Speaker 1: We're used to thinking that magic bad and everything that's
not scientific is basically sorcery and evil, and that's the
way it's kind of treated as in mainstream Christian thinking.
But that is not in the Middle Ages. That is
definitely not how it was treated, and not during the
Renaissance and not during the Reformation. It's kind of moving
towards that as we as the Age of Enlightenment comes,
because in some ways some of the oppositions to all
forms of magic are actually a conflict between science and
religion rather than a conflict between Christianity and some you know,
some of these practices.
Speaker 2: This is Jonathan Pehel.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the Symbolic World.
Speaker 1: Hello everyone, I'm here with Deacon Seraphim, who now properly
looks like the true intellectual that he is. Is getting
set he is set up. We're finally seeing all the
books that he talks about. We are we're finally realizing
that they exist. They're not just they're not just in
his mind.
Speaker 2: You don't really know somebody is a serious intellectual unless
they have books behind them on YouTube.
Speaker 1: So but it's nice to see your studio kind of
coming together and h and you becoming more and more
of a of a deacon. With the hair growing and
the kassak and everything. It's like soon the ponytail. It's wonderful.
We love it right well, you know it's dressed for
the job you want. I guess I don't know, it's just.
Speaker 4: The job you want. So what are we talking about today?
So I thought we would talk about magic.
Speaker 2: And usually when I do these videos with you, it's
really because I have things I can't figure out, and
so I do all of this work to get basically
like so that we have the premise of recording a
video together. And then somewhere in the middle of this conversation,
I'm just gonna throw out random, Jonathan, what's actually going
on with this weird thing? So we're gonna do that
with magic today, so there won't be any warning. I'm
just gonna throw it at you and be like, please
explain this bit of like this weird thing. I don't
understand why it's a thing. Now. So everybody has been
clamoring for, you know, the universal history of America for
quite some time now, and there's a lot of different
angles that we could kind of hit that with. One
of them is that we could just take a look
at the the you know, like the American civil religion
and things like that, and I do intend to do
that at some point. It's really interesting to me today
is actually an American Civil Holy Day, which is why
we get to record because I have to be at work.
But the the the thing that I'm kind of really
more interested in is actually kind of American religion and
why American religion is the way that it is, which
is like actually pretty odd historically speaking. Even the fact
that you know, there's some kid that grew up Baptist
in like the buckle of the Bible belt and he
could become an Orthodox deacon, Like, that's a pretty that's
a pretty weird thing to be able to happen. And
So what I want to do is, over the course
of the next two or three Universal History episodes, probably
I want to look at some of the aspects of
American religion, and along the way we will also handle
I know, everybody on X got super excited because I
tweeted like a picture of a particular critter from Appalachian
folklore and folk magic, and everybody is like, oh, we're
going to get a cryptid episode. Are you going to
talk about like Chewba kabra and stuff like this. Not
this time. We will probably do that at some point,
because it would be fun to actually talk about some
of the American monsters. I think it's a great to
do that. You get your but but I have a
I basically have like a planned segue into this. And
so since we're talking about the symbolism of America, we
are of course going back to Europe today and specifically
Europe at the time of the Reformation. So I thought
it would be good to talk about. So what I
what I really want to talk about today is American
folk magic in the context of American Christianity and the
way that those things interrelate. And to do that, we
have to go back to the Reformation and look at
how magic, superstition, sorcery, witchcraft, alchemy, astrology, divination, the way
that all of these things are basically handled at the
time of the Reformation, which I think will probably surprise
some people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because we're used to thinking that magic bad and
everything that's not scientific is basically sorcery and evil, and
that's the way it's kind of treated as in mainstream
Christian thinking. But that is not in the middle ages.
That is definitely not how it was treated and not
during the Renaissance and not doing the Reformation. It's kind
of moving towards that as we as the Age of
Enlightenment comes, because in some ways, some of the oppositions
to all forms of magic are actually a conflict between
science and religion rather than a conflict between Christianity and
some you know, some of these practices.
Speaker 2: So do you want to define for us what magic
is or like, what do you think magic is? Because
because actually this seems to be one of the big
questions actually is like where's the line between religious practice
and magic?
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I think that the way to understand magic
is to understand it as influence. And so it's something
like influence through meaning and influence through will they way
that will influences the world and the way that that
that that happens. So that is a very vague description,
but I think it it encompasses. The most magicians kind
of understand that our intentions and are our meaning making
can affect reality and they and they develop certain practices
in order to kind of master those effects in different ways,
And that is the basic idea. But then it can
also obviously be a way to tap into other forms
of meanings to let's say higher or you know, transum
post transhuman forms of meaning. And that's when you enter
into like demonology and the idea of invoking spirits and
all of that.
Speaker 3: So you can see how they're related.
Speaker 1: But basic, basic kind of sympathetic magic, wearing amulets, uh,
you know, the the the idea that there's a relationship
between causality and meaning and we can influence that does that?
Speaker 2: Is that a good enough I think that's nice and
broad and good for what we're talking about today. Now.
I guess as follow up question I told you I
was going to throw these things at. A follow up
question would be something like, what's the difference between magic
and superstition or is there a difference?
Speaker 3: Well, they're not. They're definitely related.
Speaker 1: They're definitely related because in some ways they're related to
the noticing of superstition. Usually it's about avoiding things. Not always,
but a lot of it's about avoiding things. So you
perceive certain patterns and then you have to do something
to counter those patterns and when you in the symbols
of massive class I did a few analyzes of some
of these superstitious patterns, and now they're actually deeply meaningful
most of the time because they've just been refined for
thousands of years.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I really liked your explanation for some of
those things. In the masterclass I was talking to. You know,
so I come from like a Protestant mission missionary family,
you know, and so a lot of times they'll talk
about how, you know, just like in these circles are
run in family and friends and things like that, people
talk about how they, you know, they have these certain
practices in the old world and this is all obviously
just superstition, and we need to cut that stuff out.
And it's not you know, not just among you know,
uh uh, you know, Pagans like you know, in my case,
my my family were missionaries in Asia, so it's like
Buddhist Daoists and so on. So it's not just those practices,
but it's also the practices of you know, Christians who
come over, but maybe they bring something like syncrist with
a Syncretists with them, or obviously the superstitions of other
kinds of Christians like Orthodox Roman Catholics, et cetera. And
it's also you find that like, yeah, all of that
stuff kind of gets like lumped together. So that's the
first thing I want to do.
Speaker 1: Let's let's disambiguate the idea, the modern idea of superstition
and the you know, the you could say the Enlightenment
vision of superstition is that rich walation is meaningless. There
is no relationship between ritualized behavior and the effects in
the world. And you see that if you listen to
some of the new atheists they talk about magical thinking.
That criticize magical thinking, which is the idea that you
can perceive meaningful structures and you can invoke meaningful structures
and that will affect the world. That that is superstitious,
That the world actually doesn't work that way, right, The
world is a bunch of things bumping into each other
and it's all this these types of mechanical causes. But
I think that at this point most people watching these
videos will realize that that's just not the case, That
in fact, there is a verticality to meaning, even if
it's only the very identities that you perceive in the
first place. You know, there's a reason why you perceive them,
and therefore there is always verticality in the way the
world lays itself out and there's always you know, if
you can disambiguate some of the mythology around magical thinking,
you realize that you do it all the time.
Speaker 3: You're always doing action at a distance.
Speaker 1: When you use influence, you're if you ask someone to
do something for you, you're using you're using words to
get something to happen that you're not doing yourself, you know,
which is in the magical mythology that gets there's a shortcut.
But you're always kind of doing things like that where
you're in using your influence and meaning making in order
to make things happen in the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and very often magical traditions, even like folk magic
traditions within a Christian context, which is kind of what
we're going to be talking about today. Magical traditions use
the idea of like bringing down something higher, something like
more powerful. So a good example will be in a
lot of Protestant folk magic in the United States, which
we'll talk about a little bit later in this video.
One of the things that is used as a as
like a major part of what like a modern person
or anthropologists would consider to be folk magic is psalms,
Like they use different psalms for things and and from
a folk from from like an anthropological perspective, or you
could say like a very let's say, like a very
pure version of Protestantism, which I'm basically going to argue
I don't think has really ever existed anywhere, not in
the way that you know, like you would like it
to be like laid out on paper. And that's not
a dig, by the way, guys, that's I'm just I just,
you know, like I want to be really clear when
I'm talking about these things today when I'm what I'm
trying to what I'm trying to do is talk about
the actual experiences that people had and actually brought over here. Yea.
