Early Medieval Magic

 A lot of modern fantasy literature is set in a vaguely medieval world, but one equipped with working magic.  There are castles, kings, peasants, riders on horseback, and wizards.  (This characterizes my own fiction as well as that of many others.)  But how did the real Middle Ages view magic?

Well, it was different.  For starters, no wizards, no wizards' schools, no magical talents developing within the young person who (maybe) is prophesied to save her people.  Although there might be some practitioners who were more versed in magical knowledge than others, magic was primarily worked by people themselves.  For example, a woman might glue caraway seeds to the insides of her legs in the hope of conceiving a child.

Many churchmen worried about the rituals and incantations that could accompany the caraway seeds (or whatever).  Anything they found worrisome could be promptly labeled paganism, saying it compared to whatever the Romans had been up to before they converted to Christianity.  For example, exchanging gifts on January 1 was declared a pagan practice.

Modern scholars have tended to believe the early medieval priests, saying that the "simple folk" continued to follow pagan practices long after they theoretically became Christian, and that anything called Christian at the time was doubtless just superstition.

But this is an attempt to impose modern ideas of correct religion on people 1500 years in the past.  The magical practices that early medieval lay people attempted to carry out were, to them, part of Christianity, a way to get the attention of God and the saints.  The priests might think they were going about it the wrong way, but they agreed with the underlying premise, that the divine was accessible in times of danger.

For early medieval magic was not something opposed to the church and its teachings (as it is in most modern fantasy stories) but rather something parallel to it.  Its incantations, spells, amulets, potions, and herbal remedies were all intended to access the supernatural.  Wise practitioners might be holy hermits (I'm not talking here about the witch scares of the end of the Middle Ages).  The real fear for priests was that incautious lay people might summon a demon when they thought they were invoking a saint, with predictable consequences.

Indeed, priests were often the source of amulets, that were used to protect against fire, or against violent weather, or against various diseases.  The amulets might be made from plants, or from bones, or have touched a saint's relic, or incorporate a few words from the Bible on a scrap of parchment.  Church councils routinely told priests to stop providing such amulets, an indication that the practice was very common.  After all, who better to help access the supernatural than a priest?

An important part of magic was divination, determining what would be a good direction to follow, or for that matter what was the cause of illness, or if someone was trying to poison you.  If someone was, you really were not supposed to poison them right back, unless of course they deserved it.

Divination could be done at home by interpreting dreams or the roll of the dice or strange signs, or by consulting practitioners with their collections of mouse bones or understanding of what a lightning strike meant.  Early medieval people did not follow the early Roman practice of divination through examining chicken entrails, as they all agreed that was pagan. 

William Klingschirn discusses Merovingian-era magical practices in the volume The Oxford Handbook of the Roman World (ed. Effros and Moreira, 2020).

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on tmedieval religion and society, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.

 

Paganism to Christianity

Europe was Christianized starting in the second century, and by the fourth century Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire.  So why does one often see references to the Middle Ages as semi-pagan?

Part of it of course is an unwillingness to see anything beyond one's own version of Christianity as "real" religion.  Protestants in the past were especially prone to do this, announcing that since modern Catholicism considers itself the unique heir to medieval Christianity (spoiler alert, it isn't), and since (according to these Protestants) Catholicism is Wrong (and probably superstitious to boot), then the label of Paganism can be blithely applied.  I kind of hope medievalists these days have gotten over this.

Another issue is that a lot of medieval holy sites had been holy sites long before Christian missionaries showed up.  Scholars have tended to assume that either the ignorant peasantry didn't know the difference between one version of religion and another, or else the manipulative priests tricked their new flocks by letting them carry on with their pagan practices.

But this doesn't always work.  Some springs, like the sources of the Seine, were clearly holy springs before the Romans even reached Gaul, because wooden votive offerings have been found in them, as seen below, but the springs acquired no Christian cult.  (The sources of the Seine, now owned by the city of Paris, instead now have a nineteenth-century grotto and statue.)

In other cases, springs or wells became holy only many centuries after paganism had died out, so it would be difficult to claim that a holy well was a pagan survival that had lurked undetected for 700 years.  For example, a monastery near Angoulême, in southwestern France, announced in the twelfth century that it had discovered the relics of Mary Magdalene in its well, and for a brief time pilgrims came to drink the well's waters.  But the well had never been holy before, and it soon stopped being so again.  (The monastery of Vézelay in Burgundy, well known for having the relics of Mary Magdalene, loftily ignored what the monks there would have considered nothing but a pathetic fraud.)

And a place can continue to be holy with changes in official religion without either ignorant peasants or manipulative priests.  The great cathedral of St. Andrew's, in Scotland, was destroyed during the Protestant Reformation, as the local populace became Presbyterian and decided they didn't want what they considered nasty Catholic magnificence.

But as seen below, they still needed a place to bury their dead, so the land next to the cathedral ruins, even inside what had once been the (now roofless) cathedral, became a cemetery, used until the early twentieth century.  Even though nobody was a closet Catholic, and even though their ministers weren't trying to trick them, an old church just had the kind of atmosphere that seemed appropriately holy.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on religion in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.