- Once magic was everywhere, landscapes held myths and stories. A tree could be sacred, a rock could be a portal to the underworld, wizards and spell crafters walked among us. What would it take to re-enchant life today, to reclaim a bit of that tingly sense of magical possibility without giving up vaccines and smartphones? Well, maybe it's all in how we see the world. Maybe magic is still everywhere. Today, on "To The Best Of Our Knowledge: Everyday Magic."
- From WPR.
- It's To The Best Of Our Knowledge, I'm Anne Strainchamps. What would it be like to live in a world where magic is still alive? We're headed up to Vermont's Northeast Kingdom today to meet a woman who is doing her best to live a magical life, Icelandic style.
- Okay, I have Icelandic horses, I have Icelandic friends. I have an Icelandic dog. I wear Icelandic sweaters all the time.
- This is Nancy Marie Brown. She's introducing Steve and me to the horses.
- Hi.
- And the dog.
- So what's her name again?
- Her name is Edda. And her job in Iceland originally would've been to scare away the Ravens and the eagles that were flying over the sheep. And Edda is a collection of poetry written in Iceland in the Middle Ages. So she's named for one of the things that I study.
- So can we just walk around a little bit and see horses?
- You wanna see horses?
- Yeah.
- There are horses in that field. And there are two along the road here, my two oldest ones. This is Geiska, she's 32.
- Oh my goodness. She's gonna come say hi.
- Hi, how are you? We need to get him some water. The horses were Nancy's gateway to Iceland, to a landscape and culture where magic feels present and alive.
- The first time I went, people started putting me on horses. Because there were some places in Iceland that you can't get to, or it's more fun to get to on horseback. So for instance, I got to ride into thing Þingvellir, which is the national park where the parliament was held during the saga times. So from 9:30 to well through the Middle Ages. And we rode into the park like we were chieftains from the saga. And it was just, this magical experience. They sat around the coffee table with me and told me stories out of the sagas stories that were a thousand years old. And these were dairy farmers, but it was a famous place in the sagas. It's a place called Helgafell, Holy Mountain, Farmers just invited me inside and started telling me stories from a thousand years ago about this particular place.
- Yeah.
- Wow.
- Hey, Chuck, could you get the horses some more water?
- So here's the question. Why is it so hard to feel that sense of everyday magic here?
- I think the problem with the landscape in Vermont or in Pennsylvania where I grew up, is that we have lost all the stories. We don't have stories from a thousand years ago. We don't know the Native American stories. I don't even know the name of that hill behind my house. When I go to Iceland, every single rock, every single mountain, every little bit of woods has a story and everybody knows them and they keep them alive. Some of them are about magical beings, including elfs, and some of them are about ravens or foxes or seals. There are creatures that we can see or that we can't see who live there. So it's this sense that it's not all about humans. It's not all about us.
- The stories we tell shape what we see, and also what we don't see. So if you grow up in America, you learn early on that magic isn't real. Landscapes are not enchanted. Invisible beings do not exist. But in Iceland, people can see elves. And maybe we should too. Nancy Marie Brown is a serious scholar who has made dozens of trips to Iceland and written extensively about Viking history. Her most recent book is called "Looking for The Hidden Folk: How Iceland's Elves Can Save the Earth." Steve and I are here hoping to learn what we've been missing.
- So there's this story of a road and we're planning to build a road, and some people stepped forward and objected and said, no, you can't build that road. 'Cause it goes right through an Elf Chapel. And then it ended up turning into a big legal case. It ended up generating headlines around the world.
- The International news media finds it really amusing that Icelanders believe in elves. So whenever you have one of these elf stories coming out of modern day Iceland, it gets picked up everywhere. It makes this big joke that the Elf Lobby has stopped a modern day construction project of a road building. And in the years that I have been going to Iceland and studying Icelandic, I've seen dozens of these stories.
- So this was not just a one-off.
- This is not a one-off.
- Oh, really?