And in those in those uh you know, in so anyway,
in that way of studying it, you would say, oh,
so so and so is sick and there's this you've
got to use this herb and you've got to say,
you know, you've got to say these prayers, and it
starts you have to use these psalms, and you're sort
of like from a from like a modern perspective, you'd say, oh,
you're using the psalm like it's a magic spell, right,
And they would say No, it's like this is like
it's the psalms, it's like a holy thing. And I'm
not really arguing for the folk magic either, but I'm
just saying from their perspective, the thing they're doing kind
of makes sense because from their perspective, what they're doing
is they're bringing in something that has the power of
God and they're bringing that in and they're trying to
basically use that to get an outcome that they're hoping for.
Speaker 1: Right, So yeah, someonays you're you're you're basically seeing scripture
as a type of incantation that is influencing the world,
and therefore it's like if you say these these words,
if you if you use these words, you can have
you can influence the disease. Obviously, it's not it's not
a there's not a trade off. You really do believe
that God is acting through this. It's not like it's
I don't think it's cheap, but but right, it's a
it is That's what it is. It's saying here's a
certain kind of incantation, I can use it.
Speaker 3: And therefore it will affect the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And the question then is, of course, like what's
the difference between that and prayer, Like.
Speaker 1: In this particular case, I don't think there is a difference.
I think I think it very much is prayer. We
in the Orthodox tradition, we have prayers for the sick.
We you know, we ask God to heal people. We
have certain prayers that we that we do. We also
will pray and invoke, you know, the prayers of certain saints.
Will ask certain saints to pray for for for the sick,
and for us, and so these things are very similar,
you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, So we'll come back to more some
more of the maybe the kind of differences between these things,
and I will share some I will share some secret
lore from my childhood that is actually related to all
of this. But so I want to begin with this,
this kind of idea that we sometimes have about the Reformation.
It was certainly like the idea of the Reformation. I
was taught growing up just as a refresher, you know.
I grew up in a very uh you know, kind
of like Reformed Baptist tradition. And in fact, we on
October thirty first every year we had a Reformation Day party.
While all the all the cool kids were doing Halloween
or like Trunker treats down a make a church down
the street. We had a Reformation Day party and people
would literally come dressed as like Martin Luther and uh.
One one year, this girl actually came dressed in a
in a pickle barrel because of the story about uh
Katerina Luther's wife who was like a nun and they
smuggled her out of her monastery in a pickle barrel.
And so anyway, like when it comes to like these guys.
Speaker 3: People will come dressed up as the Bible.
Speaker 2: Only the nerds did that. I mean the nerds did that. Yeah, yeah,
But I mean we put on like a ref We
put on like a like a play, like a Reformation
Day like play. I wrote several of those bites so
like I I you know, like when it comes to
like uh, when it comes to these reformers, I mean
these are characters I know. Well, this is a big
part of my childhood. And of course, the the sort
of the things that we tell, the stories that we
would tell, is something like you know these you know,
there's all this clutter, there's all the superstition, and then
these guys come in and they remove all the clutter,
They remove all the superstition, and all you have left
is pure doctrine, right, the doctrines of grace, like the
pure doctrine. So one of the guys who did this,
who's not as well known as like Luther and Calvin,
but is quite important. He was he was working during
he kind of came to prominence during Luther's kind of
time in exile or you know, there was a time
when Luther wasn't writing. A lot of people thought he
was dead and his but it was actually his university
chaplain Andreas Karlstadt, and he publishes a treatise called on
Holy Water and Sacred Salt, and this is a really
important treatise in the early days of the Reformation that
is published in fifteen twenty and basically his argument in
this and I'll just take this from Carlos Erie's wonderful
book called Reformations, which is a book I just strongly
recommend to people if you want a really even handed
look at the period about the three hundred year period
leading up to and then following the Reformation. The wonderful
thing about this book is that it does not treat
the Protestant Reformation as this thing that came along that
was like totally sui generous, like just appeared out of nowhere.
Everybody's blindsided by it. But he shows that there's actually
a continuity of reform movements that happens over the fifteenth, sixteenth,
seventeenth centuries, of which the Protestant Reformation is essential part. Anyway,
So in his summary of this Unholy Water and Secret
Salt text, which as far as I know, I've never
been able to find a translation of it, I've read
it in German, but I've never been able to find
a translation of it in modern English. So somebody has
a good one and they want to send them my way,
I will share it because it's quite interesting, and to
me it really kind of sums up the shift that's
happening at that time, or at least the shift that
the sort of intelligentsia of the German Reformation is trying
to push at that time. And here I would not
but you know this, this this was a kralshtat goes
a bridge too far for Luther. So again just will
be totally fair. Like a lot of the things that
Karlstadt is saying or things that Luther would not have
would not have accepted. But what he basically argues in
this treatise on Holy water and sacred salt. Why holy
water and sacred salt, you ask, because these are the
main things that are used in Western Roman Catholicism to
combat demons. Right, even though sort of like the pinch
of salt over his shoulder, Right, that's all related to
this association of holy water and sacred salt in particular.
Obviously salt is used part of a sacred salt is
part of what is used in the purification of water
for baptism and so on. That these are things that
are used specifically for as like parts of spiritual warfare.
And in this text Karlstadt argues that matter and spirit
are so radically different from each other that they are
completely incompatible. So you can never have a physical object
or a set a series of physical actions that affects
the spiritual world in any way, at least not in
a positive way. And this is a very important qualification
because of course, everybody believes that you can continue like
you can do things with your body that are sinful
and that will damn you and send you to hell. Yeah, right,
everybody continues to believe that. But the idea that there
could be something physical that actually somehow results in the
purification of the world, the exorcism of the world, you know,
like those things Karlshat really kind of tries to push out.
Speaker 1: And so wow, that's amazing because it actually accounts for
a lot of things, like why people don't kneel, why
you know, any kind of physical action that you would do,
any kind of physical discipliney can discipline, a fasting. All
of this stuff is actually seen as suspicious because it
seems because of this and I never thought that that
people still believe the opposite, still believe that in some
way the body can drag your spirit into into into sin,
but not not.
Speaker 2: And my guess is that if Karlstadt were you know,
like if you were to push them on this, he
would say, oh, well, that's because it's a it's a
the the things you're doing with your body are downstream
of like your will, and it's like the will is
choosing to rebel against God. So that's actually the thing
you're being punished for, not actually the physical action, know,
with your body. But so like that's my guess about
how that would probably be would be rationalized. But the so,
so what what he argues, is basically that material symbols
cannot convey spiritual benefits. That's the that's the that's the idea.
So that the material symbols are signs that point that
could maybe like but they're like road signs that maybe
point to a higher unseen reality, but they don't have
But but but the sign is.
Speaker 1: Arbitr right, we formed by the spiriting, right, like radical
separate that spirit forms matter, but rather that their spirit
and there's matter, and they're separate, and they have their
separate rules and separate ways of functioning.
Speaker 2: And basically you could decide to make the sign something
else that would be okay, yeah, yeah, wow, And so
hellenomenalism like yeah, yeah, exactly right. Yeah. So so Carlstatt argues,
He says, he wants Christians to stop acting like brute beasts, right,
so the idea is like, if you want to be like,
you know, like stop living this animalistic existence where you're
like in the world and instead let go of this nonsense.
He follows us up a year later with the Treatise
on Vowels in particular clerical celibacy and monastic vowels, but
then also in there also against the cults of the
Saints against holy images, basically, you know, making the argument
that all of us is idolatry, which again is not
something Luther would have really agreed with. And then he
and then he you know, follows that up with another
treatise about a few months later called on Both Forms
of the Holy Mass, which is basically an attack on
the eucharistic theology of the Roman Catholic Church. And so
it's it's it's proposing, it's denying the sacrificial dimension of
the Eucharist and then also spiritualizing the understanding of like
Christ's presence in the bread and the wine, like we're
not we're not quite to like Zingly yet, but we're
we're getting there. So again, it's just this decoupling of
the world of spirit and matter and basically treating those
two worlds like they're totally separate from each other. They
don't have anything to do with each other. The world
of spirit and the world of matter. They have they
can have associations, but the associations of the signs are
essentially arbitrary. So that's the that's the idea. And so
this this the idea is that this is supposed to
be this sort of the pristine idea that the Reformation
brings about. Like on paper, everything is nice and clean, now, right,
you know. So, so in in one of the Swiss towns,
you know, they they they throw out all the images,
they pain over all the frescoes, and vainly writes in
his journal all the churches are so beautifully white, and
and that's on paper. That was like, that's the triumph.
