Aspects of Anglo-Saxon magic

by Bill Griffiths

"Magic is something special, something unauthorised; an alternative perhaps; even a deliberate cultivation of dark, evil powers. But for the Anglo-Saxon age, the neat division between mainstream and occult, rational and superstitious, Christian and pagan is not always easy to discern. To maintain its authority (or its monopoly?), the Church drew a formal line and outlawed a range of dubious practices (like divination, spells, folk healing) while at the same time conducting very similar rituals itself, and may even have adapted legends of elves to serve in a Christian explanation of disease as a battle between good and evil, between Church and demons; in other cases powerful ancestors came to serve as saints." "It seems that there was a convergence of the two cultures, native and Christian, and this may affect the tendency to view pagan 'gods' as near omnipotent beings. Here it is argued that their origin was usually ancestral, their status rising to match the organisational needs of th