September 19, 2025 • 15 mins
This Episode originates from a non-fiction book titled A History of Magic, Witchcraft, and the Occult, published by DK in 2020. The content offers a comprehensive, global overview of magical beliefs and practices, spanning from prehistoric times to the modern era, as evidenced by its detailed contents listing topics such as ancient Greek magic, Norse magic, Kabbalah, and modern Wicca. The source includes a foreword that introduces the theme of witchcraft through the historical account of the Pendle Witch Trials, and features contributions from several academic consultants and writers. It examines the complex relationship between magic, religion, and early science across various cultures and time periods, exploring concepts like divination, ritual, sympathetic magic, and the persecution of witches.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the deep dive. This is where we take
these really big, complex histories and try to boil them
down find the surprising bits of the essential truths. And today,
while we're taking on a pretty massive one, humanity's whole
relationship with the supernatural. We're talking magic, the occult, even
early science, right from prehistory basically up to now. Our
(00:21):
goal here, our mission is to kind of zoom out
look at the big picture. We want to get a
handle on how and maybe why people have consistently turned
to magic, you know, as a way to control the
chaos that's just inherent in the world. And maybe more importantly,
we're looking at how those lines, the lines between magic
and what would maybe call early science and organized religion,
how they've kept shifting for thousands of years depending on
(00:42):
well who got to define where the power was coming from.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Yeah, and before we dig into those really ancient roots,
it's maybe important to grasp just how high the stakes
could be and sometimes still are when those definitions clash.
So let's start this deep dive, maybe not in say
ancient Egypt, but much later in the English countryside sixteen twelve,
the Pendle Witch Trials, right, a.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Really truly terrifying moment in history, it really is.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
And our sources they focus on this one figure, an
eighty year old woman named Elizabeth southerns known as Old Demdike,
and she genuinely believed, I mean really believed she had
the power to kill a man using witchcraft, okay, and
the method she described in court no less. It was
creating a picture of the person out of clay, then
(01:27):
pricking it with a pin or maybe a thorn to
cause pain, and then finally burning the clay figure to
well to cause the victim's death.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
That sounds like classic sympathetic magic, doesn't it. The idea
that what you do to the symbol the image directly
impacts the real person exactly.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
That, And this belief, which was pretty widely held in
that community, it had immediate fatal results when it got
tangled up with the law. Demdyke, her granddaughter Alison, and
eight other people were executed, hanged for devilish practice and
hellish means Wow. It just darkly shows that difference, doesn't it,
between what might have been seen as you know, accepted
(02:03):
magical practice way back and what became to find is
transgressive forbidden power.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Okay, So let's unpact that older relationship first. Then where
did it all begin? Our sources they trace the earliest
forms of magic right back to the dawn of humankind.
Seems like early people looking for some kind of control,
believe the world around them was full of conscious spirits.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yeah, animism right, Animism the idea that everything has a spirit, trees, rivers, animals,
the weather. Yeah, and they needed some way to interact
with those spirits, those forces. They couldn't otherwise control things
like birth, death, the seasons.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
So shamans stepped in.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Shaman's were the intermediaries. Yeah, they were thought to be
able to travel to the spirit world, the mystical realm.
There is that famous cave painting at LESCo, the Paleolithic
one shows a figure lying down next to a bird.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Oh yeah, I know, the one.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Often interpreted as a shaman on a spirit journey, maybe
with his spirit animal guide. It's a glimpse into that
very old belief system.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
And the sort of day to day magic. The applied stuff.
Was that sympathetic magic you mentioned that seems.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
To be a core principle. Yeah. If you need a cure,
look for something that resembles the illness or the desired outcome.
So like if you had jaundice made you yellow.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
You'd look for a yellow potion or a yellow flower.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Exactly, find something yellow to counteract it. And you know,
on the flip side, the more sinister side, you get
literary examples like Circe and Homer's Odyssey using enchantments to
turn Odysseus's men into pigs. That's sympathetic magic too, transforming
them into the animal she perhaps saw them as behaving like.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
It's fascinating how that personal, maybe tribal, spiritual power starts
getting formalized, written down.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
That's a huge step. We go from you know, neolithic
shamans and oral traditions to these high civilizations where magic
becomes well almost part of the administration. It gets written down.