- In fact, there's probably been one this summer. But I always used to just sort of discount this because Icelanders have a really dark, strange sense of humor. And I'm saying, okay, these are my Icelandic friends playing with the news media. In the case that I write about of Gálgahraun. The same people who were speaking up for the elves were also in the environmental organization. And this lava field was classified as a nature reserve. And it's one of the few beautiful open spaces that you can easily reach from the city of Reykjavik. There's birds nesting all around there. There are views that are spectacular. And they said, you cannot bring a road through this lava field to a tiny little village town where there's already a road that goes to it. So it's not like these people had been cut off, it's just this would shorten their commute by 15 minutes. It's not worth it. But those arguments didn't go anywhere. So the Elf seer, Ragnhildur Jónsdóttir wrote a letter to the mayor saying that the elves had asked her to reach out to him, that they would like them to move the roads, that it didn't destroy the Elf Church. And I went to Iceland and decided I needed to talk to Ragnhildur. I had met her and I had really liked her, and she had talked about stories about elves. She took me out into the lava field that had been protected, and she didn't say anything about elves.
- Hmm.
- And we spent several hours there, and I'm with this famous elf seer, and we're walking through a lava field looking at these beautiful silver green pillows of moss that were growing on top of some of the rocks and the lichens that were on the rocks. And it was a beautiful day. We were enjoying ourselves. We're hearing the birds and all this. And I'm thinking, what does this have to do with elves? And something happened that day that had never really happened to me in Iceland before that I still can't process that I still don't understand. We came back to the parking lot and we were confronted by this very angry woman. She drives up in her car and she's yelling at us that our dog is running through the bird nesting site, which is off limits at this time of year. So we don't have a dog. And she's yelling at us and yelling at us. And Ragnhildur finally says, "Excuse me, do you know who I am? I'm Ragnhildur Jónsdóttir, the Elf seer. I helped preserve this lava field." That didn't help. She was still very angry about this dog and had somehow decided that it was our problem. So we said, okay, we're just gonna ignore her. We got in the car, we start driving away. She jumps in her car, and it was as if she was going to cut us off. And suddenly her car goes up in the air. I'm sitting there in the passenger's seat thinking I'm gonna get rammed. Her car goes up in the air and comes down, and the steam starts coming outta the front of it. And Ragnhildur and I look at each other like, what just happened? And we got out and the other woman got out and we look, and there is a rock larger than a basketball underneath the chassis of her car. The car cannot be moved in any way without a wrecker because this rock is between the front wheels and the back wheels. Not to mention that there's steam coming outta the front. None of us had ever seen that rock. We'd walked through the parking lot. You know, it's a rock in the middle of the parking lot that is a size of a basketball. How did that get there? How did she not see it? How did she drive over it? And Ragnhildur turns to me. She says, "Now, do you believe in the elves?" And I'm going, okay, there's something I'm not understanding here. I had dismissed this concept of elves as just being sort of a joke, sort of a touristy thing. But this was something completely different. This was not Tinkerbell or Santa's elves or these little creatures. This was a powerful expression of nature. This was a nature spirit that the Icelander believe that they can communicate with, and that will sometimes protect them and sometimes destroy them. It's another force in the universe. There's this sense that rocks are inhabited, rocks are in spirited, that maybe they're little people living in there, or maybe they are just rock spirits.
- So you spent a fair amount of time with this elf seer, Ragnhildur. What is she like?
- She's a very ordinary person. She's a grandmother, she likes to bake. She likes to garden, she's an artist. She paints and she draws, but she has seen elves since she was a small child.
- What does she say the elves look like? What does she see?
- Well, the elves that she sees are very much like people about the same size. Some of them are smaller and they are dressed in old fashioned clothing because they haven't quite gotten up to the modern day. And that is a function of what elves look like in many of the stories. But otherwise, they are people and she speaks to them and they speak to her. In fact, when she moved from this one town, one of her elf friends moved with her and now lives in her new backyard. And they just have had a friendship all her life.
- Does she say they are physical beings or are they in some other, I mean, obviously they're some other dimension, but.
- Yes, they're in some other dimension. Another story she's told me of a a mountain spirit, a very large giants or ogre type spirit, was that one of her neighbors was collecting sheep, herding sheep down off the mountain. And there's some very steep areas of this mountain. And she'd gotten herself down on some kind of a ledge to get one of the sheep. And she realized that she couldn't get up again and she couldn't get down again. That she was sort of trapped on this ledge and it was icy or slippery in some manner, and she was afraid. And suddenly she felt something come and pick her up and lift her up onto another ledge from which she could easily walk to the top of the hill. She told that story to Ragnhildur when Ragnhildur said, "I can sense there is a mountain spirit in that mountain, but I can't tell if she is a good spirit or a bad spirit. Do I need to be concerned about her?" And so the neighbor told this story and said, I think she's a good spirit.
