There is an assumption of materialism that has infected every aspect of modern life. I have noticed that even devout Christians today assume materialism. If someone reports something seemingly supernatural everyone has a deep trust that either there is a natural explanation or that the report is false. For Christians, we turn off this skepticism with older miracles (from the Bible) but we generally keep it on when we hear of a psychic that told the future or a yogi that was able to levitate. We see a magician on stage and we don’t ask, “Is the magic real?” We ask, “How did he do the trick?”
This is one of the many areas where the modern is broken off from the ancient.
This is not to say that the ancients were gullible and naïve. There has always been awareness that miracles could be faked and that wild claims needed investigation before believing. In the Bible, there are many examples of such skepticism (from St. Joseph being prepared to divorce St. Mary when he learned she was pregnant, to St. Thomas demanding evidence of Jesus’s resurrection). And in the ancient world, claims of miracles were not just taken for granted but questioned, tested, and approached with caution. The difference is not the skepticism of particular miraculous or magical claims but the skepticism of the possibility of the miraculous and the magical. That is what is new.
Recently I saw a clip of an Orthodox Priest (who I later learned was schismatic) who was placing a relic of a dead saint into water and people were crowding around to drink from the water. I noted that it was gross but “perhaps magic”. Several friends (Christians) objected on several grounds. Some of the objections were to my openness to something being magical. Most of the rest were to the idea that the church would/should sanction magic. I would like to examine both of these issues by looking at scripture and history.
Christianity and Magic
Magic is defined as “the use of means (such as charms or spells) believed to have supernatural power over natural forces” or “an extraordinary power or influence seemingly from a supernatural source”. The main difference between a miracle and something magic appears to be that in the former case humans are somewhat passive agents but in the later case humans are active. The person follows a procedure that prompts the supernatural to act.
And it is this distinction that makes most people uncomfortable with the idea of magic. Who are we to command God? Or, if not God, who would we be calling upon but demons?
And on some level, I absolutely agree with these concerns. I think the long tradition of the church condemning those practicing magic as heretical or demonic is not for no reason. However…
When I was reading Rodney Stark’s excellent For the Glory of God, I found his use of the phrase, "church magic" to be interesting. By the phrase, he meant that the medieval church offered an alternative to the widespread use of pagan magic in the culture of Europe. He states that when people were desperate, they were inclined to turn to witches and magicians for help. If their child was sick, if they had an infection, if they were down with the plague, etc, they sought help. A modern Christian might say, “Just pray and ask others to pray.” But the medieval church did more. It offered an alternative to the pagan witchcraft by offering procedures and prayers that in many ways looked like magic but that worked by appeals to the Christian God not to spirits or mysterious entities. It is these procedures that he dubs this “church magic”. Here is one example,
“…a recommended treatment for someone having a speck in his or her eye was for the cleric to pray: Thus I adjure you, O speck, by the living God and the holy God, to disappear from the eye of the servant of God (name of victim), whether you are black, red, or white. May Christ make you go away. Amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
Of course no magic was perfect (neither pagan nor church) but these prayers offered an answer to the need that a desperate mother might have if her child had an eye injury or some other life changing/risking malady. And so far, many modern Christians would have no problem with this sort of “church magic”. It reads like a prayer and therefore it is okay. But what about when objects are included? Because objects were included.
“Church magic” often made use of relics (physical objects connected to Jesus or the saints) to bring about healing. Certain saints specialized in particular types of healing miracles. For example, St. Thomas Becket was known to be particularly effective for healing blindness. St. Lawrence became known for healing miracles associated with back pain (having been burned alive on a gridiron). The mechanics of the healing were explained by educated churchmen as follows: by praying near the remains of a saint, a divine communication would open in which the saint would receive your call for help and pass it along to God . But few everyday Christians understood any of the philosophy behind it. They just had a sense that the closer you were to the remains, the more powerful the effect of the prayers would be.
And it is here that “church magic” crosses the line for many. Why not just pray to God? What power could a piece of cloth or bone have to heal? Isn’t God the source of healing? Why make a pilgrimage to see the relics of some long dead human?