The ancient Babylonians, the Egyptians, they created protective amulet, sure,
but also whole books.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Of skulls, like the spells on tomb walls in Egypt.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Precisely, that wasn't just a prayer hoping for the best.
It was seen as an active magical protection technology, almost
for ensuring the soul's safe journey into the afterlife.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
So it went from being maybe a community ritual thing
to like a state bureaucracy, a supernatural civil service.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
That's a great way to put it. Look at Mesopotamia.
We have palace archives, literal libraries filled with cuneiform tablets,
recording spells, omens, rituals. It was a proper system with
specialized roles, roles like specific jobs. Yeah, you had the
Ashipu they were the exorcists, the healers. They dealt with
dark magic, curses, illness caused by spirits. Then you had
(04:41):
the Baru. They were the diviners, the omen, interpreters, reading sheep, livers,
tracking stars, trying to predict the future and advise the king,
guide state policy.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Wow. So if you have that level of specialization, that
kind of bureaucracy, it tells you this wasn't some fringe belief.
This was central, foundational to how the state were.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Absolutely it was deeply embedded in the running.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Of society, and their rituals sound incredibly specific. I was
struck by that detail about substitution they used to trick
dark magic. It shows how seriously they took the idea
of identity.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Oh, it's a key concept deflecting supernatural harm. So if
someone was really sick and they thought you know, evil
spirits or maybe a witch was responsible. The cure involved
this really careful transfer of identity.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
How did that work?
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Well, they might sacrifice a young goat, okay, but first
they'd dressed the goat in the sick person's clothes, even
their sandals. Then they'd offer the goat dressed like the
person to the goddess of death.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Wait, the goat wore sandals. That level of detail it
really underlines the belief that this was a real, almost
technical transfer, like they thought they were genuinely fooling a goddess.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
It had to be an exact exchange, you see, to
make the substitution valid. They also used physical objects for protection.
These mystical guard dogs clay dogs, slave or bronze figurines. Yeah,
used to call on the healing goddess Gula, but they
also acted as literal magical guard dogs for the home.
Sometimes they even inscribe names on them, things like Catcher
of the Enemy, giving them extra power exactly, extra potency
(06:11):
against bad lucks, illness, any kind of misfortune.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Okay, So this is where the story takes a really
sharp turn. Right, we go from this world where a
magic is systematized. It's accepted maybe even state run to
one where defining power gets really contentious, codified, often hostile.
How does an accepted ritual suddenly become forbidden? Magic monotheism
seems key here.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
It's a huge shift, a profound change in how ritual
and power are understood. Suddenly certain practices become magic in
a negative sense, they become transgressive. The core difference often
boils down to control, doesn't It is the power coming
from the one accepted God or you trying to command
power yourself, maybe from other sources.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
So channeling divine will versus trying to impose your own
will on things.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
That's a good way to think about it. Look at
the Tanak the Hebrew Bible. It very clearly forbids practices
like divination, using charms, talking to the dead, necromancy. Deuteronomy
eighteen lays it out pretty explicitly.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
The thought prophecy was okay.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Authorized prophecy, Yes, interpreting dreams, casting lots. If it was
seen as channeling God's direct will, revealing his plan, it
was acceptable. It's about the source and the perceived direction
of control.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
The Romans too, they started drawing legal lines pretty early on,
didn't they even before Christianity became dominant.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
They did the Twelve Tablets way back in four fifty
one BCE, they already had laws against spiriting away a
neighbour's crops. That tells you the law was concerned about
harmful magic impacting agriculture, impacting livelihoods right from the start,
and that concern grew, It definitely evolved. This concept of
beneficient became a major legal issue. Literally, it means poisoning,
(07:49):
but it came to cover harmful magical potions too. It
linked the criminal act poisoning someone with the uh supernatural
intent of black magic.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
So it blurred the lines between time and sorcery exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
And this legal focus led to these periodic crackdowns mass arrests,
like in three thirty one BCE, sources mentioned one hundred
and seventy women being executed accused of spreading these beneficial
these magical poisons.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
It's hard not to notice how often this opposition, both
legal and religious, seems to target women, long before the
big witch trials.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
That's a really crucial thread running through this whole story.
