The magic of affection

 As a scholar of medieval magic, passing the magazine stand at the checkout is like stepping back in time. The women’s magazines promise sex tips which will keep him returning for more. The men’s magazines guarantee six-pack abs in only six weeks and surefire techniques for getting commitment-free sex.

If this stuff really were surefire, would they need to publish new techniques every month?

But it’s not effectiveness that sells these magazines. It’s the hope.

Bronislaw Malinowski says that the function of magic is to ritualize optimism, to reinforce “faith within the victory of hope over fear.” By this he means once we perform magic, we ritualize our hopes, albeit that ritual itself produces no effects. This only captures one aspect of magic, but it’s a crucial one.

Perfect sex and other miracles

There is a huge modern industry that leverages our vulnerabilties. many scientifically unproven techniques offer not only power over love and sex, but health, wealth, good luck, influence over people , improving appearance, intelligence and speechmaking , assuring happiness and protection of self and family.

Modern books on magic like Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance and New Age handbooks like Shakti Gawain’s Creative Visualization became classics over the past 40 years and have sold many copies. They cover just about an equivalent ground. With few exceptions, the goals of medieval magic were just like these personal growth manuals from the 1970s, and fulfilment crazy tops the list.

Surely they found out this didn’t work!

A late 16th century manuscript within the British Library, Sloane 3850, contains a set of magic clearly meant for a person . There’s magic for fulfillment in gambling, hunting, fishing, and, most of all, sex and love.

The compiler and scribe was probably a nerd. He was literate, loved silly ciphers, and fancied himself as sophisticated. Just the type who probably didn’t get the girl. It includes magic to work out whether a lady was a virgin or if she was being untrue. It also includes many charms and incantations to form women fall crazy or lust with the magician. He could even raise a fairy queen to offer him a hoop of invisibility then roll in the hay her afterwards. Commitment-free!

A sixteenth-century magic figure for love. Reproduction of figure from London, British Library, MS Harley 2267, fol. 12v. (Frank Klaassen)

The thing is, there are tons of affection magic operations during this book and thousands more like them , scattered in various medieval and early modern manuscripts —some more innocent, some less. You wonder: How could they be so silly? Surely they found out that this stuff didn’t work.

But then you’re standing at the checkout again, wondering if you'll get abs like that.

Yeah. It’s all about hope.

Are we just stupid?

Medieval Arabic and Latin scholars were actually quite critical of magic and superstition. The medieval doctor Qusta Ibn Luqa talked at length about the consequence and the way doctors should leverage it.

Medieval philosophers expended tons of ink demonstrating how seemingly miraculous things were just natural effects, like magnetism. In fact, it had been a touch of an obsession at the time. beat all, they were pretty skeptical.

To respond to those attacks, writers of medieval magic books often did exactly what their modern counterparts do — they tried to form them appear as if they were scientific. They used scientific ideas and language.

In comparison, one would think that modern people would be far less curious about magic, particularly given our advanced sense of how the physical world functions and therefore the scientific educations we all get publicly school. the very fact that we don’t seem to be might be taken to mean that we are literally less intelligent than medieval people.

I don’t make this comparison to form fun of recent people that invest in miracle schemes, except for two other important reasons. First, it challenges the thought that scientific thinking somehow banishes magical thinking. Clearly, it doesn’t.

This gives rise to the second question: Why can we keep returning to magic?

And that’s an issue I can’t fully answer. But to my mind, an honest question is usually better than delusion, particularly if it helps us understand ourselves better. The historical evidence suggests a couple of things, at least.

The best things in life are free

As the song goes, the simplest things in life are free. But the simplest things also are notoriously difficult to regulate . Modern science may have helped us live longer but it hasn’t made illness and death any less inevitable. It certainly hasn’t made it possible to form ourselves more wealthy, desirable, charismatic, intelligent or successful crazy .

From one perspective, love magic is biological. We are biologically programmed to undertake anything which may help us reproduce ourselves. Skepticism would just get within the way of that. Hope, on the opposite hand, keeps us creatively trying things out and doing whatever it takes: the right clothes, the proper music, giving flowers, perfume, beautiful words, … or magic.

From another perspective, as Malinowski suggested, magic springs from human qualities that we all value very highly: Optimism, hope and creativeness. Where would we be without those? If our ancestors only stuck to the tried and true, things they knew wouldn't fail, we’d still be within the trees. We’d certainly haven't any love songs.

If magical thinking got us here, then maybe we sho uldn’t worry an excessive amount of about it.