We cleared out all of the clutter. We got rid
of all the stuff that that that's that's kind of
associated overly associated with matter overly. So so now we
can worship God with our minds because things that are
in your mind are truth. Yeah right, things that are
in your mind are spiritual. I mean to me, this
is like one of the basic in my opinion. Obviously
it's a flaw, but it's one of the basic assumptions
of the modern world, is that stuff that you do
with your mind is spiritual, as though your mind is
also not part of your body, you know. So in
any case, the idea is we're supposed to restore the
church to this ancient pristine form where everything is clean
and everything is spiritual. And so the way that erie
describes this is this idea that there's like barnacles on
the ship of Salvation, and what they're trying to do
is just like scrape all of that so everything can
be perfectly clean, so the ships, the churches can be
beautifully white and so on. And the idea is that
is that once we do this, we did it, guys,
we got rid of all the superstition. This idea of
the Reformation basically only existed for like five minutes, very
very very quickly. Magical traditions, folk magic, superstition, all these
different things kind of start pressing in. And in this sense,
I even think that maybe when like my viewer talks
about the idea of like the disenchantment that the Protestant
Reformation brought to the world, which viewer, by the way,
thought was a good thing, he's very pro disenchantment that
this never really existed on a like a ground level.
And I will try to actually give some examples again
kind of from my own life and experience. So in
the Middle Ages or like coming out of the Middle Ages.
In the Middle Ages, superstition is very it's very particularly defined.
So for instance, Aquinas defines superstition as a vice opposed
to religion by way of excess. So it is not
because in the worship of God it does more than
true religion, but because it offers divine worship to beings
other than God, or offers worship to God in an
in proper manner. So for Aquinas and for basically medieval theologians,
that is what superstition would be. It would be if
you were offer worship to someone other than God, which
everybody agrees you should not do. Now, you we might
disagree about whether you know, there's a difference between worship
and veneration, et cetera, et cetera, like all the polemics,
it's not important to get into that stuff here. But
everybody agrees only worship should only be offered to the
most like God. All Christians agree on this. So superstition
is something that either offers worship to someone other than
God or that offers worship to God in a manner
in which He has not asked to be worshiped. Yeah,
and so this is you know, the good example of
this in the Old Testament is the strange fire that
the sons of Aaron offer. Right, we don't exactly, we
don't even know what the strange fire is, like it's
some kind of incense or it's some kind of sacrifice.
But it's the point is is that probably something like
they're offering worship to God in the after the manner
of the nations around them instead of the way that
He has commanded in the law. It's something like that,
and so.
Speaker 1: God, I mean there you can imagine all kinds of
weird things that would pop up in even in Christian
churches that of course random people people decide, I don't know,
they decide that they're going to come to church with
like some some red symbol painted on their forehead, and
then they're like, what's happening. People start doing weird things,
and someone the priests and the bishops have to say, okay,
this practice here, this is not this is not traditional.
This is just some aberration that has that has appeared.
Like one of the traditions in for example, that led
to the Iconoclassic controversy was people would scrape the paint
and then would drink it as a kind of remedy.
In the church was like, no, no, that's not how
I got images. They're not like material The materiality the
icon is is quite secondary to its fund.
Speaker 2: Shit, I'll give you a fun example from France, since
that's that's my bit now is just slagging off the French.
Speaker 4: So now after a bit, now, yeah, well you know
you've never done that before.
Speaker 2: Yeah, very kind of notorious case. In the thirteenth century,
there was some Dominican inquisitor who found that some peasants
in southern France you probably know the story where had
been trying to revive dead infants by dunking them in
a local stream where a dog had had drowned, and
the dog kind of became like this local became basically
venerated as a saint by the community there. So I
love dogs. I have eleven right now, by the way,
if anybody wants a puppy, just to hit me up.
But we have. So there's a local dog that they
named Seemed. Yeah there it is, thank you. Yeah. I
was like, I don't know how to say frenchworths. So
they would they were like sort of dunking dead infants
in this stream, trying to revive them, hoping you know,
that the dog was going to like save them in
some kind of a way. And there's probably some kind
of a story where you know, the dog saved an
infant or something like that. But it basically became this
full custom and eventually, you know, church officials came along
and they said, you guys cannot be doing this. This
is not how this works. Right, So this is what
superstition is considered in the Middle Ages. Now, if superstition
is offering worship to beings other than God, and we've
decided that the veneration of saints is in fact worship,
and if it's worshiping God in an improper manner, and
we've decided that anything that is ritualistic or embodied is
an improper way of worshiping God, then sort of it
follows necessarily that all of the practices of the Roman
Catholic Church which were rejected by the Reformation, that those
things would become superstition. And also anything that looks like
those things or like bears some kind of superficial similarity
to them, would also kind of be lumped into this superstition.
So superstition is one category. There is also the there's
also the category of of the uh witchcraft or meleficium, right,
the the the actual invocation and interaction with the devil,
right and so this is actually a second category from superstition,
and then beyond that there are the related but distinct
practices of alchemy, astrology, and divination. And so what you
would sort of maybe expect if you look at it
on paper is that as the Reformation is coming along
getting rid of the idea that the way that you
that you can you can purify demons using incense and
holy water and sacred salt, that they would also get
rid of the idea that that that would be something
you needed to do. And the way that some scholars
have described it is to say that the Reformation gets
rid of the idea of the real presence, like the
physical presence of Christ in the world, but it retains
embraces and intensifies the real presence of the devil in
the world. So it actually takes away the way it
means of combating demons and the demonic in the world,
but it holds on to the belief in them in
a big way. I mean, Luther had a bunch of
encounters that he really believed was like the devil coming
after him specifically, and uh, this is this is kind
of all over the literature, and like the political cartoons
of the Reformation. As the Reformers were getting into spats
with each other, they would actually accuse each other of
being like demon possessed and you're a servant of the devil,
and you know all this stuff. And so this this
idea of like this perfect Reformation that strips away everything
so that we can go to this pure kind of
solomensous Christianity that's been stripped bare of all superstitions, never
really lasts for more than a few minutes at the
beginning of the Reformation, at least not on a popular level. Yeah,
and so, and I want to I want to be
really clear here. We're not just talking about Okay, some
peasants in some corner of the of the of Germany.
You know, they're still you know, performing whether Mancy to
see whether or not a badger is going to come
out of its hole on the feasts of the present,
the presentation of Purification of Mary, which which, of course,
as we've talked about on this channel, is the origin
of Groundhog Day. But we're talking about kings. We're talking
about the intelligencia of the day. One of Luther's sons,
I think it's Paul was was an alchemist like he
wasn't just an alchemist. He was an alchemy tutor, right.
He taught alchemy to like rich nobles as like a as
a profession. So these are so so you have all
these kind of practices that continue to to uh, they
perpetuate themselves throughout the Reformation and and throughout the for instance,
during the Thirty Years War, Johannes Kupler, you know, we
have like a whole telescope named after him. He was
he was basically the the court magician for Gustavs Adolphus,
the king of Sweden. Like basically he was his alchemist,
his astrologer. Adolphus actually had a bunch of different birthdays
circulating so that nobody could like accurately make a horoscope
for him and like predict when he was going to die, right,
you know, things like that. So like this was like
big I mean, this was like big business and it
was a big part of you know this is this
is a man who's like literally making war on Roman
Catholic states and believes that potpoury is like the worship
of the devil. But he's got his own magician because
he believes that this stuff also works, you know, So
it's anyway, the actual picture of magic on the ground
at the time of the Reformation is more complicated than
we often make it look.
Speaker 1: That's the main thing I give The Court Magician is
one where people don't think that that's real, but it was.
Speaker 2: It was totally a thing man, totally.
Speaker 1: You have very famous ones, obviously John D being the
most famous.
Speaker 3: Most people know about John D.
Speaker 1: But most kings would have had characters like that, and
and it seems like they actually did dress somewhat like
the images we have, which is that you know, robes
with like stars on them and like pointy hats and
like that kind of this kind of wild way of dressing.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And I'm personally really happy about that because it's
just kind of like when you find something in real
life that's just like this is too good, Like there's
no way this could be real, Like this is just
too SuperFect. Yeah. Yeah, So you have What eventually happens
is that all of this stuff in the the uh
in puritan within Puritanism, which is a very particular strain
of the Reformation, but it's one that has had a
very important effect on the early history of America. You
have you have superstition, idolatry and papestry, those are all
basically synonymous, and so but then like what do you
do with some of this other stuff? So a good
question to ask is, you know, you find yourself in
you're living in a Puritan settlement in New England, and
you find yourself really really sick. Maybe it's some kind
of embarrassing illness that you don't really necessarily want to
want to admit to in public for various reasons. Maybe
it's just the fact that it is something which is
it's it's a you know, you've tried all the normal
medical things, nothing is working. So what do you do?
