Dan Snow's History Hit - Magic and Witchcraft

Episode Date: August 22, 2020

Suzannah Lipscomb joined me on the pod to discuss the history of magic, witchcraft and the occult. Examining the beliefs and suspicions from the ancient era to the modern world, we discussed everything from Japanese folklore to Indian witchcraft, looking at tarot cards, Norse magic and modern Wicca rituals. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I met a listener the other day and she came up to me and said I was listening to all of your history hits on a journey driving across Europe and the first thing that came to her mind as a source of praise, she said, they're short. So, thank you but she also did say she also say it's annoying having to listen to the advert on the front and you know what i understand that understand that's why i keep telling you in the advert to go and subscribe to history hit tv because there are no adverts if you listen to it on our on our app they're all there advert free all the all the back catalogue of podcasts all the new ones history hit dot tv go listen to that but the second point is

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continue listening into the autumn, into the fall, because we've got lots of exciting stuff coming up. This one is also exciting. This is Professor Susanna Lipscomb. She's been on this podcast so many times, she might as well be hosting it. Professor Susanna Lipscomb is one of my oldest friends in history. She's incredibly talented. She's a Tudor historian. She's also a TV presenter, broadcaster in her own right. She received the ultimate accolade the other day from the one and only Hilary Mantel, author of the greatest trilogy of books in the English language. She wrote, at the back of one of her books, anyone who's interested in the subject, go and read the wonderful Susanna Lipscomb. I mean, you can die happy when you get that written about you

from such a genius. So this is an episode about one of her latest books. She's produced A History of Magic. If you don't want to get a history hit at tv and become a subscriber like thousands of people at the moment i mean it's just wild over there uh please go to history hit dot tv uh sign up using the code pod one pod one and you get to listen to all these podcasts without advertisements on the front also you get all the back episodes which are not available anywhere else in the world so i'll see you over there there. In the meantime, enjoy this episode with Professor Susanna Lipscomb. Professor Susanna Lipscomb, welcome back on the podcast. Thank you. It's a delight to be here. Always lovely to see you.

I mean, you've been on so many times, it must be getting very boring. But the reason you've been on this time is because you keep writing these goddamn books. This is extraordinary. Well this this time this time I've just written the foreword. I haven't written the whole book but you know I'm trying. I'm trying. You're a powerhouse and you know starting family. I don't know how you do it really. This is a kind of history of magic and superstition. If you hold the view that I do that once we understand something we call it science but like magic doesn't really kind of exist. So why write a history of it what's the point well i suppose throughout the centuries that have passed there's been so much that people didn't understand right there's been so much that's been inexplicable

and magic helps you tilt the balance in favor of trying to control what you can't control i think i think that's why people have wanted to harness the power of magic. And, you know, whether that's trying to control, you know, life after death or trying to or whether it's about trying to protect your crops or trying to get pregnant when you can't get pregnant or to help your child get well when they're sick. I think a lot of it is about power, really, it's about power and trying to ensure that there's some recourse when there's so much that's beyond one's own agency. And so presumably what studying people's magical practices, if that's the right word, presumably that tells us a lot about the society that they're from. Yeah, it tells us about their concerns and their preoccupations. And it often tells us a lot about the society that they're from. Yeah it tells us about their concerns and their preoccupations and it often tells us a lot about those who don't have access to mainstream power in that society as well although sometimes magical practitioners were really at the heart of things but a bunch of the time also they were people who otherwise you know didn't have access to any

public power and so were attempting to use magical practices in order to change that as well. Let's go back to the beginning because this book is such a fabulous comprehensive survey. Let's go back all the way. What about an ancient world? What's going on with the magic in the ancient world? Because I'm on Twitter at the moment, it's a hot day in the UK and everyone is talking about animal sacrifices and rain dances and stuff and it strikes me when you look at divination, people looking at entrails of animals um you know the ancient authors are full of magic yeah i should have looked up if and see if there was any specific cures you know for for dry spells um but yeah and if we go back the earliest opportunity to find in