Think about Norse sorcery cider. Okay, the mythology says the
goddess Frasia taught this powerful magic to Odin the Chief God,
but for mortal men to practice Satyr that was often
considered dishonorable, unmanly.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
So power but shameful power for.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Men kind of Yet at the very same time, who
holds the ultimate power In norsemith the norns, female figures
who control fate itself, spinning the threads of life for everyone,
God's included. So women were inherently linked to this deep, powerful,
maybe unsettling, mystical power. Whether society respected or feared that.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Length and that fear, that link between women in potentially
uncontrollable power that gets weaponized later on, leading to the
European witch craze.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Absolutely weaponized that massive wave of trials in the sixteenth
seventeenth centuries, nearly fifty thousand people executed across Europe, mostly women.
The theological argument underpinning at all was often this idea
that women were well, morally weaker, more easily tempted by
the devil.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
So they'd use magic, demonic magic to manipulate men to
upset the social order.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
That was the narrative. The power wasn't just seen as
coming from nature or spirits anymore. In the witch craze context,
the accusation was that the power came directly from the devil,
and that made it the ultimate crime heresy, collaboration with
God's enemy.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Okay, So while the law and the church were focusing
on this fear of demonic power, what are the intellectuals doing?
The scholars during this period of the Renaissance, the line
seemed to get blurry again there, but in a different way,
creating this sort of secret category of good magic, occult philosophy.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
It's the era of natural philosophy. Scholars are trying to
understand and categorize everything he figures. Like Albert the Great, Okay,
he was earlier thirteenth century, but hugely influential on Renaissance thinking.
He actively promoted studying astrology, the powers hidden plants in stones,
but framed it as natural science.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Trying to make it respectable, legitimate knowledge.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Exactly, they were trying to salvage what they saw as
real knowledge by drawing a sharp line separating it explicitly
from demonic necromancy, from summoning spirits. That was the bad stuff,
the heresy, studying God's creation, even its hidden powers, that
could be Okay, So.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
A new distinction emerges. You've got this good occult philosophy
using the inherent powers of the natural world discovered through study,
and then you have goisha, which was the dodgy stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Gasha was the ritual magic aims specifically at summoning spirits, angels, demons,
often controversially linked back to the legends of King Solomon
commanding spirits. That was seen as much more dangerous, much
closer to the forbidden territory.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
And alchemy fits in here too, right the search for
the Philosopher's Stone.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Alchemy is maybe the perfect example of this blend. The
great work turning base metal into gold on one leveloes
practical chemistry building unsophisticated Arabic science figures like Jabiri ibn
Ion were pioneers, but it was also deeply symbolic, symbolic
how well they saw the process of purifying lead or
mercury into perfect gold as a metaphor. It mirrored the
(11:24):
Christian idea of resurrection, of spiritual transformation, purifying the soul.
So it was science, philosophy, and theology all wrapped up together.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Sounds incredibly intellectual, almost spiritual, but it didn't last, did it.
Modern chemistry sort of took over. How did alchemy lose
that intellectual respectability.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
It was a gradual process, really tied to the rives
of the scientific method as we know it. People like
Robert Boyle started championing experiments. There were empirical, repeatable, transparent alchemy,
which was often shrouded in secrecy, full of allegory, relying
on mystical insight alongside the lab work. It just didn't
fit that new model.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
It couldn't be standardized, verified.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Pretty much by the early seventeen hundreds it was increasingly
seen as well, less like cutting edge research and more
like chasing fantasies. The word alchemists started to sound more
like Charlatan too many years, someone pursuing impossible dreams, maybe
deliberately fooling people.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
What's also really striking about this renaissance period is the
focus on secrecy, hiding knowledge, creating secret societies, even secret alphabets.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Yes, that secrecy becomes part of the definition who gets
access to this powerful knowledge? Take Rosicrucianism. This secret society
emblem of arose on a cross pops up in public
view in the early sixteen hundreds through manifestos.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
What were they about?