What do you do? Well, historically what people do is
they go to a they go to a witch, they
go to what's sometimes called granny magic or broucherie or
there's like a bunch of names for this sort of thing,
and many of these things are still kind of in
various parts of Appalachia and Pennsylvania, North Carolina, places like
that where you go and it's sometimes called focused prayer,
it's sometimes called it has all these kind of different names,
and it has a lot of weird kind of overlaps
just in terms of practice. It has a bunch of
kind of weird overlaps with let's say more charismatic forms
of Christianity and like the way that it looks, and
so sometimes you'll, you know, one of these folkillers. They'll
have something like a charm or an amulet, and they'll
like touch it to different places in your body, and
when they touch the place where the sickness is, they'll
you know, like go into spasms or like you know,
like if you just look at videos of like people
being slain in the spirit and things like this, which
again not at all the kind of Protestants that I
grew up as. I'm not trying to say that's everybody's experience,
but you know, I'm I'm I'm a Baptist. So we
have no upper arm strength. We can't do this during
we can't do this during prayer. Yeah, the the But
so you have all of these these practices that look
that that that have this overlap, and most of these
practices are happening in a totally Protestant context very often,
like in a totally like Anabaptist. The Amish have their
own sort of folk magic healing tradition and it's never
it's never like a totally accepted thing. There's always witch
hunts going on. Obviously a lot of famous witch hunts
in you know, in these different parts of New England, right.
Those witch hunts themselves are though, uh uh, very much
associated with the reality of folk magic among the people there,
and that it's like, well, okay, if it works a
little too well, or if somebody is able to affect
certain cures, well, what's keeping them from also what's keeping
them from also uh doing the reverse, right, you know?
And so this sort of like becomes the big question.
And once you've identified there's somebody in your community who
is that kind of power or has that kind of ability,
or you just think it's possible that somebody in your
community might have those kinds of abilities, and then it
suddenly becomes this really potentially kind of a threatening thing.
So all of this is, all of this is related
to and and as I mentioned, a lot of a
lot of these folk magic traditions which which still very
much exist within American Christianity. In all of these folk
magic traditions there are are there are heavy use of
the scriptures made like extensive use of the scriptures, extensive
use of things like psalm Versus as part of an
incantation or a charm. And usually it'll be like you
pair this herb with this Psalm verse and you pray
and you put it on that part of the body
like where the pain is or something like that.
Speaker 1: And uh.
Speaker 2: So this is where I'll tell a kind of a
fun story from my own childhood. So, as I mentioned,
I grew up in this this very kind of strict
Baptist fundamentalist, you know, Reformed tradition. But because we also
had this association with this large parachurch ministry that was
much more ecumenical in the sense of basically as long
as you were not Catholic, you could be a part
of it. I did. We did have exposure through that
group to a lot of other things. And this was
So I'll tell two stories about this kind of this
sort of like you could say, like magical thinking or
like folk magic within a modern Protestant tradition. One, do
you remember the Prayer of Jabez stuff?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, the Prayer of Jabez is one that was
favorite examples of this. First of all, like genius marketing
idea of Jabez. Guy made so much money. I mean,
my goodness, you still see those books in like Walgreens
or something here.
Speaker 3: Now explain it to people.
Speaker 2: So there's a prayer in the Old Testament that was
prayed by a guy named Jabez, and he basically prays,
you know, God, you know, do this, do this, do this,
and do this for me, and then he prospers. And
so there is a guy.
Speaker 1: That increase my increase my my my orders.
Speaker 2: Yeah, something like that. Yeah, I'm going to get the
exact scripture up just so people know. For some of
you are going to be like, oh yeah, prayer of
Jabez totally, and then there's going to be other people
who are going to be like, I'm sorry, what are
you talking about now. So the prayer of Jabez is
first Chronicles four ten. Jabez called out to the God
of Israel, if only you would bless me and enlarge
my territory. May your hand be with me and keep
me from harm, so that I will be free from pain.
And God granted the request of Jabez. And part of
the reason this pura jumps out to you is because
it comes to the middle of like all of this,
you know, like a lot of chronicles. It is just
like genealogies, like a lot of the Old Testament is
and so like suddenly in the middle of all the genealogies,
you have this prayer. It's like, enlarge my territory, May
your hand be with me and keep me from harm,
so that I will be free from pain. And you
read that and you're like, ooh, wouldn't that be nice
if my territory would be enlarged and if I would
be kept from harm and be free from pain, that
would be awesome. And so they made this whole There
was this guy that wrote this whole book about it,
and he was like, here's how to pray the prayer
of Jabez, and if you pray it in this way.
And people in my circles really pick this up and
they're like, well, okay, it can't be magic because it's
in scripture, right, Yeah, so we're going to use the
prayer from Scripture and it's going to have this effect
on our life. So you're going to pray the prayer
of Jabez and then your territory is going to be enlarged,
whatever that means, and then you're going to be kept
from harm and your life is going to be free
from pain. And there were these prayer of Jabez devotionals
on like little booklets and videos and like summits, like
conferences where you'd go to and learn how to pray
the Prayer of Jabez. And it was kind of this
your territory. Yeah, it was very much this kind of
what's the what's the what's the thing. It's like it's
not visualized, it's a it's a manifesting rights. Yeah, yeah,
name and unclaim it like manifested, you know. Like the
idea is like, there's this thing that your life could be,
and here's here it is, guys, we found it. There
was a hack like hidden in the Bible. There's this
one little verse and man, if you pray this, it's
going to happen and you can't argue against that because
this is in the Bible, right right. So there was
the Prayer of Jabez thing, which which I very vividly
remember when I was when I was young. There was
also something called the what was this called this one's
a little more this one's a little more niche. But
people out there, some of the people out there watching
this will know this. Yeah. So there was this book
that was published called The Power of Crying Out, and
the idea was that if you were praying for something
in your life. This is This is published by Bill Gothard,
who I've talked about in some other things other places.
I used to clean his carpets and which in retrospect
is pretty weird. But he read this book called The
Power of Crying Out and it was endorsed by like
all the big you know, like evangelical people like Bruce
Wilkinson and people like this, and the the the idea
was that if you were praying for something in your
life and you weren't getting it, it's because you're not
praying correctly. And the way to pray when something is
really like serious is to cry out. And so there
would be there was like a little liturgy for this,
and so the took it from like all these different passages,
especially in the Psalms, where people cry out to God
right in their distress, etcetera. Which you should do if
if you're suffering, you should cry out to God like
you should do that, you should pray, you should especially
pray the Psalms. But what would Gother did in this
book was to take the these psalm passages and actually
systematize it. So there was a certain way that you
had to cry out, and you always started out by
saying and you would so you would have one person
that was leading, and then it's more the more people
you get involved, the more powerful it is. So you
want to get as many people as possible to cry
out with you, and you have one person who's leading,
and it's it's repetition. So if I'm the one that's leading,
I cry out, Oh God, and then everybody else cries out,
Oh God, and then I cry out help us. And
you're supposed to do it at the top of your voice.
You're supposed to make it as loud as possible, and
it's supposed to like all do it together. And uh,
and this is the power of crying out. And there
again like books, seminar ours, courses, all this stuff, like
I didn't know about that one resulted from the power
of crying out and the uh and this was this
was endorsed by, like this is endorsed by like a
lot of kind of big names in that particular part
of the evangelical world. And again, there's nothing wrong with
like getting together crying out to God, you know, in
doing it in even like a liturgical way, Like obviously
all those things are great. But the idea was that
the idea was that there's these hidden secrets about how
to pray in the Bible, and you have to read
the Bible kind of like esoterically in this way and
you find the hidden secrets, like you find the Oh,
here's the prayer of Jabez. Nobody's noticed this before. But
if we pray this goblin, larger territory will be free
from pain. Or it's here's all the stuff about crying out.
Nobody's noticed this before. But if we get together and
we like all in this kind of like actually liturgical
kind of call and response way, then God is going
to hear our prayer and answer it in a way
that he would not do otherwise. And so there's like
the idea is like here's a method and if we
if we this method, then we're more likely to get
the thing that we're asking for. Yeah, So those are
some examples of kind of you could say, like sort
of Bible based where you could almost consider to be
kind of folk magic. And again, like what's the difference
between that and prayer. I do think there's a difference
in the sense that when we when we pray and
ask God for something or even when we ask for
the intercessions of a saint, I think that it should
always be with the the intention of the understanding that
God will do what he will do, and you have
to also kind of I mean, this is why, this
is why, like most of the saints don't pray. It's
it's sort of like the midwd meme. There's like kind
of a prayer bell curve, you know, where like the
very simple person and the very holy person can both
say God, please make it rain, and it will just rain.
And then for most of us in the middle, the
thing we just need to pray is that your will
be done because we just don't know what to ask for,
right and we don't you know. So anyway, all this
to say, I'm not trying to make this just about that,
but I do want to say like there is there
does seem to me to be some kind of a distinction,
and you know, the difference. The tagline for this book,
The Power of Crying Out, was when prayer becomes mighty,
you know. So it's like, if you want mighty prayer,
if you want to like then then like here's my method.
