Review : Religion And The Decline Of Magic (II)

I resume my examination of Keith Thomas' outstanding 1971 work, "Religion and the Decline of Magic". Not the snappiest of titles but it does exactly what it says on the tin. Last time I looked at how religion and magic are distinct, how the Protestant and Catholic churches had very different attitudes to them, and some of the psychological reasons why magical beliefs were beneficial. 

In this second part I'm going to begin by developing that a little further, looking at why magic is so hard to refute despite its (seemingly obvious) deficiencies and incoherency. I'm also going to cover one of the sections I found most rewarding in the book, astrology. As an astronomer its earlier conception of cosmology is fascinating in itself, but as Thomas makes abundantly clear, astrology was an incredibly important step in the advancement towards genuine science. Not only for its examination of the heavens and its use of specific mathematical methods, but also for much deeper, more profound ways of thinking without which science would never have happened.

3) Why magic "worked" : the power of circular reasoning

How was it that magic remained so appealing even when it went against all the evidence ? One major reason that it was often unfalsifiable. In particular astrology, which used genuinely complicated mathematical calculations : it was easy to make a mistake, so if all else failed, the astrologer could simply say they'd got their sums wrong. Clients could also get a second opinion, or a third... so long as one of them gave the right answer (i.e. the one they wanted), they'd still believe in the process. They'd only doubt the individuals, rather than becoming skeptical about the method itself. After all, everybody knew it worked, so there was no need to doubt it.

The same was true, maybe even more so, in medicine. People were actively looking for cures for their ailments, so when their local wizard prescribed them something and they got better, they were apt to identify the recommended remedy as responsible. They were in no sense doing any kind of systematic testing. And there were many other factors at work that made the most bizarre of cures seem normal : some illnesses go away on their own anyway (or at least diminish before returning), some prescribed herbs were genuinely useful, the placebo effect* can be quite potent in some situations... and the local wise woman would seldom try and cure anything really serious. 

* It's interesting to read here that in 1971 this was still a very new discovery.

And of course, actual medical doctors in the modern sense scarcely existed, with real scientific knowledge being extremely thin on the ground. Worse, doctors would often prescribe painful remedies which weren't any better or worse than the usually painless ones from the wizards. A final point which made the magical medical remedies unfalsifiable was that it was always possible, if the treatment didn't work, that the patient was bewitched by some other, malevolent magical practitioner. They had an answer to everything, to the extent, of course, that they explained nothing.

It's a similar story when it came to finding criminals. Since the sincere belief in magic was widespread, the idea of a wizard coming to find the guilty party could be so intimidating that they'd reveal themselves before suffering the sometimes onerous trials to determine guilt (although the practise actually ended much earlier, formally, trial by battle was legal until 1819 !). A wrong accusation could lead to the accused being extra motivated to help find the real criminal. Likewise there was a popular obsession with "ancient" (often only a couple of centuries old) prophecies, which were often hopelessly vague and/or fabrications, deliberately invented to be self-fulfilling. This could even extend to seemingly-natural phenomena : says Thomas, if enough farmers believed there would be a famine so that they didn't bother with proper cultivation of the soil, prophecy turned into reality all too easily.

The point was that the strangeness of methodologies employed by the wizards were irrelevant to belief in magical practises. They were sustained in large part through social pressures, not through any rational evaluation of the evidence (let alone any theoretical basis as to how they processes were supposed to work). It's not that people were incapable of this so much as they just didn't need to, and they had no alternatives to solve the problems magic claimed to solve. So far as the ordinary people were concerned, understanding magic wasn't an issue that needed solving. It was a practical, everyday tool which got the job done.

4) We owe a huge debt to astrology

Of all the beliefs covered here, Thomas is perhaps most sympathetic to astrology. Not because of its success, because it simply doesn't work, but because of what it tried to do. Astronomy and science in general owe more to astrology than I would have guessed.

The relationship between astrology and magic is complicated. They certainly weren't mutually exclusive. There was never a school of magical thinking and not much (though not nothing) in the way of an underlying, unifying theory behind the various rituals. Astrology made use of magical forces but astrologers would often make use of other magical practices for serving their clients as well, and in like token, wizards would sometimes use astrology to answer their own questions. Astrology was, in one sense, just a particular variety of magic which anyone could use if they had sufficient mathematical skill.

But in another sense there was a deeply profound difference and astrology wasn't just another variety of abracadabra. For astrology did possess a coherent world view, did claim to have an underlying theory and understanding of how it worked. For the first time, it was an attempt to look for quantitative patterns in data. Not in just the movement of the planets, but their supposed effects on everyday life. It did an awful lot of things very badly, being no better at avoiding circular reasoning than the other strands of magical thinking, and it certainly had no truck with being falsifiable or other modern conceptions of the scientific method. But that it bothered to make use of numerical data at all, that it found a practical use for complex and esoteric mathematics.... that makes it a legitimate precursor to modern scientific practice. And indeed even to sociology, with attempts to cast horoscopes for entire cities as well as individuals.

In terms of its actual scientific content there wasn't much reason for suspicion. It was taken quite seriously by intellectuals (even Newton*) and commoners alike, as were many magical beliefs. People could see for themselves, quite plainly, that the Sun and Moon did have an effect on the weather, the seasons and the tides, so why shouldn't the stars and planets do the same ? Since the weather and seasons affected all aspects of life, why shouldn't the planets control people's temperaments, or at least influence them to a degree ? Especially given the prevailing medical theory of humours, making it compatible with the broader scientific views of the time.

