Everyday Magic in the Middle Ages (2021) | Hacker News Reader

Everyday Magic in the Middle Ages (2021)

medievalists.net

70 pointsdrdee44 comments

What I find particularly curious is why exactly did people start to believe drawing something or saying something can actually have any magical effect. Is logical absurdity (doing an action which consumes energy of an effort but has no obvious effect) exactly the force meant to do the work here perhaps? No fun making, actually trying to dissect the logic on which does the magic stand :-)

You're thinking in modern terms of energy, force and physics, but the past, as they say, was a foreign country. People back then didn't recognize any distinction between what we would consider natural and supernatural order. They took for granted that they lived in a world deeply influenced by spirits, angels, devils and deities, with hidden hands behind everything. If you believed that God literally spoke the universe into being, then it was simply self-evident that words and symbols could have magical effects.

Add cognitive bias and placebo effects to that worldview, and as far as the medieval mind was concerned, it makes more sense to believe in magic then to doubt it, because sometimes it seemed to work. Magical thinking persists to this day for the same reason - it provides a false but shockingly self-sustaining model of reality.

If you're curious about this from a scholarly point of view, here[0] is a talk by Dr. Irving Finkel about ghost stories recorded in ancient Assyrian cuneiform, which touches on some of the magical practices involved, and I'd also recommend the Esoterica[1] channel which discusses the various kinds of magical philosophy by studying ancient magical texts. You can get a good idea of the way such people thought and how they saw the world from studying their writing.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNNaZ110ee4

[1]https://www.youtube.com/c/ESOTERICAchannel/videos

Do words really not have any "magical" effect?

You'd be surprised how much disaster a friggn tweet could lead to. If anything "word magic" has amplified with the Internet and communications technology.

It's only "magic" if you don't understand the mechanisms of how things work. And with hindsight, we can say this crap is "magic" because it doesn't work, but they weren't knowledgable enough to tell the difference.

A friggn tweet causes an effect through its influence on people who read it and act based on it.

I think what the parent is talking about is words that have an effect on something that isn't mediated by the responses of people who heard them. It's very easy to understand why a friggn tweet has an effect, because there's a clear mechanism behind how it causes that effect. Likewise the power of a witch-doctor is entirely based on how people respond to what they say and do. In contrast, it is extremely hard to rationalise any effect that is caused by "magical" words spoken to a mountain or a tree, because there isn't any part of that mountain or tree that understands the words, or has an ability to act on them.

I don't know whether this is the "correct" explanation, but I think it's plausible -

In a medieval setting, commoners visiting a court might believe courtiers dressed in fancy clothes and speaking in Latin were doing magic and performing spells. They might have no idea how things like law and government works. If those kinds of magic worked, why wouldn't magic on mountains or trees work? Especially if you were taught by wise people from the church that invisible spirits definitely existed.

> why exactly did people start to believe drawing something or saying something can actually have any magical effect

The Golden Bough (a book written by a turn-of-the-century anthropologist) considers questions like this[1]. The third chapter of the first volume discusses the principles of "sympathetic" magic being based in the concepts of similarity and contagion. One thinks immediately of voodoo dolls and garlic. It is perhaps surprising that there is a kind of logic at work here!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Bough

What I find particularly curious is why exactly did people start to believe posting something or saying something on hackernews can actually have any real effect. Is logical absurdity (doing an action which consumes energy of an effort but has no obvious effect) exactly the force meant to do the work here perhaps? No fun making, actually trying to dissect the logic on which does the magic stand :-P

Sorry i made fun. Really though what is this comment but a spell(ing)? I cast my spelling and expect an effect wether my reasoning is valid or not. Methods that seem to have a compelling causal loop at play get distilled into divinity practices such as "tarot" or "tweeting" each themselves requiring a larger semantic web to make sense of.

Way back in the day, a religious leader was described as a man of the cloth, which sounds eerily similar to todays CTOs leading their monasteries of illuminaries to build out "service fabric". Solomons temple had two columns, both draped with networking.

Just as with hn comments, one can dismiss it all, or one can approach it with suspension of disbelief.

What is the logical causal chain that compels professional sports players to do their "lucky wiggle" before a serve?

People still have 'lucky' rituals they perform before the game-- even people who aren't actually participating engage sometimes. This kind of nonrational performative behavior is common with all humans, even today. It's because we live in a hyper-rational age and we actively resist superstitions that some find it strange. It's just a human psychology thing, though, so everyone is subject to it. In 500 years they may look back and find some of the things you do are just ridiculous ignorant superstitions to them.

