Let a little magic into your life

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1:45Ronald Hutton:In the 14th century, a nun swallowed a demon while she was eating a salad. It gave her awful indigestion until it was exercised. Nowadays, we don't worry so much about lucifers in our lettuce, but according to Professor Ronald Hutton, we could do with embracing a little bit more enchantment in our lives. Welcome to Life Lessons from History with me, Dave Musgrove. The concept is simple. I find a great historian and I ask them to propose a life lesson from history. Some learning from the past that will help us today to live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.

2:24Ronald Hutton:Ronald, welcome to the podcast. How are you today? Very glad to be back. Good. Well, it's an absolute pleasure. You're always a fascinating man to talk to, and you always make me reflect on myself and think that I should be better read and more intelligent. I'd be very sad to keep inflicting that on you. Now, look, so when I sent you my email inviting you to come along and talk about this, you sent me a very interesting message back where you said you might offer some thoughts on the conveniences of living in a modern disenchanted world. So tell me a little bit about how you see the world and how it's disenchanted.

2:57I hear a lot these days about the world having lost that thrilling sense of the supernatural, a real belief in dragons and in fairies and in witches and wizards, and a general sense of wonder in the world. And I understand that feeling quite a lot. I've spent a lot of my professional life studying beliefs in exactly these things. But my basic argument today is it's actually a real asset living in a disenchanted world. First, because you don't have to be afraid of the supernatural. And second, because most people don't have to be afraid of the supernatural in you.

3:37Ronald Hutton:Okay, good. Well, let's pick up on that. Actually, let's go back a bit and just talk about the level of fear that people in the past would have felt about the supernatural. I don't know where, I mean, you're an expert on early modern period, but actually in terms of your research, which I know you've researched way back to ancient Egypt and forward from there. So maybe you could just give a little sense about the level of fear that people felt about the supernatural in the past. Today, we face all sorts of dangers in daily life, like car crashes and being knocked over as a pedestrian, problems of muggers, drunken revellers, nutcases, hasslers.

4:15but this is as nothing compared with the fears of non-human assailants, when if you went out at night in the countryside, you were in danger of being blighted by fairies or led astray by goblins and hobs. And there's also the issue of people being afraid of what you might do or believe in supernatural terms. The constant nagging fear of orthodoxy needing to be policed and to get rid of heretics. The real belief that if your child falls sick and the local doctor, if there is a doctor, can't work out what's wrong with them, they've actually been bewitched by a neighbor. And the lurking presence of demons in the air all around you.

5:04The kind of anecdote like that about a 14th century nun who forgot to make the side of a cross over a lettuce leaf when she was eating it in a salad. As a result, she swallowed a demon that was sitting invisibly upon it and was inflicted with all sorts of terrible digestive problems until she was exorcised. It's so nice not to have to worry about all that.

5:28Ronald Hutton:It's quite easy to sort of smirk at those sorts of anecdotes and be a bit flippant about it. But presumably, those feelings were very real and very live to the people in the 14th century, for instance. Well, all the way up to the 19th century, the people in charge of society all over Europe began to lose their fear of these things from about 1660 onwards and increasingly through the 18th century. But ordinary people, especially in the countryside, were burdened by them right up to the early 20th century. It's just so nice to have got rid of all that stuff. And how did that process of losing those fears come about?

6:09Ronald Hutton:What drove it? Is it the Enlightenment, science? Yeah, it is, kind of. It's really a new mood that you should experiment with things and then see if they work or not. And if they don't appear to work, you can stop believing in them. So one very good reason why witch hunting came to an end in Europe is that having tried a lot of it in the 16th, 17th centuries, Europeans realized there were no benefits. Communities that had witch hunts and put to death their neighbors as witches did not have healthier children, livestock, or poultry. Houses less likely to catch fire, better weather, better working farm and domestic equipment than communities which didn't.

6:56On the contrary. Those that had witch hunts tended to be decimated, divided, and traumatized. So it just wasn't profitable.

7:05Ronald Hutton:And what was the view of the church to these sort of supernatural entities? Does Christianity support the existence of these sorts of things? Christianity was always really uneasy about these fears. It believed in demons, and it believed that people should be scared of demons. But if the church was doing its job, they really shouldn't have been that scared. In other words, if they went to church every Sunday, if they listened to sermons, if they internalized the messages, if they took communion, they should have been safeguarded. And so the church really sat on the fence a lot of the time when it came to exorcisms, witch hunts, the existence of fairies and so forth.

7:53The beliefs in all these things are coming from ordinary people, and they're very ancient. And the church kept trying to remove them, compromise with them, or urge them on, but within a Christian framework.

