Review : Religion And The Decline Of Magic (I)

I now return to the happy topic of reviewing/analysing books. Sticking with the recent theme, this time it's Keith Thomas' 1971 Religion and the Decline of Magic. Spanning 200 years of British history, from c.1500 – c.1700, this is an attempt to chart and explain one of the most profound shifts in worldviews that ever happened. The magical beliefs that pervaded all aspects of society at the start of the period were by no means dead and buried by its end, but they were confined to something approaching a lunatic fringe. How did such a wholesale replacement of irrational thinking come about ?

Now the book was so good that I couldn't avoid lending it, so I'm going to have do this from notes alone. Although large swathes of it describe particular examples, Thomas has more than enough interesting thoughts to make a readably-short write-up extremely tricky. In the end I decided the only solution I could live with was the four-part monstrosity you see here. So be it – that's just how long it needs to be.

In this first part I'll review the book as per usual and then cover the first two major topics. I'll look at how religion is distinct from, but not mutually exclusive with, magical beliefs, and then move on to the psychological benefits of magic. Part two looks at the self-sustaining, circular, unfalsifiable nature of magical beliefs but also the hugely important advances made by astrology. Part three covers everyone's favourite sort of magic (witches !), and briefly glances at how paganistic thinking persisted in a Christian environment. Finally part four attempts some conclusions.

Throughout, I've largely tried to stick to what it is that Thomas himself says. I don't have much commentary of my own to add except at the very end.

0) The Review Bit

I'm going to cut right to the chase and give this one 10/10. This monumental 800-page work is exceptionally clear and comprehensive, perfectly focused on its topic, with a spot-on perfect balance of description and analysis. Thomas sets out his case by way of example after example, each sufficiently similar to demonstrate his point but different enough never to become repetitive. He's also aware of any deficiencies in his arguments and doesn't shy away from them. Of rhetoric there is none, of humour little. But what could easily have been, in the hands of a lesser writer, an immensely dry and plodding tome, becomes instead a gripping, engrossing work of the sociology of religion. It's an analytical page-turner.

I'm giving this one the highest rating possible because I simply don't believe it's possible to improve upon it given its objectives with the evidence available. That is not to say the conclusions aren't open for debate, just that I can't imagine this huge wealth of evidence being assembled in any better way. Absolutely magisterial; so of course Amazon and Goodreads give it a 4/5 because people are a big bunch of bonkers weirdos and this is why we can't have nice things*. Honestly, it's a bit like giving Newton's Principia 4/5 because he didn't also discover relativity. 

* I looked through some of the longer Goodreads reviews and they're simply wrong, claiming that Thomas said things he blatantly didn't say. Sigh. I really must stop doing that.

Thomas is extremely sensitive to his subject. He treats everything with commendable even-handedness and without judgement; unlike Ronald Hutton, he doesn't ram it in the reader's nose that everything should be treated respectfully : he simply does so, by describing what happened and what people believed. He attempts, in the main very successfully, to explain why they believed what they did, saying that they were clearly wrong but without ever calling them stupid. There is an implicit but clear aspect of "there but for the grace of God..." : when you don't have a modern scientific system, statistical techniques or – let alone ! – technologies to test particular claims, believing what now seems like nonsense becomes much more understandable. Likewise, Thomas lets the humorous nature of some of those beliefs come forward by itself, without ever needing to make jokes about it. 

He does, I think, about as good a job of getting into the mindset of the times as is ever possible to do, exploring the role of religion and magic at all levels of society. To give one example, I've never really understood why gambling was considered a sin. Thomas explains. At one end, it was an attempt to know the mind of God, since He governed all things, and such a practise shouldn't be used for such trivialities as monetary gain. In a more extreme interpretation it could be seen as an attempt to actually control or influence God's actions, an almost magical ritual that, as we'll see, had come to be an affront to morality itself. And Thomas presents numerous other common habits that don't often come up in medieval histories (such as using magic to hunt for buried treasure, or burying animals alive for magical rites) that illustrate just how differently people believed the world worked.

