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| A silver talisman from the 6th or 7th century, inscribed with words similar to abracadabra |
I must say, the first answer that springs to mind is Prof Tolkien's dictum Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes. Nevertheless, I would say it is unwise to meddle in the affairs of wizards.
The simplest and best definition of magic that I've come across is from Fr Heribert Jone in his classic, masterly little manual Moral Theology*. For him, magic means quite specifically using evidently inadequate means to produce some definite effect.
Even though one protests against the influence of the evil spirit, one still invokes him by using evidently inadequate means to produce some definite effect. If there is a possibility that the effect is the result of some unknown powers of nature, one may use such means if he protests against any diabolical influence. Such a protestation is unnecessary if one is certain the effect is produced by natural causes, even though the respective natural powers are little known, as happens, for example, in the use of the divining rod for the location of water or veins of metal.
How exactly does one "protest" against diabolical influence? I'm not entirely sure, but I'm reminded of Professor T reciting the Lord's Prayer (in Gothic) into a tape-recorder the first time he used one - to "exorcise" it, you know, "just in case".
Fr Jone's key phrase is actually deceptively brief in that it covers two important elements: using evidently inadequate means to produce some definite effect. In other words, an action can be "magical" in two ways - in the cause and in the effect. His definition is also both very broad and quite restrictive in surprising ways.
Taking the problem of the "definite effect" first, this is really just a case of magic being religion "gone wrong". Any prayer or ritual that promises a "definite" effect is (by definition) magical and as such irreligious, superstitious, and contrary to the First Commandment. Jone himself mentions, as an example, 'inscribing infallible efficacy to a particular prayer or picture'.† "Chain" prayer leaflets, promising particular graces to anyone who copies them and distributes them at the back of so many churches, have been the bane of Catholic sacristans for hundreds of years. And of course, here we come worryingly close to querying Our Lady's "promises" to those (for example) who wear the Scapular (i.e., that they'll live free from mortal sin) or who keep certain devotions (e.g., that they'll die in a State of Grace).
More problematic though is the "evidently inadequate means" part of the equation, and here Jone has more to say. What about table-turning? What about dowsing? What about hypnotism? Do any of them "work"? And, if so, how? Could there be something to any of them? Because it's in the "well, maybe" that there lies the difference between mere human foolishness (or even innocent experimentation) and Devil-worship.
Going back to Prof Tolkien, the great man divides magic into "true" magic (or magia) and goesy (or goetia††). By the first he means extraordinary powers of skill or cunning, and by the second he means the summoning up not of demons and devils but merely of illusions - either to deceive or to delight according to the moral bent of the conjurer. Is the latter what our Anglo-Saxon forebears would have called dwimmercraft? And is having a particular but natural skill or craft (being able to make wet wood burn as if it were dry, or to open locked doors without a key) really that "magical"?
Because the point is well made that there is no Old English term for "magic". Magic itself means simply the (pagan) religious practices of the Magi††† - including of course the Three Kings, righteous amongst gentiles, who visited the baby Jesus. As well as dwimmercraft, the modern term "magic" would have covered a huge range of "crafts", most of which would have included prayers to heathen deities (and to spirits, such as "Elves" and "dwarfs"!), such as dwalecraft (i.e. medicine using potions) and leechcraft (medicine using, er, leeches!) - up to and including presumably what the Vikings knew as seiðr but we would call sorcery and/or necromancy, and our Anglo-Saxon forebears would probably have thought of as witchcraft.
As it happens, the most normal use for magic in England in the early modern period was for protection against witchcraft, and here I think we need to be a little more precise in our terminology. Though I have little time for the Murray-Gardiner thesis that mediaeval witchcraft was a simple continuation of a pre-Christian heathen cultus, I am open to the suggestion the mediaeval and early modern notions of witchcraft drew on deep folk memories of pre-Christian shamanic practices such as seiðr and skincraft - the quite literally demented rituals of the Berserkir and the Ulfheðnar, with their own roots in hunting magic going back to the Dawn of Man.
So what is a witch really? Once again, it's philology that comes to our aid. The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root *weyk- meaning 'to separate, to choose' is almost certainly crucial. Choosers of the slain, then - like the Valkyries, or like Ahmad ibn Fadlan's (real-life "Valkyrie"?) "Angel of Death"? Maybe!
Derived terms[edit]
- *weyk-o-s
- Proto-Germanic: *wīhaz (“sacred”) (see there for further descendants)
- *wik-néh₂-ti
- Proto-Germanic: *wikkōną (“to practice sorcery”) (see there for further descendants)
- *wéyk-om
- Proto-Germanic: *wīhą (“sanctuary”) (see there for further descendants)
- Unsorted formations:
- Proto-Italic: [Term?]
