Religion and the Decline of Magic Quotes

“The technological primacy of Western civilization, it can be argued, owes a sizeable debt to the fact that in Europe recourse to magic was to prove less ineradicable than in other parts of the world.61 For this, intellectual and religious factors have been held primarily responsible. The rationalist tradition of classical antiquity blended with the Christian doctrine of a single all-directing Providence to produce what Weber called ‘the disenchantment of the world’ – the conception of an orderly and rational universe, in which effect follows cause in predictable manner. A religious belief in order was a necessary prior assumption upon which the subsequent work of the natural scientists was to be founded. It was a favourable mental environment which made possible the triumph of technology.”
― Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England

“At the baptismal ceremony the child was, therefore, exorcised (with the obvious implication that it had previously been possessed by the Devil), anointed with chrism (consecrated oil and balsam) and signed with the cross in holy water. Around its head was bound a white cloth (chrisom), in which it would be buried if it should die in infancy.”
― Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England

“Among the Bemba of Northern Rhodesia, for example, it is said that to find a beehive with honey in the woods is good luck; to find two beehives is very good luck; to find three is witchcraft.”
― Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England

“The fourteenth-century preacher, John Bromyard, used to tell the story of the shepherd who, asked if he knew who the Father, Son and Holy Ghost were, replied, 'The father and the son I know well for I tend their sheep, but I know not that third fellow; there is none of that name in our village.”
― Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England

“The stubborn reluctance of the lower sections of the seventeenth-century population to forgo their charmers and wise men resembles the unwillingness of some primitive peoples today to rely exclusively upon the newly introduced Western medicine.”
― Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England

“Great claims were made for the healing value of the royal touch. The surgeon, Richard Wiseman, testified to having witnessed hundreds of cures, and asserted that Charles II healed more sufferers in one year ‘than all the surgeons of London had done in an age’.”
― Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England

“When a man was found dead at the well in 1630 after having made scoffing remarks about its supposed powers a local jury brought in a verdict of death by divine judgement.74”
― Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England

“Further violence accompanied popular resistance to the quarantine regulations and restrictions on movement imposed by the authorities, particularly to the practice of shutting up the infected and their families in their houses. The plague, said a preacher, was of all diseases, the most dreadful and terrible;… then all friends leave us, then a man or woman sit(s) and lie(s) alone and is a stranger to the breath of his own relations. If a man be sick of a fever it is some comfort that he can take a bed-staff and knock, and his servant comes up and helps him with a cordial. But if a man be sick of the plague then he sits and lies all alone.14 When a Western traveller visits a pre-industrial society of this kind today he equips himself with all the resources of modern medicine;”
― Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England

“Further violence accompanied popular resistance to the quarantine regulations and restrictions on movement imposed by the authorities, particularly to the practice of shutting up the infected and their families in their houses. The plague, said a preacher, was of all diseases, the most dreadful and terrible;… then all friends leave us, then a man or woman sit(s) and lie(s) alone and is a stranger to the breath of his own relations. If a man be sick of a fever it is some comfort that he can take a bed-staff and knock, and his servant comes up and helps him with a cordial. But if a man be sick of the plague then he sits and lies all alone.”
― Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England

“If magic is to be defined as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones are not available, then we must recognize that no society will ever be free from it.”
― Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England

“There is inevitably a chicken-and-the-egg character to any debate as to whether economic growth produces its appropriate mental character or is produced by it. Most sociologically-minded historians are naturally biased in favour of the view that changes in beliefs are preceded by changes in social and economic structure.”
― Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England

“THE belief in lucky and unlucky days goes back at least to classical times. The Romans had their dies nefasti, and similar concepts were widespread in China and the ancient East. Indeed the idea that certain days are, for some occult reason, propitious for certain actions, and others inappropriate, is to be found among most pre-industrial peoples. It”
― Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England

“When starvation threatened, the poor were capable of using violence to secure food for themselves, but they made little contribution to the political radicalism of the time and showed no interest in attempting to change the structure of the society in which they found themselves. Unlike”
― Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England

“65. The Works of John Jewel, ed. J. Ayre (Cambridge, P.S., 1845–50), i, p. 23; ii, p. 991; J. Hall, A Poesie in Forme of a Vision (1563), sig. Biiii; Scot, Discoverie, XV.xxxi; Josten, Ashmole, pp. 85, 88. For Abel as the inventor of magic, L. Thorndike in Mélanges Auguste Pelzer (Louvain, 1947), p. 241. For Solomon, G. Naudé, The History of Magick, trans. J. Davies (1657), pp. 279–82, and G. R. Owst in Studies presented to Sir Hilary Jenkinson, p. 286; Thomas Cromwell was believed to have a Solomon's ring (L.P., v, p. 696). On the Book of Enoch, Thorndike, Magic and Science, i, chap. 13, and on Moses's rod, above, p. 280. For the Book of Daniel, C. du F. Ducange, Glossarium (1884–7), s.v., ‘somnialia’. 66. Kittredge, Witchcraft, pp. 197–8; C. H. Poole, The Customs,”
― Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England

“In the hundred and fifty years before the great visitation of 1665 there were only a dozen years when London was free from plague.”
― Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England

“This year in sowing too early I lost (the Lord being the cause thereof, but that the instrument wherewith it pleased him to work)… the sum of £10 at least, so exceeding full was my barley with charlock, in all likelihood by means of that instrumental cause, the Lord my God… being without doubt the efficient cause thereof.12”
― Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England

“For this is man's nature, that where he is persuaded that there is the power to bring prosperity and adversity, there will he worship. George Gifford, A Discourse of the Subtill Practices of Devilles by Witches and Sorcerers (1587), sigs.B4v-C1”
― Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England