And while this might make sense to modern Christians, it would not have made sense to most Christians for most of church history. Veneration of relics goes back almost as far as Christian literature exists. The relics of Saint Polycarp of Smyrna were venerated in the Martyrdom of Polycarp (written 150 to 160 AD). Constantine (272-337 AD), the first Christian Emperor of Rome, spent considerable money locating and securing relics. And the veneration of relics was taken for granted by St. Augustine and almost every major saint from his era. Churches were long built on top of tombs to saints. And in 787 the Second Council of Nicaea decreed that relics should be used to consecrate churches. Throughout the middle ages, Christians from across Christendom would take long pilgrimages to the relics of beloved saints.
What is going on here? Why would such a strange tradition enter the church so early? Why would genius saints like Augustine, Ambrose, and John Chrysostom take these practices for granted? How did the church so rapidly fall from the biblical concept of simply praying to God for healing?
One answer might be that it was never that simple. In fact, we see in the bible several accounts that should give the skeptic of relics pause.
The Old Testament prophet Elisha was the disciple of Elijah and did many powerful works during his life. But it was the work he did after he died that is relevant to this conversation. Consider 2 Kings 13:20–21.
And Elisha died, and they buried him. Now the bands of the Moabites used to invade the land at the coming in of the year. And it came to pass, as they were burying a man, that, behold, they spied a band; and they cast the man into the sepulchre of Elisha; and as soon as the man touched the bones of Elisha, he revived, and stood up on his feet.
A modern Christian looks at this and thinks it strange. But a medieval Christian might not. The medieval Christian might shrug and say, “that is what relics do.”
In the New Testament, we see a similarly strange occurrence. When St. Paul was in the province of Asia, the biblical book of Acts states that God did extraordinary miracles through him but exactly how he did those miracles is very relevant to our discussion on relics. Consider Acts 19:11-12,
God did extraordinary miracles through Paul, so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick, and their illnesses were cured and the evil spirits left them.
Here we see handkerchiefs and aprons simply touched by St. Paul that were brought to the sick with miraculous effects. Again, this is incredibly strange to a people who look on relics as a “relic” of the past but once again it would not be strange to the medieval Christian.
There are other examples that have been pointed to as evidence for the biblical nature of relics (e.g. Mark 6:56, Matthew 9:20-22, etc) but these alone should prevent any Christian from simply dismissing the possibility that some item connected to Jesus or the saints might have miraculous effects.
And so with special prayers, pilgrimages, and relics, the church offered a powerful alternative to the pagan magic that was offered by witches and warlocks. The phrase “church magic” might bother you and perhaps you do not wish to use it but it is undeniable that for much of church history something that looks like magic has been used by the church to address the fears, worries and sicknesses of the faithful.
But why? Why not just pray? Why not do what most modern Christians do and say simple and heartfelt prayers to Jesus? Why the “magic”? And one answer might be that Our Lord Jesus himself did things that looked like magic. For example, when he encountered a man blind from birth (John 9:1-12), he didn’t just pray that his blindness would leave him. He instead kneeled, spit on the ground to make mud, rubbed the mud on the man’s eyes, and only then was the man healed. Why did Jesus do this?
For anyone that knows scripture, it shouldn’t actually seem that strange. The God of the Bible is a Creator God. He is not a dualist god who doesn’t dirty himself with the material. From the very beginning we see him walking in the garden with Adam and Eve (Genesis 3:8). We see him appearing to Abraham and Moses. We see him coming into the Temple in a cloud. But of course most relevant and important is when God himself became man in the incarnation and stepped into this world in the person of Jesus.
And Jesus didn’t just create a spiritual church with angels to guide it. He appointed sinful human beings and gave material sacraments that involved real physical things. Real water to baptize his people in. Real physical bread. Real physical wine. When believers get sick, we are told not just to pray for them, but to anoint them with oil.
So tying together the heavenly and the physical shouldn’t be considered a break from God’s modus operandi but the very definition of it.
The Deeper Magic
C.S. Lewis, in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, speaks of the workings of God as a “deeper” magic than that of the witches. He writes,
“It means…that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation.”
In this classic passage Lewis points - not to something completely different from the magic of the witches - but to something deeper. And as Stark explained, “church magic” was in fact an alternative offered by the church in the middle ages. There is an overlap between the work of God and the work of the pagan gods. There is an overlap between the magic of witches and the deeper magic. We can’t pretend like they are not in any way associated. Jesus didn’t need the mud to heal the blind man but he did use it. To an outsider, this looks like magic. As does anointing the sick with oil and even the Lord's Supper and Baptism. In fact, the phrase, "Hocus Pocus" actually is a misstating of the latin, "Hoc est corpus meum," or “This is my body.” It is magic - a deeper magic.