8:06Ronald Hutton:And that's a thing that does strike me as quite interesting. There must be a reason, like a human drive for wanting to believe in these sorts of forces. What's the benefit to believing in these sorts of things? You have someone to blame. And the world seems a bit more manageable because you can take action, hunt a witch, carry out an exorcism, hang up a row and would cross over your door to keep out bad luck. cross your fingers and wish three times all these are remedies and the other thing is that humans worldwide have had a really difficult time believing in uncanny bad luck in other words that stuff happens all over the world people have wanted to blame somebody for things going remorselessly wrong with them, or for diseases that didn't have apparent known causes, or for just runs of awful misfortune, hitting the same person, same house again and again.

9:12And there are three entities on the hit list. And if you believe in one of these, you don't tend to believe in the others. And so societies dotted around worldwide tend to divide them up between them. First is to blame angry or evil land spirits, fairies, demons. Second is to blame the human dead who've taken a dislike to you, vengeful ghosts, offended ancestors. And the third is to blame evil human beings who've been working magic against you, alias witches. Mostly human beings blame witches, which is bad news because it leads to suffering and death in a community in witch hunts. But the point about all these three are there are remedies to all three, so people feel less vulnerable, more empowered in the midst of what traditionally is an overwhelmingly powerful natural world, which nobody really understands.

10:12Ronald Hutton:Do you think there is a human need to be scared by what we don't know? Do we need to embrace the unknown? I don't think we can embrace the unknown unless it happens to us. What we can do is register a whole range of different attitudes to the uncanny based on the way in which our brains are chemically wired. Some are natural skeptics, some natural believers, some more inclined to fear than others, and those are the people, I think, who benefit most from the modern situation. so I think we're going to get a range of reactions and the great thing is that we've constructed a society which potentially at least can embrace them all.

11:01Ronald Hutton:Can I just gently take issue with your thesis that we live in a disenchanted world today just from what you were talking about there given that we see a lot of interest in the paranormal in the you know ghost hunting and that sort of thing. There's a lot of people who have some credence to that form of afterlife, or at least would love to know what the answer is. Yeah, the difference is that people in our society now can or not believe in these things as an option. They are personal beliefs, they're often hobbies, and they give a great deal of pleasure, and I cheer them on. What's different now is that other people are not likely to kill you for having the wrong belief in these things.

11:47And people are not going to be genuinely scared to death by the belief that they're being haunted or being bewitched, unless they're really, really, really in mental trouble.

11:59Ronald Hutton:Was the level of fear that people felt in the past that severe, that people did genuinely get scared to death by these sorts of things? You bet. There's a medical phenomenon which Americans call voodoo death. And it was first studied in the 1940s because the American army fighting in the Pacific got worried about the number of its soldiers that died of flesh wounds. In other words, they thought they'd been seriously wounded. They hadn't been, but they still died. And so a team of doctors was put on the job to sort out what was happening. And they found the perfect clue in medical records made by doctors working in colonial possessions of imperial powers in the period between the war among indigenous peoples that truly feared and believed in magic and the power of magic to kill.

12:55And repeatedly, these doctors in the colonies found that indigenous peoples who believed in this, if they really believed they'd been fatally bewitched, they often died. And the autopsies revealed the reason, which is that if you really believe that you're fatally bewitched, you can't eat properly, you can't sleep properly. And above all, your system is bombarded by constant tidal waves of adrenaline, which suppress the immune system. and affect the central nervous system. And so all you need is to have a defect in a vital organ, something which is completely latent and wouldn't cause trouble by itself.

13:37And this bombardment of stress in the body breaks that open and people die. They're literally frightened to death. And one argument for keeping witch hunting in developing areas of the world now made by people who engage in it, is that if you believe in witchcraft, it can kill. So it really works. And therefore, there should be laws against it, or vigilantes should be allowed to take action. My argument, of course, is that if you educate people out of the fear, then it's a double bonus, because they don't die of fright, nor do they start hounding their neighbours to death or trying to accuse them before law courts for bewitching them.

14:20Ronald Hutton:No, that's clearly a good double whammy. But I suppose the flip of that is that if you genuinely believe that some magic or ritual is going to do you a service, a benefit, then you might get a positive effect. Yes, but we can have it both ways because there is no doubt that the placebo effect is enormously important in medicine. And that can be ministered properly either by official doctors in the system or by the host of alternative medics, hypnotherapists, naturopaths, homeopaths, herbalists, who have a whole range of remedies at their fingertips that are alternative to straightforward medicine.

15:06Ronald Hutton:Okay, that's a very helpful summation of how we've got to where we are. So let's take us read that we do indeed live in a modern disenchanted world, and I was being a bit silly, so yes, we don't. How do we sort of benefit from that then? Do we just wander around and not be frightened? And that's the end of the story? Well, there are two things, two big categories. The first is the not being frightened, that when I walk out at night, I'm afraid of all sorts of things, tripping over in the dark, possibly being mugged, possibly being stopped by bored policemen, etc. But I'm not afraid of being attacked by a supernatural entity.