- Yes, so what would be, I mean, that would be a big elf.
- That would be a very big elf.
- Or is that, that's a troll I mean.
- It could be a troll. Icelanders today will classify the hidden people, the hidden folk as different kinds of beings. So the hidden people are different from the elves. The elves are different from the trolls. The trolls are different from the mountain spirits. You could find all kinds of classification systems in modern Icelandic. But if you go back far enough to the original earliest texts, poems that were written down in around the 1200s, but that were probably written in the nine hundreds or earlier, all these words are used interchangeably. Whereas the concept that there are spirits in rocks, in mountains, in trees, in rivers, is very ancient. It is the pre-Christian pagan religion of Iceland.
- When Christianity came in, not just to Iceland, but around the world, especially through Europe, it kind of quashed a lot of these old beliefs. Elves and trolls were considered demonic.
- Right. And that was the proclaimed purpose of the church through a lot of the middle ages, was to get rid of the belief in nature spirits, that any kind of nature spirits were evil, and that we are only to worship the sky Gods not the earth gods. The Icelanders, however, didn't quite get that message from Christianity because they're very far from Rome. They didn't have a very powerful church for hundreds of years. And so the concepts of elves sort of slipped under the radar.
- You have a line that I love. Is it crazy to talk to elves? And you say, well, is it any crazier than Christians talking to God?
- Yeah, if you think one is crazy, how do you think the other is not crazy? The other point that I really wanna bring out is that when we say elf in America, we have this vision of what we mean by that word. And when we say we believe in elves, it's like somebody saying, I believe in Santa Claus. It's obviously childlike nuts. That's not what the Icelanders are saying. What they are saying when they say I believe in elves is more like they're saying I believe in God. And you wouldn't laugh at that.
- Yeah, so I'm wondering where all of this fits for you. You've now been to Iceland 35 times or something like that. You have spent time with the Elf seers and you've heard these stories. You've had experiences that you can't explain in any sort of scientific rational way. Do you believe in elfs?
- I have a very hard time saying that I believe in elves, but I do believe in elf stories. I think it's very important that we tell stories that encourage us to live simply and to live in harmony and to value the things we cannot see to value the spirits in the land and in the trees. And what I bring back from Iceland is when I go walking in Vermont or anywhere in this country, I'm paying attention to what is in front of me. I'm walking for exercise, yes, but I'm not listening to a podcast, sorry, not even yours. I am paying attention to the mushroom, to the butterfly, to the way the light reflects off of the bark of a tree, to the way the sun comes down through the leaves or the sound that the rain makes on the leaves. I'm trying to be wholly present and to open myself to sources of wonder and sources of awe that are all around us.
- There's another piece of all of this about the nature of belief. What belief means and why we believe in certain things and why we don't and other things. And we tend to wanna draw this very clear line between that's real or that's imaginary. I guess the question is, why do some people see elves and other people looking at the same thing? No one knows.
- Can't see elves.
- No one knows. How do we see, what does it mean to see something? Science doesn't even understand how our eyes work.
- I mean, that's a fascinating question. Is seeing, necessarily looking at an object out there outside us or is seeing coming from within.
- The papers that I read by neuroscientists pretty much say it's 50:50 based on what you have been taught, what you've read, what you understand. You expect to see things out there in the world. And if something that you look at doesn't quite fit your brain will make it fit. If you grow up with stories of elves, you will see them. You will see things happening in the world that you can't explain in any other way. So you will say, "I saw an elf."
- Nancy Marie Brown is the author of "Looking For The Hidden Folk: How Iceland's Elves Can Save the Earth." She's a student of Icelandic literature and culture leads regular trips to Iceland and lives on a farm in northern Vermont. Some people find magic in landscape, some in books. Coming up, Deborah Harkness is back with the next installment of her All Soul series about a group of academics with a few extra chromosomes and some uncanny abilities.
- Once the world is full of wonders, but it belongs to humans now, we have all but disappeared demons, vampires, and witches, hiding in plain sight.
- Arm chair magic for history buffs, next. I'm Anne Strainchamps. And this is To The Best Of Our Knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX.