There are two "magics" people can turn to. One is offered by the church by the authority given by Jesus. One is offered by demons and charlatans. The existence of the second shouldn't make us nervous about the first.
When your child is dying of cancer and a priest says a specific prayer of healing, you want something magic to happen. And I don't think that desire is in conflict with the will of God who wants to give his children bread when they ask for bread (Matthew 7:9-11).
How Church Magic Connects the Material and the Spiritual
We are incarnate beings. Flesh and blood. We don’t live in the spirit world. We get hungry. We get sick. We stub our toes. We cut our fingers. We get old. We get wrinkled. We watch the people around us die. We might sing songs about going to heaven by and by but none of that changes the fact that when our child gets a scary diagnosis our world falls apart.
It may be that God’s use of physical things of this world, sacraments, the anointing with oil, a priest saying special prayers, and the touching of relics, etc are means that he gave us to connect us as physical beings with the spiritual world. They are ways of making his world and our world close together. Humans need something more than ideas. We need holy places, mud, bones, and oil. We can’t comprehend the eternal. So the eternal comes to us.
And perhaps it is this rejection of the magic that is why we are where we are. Perhaps our inherent materialism (even among Christians) is precisely because we have all decided that such practices are superstitious and backward. Perhaps we need oil on the head from a priest saying a special prayer as we are in the hospital with cancer. Perhaps we need a holy place to travel to when we are desperate. Perhaps we need real bones to touch. And perhaps, by removing these, we are left wondering if the spiritual is even real. Maybe we departed from the path God intended for us.
Maybe we need the deeper magic.
In the middle ages, people felt close to heaven and hell. As the great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote of those days,
"In those simple times there was a great wonder and mystery in life. Man walked in fear and solemnity, with Heaven very close above his head, and Hell below his very feet. God’s visible hand was everywhere, in the rainbow and the comet, in the thunder and the wind. The Devil, too, raged openly upon the earth; he skulked behind the hedgerows in the gloaming; he laughed loudly in the night-time; he clawed the dying sinner, pounced on the ¬unbaptized babe, and twisted the limbs of the epileptic."
This is so far away from us now. Heaven seems far away. Hell seems far away. The rainbow and the comet seem like nothing. The unbaptized baby seems no different from the baptized one. The epilectic seems unrealated to God. But maybe we think this way because we have lost the magic. Perhaps we need to return to magic - the deeper magic - before we can feel the same closeness?
Postscript: An Important Caution
I didn’t want to write this in the body of this essay because it goes against my main point (to reinstate the lost magic in the church). But it is important to say: magic is dangerous. Calling down power from the other dimension is something we should not do lightly. In the Middle Ages, the church was largely unified. There were good authorities, great scholarship, and oversight for the church. And this authority of the church was able to review “magical” practices to make sure they were being conducted in a way that was sure to bless the church rather than lead it astray. This is important. There are many small cults and weird leaders that will claim “magic” without oversight or authority in the church. Be incredibly cautious of this. Because if magic doesn’t come from true Christianity, it must be coming from something else. And finally, of course, there are many charlatans and fakers that can cause confusion through lies.
One must be very careful to maintain objectivity and not get married to these ideas before you have not engaged with a wide variety of authors, and thought carefully about it. Rather stay free, but do not refrain from constant learning and exposure.
Egregore is a term used in occultism and esotericism to describe a thought-form or collective group mind created by the energy of a group of people. It is believed that an egregore can be intentionally created and maintained through rituals, symbols, and shared beliefs and emotions.
There are several books that discuss the concept of egregore, including "Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny" by Mark Stavish, "Egregores: The Dark Side of the Occult" by Mark Mirabello, and "The Egregore of the Dove or the Reign of Peace" by Leo Taxil.
Here are some links to these books on Amazon:
- "Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny" by Mark Stavish: https://www.amazon.com/Egregores-Occult-Entities-Over-Destiny/dp/1620557998
- "Egregores: The Dark Side of the Occult" by Mark Mirabello: https://www.amazon.com/Egregores-Dark-Side-Mark-Mirabello/dp/190607384X
- "The Egregore of the Dove or the Reign of Peace" by Leo Taxil: https://www.amazon.com/Egregore-Dove-Reign-Peace/dp/1169775126
Please note that these books discuss esoteric and occult concepts and may not be suitable for all readers.