Dr de Visscher then discussed the Secretum Secretorum, or Secret of Secrets, which was attributed to Aristotle and supposedly a letter to Alexander the Great but which was, in essence, a pre- Machiavellian book of statecraft and included sections on physiognomy, astronomy, and ritual magic.
#Tumblr the 5 fs of medieval manuscripts trial
The use of casting lots was condemned by Papal decree in the 12th century, as part of a wider shift in the perception of certain methods (such as trial by ordeal) and the question of how much humans should expect from God in terms of signs and answers.Īrabic knowledge began to enter the tradition, probably in part as a result of the Crusades. For example, if you achieved the sequence of numbers 5=5=4 on your dice, then you were to “Trust in God and you will conquer your enemies, and you will have your way”. Each combination of numbers on the dice would lead you to a certain answer. Three dice would be thrown, and then a question would be asked. The casting of lots was used as a means of divination, a reading of fates. There was also a “clerical underworld”, those who had had some religious training, who would become interested in magic as a means of increasing their own personal knowledge and power and would increasingly dabble in the occult as a means of doing so.ĭr de Visscher mentioned several manuscripts as a means of emphasising her point, one of which was The Lots of the Apostles, a book on lot-casting. Medieval manuscripts covering such weighty matters were often used in a scholastic environment, and also read by priests. However, planetary influence on humans caused real unease in ecclesiastical circles – the get-out clause was applied in the notion that whilst the stars could be said to be responsible for human action, the soul was still the ultimate responsibility of God. The power of the stars, therefore, could be found in everything.
Aristotle argued that changes on earth were caused by celestial bodies, which in turn descended from God and the angels. Huge importance was attached to the power of the stars, with astronomy being seen as one of the seven legitimate arts. One sees also an overlap between the scientific and the occult in areas such as astronomy, chemistry and alchemy: the best examples where these areas meet are within medieval medical texts, which include religious writing and charms, and astronomy. de Visscher pointed out that the study of magic simply cannot be viewed outside of its relationship religion, especially artefacts such as magic books, which deal with power. This raises the interesting matter of how we define magic – do we do so using our modern sensibilities, or medieval ones? Modes of thinking develop and perspectives shift, after all, and a variety of thoughts on the subject co-existed even in medieval times, with some authors condemning all or most types of what we would call magic, and some who would accept certain ones. She gave a talk entitled Magic, Science & Religion in Medieval Manuscripts. Although I rather unfortunately missed the first ten minutes of the talk due to the untimely arrival of an electrician at my flat (rather in the manner of the Person from Porlock), I nevertheless got to hear the bulk of Dr de Visscher’s presentation, though of course my writing here is but a brief synopsis of the fascinating talk she gave.ĭr de Visscher signposted from the outset the inherent difficulties in the subject on hand, not least because certain types of what we would now call magic were during medieval times condoned on religious grounds: things such as exorcisms, for example. On the second day of the Archives, Artefacts & Literary Culture workshop held at the National Library of Wales/Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru on the 27th June, came a session from Dr Eva de Visscher of the Department of History & Welsh History at Aberystwyth University.
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