- Hey listeners, I wanna tell you about another podcast called "Need a Lift." It's a show that focuses on bringing people together during a tough time in our culture, host Tim Shriver talks to guests who have transformed painful moments in their lives into purpose through their spiritual rituals and practices, and demonstrate optimism through their lived experience. Needle lift is truly the antidote to the hatred and despair. We're all exhausted of hearing, giving us hope that change is possible. You can hear more needle lift episodes wherever you get podcasts.
- If you wanna adopt a more magical worldview, fantasy fiction is a good place to start. So let me tell you about one of my favorites, the "All Souls Trilogy" by Deborah Harkness. They've got this dark academia vibe going on. Harkness is a professor of European history and renaissance science and her heroine, Diana Bishop is also a historian and a witch. We first meet her at Oxford's Bodleian Library where she accidentally calls up an enchanted alchemical manuscript and meets her love interest. Professor Matthew Claremont, eminent genetic biologist and 1500 year old vampire. I have read the series more than once. I've watched the TV series more than once, and now Deborah Harkness is back with a new installment, the Blackbird Oracle. And when it opens, Diana and Matthew have been married seven years. Their twins are about to turn six. And then one day a dead raven drops from the sky in front of Diana and Becca, followed by its mate with a magical gift. Here's how it begins.
- The sizable raven landed safely on the pavement before us light and surefooted the bird's feathers shone deeply black with a hint of darkest blue that reminded me of Becca's hair with a snap of its formidable beak, the raven cocked its head. Becca returned the gesture cautiously. She approached the bird, "Careful," I murmured unsure of its intentions. The ravens and the trees cried out with loud crow cries, Becca crouched by the dead bird. Its lively companion took a few two footed hops to narrow the distance between them and strutted back and forth, emitting a bubbling stream of chatter. It picked something out of the dead raven's beak and dropped it before her. It was a ring, "Don't touch it," I cried. I tried to probe the nature of the magic, sending out inquisitive feelers in the hope of identifying it, but it was smoky and murky without clear intentions or any discernible knotted structure. It had a strange scent too. Sea salt, pine barbies and brimstone all garbled together, given the enchantment unfolding around us. The ravens had not come to Orange Street by accident. Someone had sent them and they had come bearing a gift for my daughter. I had learned the hard way that magical gifts always came with strings attached.
- What a fantastic beginning and I love it. That magic has a smell.
- Oh yes, magic definitely has a smell. I sense a little touch of it after a rainstorm, that kind of clean, bright anticipatory smell that comes after a rainstorm with a few extra ingredients thrown in there.
- So this raven arrives with a message and with an invitation from an aunt that Diana never knew she had to meet a side of the family she didn't really even know still existed the proctors. That's how you bring in both a whole new trove of family secrets and a world of powerful new magic, a whole other side of her identity as a witch, which seems incredibly challenging for you as a writer, having already invented one kind of magic. Now you set yourself the challenge of inventing a second kind of magic.
- Well, this is higher, darker magic, which we know Diana is somewhat frightened of. She associates it with very negative experiences in her life. She's had brushes with it over the course of the previous novels. And I'm really intrigued by this notion of what is dark magic. And it led me into a lot of very interesting paths about human psychology and about shadow and concepts like shadow work, which are very much part of modern Wiccan beliefs that all have to do with facing the darkness that is inside you as a way of being more able to touch the light.
- Were you wanting to kind of push back on this concept of light as good and dark as bad?
- I think I wanted people to think about the ways that light and dark had to coexist, and that we need to find ways not to deny darkness, whether it's in our nation's heritage or our personal past, or any of our family legacies. We need to find a way not to pretend it's not there. We don't wanna just focus so much on the light that we are not equipped to deal in an honest way with who we are. And I look around me in the world as a historian, and I see an awful lot of denial and inability to face what are just part of our human story. They're terrible parts of the human story, but we have to tell them we have to hear them, and then we have to figure out where we go from there.
- Well, it's interesting that some of the historical shadow work you're doing in this case is going back to the history of the Salem Witch Trials. I don't know if it was in the course of writing this book or earlier, but you discovered that you, in fact, yourself are a descendant of one of the women accused, right?
- Yeah. I have given countless interviews about how I had no connection to Salem, which was true at that time. I did not know I had a connection to Salem. But I discovered during the pandemic that I am descended from not one but two accused witches.
- Oh wow.
- One executed, one who languished in jail because she couldn't afford to pay the jail for her upkeep during her incarceration.
- Oh my gosh.
