https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ixT8B9b60IE
I guess like my question would be to you, what do you think happened in the West that created these kind of schisms, let’s say in terms of esotericism, but also in terms of even the definition of magic as it came to be in the early modern era? I think it’s intertwined a lot with civics and deals with more secular authorities too. There was an interesting schism actually between the Catholic and Protestant groups in terms of the burning times, in terms of persecuting people for folk magic or herbalism or whatever. The Catholics had a caveat. Well, if you can establish that it’s just white magic, you’re just healing people, you’re not causing abortions and you’re not doing black magic, they weren’t burned at the stake or drowned or anything. In the Protestant tradition, a la King James demonology, of course, which you probably read, they didn’t care if you were doing any folk magic and it wasn’t explicitly canonical, explicitly uber-Christian, you were a witch anyway and would get killed for that. Yeah, and so do you think it has also to do with the kind of burgeoning of scientism that happened at that time? Because a lot of people tend to, this is one of the things I always face is people tell me the medieval witch burnings, I’m like medieval witch burnings, like witch burnings are early modern all the way up to the end. Renaissance there. And so there’s like there’s this, there’s this birth of the scientific mind which wants to categorize things in terms of just in terms of technical and in terms of quantitative things and so they face these practices which are different, let’s say, and that are more related to spiritual spiritual influence you could say or influence of the person that is performing the remedy and they don’t know what to do with it. So it’s like it doesn’t fit in this kind of like enlightenment version of Christianity. Yeah, and the really weird part is that the Middle Ages were less persecutory in some ways than the Renaissance and everyone says well things got better during the Renaissance, everything was science and technology, clockwork mainly. And then actually in the Middle Ages there was less of that I edited another work recently on medieval medicine and one of the main things discussed is in the Renaissance, you have sort of a reversion to the more antiquated notion that the sickness was invariably spiritual in nature, whereas in the Middle Ages, there was at least some attempt to say well, yes, I believe in demons and demons of sickness are definitely causing problems but also you know you’ve got these humors, and it’s not necessarily a demon maybe you just ate the wrong food. They didn’t have germ theory but they had a basic concept of the transmissibility of disease and it almost disappears actually later on it’s almost strange how there was a retrogression in medicine. There’s also an interesting one of the interesting things that I discovered was that I would see in the Roman times there was a kind of which burning that was popular, and then Charlemagne actually was one of the people that banned the burning witches he said, you know, you know, like, this, the witches don’t exist basically is what he was saying like this is just like, you know, there’s not bothering people with this. And then it came back like you said towards the late Middle Ages and ultimately especially during the Renaissance and kind of in this these weird kind of witch scares and werewolves scares that happened at that time. Oh yeah werewolves is another funny thing. Yeah, the Babylonians used to do that they used to have specifically like medicine, man, you could call them they were intertwined with the priesthood. Actually they would dispense little spells and give people like little items to put next to their door to keep witches away led by Lily to actually they’re sort of a queen of the damned if you will that informs Lilith later on in Judeo Christian tradition. And it’s actually funny because they imagine that this board of demons went out at night along with the transients and pickpockets and prostitutes actually and they were sort of all lumped together, and they would get paid to have protective spells and incantations against them. It’s funny because in the Middle Ages you see less of that I’ve edited grimoires and most of them they’re not from the Middle Ages from the Renaissance or even the Enlightenment. And there is where you get some of the classical sort of takes on on witchcraft me asmuss and stuff like burning a wolf skull with herbs in it at the edge of the village to keep the plague away and things like that even though the black death predates that by many centuries. I’m curious about because I’ve been to I talked to about this with a professor of me of Byzantine studies, and I was trying to understand because a lot of the texts that informed the Renaissance magic, some of them obviously came from, you know from from Spain, but many of them came from Constantinople as Constantinople was kind of taken by the Muslims a lot of the scholars left Constantinople for the for the West, for like the Corpus Hermeticum was preserved in Constantinople basically, but there it doesn’t see it didn’t seem to have the same effect. And so I was we’re trying to figure out like in Constantinople towards the end there were all these new platonists there were the the hermeticists you know and they’re all there. But it didn’t create this schism which we see happening in the West as modernism kind of sets itself up. It could have been like a neo Roman appreciation for the compilation of knowledge, sort of thing like just having the material there was considered comfy and and enlightening just having access to it maybe more than an actual sub movement. Maybe. Yeah, but I think there were people that were practicing and reading it, it just wasn’t, it didn’t create a kind of social disruption as it did as it is it moved into Italy, let’s say, and, and you see Boccaccio and all these people kind of taking it up. Yeah, so that to me that’s it’s curious like I’m trying to figure out I’m a Western person right and so I’m always trying to figure out what is it that happened in the West so that you come to the 18th century 19th century and you have these like free Masonic these and these Rosicrucians or whatever, and then you have popular culture, and what, like what broke like how is it that these things became became so separated.