Speaker 2 (12:44):
They claimed? To combine Kabbalah, hermeticism, alchemy, ancient wisdom traditions.
They professed access to this hidden mystic knowledge that they
believed was essential for transforming society, for ushering in a
new enlightened age. Their power was partly in the secrecy
the mystery.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
And if you have secret knowledge, you probably need a
secret way to write it down.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Makes sense, right, And we see that too. Look at
the Theban alphabet. It's this writing system, basically a cipher
with Latin letter equivalents. Renaissance occultists like Cornelius Agrippa used
it specifically to keep their magical writings, their grimoires secret,
to make sure only initiates could read them. And the
continuity is amazing. That very same Theban alphabet it was
later adopted by modern wickens in the twentieth century. It
(13:27):
shows how these esoteric symbols, these tools created to protect
Renaissance scholarship, just keep getting passed down and repurposed centuries later.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
So Lifrien pull this all together. What does this huge
sweep of history tell us today? Looking across all these millennia,
it seems like magic isn't really one single thing at all,
not at all It's incredibly flexible, isn't it. It's been
a protective art for survival, a state bureaucracy, a serious
intellectual pursuit, and sometimes a terrifying heresy punishable by death.
(13:58):
It seems to depend entirely on who gets to find
the power source. Is it spirits, God, the devil, or
just the hidden forces within nature itself.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
That's a fantastic summary. And if you connect that to
the bigger picture. Despite centuries of effort really to neatly
divide human knowledge up into science here, religion over there,
a cult in that shadowy corner, the fundamental human desire
for knowledge, for understanding, from maybe some control, it persists,
and often it keeps using the same old language, the
same symbols.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Can you give an example of that persistence.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Sure, think about astrology. Okay, it was formally condemned by
a pabal decree back in fifteen eighty six the Church
wanted to stamp out its influence. But fast forward to today,
the core principles, the symbols, the idea of cosmic influence,
there's still very much alive. You see them embedded in
modern divination tools like how aftroological correspondences are used to
structure and interpret tarot card spreads. The language endures even
(14:53):
if the official status changes.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
That definitely raises a big question for you, the listener,
to think about what kinds of knowledge or maybe belief
systems are sitting right on that dividing line for us
today between what we generally accept as rational as science
and what gets labeled a cult or fringe. What power
source is under dispute in our own time, Something to
mull over until our next deep dive
Welcome to the deep dive. This is where we take
these really big, complex histories and try to boil them
down find the surprising bits of the essential truths. And today,
while we're taking on a pretty massive one, humanity's whole
relationship with the supernatural. We're talking magic, the occult, even
early science, right from prehistory basically up to now. Our
(00:21):
goal here, our mission is to kind of zoom out
look at the big picture. We want to get a
handle on how and maybe why people have consistently turned
to magic, you know, as a way to control the
chaos that's just inherent in the world. And maybe more importantly,
we're looking at how those lines, the lines between magic
and what would maybe call early science and organized religion,
how they've kept shifting for thousands of years depending on
(00:42):
well who got to define where the power was coming from.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Yeah, and before we dig into those really ancient roots,
it's maybe important to grasp just how high the stakes
could be and sometimes still are when those definitions clash.
So let's start this deep dive, maybe not in say
ancient Egypt, but much later in the English countryside sixteen twelve,
the Pendle Witch Trials, right, a.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
Really truly terrifying moment in history, it really is.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
And our sources they focus on this one figure, an
eighty year old woman named Elizabeth southerns known as Old Demdike,
and she genuinely believed, I mean really believed she had
the power to kill a man using witchcraft, okay, and
the method she described in court no less. It was
creating a picture of the person out of clay, then
(01:27):
pricking it with a pin or maybe a thorn to
cause pain, and then finally burning the clay figure to
well to cause the victim's death.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
That sounds like classic sympathetic magic, doesn't it. The idea
that what you do to the symbol the image directly
impacts the real person exactly.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
That, And this belief, which was pretty widely held in
that community, it had immediate fatal results when it got
tangled up with the law. Demdyke, her granddaughter Alison, and
eight other people were executed, hanged for devilish practice and
hellish means Wow. It just darkly shows that difference, doesn't it,
between what might have been seen as you know, accepted
(02:03):
magical practice way back and what became to find is
transgressive forbidden power.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Okay, So let's unpact that older relationship first. Then where
did it all begin? Our sources they trace the earliest
forms of magic right back to the dawn of humankind.
