Europe's inner demons

According to Augustine, by God’s decree two realms have existed from the beginning of the world, and all history has consisted in the struggle between them. There is the City of God, which includes the angels and all good people, and there is the City of the Devil, which includes not only the demons but the pagan world with its cult of demons. The Church, as the latter-day embodiment of the City of God, is now at last victorious; but the City of the Devil still survives and is still formidable. And one way in which the City of the Devil deploys its power is through magic: by their command of magical resources the demons seduce people into accepting and worshipping them as gods. Augustine does not doubt that, with the help of demons, people can perform maleficia which are otherwise beyond human capacity. If the ungodly can abduct their neighbour’s harvest; if they can harm people by casting an evil eye on them; if they can even change them into beasts of burden — this is because the demons have lent them supernatural powers in return for adoration.⁽³⁸⁾ But the same applies to all forms of magic, however harmless they may appear. The wearing of amulets, the casting of horoscopes, even the healing of sickness by means of spoken or written charms — all such things are to be eschewed, as pagan and therefore diabolic aberrations.

In essentials the teaching of the Church continued to follow these lines throughout the thousand years which comprise the history of medieval Europe. In 314 the synod of Ancyra had decreed a five-year penance for fortune-telling and for the curing of sickness by occult means,⁽³⁹⁾ and in 375 the synod of Laodicaea had forbidden the wearing of amulets on pain of excommunication.⁽⁴⁰⁾ Around 500 both of these local provisions were incorporated by the monk Dionysius Exiguus in his code of canon law, and so acquired validity throughout the area of western Christendom. During the sixth and seventh centuries they were reaffirmed and reinforced by various provincial synods. In 506 a Visigothic synod at Agde in Languedoc prescribed excommunication for clerics or laymen who concerned themselves with divining the future;⁽⁴¹⁾

while Frankish synods held at Orléans and Auxerre in 511, 533, 541, 573 and 603 prescribed the same penalty for fortune-tellers. These forms of magic had of course nothing to do with maleficia, and the objections to them were purely religious. The synods which condemned divination and fortune-telling, the wearing of amulets and the magical treatment of the sick, were moved by precisely the same concern as the synods of Arles, Vannes, Auxerre, Narbonne, Rheims and Rouen which at intervals during the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries condemned the worship of trees and rocks and river-sources. In the eyes of the bishops it was all part of the campaign against paganism, and paganism was still equated with demonolatry.

The official attitude of the Church gradually influenced the secular authorities; and from the sixth century onwards the laws of the Germanic peoples were revised to take account of the Christian interpretation of magic. The old pagan laws had taken cognizance of magic only in the form of maleficium, and even then had judged it solely in terms of the harm supposedly done to life, health or property. Now, under the influence of the Church, there was a tendency to treat all magic as a criminal offence.

⁽⁴²⁾ This was already the case when Visigothic law was codified, around 550. The law which decreed 200 lashes for tempestarii⁽⁴³⁾

decreed the same penalty for “those who invoke demons to trouble men’s spirits, or who offer nocturnal sacrifices to the demons, or wickedly invoke them with impious prayers”.⁽⁴⁴⁾ At that time the Visigothic monarchs still adhered to the Arian heresy. When, in 589, the royal house turned to the Church of Rome, the ecclesiastical and secular authorities entered into an alliance to stamp out all forms of magic. A synod at Toledo, in 693, dealt with fortune-telling. Members of the upper classes who practised it were to be heavily fined, humbler folk were to get a hundred lashes. Significantly, the same penalties were decreed for worshipping stones, trees or river-sources,⁽⁴⁵⁾ and judges as well as bishops were held responsible for seeing that the regulation was observed. Magic as demon-worship, demon-worship as an offence which concerned State as well as Church: the basic pattern is discernible already at that early stage.