If Dianne Purkiss explores the sociology of the times more widely, Thomas' concentration on this particular aspect is more revealing. A truly staggering change of mindset took place in these couple of centuries, a shift from the spiritual to the scientific that directly shaped the world we live in today. And as parts of the world appear to be backsliding into an era of less rational thinking, understanding how this change happened could scarcely be more pertinent. 

If I could level any criticism at all, it's that he doesn't fully answer this question, What he does do is address just how incredibly complex this is, looking at various different explanations and setting forth how compelling they are (often steelmanning them) but frequently then describing their limitations without undermining their value. Given that this is looking at one of the most important and complex of all topics in psychology and history, I don't think it's reasonable to ask for more. If you think you've got a definitive answer, the chances are you probably haven't properly understood the problem.

1) Religion is not the same as magic

At the start of the period Britain was Catholic; by the end it was firmly Protestant. These two different strands of Christianity had starkly contrasting attitudes to magic. They both believed in the supernatural, but that's a much broader category. Magic, to the people at the time, meant something quite specific : a ritual one could use to create some effect by unknown means (this is much as it was thought of in classical antiquity). It was seen as firmly mechanistic. So long as the ritual was performed correctly, the desired result would be achieved. There was sometimes thought to be a distinction from this sort of purely ritualistic sorcery, which anyone could do, and witchcraft, which meant using psychic powers that were either innate or granted by the devil. But this doesn't matter too much here – what's important is the mechanical nature of magic. Follow the instructions and everything should just work*.

* You might remember I went off on one about the claim that the term "supernatural" is meaningless. I haven't changed my opinion on this at all, but I would agree that if we define magic to be purely mechanistic, then it is indeed just junk science.

The attitude of the two Churches was diametrically opposed. In the Catholic era magic was normal, routine, and at least some magical practises were endorsed by everyone. The magical power of prayer was openly encouraged. Baptisms too were thought to bring physical benefits, as was receiving the Eucharist, while holy water could be used to cure sick cows (perhaps most bizarre of all was that you could say Mass as a curse) and the Bible was frequently used for divination. The Catholic Church didn't endorse all magical practises, even when it would have been to its own advantage, but it accepted some of them enthusiastically.

All that changed with the Reformation. Magical rites were out, the wizardry of the priests seen as heretical. All the supernatural power resided with God and God alone. You could of course still pray, but now this was purely an intercessional appeal – God would choose to act, there was no longer any direct, magical benefit to it. In some ways this led to a profoundly more rational or certainly more materialistic world view, but it did so by the rather perverse method of attributing literally everything to the supernatural power of God. 

How much things shifted varied wildly. Most Protestants were fairly tolerant and saw no need to denounce every minor ritual, many of which (such as the capacity for hot cross buns to protect a house) were purely for fun. Even some protestant priests participated in some of the less offensive rituals. Some of them even saw actual Catholic people as being inherently magical. At most, they might say rude things against people who believed in magic but that was about it. At the extreme end of intolerance, on the other hand, some Puritans saw all priests as witches. For them the problem was that magic allowed humans to directly act against the will of God himself. It was opposed to their whole cosmology, which (as we'll see later) God had divinely ordained from the beginning of time. Anyone seeking to counteract this was either delusional or, far worse, in league with the only valid opponent of God : Satan.

(The Calvinist conviction that everything was predetermined feels inherently like an incredibly offensive, paradoxical belief to me, but not all Protestants subscribed to such extremist moral craziness. Most of them weren't fanatics and many were comfortable with not having fully thought-through the implications of their beliefs, cheerfully ignoring any contradictions.)

Part of the reason for the inhomogeneity of the shift may have been a very different understanding of what religion was. The modern idea is pretty clear : the adherence to a set of beliefs, which often carry with them prescribed rituals that should be followed. The earlier interpretation leant very much more heavily on the ritualistic side of things. It was important that people attended Church not (just) as a means of social control and/or cohesion, but because of a genuine belief in the magical efficacy of such actions. Religion was, to a degree, not so much about belief but behaviour. Thomas gives many examples of illiterate peasants who knew next to nothing about the religious doctrines (even not knowing who Jesus was) but fully participated in the rituals, since to them, going to Church and singing songs literally did mean that they were Christian. They would not have understood the popular quote that, by analogy, that kind of reasoning means that going into a garage makes you an automobile. To them it was the rituals that were the stuff of religion, not the ideas behind them.