Seems like early people looking for some kind of control,
believe the world around them was full of conscious spirits.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yeah, animism right, Animism the idea that everything has a spirit, trees, rivers, animals,
the weather. Yeah, and they needed some way to interact
with those spirits, those forces. They couldn't otherwise control things
like birth, death, the seasons.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
So shamans stepped in.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Shaman's were the intermediaries. Yeah, they were thought to be
able to travel to the spirit world, the mystical realm.
There is that famous cave painting at LESCo, the Paleolithic
one shows a figure lying down next to a bird.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Oh yeah, I know, the one.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Often interpreted as a shaman on a spirit journey, maybe
with his spirit animal guide. It's a glimpse into that
very old belief system.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
And the sort of day to day magic. The applied stuff.
Was that sympathetic magic you mentioned that seems.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
To be a core principle. Yeah. If you need a cure,
look for something that resembles the illness or the desired outcome.
So like if you had jaundice made you yellow.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
You'd look for a yellow potion or a yellow flower.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Exactly, find something yellow to counteract it. And you know,
on the flip side, the more sinister side, you get
literary examples like Circe and Homer's Odyssey using enchantments to
turn Odysseus's men into pigs. That's sympathetic magic too, transforming
them into the animal she perhaps saw them as behaving like.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
It's fascinating how that personal, maybe tribal, spiritual power starts
getting formalized, written down.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
That's a huge step. We go from you know, neolithic
shamans and oral traditions to these high civilizations where magic
becomes well almost part of the administration. It gets written down.
The ancient Babylonians, the Egyptians, they created protective amulet, sure,
but also whole books.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
Of skulls, like the spells on tomb walls in Egypt.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Precisely, that wasn't just a prayer hoping for the best.
It was seen as an active magical protection technology, almost
for ensuring the soul's safe journey into the afterlife.
Speaker 1 (04:11):
So it went from being maybe a community ritual thing
to like a state bureaucracy, a supernatural civil service.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
That's a great way to put it. Look at Mesopotamia.
We have palace archives, literal libraries filled with cuneiform tablets,
recording spells, omens, rituals. It was a proper system with
specialized roles, roles like specific jobs. Yeah, you had the
Ashipu they were the exorcists, the healers. They dealt with
dark magic, curses, illness caused by spirits. Then you had
(04:41):
the Baru. They were the diviners, the omen, interpreters, reading sheep, livers,
tracking stars, trying to predict the future and advise the king,
guide state policy.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Wow. So if you have that level of specialization, that
kind of bureaucracy, it tells you this wasn't some fringe belief.
This was central, foundational to how the state were.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Absolutely it was deeply embedded in the running.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Of society, and their rituals sound incredibly specific. I was
struck by that detail about substitution they used to trick
dark magic. It shows how seriously they took the idea
of identity.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Oh, it's a key concept deflecting supernatural harm. So if
someone was really sick and they thought you know, evil
spirits or maybe a witch was responsible. The cure involved
this really careful transfer of identity.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
How did that work?
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Well, they might sacrifice a young goat, okay, but first
they'd dressed the goat in the sick person's clothes, even
their sandals. Then they'd offer the goat dressed like the
person to the goddess of death.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Wait, the goat wore sandals. That level of detail it
really underlines the belief that this was a real, almost
technical transfer, like they thought they were genuinely fooling a goddess.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
It had to be an exact exchange, you see, to
make the substitution valid. They also used physical objects for protection.
These mystical guard dogs clay dogs, slave or bronze figurines. Yeah,
used to call on the healing goddess Gula, but they
also acted as literal magical guard dogs for the home.
Sometimes they even inscribe names on them, things like Catcher
of the Enemy, giving them extra power exactly, extra potency
(06:11):
against bad lucks, illness, any kind of misfortune.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Okay, So this is where the story takes a really
sharp turn. Right, we go from this world where a
magic is systematized. It's accepted maybe even state run to
one where defining power gets really contentious, codified, often hostile.