- Latin: victima (see there for further descendants)
My feeling though is that the connexion - or rather the source of the witch's power - is sortilege. In the northern Bronze Age it was the tribe's witch who would chose whether, where and when they would go a-hunting or to war, just as surely as the Pythia of Delphi (albeit by her ambiguous advice) kicked off Croesus of Lydia's disastrous war against the Persian Empire. And it was a power that came from the distaff and the spindle, from the loom and from the "storied webs" that women weave: both literally in the sense of the tapestries, made for insulation in mead hall and bridal chamber alike, and recording the preliterate histories of their times; and metaphorically, in the sense of the fama and fata that passed from mouth to mouth in their workshops. One cannot overemphasise the power of women's words, in a preliterate society far more even than in our own, to decide the fate of kings.††††
My point then is that seiðr was the most important and powerful sort of magic not just because it was wielded by the most important and powerful people within the tribe (i.e. the women) but because it purported to do things that other kinds of magic could not - and which are de facto supernatural: to see into the future; and to talk to the dead.
In broad terms, one can must take it as given that the increased recourse to magic for protection against witchcraft in the early modern era was in part due to a diminished belief in sanctifying grace - that is to say in the objective holiness of sanctified persons (being "in a state of grace" - from christening or from shrift), of holy objects (rosaries and holy water having been disposed of during the protestant revolution, even though the Good Book itself must surely have maintained a certain power until relatively recently), or even (to give an example condemned as superstitious by St Thomas) of divine words written down and worn about the person.
The Lacnunga, interestingly enough, provides an example of similar magic from the other end of English history - from the 10th century, when pre-Christian beliefs from times before St Columba and St Augustine had started their missions in the Saxon lands were surely not so dim and distant.††††† In all probability, in the original northern imagination dwarfs (or dwarves, if your being Tolkienian) were not miniature Vikings. In fact (like the Elves - which Tolkien did get right) they weren't short of stature. They were almost certainly the same as the "Dark Elves", the so-called svartálfr, and pace Snorri they didn't have black skin (as opposed to the ljósálfar, who were deathly pale - perhaps even ghostlily so). The difference was simply that whereas the "Light Elves" could happily frolic in hedgerows and long grasses by daylight, the dwarfs only left their underground caves at night - which in practice meant that, keeping themselves to themselves, they generally got on much better with men. There are no records of public ceremonies required either to placate them or to repel them. Whereas the álfablót came about as frequently as saints' days (or at least as Hallowe'en), there is no evidence that there was ever any svartálfablót.
Needless to say, it is very unlikely St Thomas would have approved of the Lacnunga charm for disposing of dwarfs. And whether or not Norse seiðr magic survived into the conversion era we cannot really know. What we do know is that spindle whorls in Iceland, essential for use in seiðr rituals, went from having old Norse protection spells written on them ('Óðinn and Heimdallr and Þjálfa, they will help you', etc.) to having cheery little Latin good luck charms ('Pax Portanti, Salus habenti!') to having finally just one word of protection - 'Maria', followed by the whole of the runic alphabet. (This last is from a spindle whorl made from Icelandic sandstone, found at Stóramörk in Rangárvallasýsla during the summer of 1926 and delivered to the National Museum the following year.) The haunting impression is left that as our northern cousins finally gave up on the Æsir and turned to Christ and His saints, they tended to invoke the aid of their new supernatural allies in much the same way as they always had the old ones.
Technically speaking, of course, prayers aren't magic, and one must bear in mind Jone's warning about "inscribing infallible efficacy" to them, in order to avoid the equivalent superstition. Nevertheless, it is easy enough to see how prayers to the (real) Divinity can take the place of incantations and pacts (implicit or otherwise) with pagan and/or demonic entities.
UPDATE: William of Auvergne on the distinction between black magic and natural magic is perhaps worth a thought or two.
*Paragraph 164, if you're lucky enough to be able to get hold of a copy!†Another magical practice, which I'd never heard of, is using the paten as a mirror as a cure for disease.
††St Clement of Alexandria uses the word, in some choice remarks (trans, commentary) about Greek paganism.
†††What did the Magi actually do? According to Herodotus, not a lot. They just sang the necessary incantations after sacrifices had been made. According to Xenophon, similarly, they just guided sacrifices - though the Persians were scrupulous about following their directions.
††††Even in the days of The Mabinogion, the fear of satire was hardly less than that of the sword.
†††††It is just possible that there was only one recorded case of "witchcraft" in the whole of the Anglo-Saxon history. And it wasn't actually witchcraft. It was "balecraft".
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