The power of the medieval Church is also shown to be much more limited than is popularly supposed. True, it could and occasionally did come down very hard on people indeed. But far more often, it didn't. Beliefs in ritualistic magic persisted long, long after the Reformation, and prosecutions for heretical beliefs were extremely rare – and even when they did happen, the punishment was usually modest or actually non-existent (I'll return to the peculiar topic of witchcraft later on, for which the situation was somewhat different). In some cases as much as 15% of the local populace were excommunicated, with an open hatred for religion stemming for poor public outreach on the part of the priests, who usually talked in terms the common people simply didn't understand. That said, genuine atheism and skepticism was not, says Thomas, non-existent, but firmly confined to the intellectual elite. Most of the general population just didn't actually care very much, with in some cases priests complaining that their churches had more pillars than people.

2) Magic helped people know their own minds

One common theme among all of Thomas' discussions on magical rituals is that they weren't total nonsense. Well, they were in one sense : the idea that a hot cross bun had magical powers of protection is clearly deranged. But psychologically the situation is different. There's a very nice Aeon essay, "If you can't choose wisely, choose randomly" with a strong overlap here. I'll also mention, oddly enough, the censored 1969 Royal Family documentary, the one the Queen hated so much it was never aired on television again.

This is not the panoply of power, but while the Queen occupies the highest office of state, no-one else can. While she is head of the law, no politician can take over the courts. While she is head of the state, no generals can take over the government. While she is head of the services, no would-be dictator can turn the army against the people. The strength of the monarchy does not lie in the power it gives the sovereign but in the power it denies to anyone else.

Part of the strength of choosing randomly is that while it might not get you the best outcome, it at least protects you from those intent on doing you harm : it denies them that power. Magical rituals may be founded in a wholly incorrect understanding of the nature of reality, but by making decisions randomly they too deny anyone the capacity for manipulation of others. And they do indeed make decisions. In many cases magic was used when there were simply no rational grounds for favouring any particular course of action but a decision still had to be made. Sure, you could roll the dice, but if you believe that some supernatural force is at work in a ritual, you're more likely to actually perform it because you have faith it'll work. Tossing a coin or rolling dice doesn't generally carry with it much in the way of mystique (divine providence notwithstanding).

More importantly, says Thomas at various points – be it about local wizards ("cunning men"), priests, or astrologers – such rituals help people to learn their own preferences. Another strangely tangential example : in the earliest drafts of The Lord of the Rings, Bilbo announces he's leaving Hobbiton to get married. Why ? Purely because Tolkien needed to get him out of the door. The reason was completely immaterial, he simply needed a place to start. Picking this rather random event got him to put pen to paper and helped him realise that that wasn't what he wanted the character to do. It's much easier to know your own mind when you carry the consequences of it at least a little way forward.

In the early modern period, astrologers (for example) might be called upon to suggest particular courses of action or even identify criminals. More often than not there was already a prime suspect and what was really being asked was confirmation from a higher authority; the astrologer was simply being asked to provide that extra step. If they were asked to suggest their client chose a course of action they didn't really want, say, advising them to move towns for a better job, this would give the client a clearer indication of what it was they themselves really wanted. By having this independent advice they could rethink their own thoughts more clearly, at which point, if the advice wasn't what they actually wanted, they might well seek a second opinion. Having that instruction from someone else is, perhaps, psychologically quite different from trying to run one's own mental simulation.

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Well, that's a beginning, at least. In the Reformation we see the glimmer of a shift towards a more rational, materialistic perspective, but no more than that. And as we'll see, that change was highly uneven, in particular causing massive social problems with witches, and if it was progressive in some areas, it was positively backward in others. Both magic and religion, which are distinct psychological ideas, have emotional benefits – if they didn't nobody would believe in either of them – but that comes at a cost. 

Nowhere was this paradoxical mixture more apparent than astrology, an unfalsifiable, magical belief rooted in ideas that today are clearly nonsensical, but also of huge importance for bringing about genuine scientific methodology. And that's what I'll look at in part two.