- And it was not until a kind soul freed her by paying her jail room and board fees. Can you imagine that she was allowed out?
- What were their names?
- One of them is Elizabeth Jackson Howe, and one of them is wonderful Mehitable Braybrook.
- Oh, Mehitable, what a fabulous name.
- Isn't it wonderful? She was the illegitimate daughter of a relationship between a master and an indentured servant. So not a slave, but a white indentured servant who was utterly dependent and in bondage for seven years, a term bondage, not a life bondage as in slavery. And he and she had a relationship. She got pregnant with what would soon be Mehitable Braybrook. And the court ordered that the master and his wife raise that illegitimate child as if it were their own.
- That seems very progressive for that period of time.
- Well, I don't know. I think the stepmother in Puritan New England may not really have liked having the child of a servant that she had to raise as her own daughter. Mehitable drank too much, and she had foul language, and she was a total Salem character, which is how most people end up in the Salem trials and implicated in them.
- I think I first read about the Salem witch trials, probably as a teenager reading the Witch of Blackbird Pond. But you know, I'm okay. So I'm guessing there has been a whole lot more historical work done on not just the Salem Witch trials, but the witch trials in Europe over the last 20, 30 years or more. How have ideas about the witch trials changed?
- We know a lot more. At first, there was a kind of belief that many of the women who were accused of being witches were midwives or healers. There's very famous book, the Midwife and the Witch. As we got more and more of the trial records, we discovered there are young women and old women. There are men and women. There are healers, and there are merchants, and there are women who run ale houses. It's not as simple as that.
- But I thought it was always supposed to be women who were kind of outcast to begin with. They were elderly, they were poor. They lived on the margins of the villages, and so they were easy victims.
- There's a bit of truth in that, but I think it's become shorthand for what is honestly a much more complicated picture. Outcasts include people like Martha Carrier who happen to have been married to a seven foot tall husband.
- Seven feet.
- Seven feet. They would not have really known what to make of him. Is he a giant, is he a monster? Why did God do this to him? We're talking Puritan New England, and in many cases, radically Protestant Europe, the Protestants who execute most of the witches. It's not the Catholics. So there's all of these sort of generalizations that we make about them that when you peel underneath them, as with most cases in history, you find out it's really much more complicated. I would not say that they were outcasts. I would say that most of the people who were accused of witchcraft and executed were people who made their neighbors uncomfortable.
- So the thing I don't understand at the same time is that I've always kind of thought that a witch is a figure of power. All the stories I've ever read, they can do magic and they have access to a kind of power that other people don't. But the stories about the witch trials, it doesn't sound like it's people who have power who are being persecuted. It sounds like it's people who are in some way or another powerless. So what's the dynamic around women and power and witchcraft?
- This is a subject very near and dear to my heart. It is actually because people who are different occupy a lot of space, rent free in people's heads. They worry about the little old lady who lives down the lane and the recent immigrant who's come to town and somebody's of a different ethnicity. You worry and worry and worry, and you build them up into your head, into something so other that you start attributing your bad misfortunes to them. People who are different have enormous power in our culture. I think for anyone who has ever veered away from a homeless person in the street, that at power move on their part, we are so afraid to come into contact with them. We alter our course. We've just given that individual, we've seeded a fair amount of power. So what I always tell my students is that power isn't a thing. You don't pick it up and wield it. Power is the set of relationships. And sometimes the harder you try to make someone marginal, the more powerful they become.
- More than any of your other books, really, I think this one is very rooted in a landscape. There's such a strong sense of place when you write about Ipswich, Massachusetts, this landscape where the proctors, Diana's other magical family. It's a place that they've lived for generations and generations. You know, there are ghosts of ancestors who walk the land. How did you get such a strong sense of that place? Is it a place you know really well?
- It's a place that kept popping up when I was reading through all of the Salem trial records. And Ipswich is a very liminal landscape. And by that I mean there's water, there's marsh, and there's land.
- Hmm.
- And so there are these in-between parts of the landscape that will appear and disappear over the course of a day. One day you can walk out to an island and the next day you would have to take a boat.
- Oh wow.
- So there's this kind of shifting landscape. It's also 1692. We're very, very close to the first white colonial settlers coming to the new world. They're surrounded by the indigenous culture. There are people who we believe had an indigenous background in the trials. So it's a very particular place.