How does an accepted ritual suddenly become forbidden? Magic monotheism
seems key here.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
It's a huge shift, a profound change in how ritual
and power are understood. Suddenly certain practices become magic in
a negative sense, they become transgressive. The core difference often
boils down to control, doesn't It is the power coming
from the one accepted God or you trying to command
power yourself, maybe from other sources.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
So channeling divine will versus trying to impose your own
will on things.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
That's a good way to think about it. Look at
the Tanak the Hebrew Bible. It very clearly forbids practices
like divination, using charms, talking to the dead, necromancy. Deuteronomy
eighteen lays it out pretty explicitly.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
The thought prophecy was okay.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
Authorized prophecy, Yes, interpreting dreams, casting lots. If it was
seen as channeling God's direct will, revealing his plan, it
was acceptable. It's about the source and the perceived direction
of control.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
The Romans too, they started drawing legal lines pretty early on,
didn't they even before Christianity became dominant.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
They did the Twelve Tablets way back in four fifty
one BCE, they already had laws against spiriting away a
neighbour's crops. That tells you the law was concerned about
harmful magic impacting agriculture, impacting livelihoods right from the start,
and that concern grew, It definitely evolved. This concept of
beneficient became a major legal issue. Literally, it means poisoning,
(07:49):
but it came to cover harmful magical potions too. It
linked the criminal act poisoning someone with the uh supernatural
intent of black magic.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
So it blurred the lines between time and sorcery exactly.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
And this legal focus led to these periodic crackdowns mass arrests,
like in three thirty one BCE, sources mentioned one hundred
and seventy women being executed accused of spreading these beneficial
these magical poisons.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
It's hard not to notice how often this opposition, both
legal and religious, seems to target women, long before the
big witch trials.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
That's a really crucial thread running through this whole story.
Think about Norse sorcery cider. Okay, the mythology says the
goddess Frasia taught this powerful magic to Odin the Chief God,
but for mortal men to practice Satyr that was often
considered dishonorable, unmanly.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
So power but shameful power for.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Men kind of Yet at the very same time, who
holds the ultimate power In norsemith the norns, female figures
who control fate itself, spinning the threads of life for everyone,
God's included. So women were inherently linked to this deep, powerful,
maybe unsettling, mystical power. Whether society respected or feared that.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Length and that fear, that link between women in potentially
uncontrollable power that gets weaponized later on, leading to the
European witch craze.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Absolutely weaponized that massive wave of trials in the sixteenth
seventeenth centuries, nearly fifty thousand people executed across Europe, mostly women.
The theological argument underpinning at all was often this idea
that women were well, morally weaker, more easily tempted by
the devil.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
So they'd use magic, demonic magic to manipulate men to
upset the social order.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
That was the narrative. The power wasn't just seen as
coming from nature or spirits anymore. In the witch craze context,
the accusation was that the power came directly from the devil,
and that made it the ultimate crime heresy, collaboration with
God's enemy.
Speaker 1 (09:42):
Okay, So while the law and the church were focusing
on this fear of demonic power, what are the intellectuals doing?
The scholars during this period of the Renaissance, the line
seemed to get blurry again there, but in a different way,
creating this sort of secret category of good magic, occult philosophy.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
It's the era of natural philosophy. Scholars are trying to
understand and categorize everything he figures. Like Albert the Great, Okay,
he was earlier thirteenth century, but hugely influential on Renaissance thinking.
He actively promoted studying astrology, the powers hidden plants in stones,
but framed it as natural science.
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Trying to make it respectable, legitimate knowledge.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
Exactly, they were trying to salvage what they saw as
real knowledge by drawing a sharp line separating it explicitly
from demonic necromancy, from summoning spirits. That was the bad stuff,
the heresy, studying God's creation, even its hidden powers, that
could be Okay, So.