And when you need to buy my book and learn
my method, and then you'll be able to And there's
something about that. There's something about that that I think
is very much connected to these like old folk magic traditions.
Speaker 1: So I think that I think that you've got it
right in some ways. You could say that the sympathetic
type magic stuff, it's usually about serving one's will, like
we want you want something there, and you're trying to
kind of funnel you're trying to funnel, meaning you're trying
to funnel intelligence, You're trying to funnel all that towards
towards getting what you want.
Speaker 2: See.
Speaker 1: The problem with some of this stuff, like the problem
with the idea of manifesting and naming and claiming is
that sometimes it actually work, like because that is actually
how things function, in the sense that if you want
something to happen and you focus your will on it,
there's definitely a better chance that it's going it's.
Speaker 3: Going to happen sometimes through causes that you can.
Speaker 2: Yeah, even if you explain that through natural So I
will tell you, like, we have stories in my family
about you know, like you know, large family pastor salary,
not a lot of money, et cetera, and like you know,
we like we cried out to God and then like
a check showed up in the mail the next day.
You know those kinds of things that we do have
those stories. So it's interesting. Like and the thing again
is that when I'm talking about all them.
Speaker 1: Even for darker things like like you if you want
a new ferrari, if you want like a new pair
of shoes, like, sometimes that will happen. Like if you
want something really a lot, and you focus on it
and you you try to to get it through your
thoughts and through that, like, the possibility that it will
manifest is greater than if you didn't want to.
Speaker 2: I want to be very clear that when I'm describing
these things, I am not trying to say that I
don't believe magic works. Yeah yeah, like I'm not that guy.
Like I definitely believe, like you know, and if you
tell me like I.
Speaker 1: Think the difference is that the problem is like, be
careful what you wish for. That's also one of the
issues is that you know, when you're wishing for a ferrari, uh,
and the ferrari comes to you the idea that this
is good for you, Yeah, it doesn't mean that it's
good for you. Sometimes you get what you want, but
it's not. It's not to the the to the benefit
of your soul. And so I think that that's in
some ways the difference. Like you said, true prayer is
always in service of something higher. So it's like when
we pray for for health, when we pray for we
when we pray for God to give us the things
we need, we kind of understand that it's not for
our increase in that sense. It's not like, so that
I become more powerful, so that I so that I
have more girls, so to have more whatever, more stuff.
Speaker 3: That's not that's not the point.
Speaker 1: So rat so that we can that we can continue
to serve our family, continue to serve God, continued to be,
you know, in the loving relationships.
Speaker 2: And if you look at the prayers for healing that
we use, for instance, in our tradition in the Orthodox Church,
the prayers for healing are always like raise, raise this
person up, so that they will have more time to repent, right,
you know, Like the thing that you're always thinking about
is the fact that you know you're going to die
eventually and then you're going to be judged, and so
the more time you have to sort of get your
life together and not be kind of like, you know,
that's the prayer against you know, it's in the litany's
you know, a Christian ending to our life painless, peaceful
and unashamed, and a good defense before the fearful judgment
seat of Christ. Like the part of that is asking
for like time, like not to be taken suddenly, but
to have adequate time to make a good repentance, make
your last confession, receive communion, like all these things because
because then because then comes the judgment. Right, So so
I think that ultimately, like one of the things to
look for if you're which is this is not the
topic of this video, but if you want to look
at like what's the distinction between these things, one of
the things would be, you know again like who are
you going to for help? That's one thing to ask.
And the second bit would be just to say why
are you asking for this help? Like is it is
it self serving? Or is it because is it because
it's got something to do with your repentance?
Speaker 1: So, but there is I think that the idea is
also to kind of to not I don't have a
black and white thinking on this.
Speaker 3: I see really that there is a scale. It is completely.
Speaker 1: Normal to want certain things like that this is just
part of being human and to in some ways have
our secret prayers that have moments where we where we
kind of wish or we ask God, you know, if
if it's your will, I would like this this to
to come to me. There's nothing wrong with that. It
really is about you could say that the scale of it,
and the image of the sorcerer is a good image
to understand when that becomes excessive, like it's a mythological
image where you usually the image of the source would
be something like I'm going to sacrifice someone else, right,
So it's kind of magical idea that in order to
get what I want, I have to give someone that uh,
someone that I love, right, I have to sacrifice them.
Speaker 2: You saw that.
Speaker 1: We see that a lot in kind of African the
African folk magic tradition was if something really good was
happening to someone, there was this suspicion that they had
sacrificed someone in their family. They would always watch to
see if someone would get sick and they'd say, oh,
they sacrifice this person to get what they want. But
that type of practice which is happens both in magic,
like in a magical way, you could imagine really doing
something ritualistic to get there, but you could also do
it in a more mundane way, which is basically like
not go see your mother ever because you're too busy
making a lot of money and you don't care. You
just like forget about about her because you're just focused
on your career. But you can see it mythologically in
magic on how that is the sinful aspect, right, That's
where it becomes really horrendous.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So one of the I was actually thinking is like, yeah,
that that basic idea applies to a lot of economic
systems actually just just the idea I mean. And the
thing is like you even know people who will be like, oh,
this good thing is happening to that person, but all
this bad stuff happens to me, And so there's like
this this like you'll talk to people who have kind
of the simplicit idea that you know, my suffering is
necessary so other people can be happy. I'm the I'm
the one person in my friend group who's not allowed
to be happy, or I'm the one person like everybody
else is getting married, I'm not getting married, or everybody
else has got a great job, but my job sucks,
and like this is sort of this idea that that
being sacrificed. Yeah, but also you can see how so
there is a dynamic that happens in friend groups and
every sitcom, for instance, does this. So this is where
we're gonna pive and talk about Seinfeld for a moment.
So no, no, So every every sitcom does this where
you'll have one person in the friend group who is
the loser. Yeah, right, like who's a little bit of
a loser or the nerd, but they're basically the person
in the group that everybody else can kind of mock
and in doing that, they actually kind of elevate themselves
a little bit and they actually do become kind of
more successful in the world, and they sort of get
there by pushing this person down a little bit. Like
that's that is like a social interaction which I've observed
many times in the real world. And it's it's again
it's a key element of like a lot of sitcoms,
and that is that same kind of the same kind
of an idea that you have to sort of push
somebody down to raise yourself up. So okay, So but
it's also I.
Speaker 1: Think it's mostly to help people understand and this is
it's hard because we're modern people, but to understand that
the notions of magic are not removed from your experience.
They're often concentrated mythological versions of things that you go
through all the time. Right of how will affects the world,
you know, how some people are able to make things invisible,
make things disappear. We see things disappear all the time
in media today. There's that those are magical actions, and
so we need to re understand it that way because
or else what are we even talking about, Like this
isn't Harry Potter, you know, shooting lightning bolts out of
out of ones or whatever, like that's not magic and
it's never been magic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, nobody, nobody's ever actually thought that was magic. Right,
And and in fact, the main thing that people sort of
you could say like that there are these different categories
for magic. So the what we've just described the ability
to kind of like harm at a distance or like
like sacrifice something so that you get some power out
of it, whether it's like I'm going to sacrifice my soul,
you know, like the like the fausty impact, Yeah, but
the selling your soul idea is the idea that whatever
comes next, I don't care about that. So like the afterlife,
whatever the devil can have me then, but right now
I get everything that I want. Right.
Speaker 1: But you every time you sin, you're doing your selling
your soul to some time you take not alone.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're you're picking to now instead of eternity.
Speaker 2: So it's like the same thing like every time you
take out a loan, you're doing that a little bit.
You're saying you can have this much of my yep, yep,
you're saying, like you can have this, I guess, so
like you can have this as much of my time
and labor and money and and attention, you know, because
like when once you once you owe money, like it's
it starts to eat like occupy the space in your
mind all the time. Right, So like like, uh, you're
saying you can have this much of my time and attention,
et cetera in the future. But what I want right
now is a car, right and you know, and so
like you justify that to a certain extent, and and
you know, basically that's what our whole economy runs on.
Speaker 3: Whole economy is based on magic.
Speaker 2: It is actually I mean okay, but like go look
up new monetary policy. I'm so sorry. I don't know
how we got here, but like yeah, like like I mean,
certainly the whole economy is based on the idea of
of like attention is value, right, right. You know when
when somebody says something like you know, the you know,
we're off the gold standards, so now our money is worthless,
it's like, well, it's not exactly true. Money is always
worth what everybody agrees that it's worth, right, And it's
just sort of this that's how it works. That's actually
how it works with gold as well. But the thing
is that with historically with gold, you can make things.