There's a lot of power in stories. Even today, on social media someone can make or break your reputation with a single post. A difference today is that you can fact check things much more easily. Historically, it's not hard to believe that professional story tellers had tremendous power. They could make or break the validity of a ruler's claim to his rule, they could "explain" natural phenomena, and essentially create an world beyond they knowledge of the audience where they had done fantastical things.

I wondered the same - it must be a combination of coincidence plus confirmation bias creating a positive feedback loop for the efficacy of the particular spell/ritual I imagine.

I'm actually not that surprised, anyone crossing their fingers for their favorite team serves as a testament to that kind of expectation (as does the economic viability of mass sport events). Now just broaden this kind of relation to the world to matters of basic survival.

Replace 'saying something' by prayer in your post and you'll see that a majority of people still believe in 'magic'

To call something you don't understand superstition or supernatural is a little bit dishonest. These were simply aspects of the mind that people trained in an environment that is completely different from ours.

Today with the return of e.g. Indian yogic culture to fight modern mental diseases like screen addiction, burnout, and deinstitutionalization, this wisdom of our ancestors may soon be very clear to us. For example, how did they deal with boredom?

On terminology, why did you go with “wisdom” and not “knowledge” or even “art”. Same for “our ancestors” instead of “past people” for instance, especially on an international forum ?

Pushing for negative or positive connotations feel both odd to me if the point is to evaluate a set of practices to apply to specific issues they could efficiently solve.

Also burnout can’t be a purely modern phenomenon. Scale might be different, but I can’t imagine it appear only a century ago for instance.

> Pushing for negative or positive connotations feel both odd to me if the point is to evaluate a set of practices to apply to specific issues they could efficiently solve.

The point is, it's not just a set of practices" applied to "specific issues". It's a complex system of beliefs that ultimately result in living differently and being less susceptible to today's problems. "Wisdom" sounds like a fitting name for such system of beliefs.

Going for the whole system of beliefs makes it a different proposition, where as you say we wouldn’t be trying to solve specific issues within our culture, but replace wholesale one’s individual culture with another.

I think it extremely rarely happens (or it does in dramatic ways that few people survive), and instead we try to look at positive parts and cherry-pick them to merge into our own culture. The yogi example is not (I think) about moving to India and restarting one’s life as a yogi, but to cherry-pick some specific parts (fitness exercices and/or meditation techniques probably) and wedge them where it could fit in our modern life.

There is an impedance mismatch between the Indian yogic tradition and the West's ability to assimilate it. Theirs is a world onto itself and for us to get something out of it takes willpower. How this might ultimately manifest itself in the West could be demonstrated by e.g. the proposition of neuroenchantment.

This was handed down in families as lore that helped them survive. It is the organic nature of the living tradition that makes it a wisdom teaching. You have your life thanks to this tradition.

The positive connotation is the default mode of healing and 'magick'. It is the negative connotation that gets pushed, which is what leads to 'spirit possession': mental illness.

People with burnout survive these days. That is new.

Pregnant women leaping over graves repeating rhymes (from the article) is wisdom that helped our ancestors survive? Ok.

I'm fascinated by this stuff. I have shelves full of books on it, and occultism of various forms. It's fascinating, because it opens up a window into how people perceived the world, how they communicated with each other, and what they valued.

It's 99% tosh though, and much of it is either dangerous and counterproductive, or often time wasting or an explicit scam. Charms and potions that couldn't possibly be what they were purported to be were rife. The history of the occult and witchcraft is as much a history of fleecing the gullible as it is of any kind of wisdom or philosophy. It's one of the reasons I find it so interesting, and the characters involved so colourful. Someone has a problem and you have, or want a reputation for wisdom? Make up a silly little ritual or charm and send them on their way. Everyone's happy.

Whether magic works in mystic ways, or not - it is also psychology. Placebo effect. A pregnant women close to freaking out, that does some ritual, she believes is helping - likely does help. More than her running in circles.

(and with no modern medicine avaiable)

Why would I waste my time on someone as arrogant as you?

My issue with this viewpoint is, it’s survivor bias in its purest form.