history of practicing magic appears to be like about 4 000 years before the common era so ancient mesopotamia modern day iraq um and there's evidence there from the palace library of an assyrian king called ashurbanipal who had hundreds of clay cuneiform tablets in that library and they are inscribed with spells and incantations so you know we have to go a pretty long way back to get to the beginnings of magical practice and then of course we've got ancient persia herodotus talks about the magi in ancient persia who are interpreting dreams and who are intoning over the flesh of sacrificial animals and accusations of sorcery in ancient persia were pretty serious like you could if you were accused of sorcery um the you could have molten metal

poured over your tongue to determine guilt i'm not quite sure how it determined guilt but that's what they did and then in ancient greece is the as far as i can tell is the first time we see the use of wands and also potions again um looking at the odyssey the homer's odyssey we've got odysseus taking a potion uh made of uh moly which is a kind of magical herb to stop circe turning him into a pig um and one of the key concepts in ancient greek magic is um about binding so trying to bind sort of physical or intellectual attributes of your victim to your own will so you know whether you've got clay or metal figures that are literally sort of bound and when we found them or we found um papyrus with incantations on that start i bind

or whatever and a lot of that is imported into ancient rome one of my favorite things about ancient rome is the use of amulets is quite popular there and it was normal for Roman boys to wear the bulla which is a phallus-shaped charm to protect against evil spirits. But the book also covers ancient Japan for example and that's an amazing example where you've got um occult practitioners omnyaji who are um mainstream practitioners and they they become court officials they there's even a divination bureau uh that appoints them and that exists get this up until 1868 when the emperor Meiji disbands it so So a divination bureau.

And they're doing things like exorcisms and rituals to determine whether an ex-person can come into the court and that sort of thing. That's very cool. When you were working on this project, were you struck by what joins us, what binds us together as humans, our common humanity? Yeah, I think so. It feels really amazing to look at all the examples or you know there are the rituals and the spells and the incantations or whatever it is the practices themselves may change but they have on the whole sort of broadly similar concerns and it is incredible when you have a look at a survey like this to see similar beliefs popping up all

over the place and obviously it's sort of difficult because you don't want to focus on the the similarity to the extent of ignoring the particularity you know if you think of the Pitt Rivers Museum like that was criticized for years um in oxford because um it gathers together say like all of the fetishes that or you know all of the shrunken heads or you know like from different places and makes a parallel between them but at the same time you know so for example um i've got really fascinated in reading this book about practices relating to divination one of the things that we most can't control as humans is that we live in linear time and we can't see the future.

So we have been fascinated with trying to predict what it's going to be. And people have used all manner of things. So in ancient China, they would cast yarrow stalks uh clearomancy and i put this on twitter a few days ago and someone tells me you can go into a chinese uh medical shop today and buy yarrow stalks you can still use anyway um or again back to homer you know we've got divination there achilles um is said to consult was told to consult or he suggests or a consulting um an interpreter of dreams to try and figure out why the god apollo is angry with the greeks and in ancient greek they were particularly concerned with observing the flight of birds

to try and define the future or um ancient rome they are interested in animal entrails, so the colour of livers, which is called haraspicy in the, you know, the Mexico, the Aztecs, they scatter maze kernels and patterns on the ground. And some of these things have just got the most fantastic names, you know. My favourite, I think, is from medieval Byzantium and it's called Chromistomomancy, which is interpreting horses' neighs. Although the Byzantine also have Palomancy, which is about interpreting inadvertent bodily twitches. Well, that is interesting because, of course, now we're told that the great powers all have special bodily twitch experts who are reading body language of other prime ministers and presidents, aren't we?

So that has actually surely come back into fashion. So, okay, what about, that's brilliant, love divination. There's a lot of alchemy in the book, isn't there? Alchemy feels like a kind of gateway drug to science. But alchemy, especially in your period, you're so versed in the 16th century, you must see that alchemists, I mean there was a sort of respectability of alchemists, wasn't there? Yeah, there certainly was, I mean in the 16th century it's mainstream, and actually one of the reasons we don't perhaps, perhaps we don't know as much

about this as we could do, is that one of the major sources used for the 16th century is um the state papers that were all gathered together and calendared i.e put in chronological order and typed up basically in the 19th century and these 19th century men choosing which state papers were important didn't think the ones about magic were that important so there's a whole there's a lot of stuff in the manuscripts that hasn't really made it into much of the normal discourse but yeah so dr john d obviously famously an alchemist but also people like william cecil and sir thomas smith so queen elizabeth the first court was riddled with alchemists and she actually had alchemical laboratories at her court