And yeah, so okay, so I don't want to go
down like a whole rabbit hole here about the FED,
et cetera, et cetera. So we're gonna we're gonna, yeah,
you gotta.
Speaker 1: Going the universal history of America. We're gonna have to
talk about the FED itself.
Speaker 2: We will actually have to talk about well, okay, so
it is it is actually related to where I want
to go in a few weeks. And so all right,
So the kind of magic that we've just talked about now,
which would be like uh, harm at a distance or
like control at a distance, where like enlarging yourself at
the expense of some other thing that you sacrifice. Right,
that's the what would normally be considered to be like
witchcraft when it's done in an improper way, right, the melaficarum. Right.
So another really important kind of magic, especially during the Reformation,
is what we would call divination. So there are basically
there are basically two ways to do divination, and one
of them has always been totally rejected by Christianity and
the other actually has always been basically accepted. So this
will this is a plug for my Lord of Spirits
talk later this year. If people are coming to the
Lord of Spirits conference where I'm going to say all
the things about astrology out loud. It's going to be
really fun. I'm very excited about it. Yeah, it's gonna
be awesome. But you have to like drive to like
rural Pennsylvania to hear it. So it's like, you know, yeah,
So divination is when you either you call out to
some spiritual power, like, for instance, like a god, like
you know, let's say like Marduk, who's you know, the
king of the Gods, and like the god of war.
And so you say, I went to invade the neighboring
city state, you know, in the Mesopotamian Bronze age, I
want to. I want to. I want to invade the
neighboring city states. So I'm going to sacrifice an animal
to Marduke, and then we're going to look at the
liver of that animal, and there's somebody who is trained
on interpreting animal livers, and they're going to basically look
at that and tell me whether or not Marduk will
give me a favorable outcome. Then there is the observation
of natural signs and events. These are in Greek German.
These are called wunder like wonders, but like as in
like signs and wonders. And this kind of divination is
based on the interpretation of things that happen out of
the ordinary in the natural world. Astronomical anomaies, strange lights
in the sky, cloud formations, dragons flying overhead, beached whales,
deformed animals, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right, these
are things that are not normal but do happen, and
so when they happen, this tells you something. And so
the question then is like, what does it tell you?
So famously, for instance, there's a bunch of a bunch
of wonders, a bunch of you know, like two headed
calves being born, and or you know, various you know,
comments in the sky, et cetera, the night before Caesar's assassination. Right,
if you read even in the chursh Fathers, they will
talk about things like how the passage of comets predicts
the birth of kings, and they would not have considered
that to be astrology in the sense of the first sense,
which again, you know, is like let's sacrifice something to
a pagan god and ask them for an outcome, because
the idea is the world is made by God and
so God can communicate things to us through the natural world. However,
that's not always so clear. Yeah, And what's.
Speaker 1: Interesting is that you can see the difference that we're
trying to point to right in those two examples, which
is that the idea of invoking a deity and offering
a sacrifice in order to control what it is you're
going to do in order to know you know what
you should do, and especially in terms of things like
battles and all of that, you can see why that's
different from in some ways, being attentive and noticing what
is being given to you, like noticing the signs that
are given to you and then trying to make sense
of them, Like one is this willful desire to increase
my power, and the other is a kind of attention
to the language of creation in order to understand what
it is that's happening to us.
Speaker 2: So the medieval West, the Catholic Church very carefully regulated
the kinds of divination you were and were not allowed
to practice. Yes, so for example, it's against the law
of the Church to make a birth chart that is
a horoscope for yourself if it is for unless it
is for medical purposes, so you would have basically like
medical astrologers. I mean, this was actually just a part
of learning to be a physician in the ancient world,
because the idea is that different parts of the heavens
correspond to different influence have influences corresponding to different parts
of the body. And so you were not allowed to
because most of the time when people make a horoscope,
what they want to know is I'm talking about like
real astrology back in the day, not like whatever your
weird aunt does now. But you know, although other I
mean obviously they're kind of related, but the old stuff,
you know, very often it it has to do with like,
am I going to be? You know, it has to
do with wealth and power basically those things, right, increasing
your wealth and power. It's not always like, oh, am
I going to meet somebody or something like that, you know,
which seems like what most horoscopes are about now. But
it's about wealth and power. So if you're doing that,
you're doing it for a bad reas and and ultimately
for like a reason that's really harmful to your soul.
When the Church bans astrology, it is not because they
don't believe it works the other way around, right, And
when the so like if you're a doctor who's doing
this as part of a medical examination, well that's for
the purpose of healing somebody, So it's it's different. That's
how they treated it. Now. When the Protestant Reformation comes along,
they do not get rid of these practices. In fact,
they intensify them. So for instance, in Zurich, which is
the ultimate citadel of the Swiss Reformation, that's where sorry Geneva,
that's where that's whereas Vingley, for instance, you know says, oh,
how gloriously white all the churches are. Right, They had
entire libraries where they collected massive amounts of what were
called wonder literature, which is basically people would write, usually
pastors would write and collect here's all the weird signs
that are happening right now in the place where I live,
you know. Just for instance, in fifteen seventy eight, there's
a deformed lamb born in the village of Cedarsdorf, and
so one of the local pastors immediately publishes a pamphlet
about this and interprets this four eared, eight legged monster
with a snake's mouth, and this is like God is
sending a message to the people of this village that
you're all wicked and you need to repent. And here's
the things about you that are specifically wicked, and here's
what The ways that the lamb is deformed are allegories
of the way that you're deformed. And this is a
sign from God, and you should get your life right right,
that kind of thing. And so people publish pamphlets like this,
and the publication of them massively ramps up during the Reformation,
so that by like fifteen eighty five. You have entire
libraries across Germany and Switzerland basically just full of this
kind of literature and which also includes things like how
to interpret the different kinds of science when they come
along and things like this. So these this kind of
divination is uh is like at a really kind of
larger like cosmological scale, but it's associated with some other
kinds of divination at a at a much at a
much smaller scale, which which have to do again, it
has to do with folk magic and things like this,
and among this is the practice of like water witching.
So this is something I've never understood, Jonathan, I don't
know what that is.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: You see like, uh, like an old movies. You just
see somebody like with like a stick with like a
like a fork a fork branch. They're holding it by
two ends and they're like walking across the the ground
and they're looking for water, looking for the water, and
just about to feel like some kind of vibration in
the stick or something that would tell you that there's
a source of water here.
Speaker 3: I mean, look, man, I have to be honest with you.
I know someone who does that.
Speaker 2: I do too. Please explain. Let's go. And again, when
I talk about these things, I'm not saying they're not
really what's going on.
Speaker 3: And it's been interesting.
Speaker 1: It's actually been interesting talking to him about it because
it's something that he discovered, and he wouldn't want this.
It's someone he had another job. And ultimately what happened
to him is that he was he had the sense
that he really had to quit his job and to
start a water detection like water infiltration detection company, and
so he I think he was like making furniture or something,
quit his job, bought all the equipment in order to
help people detect water infiltration in their houses and their
buildings and stuff. Started doing that, and then at some
point started realizing that he didn't need the equipment, and
so he would walk into the building and be like,
I'm using the equipment for the client, but I know
exactly where the leak is.
Speaker 2: He said.
Speaker 3: It's someone he would just he just would just he said,
same time.
Speaker 1: I walked into a building and I went up and
like he said, I punched through the gypsum and I
grabbed the pipe and it was like, that's where the
leak was, and I just knew where it was. And
so he didn't know anything about it. He started looking
online about what that is and what it is, and
so he ended up buying like a copper rod because
these they saw that that's what people were doing, and
so he started like.
Speaker 3: He started using it.
Speaker 1: Uh and uh, and it was like, I mean, so
what's interesting is that this is this is so interesting,
so you could you could, really this is something that
you could totally explain naturalistically, right, the idea that some
people have an intuition about where water is.
Speaker 3: This is something that would be completely normal animals have.
Speaker 2: I'm sure that, Yeah, you could make some kind of
like evolutionary psychology explain it.
Speaker 1: There's a completely you know, but then you could what's
harder for people to understand is to what extent certain
physical disciplines, certain disciplines of ways of acting or ways
of or are also of relating to the history of this.
All of these would actually increase that capacity in you
where you know, by that's a learning from someone who's
done it before. If you already have the intuition, would
also help you kind of refine that and be better
at it. But definitely, I mean, I don't completely I
mean I think that I think that even naturalistically, you
could understand this type of behavior this time.
Speaker 2: So I mean, I'll do you one weirder well. It's
not weirder. Actually, I do have a weirder thing than that,
but I'm not going to say it while we're recording.
