How To Do Celtic Magic

faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond.

“Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. L. Neonaga, and some of the world's leading historians, as we”

bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War 2. Just visit historyhit.com/subscrib. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleonoreonaga, and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. The podcast

that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries,

the gobspacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to poops to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were, and how we got here. If you've ever been bitten by a poisonous snake, here's a useful bit of magical healing advice for medieval whales that should help. Take a live chicken, and press its anus against

the bite until the chicken dies. Of course, one, you'd have to have a chicken close by, and two, you probably won't be able to roast that chicken for your dinner, because now it's full of snake poison. These days,

we make a clear distinction between medicine and magic, but that wasn't always the case.

The chicken anus snake bite remedy might seem logical enough though, not much fun for the chicken. You could see it as a simple medical procedure in which the chicken absorbs the poison, allegedly. But, in the medieval period, these boundaries between science and what we might consider superstition didn't exist as they do today, often remedies were considered more effective

if they had some sort of oral component. For example, a Welsh medical manuscript prescribes

“that if you're ever suffering from a fever, you should collect greater plantain while”

saying you're potternoster and drink that mixed with wine. So here, the curious brought about by the consumption of a herbal remedy while reciting the lore's prayer. Probably not much different from saying, "Oh God, under your breath, before succumbing to the dentist's drill." But, somehow, we think medieval people were very different to us. In her new book, Celtic Magic, a Practitioners Guide, Dr. Bridget

Irmintrap from the University of St. Andrews, writes all about the integration of magic into daily life. The Celtic world was filled with it, but by the start of the medieval period, magic was seamlessly absorbed and restructured within a Christian worldview, with saints, prayers, and sacred objects, replacing earlier supernatural beings in Cantations, charms, and talismans. Bridget shows that in medieval Ireland and Wales, what we might label magic was understood

as fate in action. She also offers practical advice on how to curse your enemies, keep demonic powers at bay, and serves up a medieval Welsh cure for a hangover, which I cannot wait to try out. Bridget, welcome to Galmud Evil. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. I am absolutely delighted to have you on here, and I'm going to start you off with a terrible test. Okay. Because this is what, so if you page my professor who taught me medieval magic in

my master's used to do to us at the beginning of every master seminar, and should say,

“how do you define magic? Oh, this is a great question, and I think the real answer is everyone”

defines magic a little bit differently, and people in the past didn't necessarily think about magic exactly the same way we do today, and no two people today think about magic with exactly the same definition. So in the book, I work loosely with the OED definition of magic as the use of ritual activities or observances which are intended to influence the course of events or to manipulate

definition vague enough that really most things could fall under it if you wanted. You know,

doing your laundry is this magic. There's a ritual to it. You do it in a particular way. You want to influence the course of events. You want clean clothes. You might not tell us

“them when you know where you hit the laundry detergent. But I think this really kind of gets to”

the heart of it because I think when we're talking about medieval magic, there are so many things that medieval people count as magic that now today we just say, yeah, that science, but if you don't quite understand, you understand there's a causality, but you're not quite exactly sure why, then they just go, yeah, but it's magic. Absolutely. Right, you know, in electric yellow is magic, a magnet is magic. And for all intents and purposes, right, the laundry kind of is magic. I

understand that if I put the soap in my laundry comes out clean, do I actually understand the scientific process behind the soap breaking down with water? I do not. Indeed. You know, I'm taking it to the right. Do you understand by one statement or works on white and one where some colors? No, this is a cult knowledge. No, I don't. I don't. And this is, this is quite, I guess, similar to, yeah, what you, you kind of see from, from Godbooks, right, because I do remember seeing an

in certain, like magical manuals, for example. And Britain there, they'll say, oh, yes, I've tried

this and I've worked. You know, there's a lot of tried and tested that are next to spells, which I always

thought was quite sweet, but it's, it's, it's playing to that, right? This idea that it, it's practical. Yeah. I suppose is, is, is, a lot of it. Good, look, it's not all practical. I think, yeah.