We try our best to learn from history, and I think we can reasonably accept that the tradition that got perpetuated up until now might not be optimal, and is only “wisdom” until it’s widely proven wrong. Problem is, it can take centuries to finally accept that it was wrong (and boy do we have deeply wrong views of the world and humans, that took centuries to prove wrong, and we’re not there yet)

That’s why I’m not fond of labelling tradition as “wisdom” when we should keep a critical view of it, and be open to chalenge these at any situation where it matters to not screw it.

You missed the selection bias of both the author and simonh homing in on something fanciful and eye-catching instead of something reasonable, and proceeding directly to extrapolate a tale of ignorance. - This is cynicism and not insightful.

Maybe they just felt like using linguistic flourishes that reflect their preferences?

People aren't utility function maximisers. Even if lots of us like it dry that won't necessarily be their preferred way of communicating.

So you disagree with ganzuul's objection to the use of judgemental language, in this case describing these practices as superstition and supernatural?

Then it meant that they didn't respect the subject they studied, so they obviously never had an intent to make a discovery. The subject matter is entirely opaque to a mind that dishonors everything it touches.

> For example, how did they deal with boredom?

I'm not sure if boredom was that much of problem. Days were filled with work, much of it requiring focus, mastery, improvised solutions to unexpected circumstances etc. Also, since the work wasn't "alienated", it didn't feel dull or pointless like much of the work today.

Are you speaking from personal experience?

Kind of, on both accounts. I was definitely bored out of my mind when I worked in software jobs. Now I'm retired on relatively a small amount of money, so I cannot just pay to provide all of my materials needs, but have to be engaged in multimodal ways (e.g. cycle instead of going by car, cook for myself from cheap ingredients instead of eating out and not minding prices, fixing my stuff myself instead of discarding it or paying the repairman etc.). This way of living is much more varied and engaging, at least for me.

Also, I have a 92 year old grandmother who, during her youth, lived in what was basically a premodern village. She has told many tales of the life back then but she never mentioned being bored. The number of skills she had would be mindboggling for a typical XXI century office dweller, who often can pretty much only (for example) code and swipe his credit card.

I meant to say that boredom was actually not a problem because they had ways to deal with it, as that they didn't have the kind of work/life imbalance that labor laws impose.

Dishonest?

Trying random things and repeating what works while discarding what doesn’t is how evolution works, but it’s not the same type of thing as a scientific or proto-scientific understanding (lots of cultures did proto-scientific at different times, and real science is much more recent and mostly worldwide).

Sure, that’s how we got humans from single-celled life, so it’s not nothing — but evolution is also why humans still have an appendix, why dudes have nipples, why the recurrent laryngeal nerve takes a stupid path from the brain to the larynx via the heart not just in us but even in giraffes, and why so many people descended from malarial regions have a gene where two copies gives you sickle cell anaemia.

So while I would agree that it is wrong to call something “superstition” just because one doesn’t understand it [0], if the people doing the rituals also don’t understand it then it becomes fair.

Consider the Covid pandemic: wearing a mask slows transmission, but every so often I saw people with a mask covering only their mouth and not their nose.

Consider people asking for an antibiotic for a viral infection. People who say “I don’t want chemicals in my food”. People who think 123456 is a really good password.

Consider a Diesel engine: you can run it on vegetable oil, including recycling used oil from a commercial deep fat fryer, if you filter it. Imagine two people who didn’t know why it needed to be filtered, one who wasted time filtering fresh oil and one who didn’t filter dirty.

Consider a small pacific island in WW2: one day a lot of strangers clad in unusual clothes show up in a big boat, make a long flat clearing, hold strange shaped objects to their mouths and ears while repeating a mysterious chant in a language none of the locals speak, then loud birds appear and land, laying eggs filled with wonderful treasures beyond measure.

Clearly these people are wizards, so when they all eventually leave, the locals copied them, carving their own mouth-and-ear totems from wood, sewing ritual clothing in the same style as the strangers’, chanting the same words.

A decade later, it works! Another giant loud bird lands, and people who look and sound like the old wizards emerge. The new arrivals seem perplexed, so you explain that you are all following the teachings of John Frum, trying to summon the great god Cargo.

This isn’t a value judgement I’m making here, because if it was I would have to condemn myself also. Nobody is immune to this. And something being a cargo-cult or any other kind of superstition doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, just that you’re only going to get a useful result by luck (e.g. because an aircraft had to make an emergency landing and your palm-tree runway with a bamboo observation tower and people holding hand carved toy radios looked good enough from a distance).