I'll tell you later. But there's a I have a
series of books that somebody actually a podcast fan sent
me recently, and it's just it's a collection of the
life the life and like recorded miracles and stories about
Saint Porphyrius, one of my favorite modern saints. One of
the most common miracles that he performed was to find
locations for wells. Yeah, like and he would just know,
like he didn't have like a tool he did or
like a like a copper rod or something. He would
just be like, Oh, He's like, you're going to drill
a well here in three years, and that well will
be contaminated and you're going to figure that out too
late because you're not going to take my advice. So
you're going to drill a well there and that well
is actually contaminated with diesel fuel. But then after you
figure that out, you're going to dig one over there,
and that one's going to be pure and then like,
you know, three years later the guy laughs all that off,
But three years later he digs a well where he
wanted to dig a well and turns out it's contaminated,
and then digs a well where saying Porphyrius tells him
to dig the well and the water is there. Right, So,
accepting that this is basically this is a thing that
some people could do. I know people who can, like
more than one person who can do this kind of thing,
what is it the symbolism of that? Like, what's it mean? Like,
what's the symbolism of like finding hidden water?
Speaker 1: I mean, we it's also finding fresh water. It's not
just about finding right water, it's about finding fresh water.
You know, it's related definitely.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: The idea also that they have this rod that they're
using is related to the story of Moses and the tree.
Speaker 3: Right, So the rod Moses has this tree what is
a rod?
Speaker 1: And then he you know, he he puts it in
the salt water and it becomes it becomes pure water,
and so you know, it's related to how how can
I say this, Like it's it's an image of how
humans are able to find value, like because clean water
is heavenly water. Right, it's water that I know it's
hard because it comes from below, but it is it
is it is like it's like a well, is this
pure like pure water? And so I don't see. Like
to me, it's pretty simple, like you know, it's the
capacity of humans to find value, to find meaning, to
find things that are that are that are important to us.
Speaker 2: It's always seemed to me that there is a connection
between the symbolism of like being able to find water
and like looking for buried treasure in the sense.
Speaker 1: That sure, actually, my friend, this friend that can that
this is going to get Now it's going to get
a lot weirder. My friend that can find water, he
also realized he can find other things and and and
he at some point there's this guy who was this
guy was skiing like a water skiing, and he was
a guy who had like a fake leg, like he
had like a prosthetic leg, and he was water skiing,
which doesn't seem like the smartest thing to do.
Speaker 3: But he fell lost his leg. The leg fell into
the water.
Speaker 1: Nobody could find it for like days, people were like
trying to find it, couldn't find it. And because obviously
the boat was going super fast, they couldn't find it.
Speaker 3: Uh, And so my friend.
Speaker 2: I'm trying not to laugh at your disabled friend, like that's.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so I don't know the guy with.
Speaker 2: The leg, Okay, we can laugh at.
Speaker 1: And so my friend find out about this and and
he said, well, take me out on the water. And
they took him out on the water and he said,
it's here, and then they just went down and it
was right there. And so he discovered that he can. Yeah,
he can find things, and so it's definitely related. I mean,
now it gets weird because people are like, oh, well,
you can't explain that naturalistically.
Speaker 2: But the thing is that I can, though, because my
wife is better at finding things than I am. Yeah,
and like like i will look for half an hour
for something around the house and I'm like so frustrated,
do you know where this is? And she's like no,
but let me look, and then like literally three minutes later,
she'll find the thing that I'm looking for. Like some people,
some people are better at finding things. It seems not
unreasonable that you could then extrapolate that, but yeah, it.
Speaker 1: Does become a little harder to at least like played
with normal naturalism. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely more of a
vertical of a vertical thing.
Speaker 2: So, boy, I've got a weird story to tell you
later when we're not recording. But in any case, okay,
So this kind of brings me to one of the
most interesting to me folk magic traditions in America. So
this is this is it, guys. We're going to tie
in the last video the idea of like titular spirits
and guardian spirits and things like this. We're going to
tie that in because one of the most common folk
magic traditions in North America. And this is very closely
tied with like Protestant folk magic. And again, like I'm
not saying, I'm not saying it should be like, it's
not like a I don't know, I'm just just reporting,
like historically, this is the reality, right and so, and
this particular happens in a part of upstate New York
that's usually referred to as the Burned Over District. It
was like this heavily charismatic region of New York State
where a lot of important spiritual movements happened that a
lot of people know about. And some of you already
know where I'm going with this. When I mention it
in the Burnover district. There were a lot of folk
magic traditions that are part of this part of this
kind of like wider, kind of more mystical is not
even the right word, but definitely more like you know,
the idea that you certain kinds of prayer, like you
say this prayer under a full moon and you'll get
this result, right, So like like much more like folk
magic traditions that are also associated with this highly revivalistic
version of Christianity. And this includes things like folk killing,
folk medicine, folk magic, also things like divination. As we've mentioned,
one of the main forms of divination was the ability
to find buried treasure. So this is what it's usually
called money digging, is what they called it money digging.
And the way that it would work is that you
would you would have a vision. You would receive a vision,
usually through like a scrying stone of some kind, which
is like comes from your ultimately comes from European alchemy, right.
You would have a scrying stone of some kind like
this is like a stone that used like like a
big pug of quartz or something like that, and you
would look into it and you would have visions in
the stone, right, and the visions would tell you where
is located. That's one of the main things they used
it for. But they also used it to find Bury treasure.
Now whether or not anybody actually refound Bury treasure doing this,
I do not know, but lots and lots and lots
and lots of people were trying. In fact, in the
early nineteenth century there was a massive wave of this
kind of treasure again going on throughout New England, not
just in New York but all around New England. And
the way that it would work is you'd have somebody
who's a seer and who had this gift of being
able to find water and being able to find Bury treasure,
and they would look into the stone and they would
find they'd have a vision. They'd say, Okay, it's right here.
But here's the problem. Bury treasure is always guarded by something.
Everybody I think knows this intuitively, you know, like, obviously
if there's Bury treasure, there's going to be something guarding it.
Speaker 3: And is the reason why if someone buried it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. In a medieval alchemical like tradition, the idea like
Bury treasure is or hidden treasure is also associated with
like a like a dragon, or like a small like
a dragon's spirit, like a familiar that would like be
guarding it. So you have to, like if you want
to get the alchemist's secrets, you have to get past
his familiar kind of a thing. And so they would
have this, they would have this. They would say, all right,
there's right here, there's buried treasure under here. But the
problem is that there is a garden guardian spirit guarding it.
And the guardian spirit is usually supposed to be the
spirit of like Native Americans who used to live there,
and maybe they're the ones that buried the treasure, or
specifically sometimes they had this idea that when the treasure
was buried, they killed a warrior like on the spot,
and so that his spirit would remain there to guard
the treasure. Right, that kind of an idea. So you
have to do is you have to placate the spirit
in some way. This isn't New England, this is in
New England. This is in the nineteenth century, Jonathan wild Man,
It's like the early nineteenth century. And so the way
that you would plicate the spirit is by offering it
a sacrifice of some kind, usually an animal sacrifice. There
were always like rumors about like they would like you know,
like you would. There were rumors about like being a
human sacrifice, like you would murder one of your company
and like offer their blood to the spirit. I again
don't know if this ever really happened, this is the rumor,
but usually it was like a rooster or a dog
or something like that. So you kill this animal, you
offer the blood as a sacrifice to prolicate the guardian
spirit of the place and then very importantly, the seer.
This is part of being this kind of diviner, is
that you know that there's a certain number of things.
There's certain ritual, procedural things you have to do, and
if you violate any one of them, even in a
very small detail, the guardian spirit will wake up or
be displeased. And then what it what they will do
is they will draw the treasure down deeper into the earth. Okay,
so I don't want to be overly cynical. I think
I've established I'm the sort of person who's like not
cynical about spiritual.
Speaker 5: Real however, but I don't even understand, I mean, what
what treasure would would like Ancient Native American people already
gold Man.
Speaker 2: It's always like golden, I mean, just like treasure. Like
it's like, I mean.
Speaker 4: The the I mean you think about think about England,
Native Americans, like care about gold.
Speaker 2: That doesn't matter. That's got nothing to do with this, Jonathan,
like I and I don't know the answer to that.
But also it doesn't matter, like it's it's got nothing
to do with this. Like if you think about part
of the symbolism of the New World, right, is this
idea of there's a fountain of youth, or there is
a or there's you know, treasure in the terms of
like you know, gold and silver, you know, especially from
like South and Central America, which is where most of
that was coming from. But like when people exploring I mean,
we'll talk about some of these explorers at some point
if we ever get to them, but like when they're
exploring the New World, they're looking for the fountain of Youth,
They're looking for elderod of the City of Gold, like
all this stuff, and that is farther south than New England.