but it goes back much further that the word alchemy comes from alchemia which is Arabic and it means transmutation so it's about trying to change one substance into another and you're absolutely right about it being the sort of gateway to science because people like the 9th century Arab scholar Al-Razi were basically early chemists so they are people who are coming up with the idea of having laboratories and distillation and it's actually even practiced in ancient China even before that as well but in the Renaissance the focus comes to trying to find the philosopher's stone, so that the thing that will help you change base metals into gold and will help you cure illness and attain immortality, and that's

the focus. And the other thing to connect this with science is that people go on believing this for quite a while. So Isaac Newton, you know, one of the founders of the scientific revolution was an alchemist. He undertook alchemical experiments. He read alchemical texts. Heard of him. Yeah. No, I mean, that's fine. I think that's I think that relationship so far. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows,

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new What about, okay, so another thing you cover, which I like, is similar to the Voska Stone, objects, magical objects. See, I'm in honour of this interview. I'm wearing my lucky charm. You see, my kids made me this little shell necklace. And I had this strange attachment to it. I'm not really an object kind of guy, but I have this strange attachment. And it's like a charm. And so I thought, this is my little bit of magic.

What kind of things have you come across? Yeah, yeah. So amulets are a crucial thing. So warding off evil, really. So basically, stones and objects can often be thought to be receptacles of magical power. stones and objects can often be thought to be receptacles of magical power so you in ancient greece you've got um hamatite which was thought to protect unborn babies and jasper to cure stomach infections um in ancient greece jade was thought to keep away evil spirits um and in medieval byzantium sardonyx was thought to help protect against miscarriages so quite often you'd wear

one of these because you could put it in a piece of wood or a piece of bone and then you could wear it just as you're wearing your shell and obviously the modern version of these are the kind of talismans of Saint Christopher's you know medallions or those cats with the raised paws you see in shops often or lucky mascots of sports. But the other thing about, apart from that, and then also in the 16th century, it's quite often things like witches' bottles and shoes in chimneys and silver coins and stuff to protect against malevolent spirits. But this idea goes back, you know, to ancient Egypt, scarab beetles or ancient Islam, the hamsa, the hand of Fatima.

So it's been really common. Islam, the Hamza, the Hand of Fatima. So it's been really common. And I think one of the things is, one of the parts of it is basically, I think at the heart of the idea about objects as intermediaries is that there's transference. So they will take the evil spirit as opposed to you. And in a similar way, it's been thought things like um you know you could use objects or animals to heal yourself if you had plague buboes put a live chicken against those plague buboes and the the illness will transfer to the bird um or more uh malignantly poppets so you know voodoo dolls figures shaped to look like somebody and you do harm to that doll in order to do harm to um the person and this is but this is going on what's amazing is how many places have poppets like around the world how common this is um you

know you find it in Haiti and um but you also find it in 1612 in Lancashire, in the Pendle Witch Drafts, you know, clay figures being pricked with a thorn or a pin to cause pain. Well, you once tweeted a royal advice manual, pamphlet written about how to cure an aching stomach and that was to lie with a beautiful maiden but that does kind of remind me of herbal because this is magic is such a fascinating subject isn't it because some of it like poppets is just balls and then others was obviously kind of

what was true because it was proto science so herbal healers and remedies we now go oh look at that you, it turns out that that is like an antibiotic or an anti-scorbutic. So that's a whole part of magic that's been hived off and turned into science, hasn't it? So you cover that as well, I presume. Yeah, I think that's right. In fact, so to quote you back at yourself, I remember once you gave a talk about the value of history and you were talking about how we so often say that history is not useful because so much of it when it works it's become something else like so it you know the historical experiments uh with you know alchemy becomes chemistry and then they're like that's our subject so no actually it's ours really

but um so you know or whatever it is the successes of uh of things so So yes, absolutely, the therapeutic qualities of plants, you know, sage to heal fevers, aloe vera to treat burns, things that work. But also, you know, for example, basil to calm your mind. Now, I quite often put a few drops of basil oil in, you know, one of those diffusers in here when I'm trying to focus and I think that's fine I think that works basil was also thought though to create wealth and so far it hasn't managed to do that but you know or patchioli which was thought to be an aphrodisiac mistletoe was thought by the druids Celtic druids to bring fertility and then one of the sort of most difficult plants of all was mandrake which was thought to be an aphrodisiac and thought to be a cure for sterility.