- Going back to the particular magic that the proctors do, this higher magic, the way you write about it feels very elemental. It's something that flows from the natural world.
- Absolutely, most people in the past believed that there was a designer behind the world, some kind of plan. So there is design in nature, a vitalistic landscape, one in which we see things animated. I had a wonderful experience to talk to a member of a Native American tribe who was telling me about her culture's belief in two legged people and four legged people and winged people, and standing people and standing people are trees and plants. One of the things that is true about my book is that both Diana and Matthew are students of how the world works, what their place in it is, and how they can understand that better, which makes 'em both natural philosophers.
- All right, I have to let you go, but may I ask you for one more short reading? I have something in mind based on what you just said.
- Okay.
- All right. This is the beginning of chapter 10. It's page 146.
- All right, so Diana has come to Ravenswood and has learned that one of her Aunt Gwyneth's desires for her time there is that she would be introduced to the study of higher magic. And really, except that this too is part of her lineage. And she starts to sort of process that through the lens of watching how the proctors engage with magic. So I'll start reading from there. When Gwyneth adjusted the windows to let in the breeze, she sprinkled salt on the window sails. When she crossed a threshold, her lips moved in silent blessing. Each morning when she made her first cup of tea, my aunt tucked a sprig of rosemary into the frames of the ancestral portraits. Gwyneth told time by the rising and setting of the moon, not the sun. Her hours tied to the goddesses rhythms. During my first few days at Ravenswood, I'd wake after midnight and she would be out walking the meadow staring out to sea. Higher magic wasn't a bag of tricks. The proctors pulled out at Halloween. It was their way of life.
- I love that so much, and I have to thank you for giving us Gwyneth. What a marvelous role model for an older woman.
- Anyone who has ever been to a women's college and has met a feisty alum from the class of 1930, will instantly recognize Gwyneth as one of those indomitable gray-haired ladies in their Talbot Summer wear, who literally could organize an army, run three countries, raise a family, cook a chicken, dinner chicken, and not break a sweat.
- As a graduate of Bryn Mawr College, this is who I aspire to be.
- I did not know that I was talking to a sister. Well, there you go. That is, you know then, you know women like Gwyneth. My favorite thing about them is that when they show up from reunion, the first thing they do is throw open the trunk and call out, "Trixie, do you want a martini?" Oh, they're the whole package.
- Yeah, oh, thank you. This has been such a pleasure.
- I can talk to you for hours. Thank you so much for having me on.
- Oh, thanks.
- That's Deborah Harkness, professor of European history and Renaissance Science, and author of the bestselling "All Souls Trilogy." The newest volume is the Blackbird Oracle. Coming up, a historian who completely changed my view of the past and made me realize how ordinary, how every day magic once was. I'm Anne Strainchamps, and this is to the best of our knowledge. From Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. In the autumn of 1637, Mabel Gray lost some spoons. After a morning spent tearing her house apart, she asked her neighbors for help in their recovery. Unfortunately, no one had seen them. So Mabel's friends suggested she seek out a magician. Thus began a long journey across London during which Mabel visited some of the seediest areas of the capitol and met several wizards, all in the hope of getting back what was hers? This sounds like the beginning of a novel, right? But in fact, Mabel Gray was a real woman. She really did live in 17th century London, and she did lose a set of valuable cutlery. And we know about her thanks to this woman.
- I'm Dr. Tabitha Stanmore, and I'm a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter and historian of magic and witchcraft in the late medieval and early modern periods.
- So where did Mabel Gray go on that fateful day in 1637?
- We know that she traveled 15 miles or so in total across the city of London. She crossed over the Thames three or four times. No means it's a big river. She didn't have very much luck the first couple of times, she met a wizard down in south of London. She went to this cunning woman and said, "I've lost my spoons, can you help me?" And the cunning woman, very regretfully said that she couldn't, because that's not the kind of magic that she specialized in, but she did know somebody to the north of the river who might be able to help instead. So Mabel crosses the river again, goes and consults another cunning man who says, "No, it's not my kind of magic either, but there's a Mr. Ton in Ram Alley who does specialize in this kind of thing." So she goes and meets this third and final magician, and he says something along the lines of, the spoons are where you last left them. They are where they were last seen.
- Do we know whether she ever found her spoons?
- We don't know, I'm very hopeful. I'm hopeful she got them back, but we don't actually know.
