“The Medieval Catholic Church laid claims to many powerful kinds of magic which touched the lives of its members at every point.”
- Magic of confession and absolution
- Magic of conjuration and consecration whereby ordinary materials such as oil, water, salt were invested with the power of God to protect the wearer from evil.
- Magic of exorcism and healing
- Magic of the sacraments
And the source of this magic was always God.
The Elizabethan Underworld by Gamini Salgado
With the reformation came another form of Christianity that differed from Catholicism in a number of important ways. According to Gamini Salgado, ‘it almost literally took the magic out of Christianity’ (Pg. 80).
Unlike the Catholic Church, it claimed no magical powers, it abolished auricular confession and opposed exorcism and conjuration. It took the view that:
‘consecration was not an operation by which the actual nature of objects – oil, water, wine, bread or whatever – was miraculously transformed, but only an act by which certain articles were dedicated to the worship of God. From this it followed that no particular object, whether it was a cross, Bible or anything else, nor any particular form of words had magical power in itself.’ (Salgado, Pg. 80)
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