“I think the other really important thing to remember is, and this is true for some people today,”

as well as for people in the past, be they medieval Christians, or be they, you know, people in ancient Greece are around. Magic, one is not necessarily different from science. She was not necessarily different from faith or religion, right? You might pray to God as a medieval Christian in medieval Ireland, and you might say some kind of charm when you're doing a medical ritual, and this charm might mention God, might mention the saints, or it might not, but you're

probably not thinking of this as an alternative to faith. This is just part of faith for you. Mm, yeah, and I, I mean, I suppose that it, that is true that these things are possible within a universe that is considered to be ordered and created by God, right? And there, that is the sort of practicality. It's the, the working definition I use of magic because I've got PTSD from Sophie Page torturing me as a master student. I use hers now, which is a practical way of ordering

the universe. That's great, too. Which is, you know, the one that you've got is actually quite good, because there are explanations of how you get to that point. But I think there are so many types of magical practitioner that it, it's sort of like how long as a piece of string. Yeah, after a while, you know, but okay, so in your book, you actually begin in the ancient world, right? Like you're not, you're not starting with the medieval period. So is there a large differentiation in the use of

magic in the Middle Ages as opposed to in the ancient world for Celtic people? This is a great question. I, I try to think of the book as sort of a book in two halves with a big, well, I guess it's

it's printed in green. So a big green line down the middle of it, where the first half of the book

deals with things in Gaul. So things that Celtic speakers in Gaul both free and postroom and Gaul are doing and things people are doing in Roman Britain. And second half of the book deals with mostly medieval Irelanded Wales. There's a bit of Brittany in Scotland, the Cornwall Throne in there, too. And the reason for this is because our evidence sources are very different for these two areas and there's about a thousand years that that separates most of the material that I'm considering on

both sides of this or at the very least multiple centuries. And so what I'm saying here is that Celtic like magic is kind of a tricky thing to define means the language family. So it means people who are speaking languages that we would today call Celtic languages that are related. It doesn't necessarily mean their culture, their ethnicity, their DNA, how they think about themselves. People in the Middle Ages have no idea by and large that you know people who speak Welsh or

speaking a language fairly closely related to Irish. They think these are completely different.

“So that that's why there is a difference there. That said, come back to your question on magic.”

I think there are definitely similarities in how people think about the world. But I think that these similarities are very similar to the ways in which people on different sides of the planet today might do similar rituals or think that the stars might tell them something about the future. So in that respect, there's kind of universal elements that you see on both apps here, both

material that I'm talking about is produced by medieval Christians for other medieval Christians, so they are thinking about this solidly in a Christian framework. But they might be doing the same everyday things. You know, they might still be muddering charms. They might still want to go visit places that they associate with important people, be those gods in the ancient world, be those saints in a Christian context. They might still want to touch holy matter like

“relics in a Christian context. So I think universal elements definitely similar, but the cosmology”

reusing to think about these things. Very different. Well, I'm going to be honest with you, I'm just going to think of the ancient part of the book as Astrix and Abelisk are doing it

and the second part of the book. Same Patrick is doing it. Yeah. That works, right? Good. One

thing I do want to mention there is that a lot of people like to say, "Oh, there's continuity here." Oh, you know, when you read a medieval text and you read about this character, "Lug" in medieval Irish texts, like, come like a turret, the battle of Marciara, really what you're reading about is there's some ancient pagan myth here and it's just been glossed over by Christian authors. And I think this is a big misconception about how medieval literature works. You know, yes,

you have this character named "Lug." You have similar characters with related names like "Clay"

“in the four branches of the map of Nagy and Wales, and you have this god who you see a tested”

cross, the Celtics-speaking world, an antiquity called "Lugus" or "Lugos" and these all share a route. And you could say, "Oh, look, they're really all the same god." At the same time, how many,

this is my favorite example. I put it in the first half of the book, but how many people do you know

name "Dennis" or "Denis" or "Denis" or "Denis"? Right? Most of these people's parents did not name them thinking, "Oh, yes, I'm going to name my kid after the Greek god of wild dialysis," which is where the name comes from. So when you look at this, you can say, "Okay, this name is an old name. You can find other versions of this name," just like "Denis" or "Denis". But that doesn't mean that the same character, that doesn't mean that anything connecting them. There might be something connecting them,

