During the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries a group of monks with occult interests donated what became a remarkable collection of more than thirty magic texts to the library of the ...Benedictine abbey of St. Augustine’s in Canterbury. The monks collected texts that provided positive justifications for the practice of magic and books in which works of magic were copied side by side with works of more licit genres. In Magic in the Cloister, Sophie Page uses this collection to explore the gradual shift toward more positive attitudes to magical texts and ideas in medieval Europe. She examines what attracted monks to magic texts, in spite of the dangers involved in studying condemned works, and how the monks combined magic with their intellectual interests and monastic life. By showing how it was possible for religious insiders to integrate magical studies with their orthodox worldview, Magic in the Cloister contributes to a broader understanding of the role of magical texts and ideas and their acceptance in the late Middle Ages.
In this original, provocative, well-reasoned, and thoroughly documented book, Frank Klaassen proposes that two principal genres of illicit learned magic occur in late medieval manuscripts: image ...magic, which could be interpreted and justified in scholastic terms, and ritual magic (in its extreme form, overt necromancy), which could not. Image magic tended to be recopied faithfully; ritual magic tended to be adapted and reworked. These two forms of magic did not usually become intermingled in the manuscripts, but instead were presented separately. While image magic was often copied in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, The Transformations of Magic demonstrates that interest in it as an independent genre declined precipitously around 1500. Instead, what persisted was the other, more problematic form of magic: ritual magic. Klaassen shows that not only were texts of medieval ritual magic cherished in the sixteenth century, but even the writers of new magical treatises, such as Agrippa von Nettesheim and John Dee, were far more deeply indebted to medieval tradition than previous scholars have thought them to be, and specifically to the medieval tradition of ritual magic.
This exciting new study draws on objects excavated or discovered in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century at three Mediterranean sites. Through the three case studies,Materia ...Magicaidentifies specific forms of magic that may be otherwise unknown. It isolates the practitioners of magic and examines whether magic could be used as a form of countercultural resistance. Andrew T. Wilburn discovers magic in the objects of ancient daily life, suggesting that individuals frequently turned to magic, particularly in crises. Local forms of magic may have differed, and Wilburn proposes that the only way we can find small-town sorcerers is through careful examination of the archaeological evidence.
Studying the remains of spells enacted by practitioners, Wilburn's work unites the analysis of the words written on artifacts and the physical form of these objects. He situates these items within their contexts, to study how and why they were used.Materia Magicaapproaches magic as a material endeavor, in which spoken spells, ritual actions, and physical objects all played vital roles in the performance of a rite.
Materia Magicadevelops a new method for identifying and interpreting the material remains of magical practice by assessing artifacts within their archaeological contexts. Wilburn suggests that excavations undertaken in recent centuries can yield important lessons about the past, and he articulates the ways in which we can approach problematic data.
From risqué cabaret performances to engrossing after-hours shop talk, Trade of the Tricks offers an unprecedented look inside the secretive subculture of modern magicians. Entering the flourishing ...Paris magic scene as an apprentice, Graham M. Jones gives a firsthand account of how magicians learn to perform their astonishing deceptions. He follows the day-to-day lives of some of France's most renowned performers, revealing not only how secrets are created and shared, but also how they are stolen and destroyed. In a book brimming with humor and surprise, Jones shows how today's magicians marshal creativity and passion in striving to elevate their amazing skill into high art. The book's lively cast of characters includes female and queer performers whose work is changing the face of a historically masculine genre.
A concise and engaging introduction to magic in world history and contemporary societies. Presenting magic as a global phenomenon which has manifested in all human cultures, this book takes a ...thematic approach which explores the historical, social and cultural aspects of magic.
The Bible in the Bowls represents a complete catalogue of Hebrew Bible quotations found in the published corpus of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic magic bowls. As our only direct epigraphic witnesses to ...the Hebrew Bible from late antique Babylonia, the bowls are uniquely placed to contribute to research on the (oral) transmission of the biblical text in late antiquity; the pre-Masoretic Babylonian vocalisation tradition; the formation of the liturgy and the early development of the Jewish prayer book; the social locations of biblical knowledge in late antique Babylonia and socio-religious typologies of the bowls; and the dynamics of scriptural citation in ancient Jewish magic. In a number of cases, the bowls also contain the earliest attestations of biblical verses not found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Pre-dating the next available evidence by four to five centuries, the bowls are a valuable resource for biblical text critics. By making these valuable witnesses to the Hebrew Bible easily available to scholars, The Bible in the Bowls is designed to facilitate further research by linguists, liturgists, biblical text critics, and students of Jewish magic. It collates and transcribes each biblical verse as it appears in the published bowls, furnishes details of the bowls’ publication, and notes various features of interest. The catalogue is also accompanied by an accessible introduction that briefly introduces the incantation bowls, surveys their deployment of scripture in light of their magical goals, and discusses the orthography of the quotations and what this can tell us about the encounter with the biblical text in late antique Babylonia.