* This is not a great piece, but does make the point that many of the intellectual titans have had some seriously weird and irrational ideas. There's certainly more to reasoning than pure logic, but the conclusion that it's because "beauty is truth" is ridiculous. A much more plausible factor is creativity.

And it didn't begin as a fully-formed world view that claimed answers to every question, but as with so many belief systems, it evolved into that gradually and unevenly, only reaching the zenith of its claims after the reputable academics had largely discarded it.

We often take the modern view of cosmology for granted. There's the Earth in the Solar System with all its planets, then there's the stars which are very much further away and spread out in the galaxy, and then there are other galaxies which are massively further away again. But as I try and remind my students, until the 1920s all we had as evidence for other galaxies were smudges of light just visible through powerful telescopes. In 1620 we had very much less than this. Comets were very plausibly atmospheric phenomena and therefore entirely capable of direct influence over us; there was next to no evidence for what meteors were and no clue as to the distance of the stars. In a sense, our whole conception of distance was fundamentally different. To suppose that the stars were Sun-like objects was radical and unwarranted; lack of atomic theory made their fusion power source literally beyond imagination. So the idea they were fixed points of light on a relatively close surface, that could potentially influence us, was by no means whatsoever crazy or irrational. Mystical, yes, but as far as anyone could tell, there wasn't that much reason to doubt mysticism either. We simply didn't have the tools to evaluate things properly.

Astrology was of course eventually broken by all sensible scholars. It wasn't the shift from geo to heliocentrism, says Thomas, that was ultimately fatal, but this collective, much more radical and fundamental shift in our view of the nature of reality itself. Astrology could have accommodated heliocentrism, but not the notion that the planets were rocks and the stars burning balls of gas. That some persist with it anyway is to miss the point : once, everyone, including the brightest minds of their generations, accepted it as normal, whereas today hardly anyone takes it seriously.

But even in the period when astrology was a reputable practise, it had other detractors. As with all magical notions, astrology came under fire to highly varying degrees from different Christian sects. It was in some ways very pagan, certainly predating Christianity, with some concepts of human beings being themselves hosts to planetary systems. Just as the macrocosm of the wider Universe could directly influence us, so too could we influence our internal planets : quite literally, as above, so below. 

There were two things about astrology that really annoyed the more religiously zealous. First, it claimed a deterministic nature to the universe, with the planets – not God – as the direct cause of events (even though God as a prime mover would have accommodated this perfectly well). This was sometimes viewed as blasphemous, even though most astrologers regarded the cosmos as no more than one among many influences upon earthly life, rather than being the singular force at work – this helped give them an out when their predictions went awry, and of course justified them in being vague to begin with. 

All this caused the most friction, ironically, with the Puritans, precisely because their own deterministic beliefs were so similar : their ideas were not identical and so, says Thomas, the result as that they were rivals. In particular, while Puritans thought the future was set by God, they didn't think it was possible for anyone except God to know the future... except with the help of the devil (who was their answer to an awful lot of tricky religious questions, far more so than he ever had been for the Catholics).

More fundamentally, what annoyed both Catholics and Protestants alike was that astrology claimed it could provide moral guidance. This made it seem like a fully-on alternative religion, even a pagan religion in which (for some at least) the planets were literally gods. Thomas says that these concerns were largely overblown, with most astrologers themselves seeing no incompatibility with Christianity, but not entirely without foundation. It's fascinating to consider astrology as a late-surviving pagan practise, if not ever really a wholehearted sort of paganism itself. It's also important to remember that while such a thing would have been heresy of the highest order, for which astrologers risked the worst sort of punishments, attitudes to it were... confused. Prosecutions were extremely rare, bordering on non-existent, with even some Puritans finding nothing much wrong with it. Then as now, people are complex beasts indeed.

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Belief in magic, then, fulfilled an essential role in society. It helped people understand their own inclinations and make their own decisions, allowing them to choose when there was no rational method of choosing but a decision had to be made. It was sustained in part by society (because everyone believed it, and in the earlier era at least, the Catholic Church actively encouraged it), in part because of lack of evidence to the contrary (itself due to a lack of scientific methodology) and because it was almost impossible to falsify.

And yet it was both necessary and unavoidable. The essence of both magic and science is in looking for patterns; in the strictly mechanistic sense, the only difference between science and magic is that the one works and the other doesn't*. Without knowing how to test things rigorously, assuming that the world behaves magically, with unseen but broadly predictable forces at work, is all but inevitable. Modern scientific practise is a hard-won (and still developing !) result of all this which owes a great debt to astrology, which tried more than any other magical belief to construct a coherent, numerically quantifiable world view.

* I'd probably go considerably further though. It's not magic if the cause is known and understood.

As we've already seen, the change of beliefs from the Catholic to the Protestant wasn't uniform or smooth. People might label themselves one or the other but in practise, especially given the understanding of religion as more a ceremonial practise than a set of beliefs, they could be anything but. Even so, the broad change from a magical to materialistic perspective brought with it enormous social changes. This was no mere esoteric quibble but a change of mindset with profound consequences. In particular, local "cunning men" and "wise women" were no longer the important community figures they'd once been. Now they were about to find themselves labelled as witches. And that's what I'll cover in part three.