but if there is, we don't know that. We just know how medieval people write about this and say, "This character, Lugus, really cool. I want him to do this in my story. Someone else might write a different story where he does something else." And this is implications for that. How they think about their history and how they think about their literature, but it probably doesn't tell us anything real about the free Christian past. Yeah, I wish it did. That would be really nice and useful,

but then we'd have more information on the free Christian past, but unfortunately not so much, right? Yeah, I don't know. I like to tell students who have this kind of disappointed feeling that, "Oh, but I wish we knew something. We must know something." It's just a matter of who you are interested in and whose voices you want to hear. So we might not have a lot about, or at least a lot of textual sources that will tell us things about how people in free Christian Ireland

worshiped or what they believed. But we have all this great information about what medieval people thought. And so by just kind of sifting through medieval texts and saying, "What's hoped for the free Christian past here, what you're doing is denying the agency of these great dynamic medieval authors who have all sorts of exciting ideas." So it's really just a question of who's voice

do we have and whose voice can we hear? Lugus and, frankly, here we are always pro, hearing the

medieval voices. So great, great news forever. He actually, one of my favorite things that the

“book addresses is the story of St. Patrick battling the Druids. I think this is a really important”

one to kind of get our heads around because I think it does a great job of explaining the balance of ideas about magic and Christianity at the time, right? Because, you know, obviously on its face, there's kind of like a metaphor for how true Christianity can have power over magic. And it's a lot like I suppose Moses battling the Pharaoh's wizards. There does tend to be a specific metaphor that we see play out a lot. But I think there's more to it than that.

And I would just like you to demonstrate that I'm correct, please bridge it. Yeah, absolutely. So when we look at these early lives of St. Patrick from the 7th century, we're indeed even later lives of St. Patrick written, after these but often drawing on the material, in the early lives, we see a lot of biblical models here. So you see a lot of episodes look really like episodes in the Bible, be it the Old Testament, or the New Testament. So, for instance,

in muriches life of St. Patrick, there's this great scene where St. Patrick and one of it's a Latin text. So it says that the sky is a magus, a wizard, although later authors have said

but just keeping in mind that in Latin, it doesn't say that at least in the 7th century text.

“So you've got this druid, if you will. And he and Patrick have a series of contests. So he calls”

up all this horrible weather, and then Patrick says, "Okay, great, get rid of it now." And it can't. You can only do bad stuff. So Patrick prays to God, and the horrible weather goes away. And we do this with fog, and we do this with snow, and Patrick prays, and the sun comes out. And this is gradually escalates, and eventually they decide to have this competition to really work out, "Okay, who's got his read?" And they do this, rather elaborate, they build this structure,

and the text is called a house, and half of it is built out of dry wood, and half of it is built

out of kind of fresh green wood. And the druid goes into the side that's all built out of green,

damp wood, wearing Patrick's shirt. And one of Patrick's disciples, this boy named Benignus, goes into the side, made out of all of the dry wood, wearing the druid's cloak. So complicated

“and set up, but they set the whole thing on fire, and when it's all burned down, Patrick's disciples,”

of course, is sitting there, happy as a clam, although now he's taken because the druid's trope cloak has caught on fire and burned. And on the other side of the house, the druid's nowhere to be seen, he's a pile of ash, but Patrick's shirt is still intact. So on the one hand, you read this and go, this is a very elaborate setup, this is in the library's story. Some people of earlier errors have connected this to the sort of wicker men's sacrifice that Caesar talks

about the goals doing, but we don't have to look for something like that because this is just down with the Bible. So this is the bit in the book of Daniel, where the three youths get thrown in the oven, and they print, dental praise, and then when the oven has burned down, they're sitting there, unscathed. So this kind of trial of divinities here is just based on an old test of it. Daniel, various is a light versus other pagan kings of the area. Story. And similarly,

