The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-Modern Europe

Folklore, April, 2004 by Malcolm Jones

The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-Modern Europe. By Stephen Wilson. London: Hambledon and London, 2000. xxx 546 pp. B/W illus. 25.00 [pounds sterling] (hbk). ISBN 1-85285-251-8

This book represents a remarkable synthesis for a single author to have achieved, especially one who has not published in this area before. It is encyclopedic in its scope, but contains none of the common fallacies perpetrated by other previously unheard-of writers on matters folkloric. Its thesis is perhaps best summed up in the excellent introduction:

   This book ... [draws] attention to the wealth of rituals recorded by
   folklorists and others and also ... [extends] the boundaries of what
   previous historians have regarded as magical ... Magic was a central
   component of traditional culture ... which died out in most of
   France, for example, only in the last third of the nineteenth
   century, in Britain earlier perhaps, in much of southern and eastern
   Europe later (p. xxvii).

And he is surely right to state that "another false impression, encouraged by historians' preoccupation with witchcraft, is that magic was pro-active. In fact most European magic was apotropaic, seeking to prevent, to protect, to repel." In the introduction Wilson also pleads--quite rightly--for something of a rehabilitation of Frazer, whose monumental work is too often glibly dismissed, for he was right about three things:

   The customs he described are universal in time and space and demand
   a comparative approach to understand them. Magic operates mainly on
   the principles of sympathy and contiguity which he outlined. And
   fertility is a central concern in most human rituals. We may abandon
   the corn spirit but not the ethic of fecundity which it stood for
   (p. xxx).

The book has five major sections: "Agriculture," "The Life-Cycle," "Disease and Healing," "Divination and Signs," and "Magical Power." Each contains a thorough survey in time and space, but while the breadth of Wilson's reading is impressive, such a venture inevitably exhibits some of the faults inherent in most encyclopaedias: certain evasion over, or omission of, detail, for instance. The "Pre-modern" of the subtitle is a usefully vague adjective that elides nearly all centuries before the present, releasing the author from the responsibilities of chronological distinction, and seeming to imply that before 1900 Europe was one homogeneous cultural continuum.

As for the bibliography, it is always possible to find minor omissions even in one as comprehensive as this. Surprising major omissions, however, are two standard reference works, Thompson's Motif Index of Folk Literature, and Opie and Tatem's Oxford Dictionary of Superstitions [ODS]. The former (at E32) would have revealed what an early hagiographical commonplace is the miracle reported here (pp. 414-5) from the late nineteenth-century (!) Life of Fra Egidio of Taranto of the butchered/cooked animal reconstituted by the saint. A minor instance of how consulting the ODS would have helped is the citation on page 73 from a title not written (as implied), but printed by Wynkin [sic] de Worde, which explains that bells are rung "during thunderstorms, to the end that fiends and wicked spirits should be abashed and flee and cease the moving of the tempest," whereas the ODS shows that de Worde was simply reprinting a work earlier published by his master Caxton. The principle of "taking a hair of the dog that bit you," here (p. 357) illustrated from Cervantes' La Gitanilla (1613), not only appears in both ODS and the Motif Index (where it is D2161.4.10.3), but being proverbial may be traced in the standard proverb dictionaries, such as that of B.J. Whiting, where the first citation is from the mid fifteenth century. Similarly, reference to ODS would have shown that the belief that being born with a caul prevents drowning (pp. 203-6 here) is traceable back to the fifteenth century in England and would have provided chapter and verse for the ill luck that follows the killing of a robin (p. 416), and, indeed, for many of the omens and other practices listed in Chapter 11, "Death and the Dead."

One should be forgiving of chronological errors in a book of this size, but two I have noted are the placing of the Gunpowder Plot in 1603 (p. 43), and "Luther using the 'calf-monk', born at Freiberg in Saxony in 1552" (p. 208). Apart from the fact that it is usually Englished as the "monk-calf," Luther died in 1546, and the actual date of the appearance of this misbirth was 1522.

Errors are very rare and minor, but I mention some. From the author of The Means of Naming (1998), we might expect a discussion of the erroneous etymology that saw the first element of bonfire as Fr. bon, rather than English bone (an error perpetuated by Dr Johnson), when quoting Stow writing of medieval London, "These were called bonfires ... of good amity amongst neighbours." The apparent single title, Gargantua and Pantagruel (p. 331), is really two titles, as the books were issued separately. To explain the modern idiom, "you'll pull through," meaning "you'll recover eventually," as deriving from the traditional healing practice of passing a sick person through some aperture (p. 356) would seem to be a piece of "folk" etymology on the author's part. For "quartian" read "quartan" (p. 352), for "Clynnos Fawr" read "Clynnog Fawr" (p. 412), and Skara Brae is wrongly located in Ireland (p. 457). To state that nine is a lucky number because it is "a multiple of three" (p. 447) is to miss the point that nine is three lots of three, the magical number multiplied by itself.