history of atheism, arguing that people believe what they believe not as a result of a chain of reasoning, but as a consequence of emotional responses to lived realities.

By comparison, Keith Thomas is not afraid to roll around in the muddy peasantry. In Religion and the Decline of Magic, Thomas attempts to construct the changing belief systems of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It’s a thankless task. And frankly reading his book is a little thankless too. An interesting and quite hefty volume dealing with the various magical beliefs during the stated centuries in England - although the author does contrast the situation then with that in the middle ages - describing the tensions between them and the established church, and the change in the strength of those beliefs over time, especially with the effect of the Reformation and later Civil War. He makes a good case that in the middle ages, the church had its own "magic" in the form of rituals, Latin prayers, holy water, etc, which people could have confidence in when these were deployed against negative magic such as that of bad witches. In the later period, with all these swept away, the only remedy the church could offer was fasting and prayer, which led people to look more to alternative means of protection such as the services of cunning/wise men and women, and astrologers. Magic, prophecy, witchcraft and astrology – the outmoded, discredited, untenable intellectual debris of a former era; so one would think, but during the past half century in particular, there has been a recrudescence of interest in each of these, and as for religion, it hardly needs me to draw the reader’s attention to the revival of its poisonous fanaticism across the globe. In the eighteenth century, for example, physicians finally ceased to regard epilepsy as supernatural, although they had not yet learned to understand it in any other way. But they now grasped that the problem was a technical one, open to human investigation, whereas a hundred years earlier, as a contemporary remarked, people were 'apt to make everything a supernatural work which they do not understand'. The change was less a matter of positive technical progress than of an expectation of greater progress in the future. Men became more prepared to combine impotence in the face of current misfortune with the faith that a technical solution would one day be found, much in the spirit in which we regard cancer today. (p 790)

An interesting popular historical treatise. I’m not rating it however as I only dipped in and out of the book upon finding it wasn’t quite what I was after. My fault, I emphasise, not the authors. A similar process (not, however, discussed here) can be seen in the New Light found in Quakerism and in the Scottish and Ulster Presbyterianism of the later seventeenth century, but which persisted into the nineteenth century. Here God revealed himself centrally in the indwelling “Light” of Conscience and Reason found in the human heart. It was a view that gave its name to the “Enlightenment”. Unfortunately for religion, it became possible to see Reason and Conscience as entirely human faculties, and forget they were supposed to be divine ones.Whereas beliefs relating to these matters during the period in question – a period of great social, political and intellectual upheaval – were far from uniform, towards its end in particular, the beliefs of the educated elite had diverged greatly from those still adhered to by the uneducated mass of the people. By 1700, Aristotelian scholasticism, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism and the attendant paraphernalia of beliefs in astrology, occult forces and mystical correspondences had largely been consigned to the intellectual fringes, where they have since remained, supplanted by the rationalistic natural philosophy. Advances in science, technology and – perhaps surprisingly, insurance – served as the solvents in the dissolution of the old beliefs, which still lingered on in the remoter rural communities into the nineteenth century. By the later period, however, the use and belief in such ritual means had much diminished in favour of rational, mechanical, and more strictly practical means, informed – at least in principle - by careful observation, experimentation and by “trial and error”. Belief in the danger of witchcraft and sorcery had similarly diminished. This shift was never total, however, but a matter of emphasis. In the sixteenth and earlier centuries, plenty of rationality had co-existed with magic and religious ritual. Conversely, ritual practices have persisted, despite the pre-eminence of science and rational technology. Thomas goes into considerable detail laying out the influences of Church teachings on demonology, religious despair, possession and the like, and the effect of these on ideas about and belief in witchcraft. He builds a convincing case for the relationship of these two bodies of beliefs, but unfortunately does not explain why this topic remains important in light of his earlier assertion that the role of the demonic in witchcraft was a later and less influential addition to concern with maleficium. Even after this religious exposition he adds again, "Witchcraft prosecution on England did not need the stimulus of religious zeal," but a paragraph later conversely concludes that "religious beliefs were a necessary pre-condition of the prosecutions."