15:47And that's a really nice thing. It's good to be able to confront the darkness and not be afraid of the darkness itself. On the other side, it's really nice that I can believe what I like about these things without being prosecuted or lynched because of what I believe. It's one of the great ironies that it's only safe to be a witch, a self-declared witch, someone who contacts a magical world, at least in your own mind, as a personal belief, personal development, personal religion. And you can only do this safely in a society which doesn't believe you're a witch or doesn't take you seriously if you are.

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19:09Ronald Hutton:Is there, given that we can engage in belief, as you say, in the way that we want, I just wonder, I'm getting into murky territory here, but I think in a, In a lecture I've seen that you did for Gresham College, you mentioned that magic in the past could be a form of therapy in a way. Is having a belief in the supernatural, in the way that you've described against certain fears, is that something that's going to help with mental health? Indeed, people often stabilize their lives in all sorts of societies and places by having what, slightly patronizingly, scholars often call a myth to live by. A religion, a personal guardian spirit, a belief in certain aspects of the preternatural, supernatural.

20:02and these are not just extremely comforting they're beneficial structures by which you can order your life they give confidence they build character they enable people to explore the world profitably in all sorts of ways they they work extremely well and the other side of this is that I'd be the last person to suggest that actually none of these entities actually exist. And I'd never suggest that these belief systems are necessarily false. It's just they're not proven, so we can take or leave them. The world around me may be full of deities, for all I know, may be full of spirits. Certainly, I've met a lot of people who talk to them and see them.

20:49and the fact that they leave me alone if I wish it I think is an absolutely wonderful relationship just as people who feel them see them hear them can communicate with them without the authorities

21:04Ronald Hutton:getting in the way well that leads me on to my sort of a more personal question given that you've studied this this area of the past and devoted your life to it do you do anything in your day-to-day life, which makes you happier or makes you live a more productive life, given what you know about this aspect of history? Well, I get a great, not just entertainment, but a sense of a more exciting world by reading a huge amount of myth and legend. I am in this line as a historian because I've always enjoyed it. And I also enjoy being with and talking to people to whom mythology, religion, magic are all very real.

21:45I find that very interesting. I also take an immense comfort from the fact that I get complete radio silence from the supernatural, with so much else to worry about in my professional and personal life. It's great to be able to dispense with that. It's great to be able to be, if I am alone, to go to bed alone in a particular room and not worry about anything else being there.

22:11Ronald Hutton:I'll come back to that in a second, but I wanted to just ask you, again, another uncomfortable question for a historian, but looking forward, future gazing. Church attendance in the UK is going down. It's been going down for years. I think maybe it's had a little spike post-COVID perhaps, but that, you know, attendance in official religious services is going down. Is there some sort of replacement possibility of people taking to more ad hoc supernatural forms in the way that you've just described, do you think? It's not a possibility. It's a well-established reality. The institutional and formalized forms of religion are in decline, some quite steeply.

22:53But DIY religion, religion that people can practice in their living rooms or their back gardens is booming, but in many different varieties, which means that people who are interested in this sort of thing have an amazing and unprecedented choice. It isn't entirely unprecedented. It's unprecedented in its scale. If you were going around Rome and London 2 ,000 years ago, then you would find yourself surrounded by an enormous range of deities speaking different languages, philosophies, and belief systems about the divine and the supernatural with no formal structure to decide which are best. You can take your pick.

23:36And we're simply reverting to that with the tremendous multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity now which Roman Britain had.

23:46Ronald Hutton:So are we in a new golden age of religion then? Create your own religion? From that point of view, it could be a golden age. But of course, not everybody finds multiculturalism and diversity soothing. A lot of people find it quite threatening. My belief is, which is really just faith, it's a hope, it's an aspiration, that given that diversity and multiculturalism, whether people like it or not, has actually happened. We're becoming more multicultural, multi-ethnic, and diverse all the time, despite attempts to restrict it, that people will get more used to it. And with that wonderful adaptability of our species, find more ways of turning it to their advantage than merely having a range of different extra restaurants in which to eat.

24:39Ronald Hutton:Yeah. And I suppose an acceptance that there are different ways of thinking about things and this sort of multi-polar way of looking at things is probably helpful, right? I think it's very difficult for a lot of people to get their heads round. I mean, it's happened really very quickly. Way back, only as far as the 1950s, we are still in a totally different world. And it's really amazing that our society hasn't destabilized more than it has, given this immense influx of differentness in my lifetime. Of course, they say it does worry people. I hear danger warnings and doom predictions all the time on podcasts and interviews sent to me by concerned friends.