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Magic, Religion and Healing
From: Cambridge University Press
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Mary Lindemann |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The idea that human illness is a manifestation of divine providence is a feature of many cultures. Indeed, the idea of a miracle cure still holds currency even in the scientific Western mind-set. So what is the connection between magic and religion? In this lively extract from her book Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, historian Mary Lindemann traces the dialectic of these ideas in their European context. |
 n the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many people put great trust in magical and astrological healers. By the eighteenth century, however, astrological physicians and magical cures had noticeably waned in popularity. Here, I want to look more closely at those who used magic and astrology in diagnosis and therapy. |
Thanks largely to the works of Michael MacDonald and Ronald Sawyer on Richard Napier, we possess excellent studies of the practice of a man who was at once healer, magus, and cleric. Over a period of almost forty years, between 1597 and 1634, thousands of patients found their way to the small town of Great Linford, Buckinghamshire, to consult him and hundreds more sent letters. Like others influenced by Renaissance neoplatonism (which viewed the physical world as animate and alive), Napier's medical practice blended religion, magic, and natural philosophy. |
So what did Napier do when approached by patients for help? After jotting down vital data on each visitor--place of birth, location, and reason for consultation--he noted the precise time of the meeting. He mapped the heavens, recorded the patient's description of his or her problems, and then compared the two, selecting treatments indicated by the stars and current medical principles. He generally prescribed standard therapies, for example, bleeding or purging. He only rarely turned to the use of amulets or exorcism. |
Religion and healing
Napier's practice raises the question of the general relationship between religion and healing. Mental distress seems to have yielded to pastoral intervention quite frequently. Pastor Alutarius, for example, cured "a melancholic peasant" of his "religiously tinged depression" in Woerden (United Provinces) in 1623. It is, therefore, difficult to draw the line between magic and religion. Anthropologists have pointed out that the western secular attitude often assumes that what "we" do is religion, while what "others" do is magic. Recent historical scholarship has demonstrated how weak the distinction between magic and religion was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To an appreciable extent, early modern religious and magical practices rested on a similar assumption: that supernatural forces--whether divine or magical--could affect nature. This was true whether one chanted a magical incantation or muttered a humble prayer. Thus, there are clear affinities between religious and magical practices, especially in the realm of medicine. |
Christianity has always been a healing religion. Many of the miracles of Christ were curative. Christianity ultimately regarded illness as the wages of sin, either individual or collective, although its manifestations might differ; leprosy punished individual transgressions while visitations of plague scourged a wicked society. On many of these points, little distinguished Protestant from Catholic outlooks. Thomas Becon, much like his medieval predecessors, understood that "sickness and adversity is sent ... unto the children of men for their great profit and singular commodity." We thus find in Christian thought and practice a close affinity between saving souls and healing bodies. Medicine could provide images for talking about souls and vice versa and the most immediate remedy for the soul--prayer--was also the most important relief for the body. The English church's "Great Litany" of 1544 petitioned God for "pity upon us miserable sinners, that are now visited with great sickness and mortality, that like as thou didst command thy angel to cease from punishing, so it may now please thee to withdraw from us this plague and grievous sickness" (J. Booty, "The Anglican Tradition," in R. Numbers and D. W. Amundsen, Caring and Curing, New York, 1986, p. 249). |
Christian churches taught, and Christians believed, that illness came ultimately from God as punishment for sin. That acceptance did not, however, prevent people from seeking, and being advised to seek, natural cures for illness. By 1500, the Roman Catholic church had long since come to terms with secular medicine. Thus, while clergy emphasized that prayer and penitence were vital to the success of any cure, and while God remained the ultimate arbiter of life and death, churchmen also counseled Christians not to disdain the aid of physicians nor to spurn the medicines of this world. |
Although prayer remained the preferred religious panacea for illness, other practices also fell within the sphere of religious healing. Besides praying, one could invoke the aid of Christ, the Virgin Mary, or saints. Although the Roman Catholic church never taught that saints could cure, people nonetheless entreated them to intervene in cases of illness, and associated certain saints with particular diseases or afflictions: Sts. Roch and Sebastian with the plague, St. Antony with plague and anthrax, St. Huburt with mental illness; and St. Laurent with burns. Women in childbed would cry out to St. Anne for assistance, while epileptics journeyed to the shrine of St. Cornelius near Cologne or to that of St. Willibrod in Echternach (Luxemburg). Such pilgrimages, whether to the holy places of particular saints, such as that of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury or to the Marian site in Kevelaer (Germany), could be undertaken to seek a cure or to acknowledge a cure already received. In the latter case, pilgrims might leave an ex-voto (a symbolic object) to attest their recovery and express their gratitude. The walls of the churches at the nineteenth-century shrine of Lourdes and at twentieth-century Fatima are festooned with discarded crutches. |