A thousand years before Isaac Asimov set down his Three Laws of Robotics, real and imagined automata appeared in European courts, liturgies, and literary texts. Medieval robots took such forms as ...talking statues, mechanical animals, and silent metal guardians; some served to entertain or instruct while others performed disciplinary or surveillance functions. Variously ascribed to artisanal genius, inexplicable cosmic forces, or demonic powers, these marvelous fabrications raised fundamental questions about knowledge, nature, and divine purpose in the Middle Ages.
Medieval Robotsrecovers the forgotten history of fantastical, aspirational, and terrifying machines that especially captivated Europe in imagination and reality between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. E. R. Truitt traces the different forms of self-moving or self-sustaining manufactured objects from their earliest appearances in the Latin West through centuries of mechanical and literary invention. Chronicled in romances and song as well as histories and encyclopedias, medieval automata were powerful cultural objects that probed the limits of natural philosophy, illuminated and challenged definitions of life and death, and epitomized the transformative and threatening potential of foreign knowledge and culture. This original and wide-ranging study reveals the convergence of science, technology, and imagination in medieval culture and demonstrates the striking similarities between medieval and modern robotic and cybernetic visions.
Magic is an art form that has fascinated humans for centuries. Recently, the techniques used by magicians to make their audience experience the impossible have attracted the attention of ...psychologists, who, in just a couple of decades, have produced a large amount of research regarding how these effects operate, focusing on the blind spots in perception and roadblocks in cognition that magic techniques exploit. Most recently, this investigation has given a pathway to a new line of research that uses magic effects to explore the cognitive abilities of nonhuman animals. This new branch of the scientific study of magic has already yielded new evidence illustrating the power of magic effects as a psychological tool for nonhuman animals. This review aims to give a thorough overview of the research on both the human and nonhuman perception of magic effects by critically illustrating the most prominent works of both fields of inquiry.
In this intimate ethnography, Raquel Romberg seeks to illuminate the performative significance of healing rituals and magic works, their embodied nature, and their effectiveness in transforming the ...states of participants by focusing on the visible, albeit mostly obscure, ways in which healing and magic rituals proceed. The questions posed by Romberg emerge directly from the particular pragmatics of Puerto Rican brujería (witch-healing), shaped by the eclecticism of its rituals, the heterogeneous character of its participants, and the heterodoxy of its moral economy. What, if any, is the role of belief in magic and healing rituals? How do past discourses on possession enter into the performative experience of ritual in the here and now? Where does belief stop, and where do memories of the flesh begin? While these are questions that philosophers and anthropologists of religion ponder, they acquire a different meaning when asked from an ethnographic perspective. Written in an evocative, empathetic style, with theoretical ruminations about performance, the senses, and imagination woven into stories that highlight the drama and humanity of consultations, this book is an important contribution to the cross-cultural understanding of our capacity to experience the transcendental in corporeal ways.
Sorcery or Science? examines how two Sufi Muslim
theologians who rose to prominence in the western Sahara Desert in
the late eighteenth century, Sīdi al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī (d. 1811) and
his son and ...successor, Sīdi Muḥammad al-Kuntī (d. 1826), decisively
influenced the development of Sufi Muslim thought in West
Africa.
Known as the Kunta scholars, Mukhtār al-Kuntī and Muḥammad
al-Kuntī were influential teachers who developed a pedagogical
network of students across the Sahara. In exploring their
understanding of "the realm of the unseen"-a vast, invisible world
that is both surrounded and interpenetrated by the visible
world-Ariela Marcus-Sells reveals how these theologians developed a
set of practices that depended on knowledge of this unseen world
and that allowed practitioners to manipulate the visible and
invisible realms. They called these practices "the sciences of the
unseen." While they acknowledged that some Muslims-particularly
self-identified "white" Muslim elites-might consider these
practices to be "sorcery," the Kunta scholars argued that these
were legitimate Islamic practices. Marcus-Sells situates their
ideas and beliefs within the historical and cultural context of the
Sahara Desert, surveying the cosmology and metaphysics of the realm
of the unseen and the history of magical discourses within the
Hellenistic and Arabo-Islamic worlds.
Erudite and innovative, this volume connects the Islamic
sciences of the unseen with the reception of Hellenistic discourses
of magic and proposes a new methodology for reading written
devotional aids in historical context. It will be welcomed by
scholars of magic and specialists in Africana religious studies,
Islamic occultism, and Islamic manuscript culture.
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