- When I first read this, it kind of blew my mind to think that 400 years ago, the city of London was crawling with wizards and magicians. But before you go, imagining hordes of pointy-headed wand waving dumble doors, stocking the streets of Renaissance England, these were more like plumbers, neighborhood grocers, folks doing a brisk trade in what Tabitha Stanmore calls surface magic.
- There are magicians everywhere. They were called wise men, wise women, cunning folk, wizards, magicians, sorcerers. There's lots of different names for them. They could be men or women. They could be rich or poor. Some of them were cattle herds or farmers. Some of them were qualified priests.
- Huh.
- It's a real range of people who would be practicing these magic spells, and it was just part of everyday life.
- But this is during the period we call the burning times, right? People all over Europe were torturing and burning. Anyone even suspected of using magic? How did these people get away with it?
- Yeah, it surprised me too because as you say, yeah, in the 16th, 17th centuries, they are periods of incredibly dark, just dark times altogether. It's a dark time for religion. It's a dark time for famine. And this is where people start getting really scared of witches, sort of cursing you and killing your children and all that kind of thing. There's huge paranoia about it. But what I found when I started doing this research was that there was a difference in people's minds between a malevolent witch and a benevolent wizard or cunning person. It was turn a blind eye to a lot because it was useful.
- I love your phrase, service magicians. That gives me the idea that, well, it's kind of like calling an electrician or a plumber or a house cleaner or something. I mean, it's very mundane or ordinary. What's the range of services they offered or performed?
- So, yeah, I completely agree with you and I sometimes think of myself as the person who's trying to take the magic out of magic, because it really is just that the range of services they offered might actually ring some bells because they're things we sometimes still use magic for today, the most common uses were health magic, healing, finding lost and stolen goods like your precious spoons. Love magic, lots and lots of love, magic fortune telling or future telling. And for some reason, finding lost or buried treasure turns up a lot, which I think of as the kind of 17th century version of winning the lottery. It's just like your magical, get rich quick scheme.
- Do we have any idea how successful they were? In other words, did any of this work?
- That is the million dollar question? Yes, well, we have a lot of records that say it did work. We have surviving spell books from the time, which have notes in the margin saying this worked or changed the spell slightly and it worked. We have people standing up in court and saying, yes, this person practiced magic and it worked for me and I would definitely consult them again, 10 outta 10 servers. So it clearly worked for them.
- Wow.
- How it worked varies.
- Yeah, any of those stories that really stay with you?
- Yeah, yeah, there is one that really, really stays with me, Elizabeth. Well, there are two Elizabeths, Elizabeth, the cunning woman, and Elizabeth the mother, they lived in the same village. And Elizabeth had a young child who got sick. She was probably a girl of about two years old, something like that. But Elizabeth, the mother, she had this child and she obviously a daughter, but then got extremely worried when she got sick, she was perfectly healthy. One day, the next day she was barely moving, she wasn't eating. Absolutely terrifying situation. So Elizabeth took the child to a cunning woman. Unhelpfully also called Elizabeth. So for now on, I'm just gonna say cunning woman, she had a look at the child and then she just left without comment. She said nothing at all. She just left the room. Elizabeth was terrified, obviously. I mean, what does this mean? So she waits a day, her child doesn't recover. And so in desperation, she goes back and hammers on the cunning woman's door and says, "What's happened? Why did you leave, is there anything that can be done?" And this cunning woman says, "Well, the reason I left is because your child is genuinely very, very sick. And I think I can heal her, but it's such a dangerous illness that I might die in the process of healing this child." So Elizabeth begs the cunning woman for her help anyway, and eventually she relents and says, "Okay, well, take the child to bed with you tonight, lie with her. And around midnight, the child will start to recover." So Elizabeth does so, and she's just sort of lying there in the dark, absolutely terrified, child's not moving. And about one o'clock in the morning, suddenly the child wakes up and starts to feed.
- Oh my gosh.
- Oh. I mean, the sense of relief that I had when I read that outcome was incredible. But yeah. And then the cunning woman later on says that it was, has felt that fixed this child and kind of got rid of her disease, but it really was a very dangerous one. Basically, she took the disease from the child into herself and basically hoped that her own body was strong enough to be able to cope with it. And then she was incredibly proud of this as well. The cunning woman would go around for years afterwards, sort of introducing the child as her own, saying that just like her mother did, I gave this child life.