Keith Thomas’s justly acclaimed book tells of the decline of medieval styles of religion and magic and of the rise of secular thought. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, he shows a shift in emphasis between two different ways of dealing with life’s problems. In the earlier period, there was a heavy emphasis upon the use of magic and what Thomas calls the “magical” aspects of religious ritual. To cure illness, to win a lover, to foretell the future, individuals characteristically employed charms, amulets, rituals and the like. Conversely, it was often assumed that misfortune came from the animosity of sorcerers or witches who used similar means to bring afflictions. The poor in particular might use sorcery or witchcraft when the well-heeled neglected their obligation to give them alms or other assistance. And the relatively well-to-do might attribute their misfortunes to an impoverished crone whom, they might suspect, they had inadvertently failed to assist. Religion & the Decline of Magic is Keith Thomas's classic history of the magical beliefs held by people on every level of English society in the 16th and 17th centuries and how these beliefs were a part of the religious and scientific assumptions of the time. It is not only a major historical and religious work, but a thoroughly enjoyable book filled with fascinating facts and original insights into an area of human nature that remains controversial today- the belief in the supernatural that still continues in the modern worldThe author apologises for being fairly superficial with his publication, intending it to be a popular exposition. But one historian’s superficiality can be a lay reader’s in-depth history, it seems! The author usually supports, often with several referenced examples, any statements he’s trying to make. So, at least for me, it came across as a more academic work than I wanted. I just dipped in and out of various well labelled chapters in the end, skipping what seemed to me an over emphasis of the points being made. What’s crazy is that it worked. People gave money to the poor and thieves succumbed to the pressure of mystical examination. Even more radically the book suggests magic ‘may have provided as effective a therapy for diseases of the mind as anything available today’. Authors of popular history often concern themselves with the main events: discoveries and dictatorships, the Henry VIIIs and Alexander the Greats. As readers we enjoy watching the drama unfold on the global stage. But what about life beyond the spotlight? He starts by setting the context of that environment--disease was common, crops and financial survival uncertain, societal safeguards for the poor few, and geographic and class boundaries close and seldom crossed, natural disasters like fire and flood seemingly unpreventable, unpredictable, and capricious. The 16h and 17th centuries of his scope encompassed the bubonic plague, the great London fire (and many disastrous fires on smaller scales in other cities), short and often brutal lifespans fraught with pain and danger from childbirth. The Catholic church before the Reformation offered incantations in the form of prayer, talismans in the form of holy relics of the saints, and magic in the form of transubstantiation during Communion and exorcism at infant baptisms (to remove the demon of original sin from the unbaptized newborn). From there, despite legal restrictions and church sanctions, it was a small step in the mind and life of the average layman to the use of Medical practitioners had built up an elaborate theoretical edifice, but it was of little use in practice, and even if it had been, poor people relied on the cheap and locally available services of herbalists and wise women. Every childbirth brought a woman to a liminal state, poised between this world and the next; the midwives who attended her were (alas for feminist sentimentality) often dirty, cruel, and useless. There was nothing to buffer the individual from fatal or life-changing disaster. There was no insurance. There was no compensation. Sudden death could whisk you before God for his eternal judgment, without any chance of confession and forgiveness; hell gaped, its torments graphically illustrated for you, in color, on the walls of your parish church.

Laura Sangha, ‘The Social, Personal, and Spiritual Dynamics of Ghost Stories in Early Modern England’, Historical Journal 63/2 (2020): 339–59. In this fascinating and detailed book, Keith Thomas shows how magic, like the medieval Church, offered an explanation for misfortune and a means of redress in times of adversity. The supernatural thus had its own practical utility in daily life. Some forms of magic were challenged by the Protestant Reformation, but only with the increased search for scientific explanation of the universe did the English people begin to abandon their recourse to the supernatural.

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Science and technology have made us less vulnerable to some of the hazards which confronted the people of the past. Yet Religion and the Decline of Magic concludes that "if magic is defined as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones are not available, then urn:lcp:religiondeclineo0000thom:epub:35483696-8499-4fe0-8947-fcbc7040e215 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier religiondeclineo0000thom Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t5w76t75d Invoice 1652 Isbn 0684106027 Francis Hutchinson, An Historical Essay Concerning Witchcraft (1718), pp. 150–51; James VI, Daemonologie (1597), p. 42. Jan Machielsen, Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-Reformation (2015), pp. 265–66.

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