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| Each year more than 5 million people, of whom a great number are sick or handicapped, visit the Marian shrine at Lourdes in France. | |
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Epidemics and plague
Individuals turned to prayers, pilgrimages, and supplications in response to distress or suffering. Epidemics, however, called forth more structured, large-scale religious responses. Supplicative masses and processions counted among the commonest communal reactions to an epidemic outbreak. Processions drew in the entire society or at least its representatives. Images of saints or crucifixes formed the focal point of processions that wound their way through the entire city, stopping at, or passing through, all places of religious or civic relevance. In 1651, the tanner Miquel Parets related how |
The city of Barcelona, seeing that Our Lord was so angered with us and that the plague kept spreading, ... decided to hold a procession and carry the relic of glorious Saint Severus along the entire Corpus route. This procession took place with great devotion on April 30 ... and was attended by the lord councilors and the governor ... and the wool weavers, who marched with torches and dressed as pilgrims, as they always do whenever the relic of the glorious saint is brought out. A great crowd came to this procession. (J.S. Amelang (trans. and ed.), Journal of the Plague Year, New York, 1991, p. 47.) |
Processions and supplications remained part of the mainstream of religious and communal life throughout the medieval period and, in Catholic areas, long after the Reformation. If Protestants no longer turned to "graven images" or sought the intervention of saints, they, too, did not abandon the habit of public prayer and penance during crises. |
The theological affinity of Christianity for healing was personified in religious healers. Throughout the middle ages, and well into the early modern period, clergymen--whether secular or cloistered--practiced medicine. Medieval monasteries long served as repositories of medical knowledge and, more practically, medical care. Religion and healing coexisted not only ideologically but also physically in the body of the priest-, monk-, or nun-practitioner. The separation of functions--between medicine and religion, and between lay and religious practitioners--occurred only slowly, and was conditioned by ideological, theological, and socioeconomic forces. One can trace three major steps in the process: the first taken by the Roman Catholic church itself in the late middle ages; the second resulting from the Reformation; and the final one in the increasing secularization of the middle to late seventeenth century. The separation was never clear and sharp, but the general trend was to define two spheres of activity and to hold them apart from each other: the care of souls and the cure of the body. |
Catholic and Protestant approaches
Beginning as early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the church itself began to limit the practice of clerical medicine. Mounting disquietude among the upper ranks of the clergy with the healing activities of monks, nuns, and priests partially drove the shift, but the timing also coincided with the rise of the universities and urban growth. Church councils pared away at the medical practice of the clergy, first banning them from doing surgery and then forbidding regular clergy (i.e., the cloistered clergy) the practice of medicine unless they had also attained a medical degree. The Second Lateran Council of 1139 ordered that "monks and canons regular are not to study jurisprudence and medicine for the sake of temporal gain." |
Still most people accepted that possession or bewitchment could cause illnesses, especially those characterized by bizarre or intemperate speech (or, conversely, muteness), convulsions, or uncontrolled body motions. For these, the spiritual healer remained the practitioner of choice. Priests performed exorcisms and attempted to lift spells, as did cunning-men and -women whose white magic was viewed as an effective response to malevolent forces. At the same time, the Catholic church remained extremely active in running charitable institutions, including the hospitals and the nursing orders that cared for the poor. |
The Reformation of the sixteenth century worked to transform the relationship between magic and healing on the one hand, and between religion and healing on the other. The Protestant attack on the miraculous powers of priests included an assault on their ability to heal. Likewise, Protestants decried the whole range of what they termed "superstitious practices": the use of the sacraments or sacramental objects such as the communion wafer to work wonders; the veneration of saints; pilgrimages; and exorcisms. Of course, Protestants did not deny the power of God to heal, but emphasized that prayer and repentance were the only proper spiritual recourse for the ill. More practically, the Protestants stressed the importance of pastoral counseling. The Dutch Reformed church, for example, appointed "comforters of the sick" (ziekentroosters) whose primary task was