- Wow.
- And so now she's basically my sort of magical daughter. Oh, that's just kind of lovely, isn't it?
- It is.
- So this is an example of, I think what you'd call sympathy magic.
- Yes.
- Right, yeah. And so there are other kinds also, there was something called the Black Fast.
- Yes, yeah, that's the opposite and darker version of this. Yeah, so sympathy magic is basically the idea that you can form a kind of sympathetic or magical bond with another person. And so whatever happens to can happen to them. The black fast is, well, it's actually a very normal, traditional Christian practice of fasting in memory of a saint or of Christ, but it can be corrupted. And some cunning folk and some people who intended harm could use it to basically harm others. So they create a sympathetic link with their intended victim, and then the cunning person would essentially just starve themselves until the physical wastage that was happening to their body would start to happen to the victim's body as well. And the idea is that it would kind of multiply. So whatever's happening to you is that it's getting worse and worse for the victim until eventually your intended victim dies. It's incredibly dark. Not gonna give any more details than that. Nobody's tried at home.
- So I sometimes have caught myself thinking, gosh, the contemporary world seems so bereft of magic, an enchantment. I wish I lived in a more magical world. I kind of think that the conclusion you came to after a lot of this research is that in fact we do still live in a magical world. We just don't notice it or think that we do for some reason. But that there is a through line between the cunning folk and today.
- Yeah, I think it's very easy to, as you say, think that we just live in a very secular world and we don't really believe anything anymore, and we're all just very cynical. But magical thinking is all over the place. People trying to have some kind of control over their lives, understand the deeper meaning of life. One of the most obvious examples I have in my life is I have rituals that I do before I ever get on a plane. But you know, I'm terrified of flying, so I'll always wear the same lucky necklace. There's no reason why that should keep the plane up, but to me it does. You know, there is no way I'm getting on a plane without that necklace. And it's a mundane example, but I think we've all kind of got that going on in our lives in some form or another. And we did see that happening during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Oh really?
- Yeah, demand for fortune tellers just shot up because in a tight spot, I'm not sure any of us really turn away from magic entirely.
- That kind of makes it seem like magic is maybe just a mental or spiritual crutch, right? Something we kind of regress to when faced with fear about the future? Or do you think it's something more, I mean, maybe we need magic. I guess what I'm asking is, is it a crutch or is it ennobling?
- It is very much part of being human. And I think in the last couple of hundred years we've been focusing very much on mechanization and globalization and that kind of thing, which makes us think that we are further away from a magical realm. But if we embraced the fact that magic isn't really going anywhere, we still use it and our ancestors used it and they weren't stupid for using it, then I think we probably would be slightly more accepting and open people. Because belief and hope, I think are two very, very powerful forces and ones that do make us human and believe plus hope, I think does tend to equal magic a lot of the time. So yeah, I think it is a fundamental part of being human, and I think that we should embrace and celebrate that. It can obviously have darker sides to it, but then so do pretty much every aspect of human identity. So I don't think we should condemn it.
- I started noticing after reading your book, small things that I wouldn't necessarily have called magic before, making a wish when you blow up birthday candles.
- Mm.
- It just can make you feel, or at least now it makes me feel connected across this long lineage back to people 400, 500, 600 years ago, this thing that we have always done in different times and places.
- That is beautiful. And it's a wonderful example, and you're absolutely right. Now you've said it, if I see a rainbow, I'll make a wish. If I see a shooting star, I'll make a wish. If I see a certain number of mag pies, that will define how my day goes. So yeah, yeah. It's all over the place, really.
- Yeah, hidden in plain sight.
- Yeah.
- Tabitha Stanmore is a historian of medieval and early modern magic, and she's the author of a book full of amazing stories. It's called "Cunning Folk: Life In the era of Practical Magic." To The Best Of Our Knowledge comes to you from Madison, Wisconsin and the studios of Wisconsin Public Radio. Our producers Bell Crafters are Shannon Henry Kleber, Charles Monroe-Kane and Angelo Batista. Our technical director and sound wizard is Joe Hartke with help from Sarah Hopefl. Additional music this week comes from Scott Holmes, Julian Winter, Katza, Nutmeg, and Rambus Mary Legs. The executive producer of, To The Best Of Our Knowledge is Steve Paulson. And I'm Anne Strainchamps. Thanks for listening, and now go make some magic.
- PRX.
