Review

General Books

Wilson provides a comprehensive survey of magical practices and beliefs in Western Europe from antiquity to the present. More inclusive than earlier studies of the "sensational" elements of magic, such as the witchcraft trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Wilson's book details a broader picture of "everyday magic," e.g., contextualizing the trials in "the much wider system of magical belief and practice" (xvii) that pervaded life across this span of time. In sections on agriculture, the life-cycle, disease and healing and divination and signs, Wilson describes the insecurity and brutishness of pre-modern European life. Protection was sought through animate, spiritual forces, not only God, generally regarded as remote, but also powerful intermediary beings (saints, witches, ghosts). Religious and magical activity could control the vagaries of human existence, ensure prosperity or ward off threatening forces. Not only significant events like birth, marriage and death, but even daily tasks such as weaving and laundry, involved ritual and taboo.	1
Wilson interprets the calendar, Holy days and festivals primarily in terms of magical fertility rituals. Easter, Carnival and May Day were the most obvious festivals of fertility, but many others, including Candlemas, Rogation, and feasts for patron saints involved rituals such as sprinkling with holy water and processions. Rituals protected the fertility of humans as well as fields and animals. Sterility, crop failure and drought were attributed to neglect of ritual or the effects of hostile forces. Stones in shrines and water from springs were reputed to make women fertile. Marriage rituals transferred the bride to the groom's family and ensured the couple's fertility: the bridal canopy or crown protected the couple from the evil eye, and tokens of fertility such as rice, wheat, nuts or hops were strewn over them. The dangers of pregnancy were often attributed to evil spirits. Pregnant women were sometimes isolated as impure. Immersion in or drinking from sacred wells and springs and relics of saints were believed to be efficacious for safe delivery, and strings, ties and ropes in garments were avoided as harbingers of problems. Even animals could affect pregnancy: turning back a hare could cause a harelip, and birthmarks were attributed to encounters with dogs, toads and other animals. Illness was attributed to either supra-human agents such as spirits, angry ancestors, and heavenly bodies, or personal sin or a guilty conscience. "God sent diseases to punish" (314); e.g., plague for conversion to Protestantism or yellow fever for revolutionary and anticlerical tendencies. Illness was also interpreted as a test of faith, a warning, or a means of expiation. Religious remedies included baptism, exorcism, penance, anointing, Mass or the Eucharist, appeals to the saints, and sacramentals such as lighting candles. Another alternative was recourse to faith-healers who used herb remedies, incantations, laying on of hands, and a broad range of manufactured or natural substances like saliva, the milk of women, and urine.	2
Wilson's concluding section discusses the elements of magic in three chapters: persons, spirits and animals; things, words and gestures; and magic and religion. The last chapter, however, is but ten pages long and lacks a nuanced discussion of the distinction between superstition and religion. The Introduction refers to problems in distinguishing between the spheres of religion and magic, and among his many examples of the interplay between religion and magic, Wilson notes that "with the [faith] healers there is perhaps a mechanical emphasis and a taking of prayers out of their context" (367). Unfortunately the reporter trumps the theologian, and Wilson simply subsumes all religious practices and beliefs into his broader category of magic. Rather than discussing the theology of baptism and original sin and its use or misuse in the popular imagination, Wilson offers only Charles Lamb's epithet that Augustine was "the consigner of undipped infants to eternal torments ... whom all mothers hate" (218). And although he mentions "some distinction between official and unofficial rituals, between what the authorities, mainly clerical, approved and what most people did" (26), Wilson does not discriminate between doctrine and popular mythological beliefs, between sanctioned rituals and popular pieties straining the bounds of orthodoxy, nor between mainstream theological opinion and the eccentric interpretations of individuals. Devotions to the saints, blessings and prayer of petition are all afforded the same weight as rubbing a diseased body part against a stone held to have magical properties. Legends are presented at face value, with no attempt to separate fact from fiction, explain plot development, or delineate the rationale behind their persistence (104). Similarly, the charged, imaginative writings of the mystics, e.g. St. Teresa of Avila (425), are rendered the same flat, literal reading afforded peasant superstitions.	3
Wilson strives to be encyclopedic in scope, citing nearly 1000 works in the bibliography. He catalogues hundreds if not thousands of tantalizing factoids, but the book is as short on theory as it is long on examples. Wilson succeeds in describing the ways in which magical practices permeated everyday life and illustrating some of the linkage between religion and magic. The book is useful as a reference work for secondary and college students who do not require a critical or synthetic approach and as a source of anecdotes for teachers. However, theologically sophisticated readers seeking either to conceptualize how religious ritual and belief differ from magical practices and superstition, or to understand organized religion's dynamic of both suppression and reinforcement of magical elements within its own ranks, must look elsewhere, indeed to some of the theoretical works Wilson cites.	4
Immaculate High School, Danbury, CT Joseph Gerics

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