But it was also thought that it would scream as you pulled it out of the ground and that its scream would kill anyone who heard it. So I guess I don't know what's going on there. Is that just so you don't try? But the thinking behind that is sympathetic magic. you know what's going on there is that just so you don't try so you're like anyway but the the thinking behind that is sympathetic magic so the idea is that as you well know that the that the healer would find something in nature that looked like um the ailment and then use that as a cure so in medieval europe to cure jaundice for example they would try making a potion of mashed earthworms and old urine the idea being that the yellow colour would act to cure the yellow tint of the jaundice and mandrake is supposed to be shaped like a human body so it's supposed to cure lots of things. Crikey and then we

should talk about magicians and witches. Do you see a similar thing with that you do in religion with the priesthood where some societies develop kind of a quite hierarchical structure and you've got witches and wizards that need training in an almost separate caste, where others are a little bit more Protestant about it and where everyone can kind of do magic? I mean, you must see that in different cultures. Slavic culture of what's sort of modern Ukraine they had the uh the witches and wizards I suppose or male witches as well were called Volkovi and that was both men and women um and they would you know doing things like divination and protecting against bad spirits and healing all the standard stuff but they were also said to be able to shape shift into becoming bears and wolves and they were supposed to have dragon ancestors but then the most famous of those is a woman a wild old woman called baba yaga who still appears in russian folk tales um flying around in a mortar with a pestle um but yeah in some places so i mean when the those japanese the japanese divination bureau i talked

about that's all men. But in some places, it's all women. So in the Norse magic sorcerers, some of the most revered were female wand carriers who had a long blue coats, which were lined with white cat's fur and black lamb's wool. And they also could shapeshift. So shapeshifting, it seems it's one of sort of the if you're on the higher echelons of witchery or wizardry you know shape shifting and you know making things invisible yeah you've talked to me a lot about witchcraft and its persecution and in a perhaps less humorous way in seventh century france but i mean what other kind of spells i mean a lot of spells to have medicine and and putting and is it putting

the evil eye on people is it like sort of both for good luck and bad luck and then and then the love let's come to the love because that's nice that's nice magic i think isn't it yeah i love spells well it depends i mean it depends what you do i suppose but um yeah there's all sorts of things that can be done um to try and cure sickness by um tying you know herbs and salt into a a cow's tail that's fairly benign you know burying a dog not so benign but love right so there's a medieval jewish love spell which uh in which you fill an eggshell with your blood and the blood of your intended there's not much clue about how you get that but um once you've got that uh you write both your names in blood on the show and then bury it and that apparently promises

instant results well you and i've talked a lot about sort of your you're obviously a world expert in the tudors and your recent book is astonishing on on france or french history as well so please go back and listen to those podcasts so we're not going to talk too much about that period because i actually would love to go on to something that I've seen a little bit recently. I've had friends and close people to me that have lost loved ones. And they're quite fascinated by spiritualism and the idea that you can talk to people after death. And it's very difficult for me because I know a little bit about it. And I know that particularly, it was particularly popular after the First World War.

Where these vast numbers of bereaved families were frankly taken for a ride by various sort of spiritualists who said, you know, I can talk to you, you've been talked to your deceased son, you know, these young boys through me and stuff. So I'm quite, it's been tricky, because that seems to linger in our society, this urge to speak through mediums. Is that something that's recent,

or do you see that all the way back through history? In its modern form the idea of having seances that you can communicate with the dead through a medium in the west that's been since about the 1840s. There was a couple of sisters in New York called Maggie and Kate Fox who claimed they could commune with the dead and then it got particularly popular in America following the American Civil War exactly as it did after the First World War because of all these lost loved ones and it gained popularity because celebrities endorsed it and back to the science magic question what's really interesting is you've got people like William Crookes who was a leading chemist the president of the Royal Society