But the point kind of stands that the part of
the symbolism of the New World is that it is
this unprecedented source of riches. Yeah, Like the thing that
ends the Middle Ages is Spanish gold. Like, they have
so much gold and silver coming over it totally changes
the eastward orientation of Europe and basically like just like
changes everything. That's one of the major things that brings
the Middle Ages to an end. But once you're there
and you're living now in this land of plenty, and
you find out it's actually really hard and you have
to farm most of the time. Like, well, instead of
the gold being over there, now it's under here. Right,
There's supposed to be some kind of a treasure here.
There's gold in them in our hills. It's supposed to
be some kind of a treasure here.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: For sure, all of America, the gold rush and all
of this, the whole esthetic of the gold of like
the gold hunting is important for sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And so the and just this idea in general
that there's some resource that we haven't tapped yet, and
if we tap that, I mean this is this is
of course a human desire, but it's one of the
main things that drove European exploration, settling, colonization, et cetera.
Of the New World. Was this idea that there's there's
this untapped resource out there, and if we just tap that,
it's gonna fix all of our problems. We're gonna heal,
we're gonna cure aging, We're gonna cure and we're still
doing all of this, we're still looking for every one
of these things. So they, uh, so, imagine that you
are somebody who has at least convinced other people that
you have this gift right, that you have the gift
to find water, to find treasure, et cetera, et cetera.
And then all we have to do is we go
out here, we make a little sacrifice. We kill a dog,
sacrifice the blood, we piece of guardian spirit, and then
we start digging. We start digging. We dig and we
dig and we dig. After like a day of digging,
we've been keep in mind like we had to hire
like an entire digging crew plus my fee, you know,
so it's not a cheap endeavor. And after a couple
of days of digging no treasure, what you say is
is that guy over there this yere No, no, no,
you at the sere you say it was that guy
over there. He talked when he wasn't supposed to talk.
Speaker 3: He did he didn't follow the us.
Speaker 2: One of the words that you're not supposed to use,
and that woke the guardian spirit up. And now the
treasure is pulled down even deeper. It's actually going to
take more money and time. Yeah. Yeah, So then it's
like the only people actually getting wealthy off of the
treasure digging are the treasure finders themselves, right, that's the idea.
So all of this to say, one of the great
money finders, one of the great money diggers of New England,
was a guy by the name of Joseph Smith, who is,
of course the founder of Mormonism. Joseph Smith had two
scrying stones that he used that he kept and he
would put it in his hat, so the way you
had to we work with a scrying stone. It's actually
fun woodcuts of like a guy looking into a hat
with like light coming out or that's like that's Joseph Smith.
Maybe we could put one up on the screen for subuquency.
Joseph Smith, he was a seer, like he was somebody
who had at least convinced the people around him that
he had these certain gifts, this ability to kind of
find this lost treasure, this buried treasure. And the way
that he would do it is he had these two
scrying stones like chunks, of course, and he would put
them in his hat, because to make a scryingstone where
you have to blot out all other sources of light
so you can see the light that's shining out of
a stone. So he would put it in his hat,
and then he would hold his hat up to his
face and block out all the other sources of light.
And then as he's staring into this growing stone in
his hat, he would start weeping. He would start kind
of like speaking in tongues. He would start doing all
these things, and then he'd say, I've seen it. I've
seen the vision. I know where the treasure is, I
know where the thing is. As far as we know,
never actually found anything, until, of course, he found the
vision of where these golden tablets are. Yeah. So Harold Bloom,
the great literary critic American literary critic, in his book
The American Religion, he makes the argument that American religion
is fundamentally gnostic in all the senses that this means.
And importantly, Bloom does not think this is a bad thing. Yeah, Okay,
so he's he's not he's not saying this like in
a negative way. If I said something was fundamentally gnostic,
you would note that it means I don't like that thing.
But for Harol Blooms is actually a good thing. And
so one of the trademarks of narcissism, well, for Bloom,
it's the common of the separation of the material from
the spiritual. And then it also has to do with
the idea of there being kind of like echelons or
like deeper levels of esoteric knowledge that you can move into.
So for Harold Bloom, American religion is fundamentally gnostic, which
he sees is a good thing. And he sees that
and in his view, Mormonism is the most purely gnostic
and therefore the most purely American form of religion. And
that's where we're going to stop today. It's going to
leave that out there, and in a few weeks when
we pick this up again, what I want to do
is actually look a little bit at the early history
Mormonism and some of the folk beliefs and practices as
folk magic from Europe gets carried over as also gnostic
influences from other things. I mean, I didn't even talk
about all the Puritans. Some of the Puritans who are
involved in some of the witch hunts that we mentioned earlier,
some of them were very interested in and extensively studied
like cobblah. So there's a lot of weird stuff that
I want to look at as we look at kind
of the weird history of like early American religion and
this kind of esoteric thrust that it takes. So that's
where we're gonna be.
Speaker 3: And it's amays it. It's funny because it looks like
a contradiction.
Speaker 1: But if you because at first we started with the
idea that in the early Reformation you have this split
of heaven and Earth where in some ways there's this
but what happens and you see it, you know in
the split right away, very soon, is when you see
freemasonry being developed. You kind of see these secret societies,
and in some ways this split is creating a type
of esoteric thinking and magical thinking that becomes divorced in
weird ways from the basic belief of people and becomes
this kind of secret thing that people participate in. And
so although it looks like a contradiction, it is in fact,
if you don't have a completely in graded vision of
how it is that God acts through his saints, you know,
through his angels into the world and how you know,
we're meant to ask God to show us to to
to to help us, uh, and that we it's embodied
in the turgical practice. It's not that those will go away,
is that they'll just become weirder and weirder and weirder.
Speaker 3: Because it's a it's it's a human need that people have.
Speaker 2: One of the things that I think that I'm ready
to start pushing back against actually is the idea of
re enchantment in the sense that I don't think the
magic ever really went out of the world, but I
think that what happened is something more like modernity. And
you can see this. I mean, there are extreme cases
where you have like nuclear physicists who are also like
practice practicing occultists and things like that, and that stuff
is well relatively well known, But I don't think it
is really the case that this, you know, Weber's idea
of like disenchantment like just totally sucked all the enchantment
out of the world and now we can just deal
with the world in this rational basis. But is that
when the you could say there was like a hierarchical
way within Christianity of approaching these things in the world.
And as we kind of established in our last video,
there was like some messiness on the edges of that
where you're like, okay, but what about this fairy. Maybe
she can be saved, maybe she can't. We'll see if
she can hack it as a monk for seven years
or like whatever. Like there's like there's folk traditions and
legends and things like that kind of on the edges.
But then you have this kind of solidity in the center. Yeah,
and when that is kind of stripped away from the cosmos,
what we don't get is this kind of perfect everything
is now rational and explainable and understood. What we get
in said is this really where everything kind of becomes ambiguous.
And so then what you need is you need to
find the secret. And maybe the secret is you know,
for a lot of of Christians, even in like the
kind of a modern American Protestant context, this is meant
trying to go back to Judaism or some form of
Jewish mysticism, right, say, well, they you know, like Christianity
came from Judaism, So maybe we can go back to
those things. For other people, it has meant, you know,
the creation of basically gnostic hierarchies of knowledge and esotericism.
And for a lot of people it has meant things
like here, I am reading my Bible every morning like
I'm supposed to, and I'm reading the genealogies and first chronicles,
and this is really boring. But every part of the
Bible is just as important as any other part of
the Bible, and so there must be a reason to
read the genealogies and bam, right in the middle of
the genealogy, here's a prayer. Here's the secret. And if
you say this prayer, your life is going to be ordered.
And I think that is a very kind of important
thing for us to understand about ourselves. And the reason
that this is important to me is because you know,
there's there's as we talk about like the re enchantment movement,
and obviously, like you have been featured in books about
re enchantment, right, you know, so like you're you're here
kind of at ground zero, and as we talk about
these things like there there definitely is a dark side
to some of the stuff. And there's also like you know, uh,
it's very easy to get carried away and kind of
lose sobriety as we're as we're kind of dipping our
toe in these things. So I think just kind of
understanding where some of these motivations come from, especially for
those of us who are Americans, and this is actually
like a really key part of our a really key
part of our our tradition, our culture, the symbolism of
what it means to be an American. It will be
important to help tease some of those things out. So
all right, promise guys, we will get to Bigfoot eventually.
I just like, we'll get there when we get there.
Speaker 3: There, when we get there.
Speaker 1: So next episode you can Seraphin takes on the history
of Mormonism.
Speaker 2: Everybody, I guess you're doing, extend all of your hate
mail to Jonathan.
Speaker 3: All right, everyone, talk to you soon.
Speaker 2: Bye bye.
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