to visit the ill, pray with them, and help them try to make sense of their pain and suffering, although they also gave medical advice. Protestant clergymen crafted special prayers for the occasion of sickness and placed them in prayer books. Both Catholic and Protestants believed that only a good man--i.e., one of conscience and right belief--made a good physician. Protestant theologians, too, helped strengthen the claims of learned physicians by advising the sick to use medicines and consult physicians in illness. Martin Luther, for instance, taught that "God created medicine and provided us with intelligence to guard and take care of the body so that we can live in good health" (quoted in C. Lindberg, "The Lutheran Tradition," in R. Numbers and D. W. Amundsen, Caring and Curing, New York, 1986, p. 178). Likewise, Reformed teachings tended to undercut beliefs in non-natural origins of disease, for example, by bewitchment. One famous opponent of witchcraft persecutions, the Protestant Johann Weyer, insisted that diseases supposedly caused by witches could be traced to natural origins. |
The Catholic church in the sixteenth century underwent its own reformation and revitalization, variously called the Counter- or Catholic Reformation. In the course of this movement, the church accelerated its retreat from claiming special healing powers for its clergy. In 1626, for instance, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (the part of the church in charge of missions) forbade priests in Bulgaria to "dispense medicines--and in particular laxatives--to the sick, whether they be of the Faith or not" (quoted in M. R. O'Connell, "The Roman Catholic Tradition since 1545," in R. Numbers and D. W. Amundsen, Caring and Curing, New York, 1986, p. 120). Exorcism, too, was no longer accepted as the unquestioned prerogative of the clergy and the Catholic church discouraged its use. Nonetheless, in the decades after the Reformation, some elements within Catholicism used both exorcism and healing to retain souls for Mother Church and to convince strays to return to her bosom. Particularly the Jesuits were involved in exorcism and perhaps this accounts, at least in part, for their success as missionaries. As Ramon Gutiérrez has demonstrated in a fascinating study of the introduction of Christianity into the north American southwest, the Jesuits adeptly manipulated the magic of pueblo Indians to their own--and their church's--great benefit. Jesuits in Naples actively encouraged belief in miracle cures linked to their missions. In addition, the French dévots (members of the laity dedicated to ideals of Counter-Reformation religiosity) pushed programs of reform that included medicine. |
Religious healing and healers, sanctioned neither by the Roman Catholic church nor by established Protestant churches nor by secular authorities, of course persisted. Matthew Ramsey, for instance, tells the story of the "saint of Savières," an erstwhile shepherd named Pierre Richard. In 1767, when already in his fifties, he began curing with holy water and at the height of his popularity reportedly treated hundreds each day. As Protestantism in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries experienced waves of revivalism, in the forms of Pietism in Germany (a mystical and inner-directed religious movement within Lutheranism) and Methodism in England, the role of religion in healing began to expand once again. At the strongly Pietist-influenced university at Halle (in Prussia), the university clinic educated theological students to minister to the sick. The university also established a pharmaceutical industry and dispatched medications throughout the world. Missionaries educated in Halle, like Batholomaeus Ziegenbalg (1682-1719) who went to India, and Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1711-87) who missionized in America, practiced medicine along with their theology. John Wesley (1703-91), the founder of Methodism, criticized the standard medical practices of his day and developed his own method of "physick." The first edition of his Primitive Physick appeared in 1747 and continued to be printed until 1880. |
Conclusion
To sum up: in the early middle ages, religion, magic, and healing coexisted within the framework of Christianity. Toward the end of the middle ages, however, the Catholic hierarchy tried to disentangle religion from healing without abandoning the latter altogether. The Protestant and Catholic Reformations of the sixteenth century produced churches that focused more singlemindedly on the care of souls than the cure of the body. By the middle of the seventeenth century, most clergy were reluctant to attempt supernatural cures. Still, religious healing did not disappear simply because established churches began to distance themselves from its practice. Clearly in many regions religious and magical healing tended to hold on longer, although it is far too simple to accept that countrypeople or the "small folk" of early modern Europe were particularly benighted and clung pigheadedly to superstitious practices, while more knowledgeable urbanites forged ahead, accepting the modernizing and secularizing tendencies of the new science of the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth. |
Cures that relied on magic and religion were, however, only one option. As we have seen, there was little tendency in early modern Europe to spurn medicine and few people satisfied themselves with magical or religious cures entirely. The breadth of other choices was great: local healers of many kinds; midwives; traveling practitioners; surgeons; apothecaries; and physicians. These men and women filled important niches. |
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