supporting spiritualism Sir Arthur Conan Doyle the man who invents you know the most forensic minded detective of the age and Conan Doyle was also a member of something called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which was a kind of esoteric, secretive society that you had to be initiated into and that assumed that there were planes of consciousness and that you could rise to a mystical awakening through that so there was a there was a sense in which um there was a i think a hunger for this sort of spiritual belief in the 19th century and if you think back towards the beginning of the 19th century end of the 18th century gothic literature of course is very popular if you think of the castle of otranto and frankenstein and all that so there's a real um tending towards uh that that spiritual nature and i think i think i think ultimately it just boils down to the fact that death just seems too final and that we don't we don't understand my lit my lovely literary agent died two months ago and i remember

walk within the night i heard the news just going for a walk and thinking and just really genuinely asking the question but but but where has she gone do you know what I mean well what that what like asking and and really being faced with the most basic of ideas of of loss and of the fact that everybody I love will die if I don't die before you know you know before that and I think it's just it's just such a hard idea to grapple with so it makes a lot of sense that people are looking for an answer and I think you're all you're completely right that lots of people have taken people for a ride as a result of that have played on that loss and um you know been total charlatans what we got um Dan Friedman on the chat here he's he's a hardcore

man dan's got gone straight for it he just thinks is this is this is magic just a way for intelligent people to gain influence within their societies like after working on this project are you left thinking all these magic you know all these so-called magicians and things that they're just looking to get to trick people and gain influence and power. I'm sure that's true of some people. I'm sure there were people for whom that applies. But I also think that there were people, and this is where we have to start to grapple with these,

with the reality of different people's beliefs about things. There were people who genuinely believed that they were witches or wizards um or you know soothsayers in the past that they weren't seeking to hoodwink anybody that they weren't trying to manipulate the systems of the society that they genuinely believed it and others believed it too then you have to start to look at the world in a slightly different way and people you know not just confessing under torture but genuinely confessing without torture to say yes i am a witch that makes you think about people's frameworks of belief as being very different from our own. Adrian says, what's the sort of dividing line between belief in magic and religious faith? Yeah, it's a really good question, because quite a lot of the time,

there've been really blurred lines. So for example, much of what we call voodoo, but more properly it's called voodoo in belief, is syncretic. In other words, it takes elements of Roman Catholicism, mixes them in. And there are, you know, there's an 11th century English spell as a cure for dysentery, which in which you are, you know, you have to dig up a bramble root, which is a blimmin' hard thing to do, are required, you know, you have to dig up a bramble root, which is a blimmin' hard thing to do, and say the Lord's Prayer nine times, and then boil up the root with mugwort and milk until it turns red, and so there's, you've got that combination of, here, go do something in nature, you know, and have some incantation, except the incantation happens to be a prayer,

right, so you've got that absolute overlap. And the line between magic and miracle basically depends on the view of the eye of the beholder, I think. So we were talking about amulets and objects, but you've got someone like Charlemagne owning a couple of crystal spheres in which one of them's got a bit of the true cross and one of them's got, you know, a relic of the Virgin Mary and he thinks these protect him. So it depends who's drawing the line between the two, what is considered orthodox and what is not. Well you know what everyone, thank you very much Professor Lipscomb, that was fantastic. Suzanne, what is the book called?

Okay the book is called A History of Magic, Witchcraft and the Occult. It's published by DK and you can get it in all good stores although I would particularly say that there's a shop called Fox Lane Books up in North Yorkshire an independent bookshop that I've teamed up with if you want me to sign a copy or dedicate it I will put a book plate in it if you buy it from them

so look them up, Fox Lane Books What's your next big project, what's your next big book? Next big book is about six women who aren't that terribly well known. They were married to this big fat chap at the beginning of the 16th century. He killed a couple of them, divorced a couple of them.

One died in childbirth and another survived. I wonder if you can guess. Susie, Professor Lipscomb, thank you very much for coming on this podcast. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it and I hate myself.

Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts and give us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps and basically boosts up the chart, which is good, and then more people listen, which is nice. So if you could do that, I'd be very grateful. I understand if you don't want to subscribe to my TV channel. I understand if you don't want to buy my calendar, but this is free. Come on, do me a favour. Thanks.