1.2 Introduction to Medieval Magic

Delilah

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1 - 2 - Introduction to Medieval Magic

If we're going into the subject of medieval magic. We have first, to establish some basic ideas about magic itself. It is not easy for us, living in the 21st Century, to understand the way in which our ancestors saw the world, in the past, and conceptualize its magical nature.

Despite this difficulty we have to acknowledge that the magical perception of reality has been hegemonic during the most part of human history. And it is still today in many parts of the globe. This fact has been explained by modern scholars through different approaches.

One of these approaches associates magic with a primitive state of knowledge, characteristic of pre-modern cultures. Those cultures, allegedly incapable of understanding certain phenomenons, would have built magical explanations in order to give sense to the world that surrounded them. This idea is firmly based on the notion of the linear human progress that attributing a lesser grade of development to earlier cultures and a gradual improvement throughout history, from darkness to light, placing us on the top of that teleological progression. Following that logic, the alleged intellectual awakening of modern times, would have liberated us from this magical nonsense, characteristic of previous cultures. Another common explanation for magical thought, based mostly on anthropological studies, relies on its function and structure as a cultural construct.
That's designed to regulate human emotions. Such as fear, violence, power, or the cohesion of human groups. Both explanations have in fact a lot in common.First, they are both formulated by Western scientists who often see as inferior, or less developed the people and societies who share magical beliefs, either historical or contemporary. Second, they both understand magical beliefs as intrinsically wrong, as disproved by modern science.

As you may have already guessed, we do not share this kind of approaches as accepting them would mean to catalog as ignorant most of the societies that have existed in the world since we humans started to walk this earth. On the contrary, we will consider magic, and specifically medieval magic as simply another way to see and interpret things. A way to understand and mediate with the world around us. Our goal then, will not be to explain, prove, or disprove the reality of magic. But rather to describe and try to understand the magical beliefs and practices of medieval people in a non-judgmental way.

Delilah

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