Speaker 1 (10:36):
A new distinction emerges. You've got this good occult philosophy
using the inherent powers of the natural world discovered through study,
and then you have goisha, which was the dodgy stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Gasha was the ritual magic aims specifically at summoning spirits, angels, demons,
often controversially linked back to the legends of King Solomon
commanding spirits. That was seen as much more dangerous, much
closer to the forbidden territory.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
And alchemy fits in here too, right the search for
the Philosopher's Stone.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Alchemy is maybe the perfect example of this blend. The
great work turning base metal into gold on one leveloes
practical chemistry building unsophisticated Arabic science figures like Jabiri ibn
Ion were pioneers, but it was also deeply symbolic, symbolic
how well they saw the process of purifying lead or
mercury into perfect gold as a metaphor. It mirrored the
(11:24):
Christian idea of resurrection, of spiritual transformation, purifying the soul.
So it was science, philosophy, and theology all wrapped up together.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Sounds incredibly intellectual, almost spiritual, but it didn't last, did it.
Modern chemistry sort of took over. How did alchemy lose
that intellectual respectability.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
It was a gradual process, really tied to the rives
of the scientific method as we know it. People like
Robert Boyle started championing experiments. There were empirical, repeatable, transparent alchemy,
which was often shrouded in secrecy, full of allegory, relying
on mystical insight alongside the lab work. It just didn't
fit that new model.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
It couldn't be standardized, verified.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Pretty much by the early seventeen hundreds it was increasingly
seen as well, less like cutting edge research and more
like chasing fantasies. The word alchemists started to sound more
like Charlatan too many years, someone pursuing impossible dreams, maybe
deliberately fooling people.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
What's also really striking about this renaissance period is the
focus on secrecy, hiding knowledge, creating secret societies, even secret alphabets.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Yes, that secrecy becomes part of the definition who gets
access to this powerful knowledge? Take Rosicrucianism. This secret society
emblem of arose on a cross pops up in public
view in the early sixteen hundreds through manifestos.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
What were they about?
Speaker 2 (12:44):
They claimed? To combine Kabbalah, hermeticism, alchemy, ancient wisdom traditions.
They professed access to this hidden mystic knowledge that they
believed was essential for transforming society, for ushering in a
new enlightened age. Their power was partly in the secrecy
the mystery.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
And if you have secret knowledge, you probably need a
secret way to write it down.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Makes sense, right, And we see that too. Look at
the Theban alphabet. It's this writing system, basically a cipher
with Latin letter equivalents. Renaissance occultists like Cornelius Agrippa used
it specifically to keep their magical writings, their grimoires secret,
to make sure only initiates could read them. And the
continuity is amazing. That very same Theban alphabet it was
later adopted by modern wickens in the twentieth century. It
(13:27):
shows how these esoteric symbols, these tools created to protect
Renaissance scholarship, just keep getting passed down and repurposed centuries later.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
So Lifrien pull this all together. What does this huge
sweep of history tell us today? Looking across all these millennia,
it seems like magic isn't really one single thing at all,
not at all It's incredibly flexible, isn't it. It's been
a protective art for survival, a state bureaucracy, a serious
intellectual pursuit, and sometimes a terrifying heresy punishable by death.
(13:58):
It seems to depend entirely on who gets to find
the power source. Is it spirits, God, the devil, or
just the hidden forces within nature itself.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
That's a fantastic summary. And if you connect that to
the bigger picture. Despite centuries of effort really to neatly
divide human knowledge up into science here, religion over there,
a cult in that shadowy corner, the fundamental human desire
for knowledge, for understanding, from maybe some control, it persists,
and often it keeps using the same old language, the
same symbols.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Can you give an example of that persistence.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Sure, think about astrology. Okay, it was formally condemned by
a pabal decree back in fifteen eighty six the Church
wanted to stamp out its influence. But fast forward to today,
the core principles, the symbols, the idea of cosmic influence,
there's still very much alive. You see them embedded in
modern divination tools like how aftroological correspondences are used to
structure and interpret tarot card spreads. The language endures even
(14:53):
if the official status changes.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
That definitely raises a big question for you, the listener,
to think about what kinds of knowledge or maybe belief
systems are sitting right on that dividing line for us
today between what we generally accept as rational as science
and what gets labeled a cult or fringe. What power
source is under dispute in our own time, Something to
mull over until our next deep dive
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