[0] likewise “supernatural” but in my experience the latter term is used by believers and the former by nonbelievers

Your rant is long and rambling. What is your point?

If the people doing the rituals also don’t understand the causal mechanism, then it becomes fair to call it “superstition”.

And that this isn’t limited to just “them” for any value of “them” who do things.

The rest is a bunch of examples of why, even when an effect exists.

Understanding is subjective. 'Shut up and calculate' is considered objective. The latter offers no insight or understanding and instead demonstrates how to model the functions of the system under scrutiny.

These two are provided by different faculties of the mind, and sensory perception of a physical reality is yet a third instance with reference to the one thing. If you have additional faculties of perception, you grasp the thing in additional ways.

Should you be color blind, is paint superstition?

For the first two paragraphs, my answer is basically: Yes, and?

For the case of paint: paint can be understood in both superstitious and non superstitious ways regardless of if you can or can’t see it, and whether it is or is not being understood superstitiously depends on the details of what one does or doesn’t know. I’ve read superstitious accounts of colour by people who can see it — “pink is for girls, blue is for boys”, which of bold or soft colours is better for a child’s education, does yellow encourage intellectual thought…

Here’s something for you: is the use of blue-and-orange in action film posters backed by research that poster designers know about, or are they just cargo-culting one particular successful film’s poster? As with John Frum, this isn’t about the original, it’s about why everyone else is mimicking it: a blind or colourblind person doesn’t need to have a colour qualia to find out either way.

I think your groups are too broadly encompassing. The division between superstition and scientific method is inside any given decision, not between entire beliefs or results, so you can’t just point to a specific belief or result and categorise it as either. (I’m not sure I was clear on that myself in the previous postings).

If this is about how we factorize our categories then we can argue endlessly about what is what.

You'd be surprised at how many things we do without understanding the causality behind them.

I don't think you'd call those superstition.

eg. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22730370-400-how-does...

Most people would be surprised, but I’m happy to assert most of the things we do with an expectation of causal effect are superstitions.

While people don’t generally understand bikes [0], in this case superstition would be more about people building them like in any of the [0] illustrations (or e.g. saying “I need suspension/carbon fibre frame” without knowing what those are for) rather than not being aware of how the laws of motion stop it falling over — except for bikes with trick steering, average people aren’t even going to bother asserting a causal mechanism for motion: https://youtu.be/9cNmUNHSBac

[0] https://momentummag.com/can-tell-whats-wrong-bicycles/

I bet you didn't expect them to double down with "actually i do think bikes and most things we do are superstition"

Specific aspects of bikes, not bikes in general. Hnfong may yet convince me I’m wrong.

This is a great read on Natural Magic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magia_Naturalis

More Renaissance, than medieval. But a beautiful and highly influential book.

I’ve found a ton of pleasure understanding philosophical magic. SHWEP.net and the Rittman Library have been indispensable.

Fair those with a passing interest in the subject, I recommend Way Of The Wyrd. It's a well-researched novel about an early mediaeval novice's adventures with a pagan sorcerer.

[0x1] [0x2] [0x5]

[0xb] [0xe] [0xc]

[0x2] [0xf] [0xc]

[0x6] [0xa] [0x8]

The Hexen Square

Modern Magic:

There are a variety of handy mods that can be used with the Armour.

[Cracker Pad]: Tell if someone's lying

[Ganjala Pass]: Psychoactive Kit Autotuned

[BGM 360]: Auto-Background Music with non-verbal communication synthesis

[Mapper]: Tell Mapper something like "I want to party with some Goths" and be directed there. Visuals appear when you close your eyes

[Crystallize]: Armour takes on the properties of Crystals auto-tuned to your ambience. [Public/Private] Mode.

[LifeOptimizer]: Tracks your life and gives you helpful hints in syncing and moving up

[NotBoring]: If you're Bored, take this a shot

[News]: Get News in real time

[Alarm]: Pick your wake-up call: [Water splashes your face]/[Oven turns on in your Manipura Chakra] and a thousand others.

[Social]: A real-time visual graph of people's attitude (energy) towards you.

[Movies]: Comes with a list of movies that resonate with your taste. Dawn and Pre-Dawn movies (Free and Paid^ content)

[Music]: ^^^

[There's a lot more]

The UI for all these mods appear when you close your eyes; if you're really sensitive to the astral, you can project it on to a wall or overlay it with your vision They're all activated by mental commands, so a UI isn't always necessary.

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