we get a lot of things in these early Petrussian lives. I eat lives about St. Patrick, Lev's of Patrick. But look, an awful lot like stuff you get in the new testament. So Patrick, again, fighting these evil wizards or druids, if you will, a lot of this looks similar to what you get in the new testament and an apocryphal tax associated with the new testament about the apostles and Simon and Ibus Simon, the wizard, who in various apocryphal texts

calls up this chariot or calls up the winds and levitate himself above the forum, and then Peter, or sometimes Peter, and Paul, depending on the text right there, and they pray to God, "Don't let this guy show off, don't let him discredit us, and he falls down and dies." And so here again, we have an example of a Druid getting dropped from a great height in one of the Irish texts. So this is just right out at the, at least apocryphal traditions surrounding

the new testament. No, it's also the way there Antichrist is defeated, right? Because Antichrist is supposed to ascend into heaven, when he's trying to ascend into heaven to prove that he's a cool guy,

“and then he falls down very high and dies. Yeah, it doesn't work for him. And I think that that's a”

really important point. Because over and over in the medieval Christian tradition, we do see this acknowledgement that magic is real, right? The argument is not that magic is real. The argument is that God can control magic and God can overcome anything that a scene is is sort of demoniac. I'm right there, right? Wait a minute, Richard, you're the expert.

Yes, absolutely. So the idea here is that ultimately all of this power comes from God, right?

And God can do it and God, so it's can do it and God sometimes allows this sort of magic to be worked by demons or evil magicians for the purpose of allowing his saints to try and fit for it. And we know this from the text themselves. So there's one fairly influential life, the life of St. Germano, who's not a saint from the Celtic speak area, but this is meant by people in Celtic speaking areas. And in this life, the saint defeats a legion of demons

that are trying to call up a storm so that he can't travel over the sea and preach to other people. And the text tells us that this is something that God has allowed to happen so that the saint could defeat them. And you see this kind of thing all over the place in medieval Saint's lives. So you see a mistake, Patrick, you see it in the life of St. Germano, out of the life of Colombo, which is another in this case, late 7th century Saint's life from medieval Ireland. And in this too,

And so the idea here again really is that God sometimes allows evil magicians to do magic or evil magicians to do, especially whether magic got fit involved in demonic aid. And the reason for this is so that the faithful can try. I mean, it's so smart of him, right? You know, you've got to give him something. It's a little bit of the kind of pro wrestling magic, right? You know,

“you got to have a heal. Absolutely. And I think that's so important. But you know, I suppose one of the”

things that you would think, given this, if bad magic exists, so that the faithful can try and

over it, is that the faithful are out then always doing nice things with magic, which is what we see,

you know, with tripping over storms and snow and things. But in the book, you also talk about what I think that you could call curses, that are, yeah, you know, with their nice Christian curses. I've been thinking, in particular, about the story you share about St. Ronan, can you talk about that a little bit? Definitely. So States can cause all kinds of things to happen. Then cause bad things to happen. Yeah, through the concoids aid, just like they can cause good things

to happen. Like, you know, the horrible weather to go away. Sometimes you get angry saints who will fast against people often in Irish literature. Oh, I love it. It's like a hunger strike. It's like

“actually like a hungry strike. That is the idea. And you fast against the person. And as a result”

of this action, presumably there is, there is some social repercussion. The person realizes

that they have done something wrong, or the community realizes something bad has gone on much like a modern hungry strike. But this also has different metaphysical power. And so you get a saint famous example of this in Irish literature, a saint Rudon who fast against the King German McCurbel. And sits there, reciting the Psalms, bringing some bells. And eventually, it tells the king that this kingdom is going to fall and his descendants will not rule after him. So this

is the one way of doing a curse as a saint. You don't necessarily need to do the hunger strike either. So in the example, you're talking about Saint Ronan. So this is from a text in Irish called Willah Hivna or Willahini, probably best known by a famous TV's translation of it is Sweeney Estrey or the frenzy of Sweeney. And the digital director here is Sweeney, medieval Irish, or Sweeney in modern Irish, upset Saint Rudon. So he steals a book of Saint

Rudon's, a solter, so a book of the Psalms, and he throws it in the lake. It's okay, it's fine, and all that brings it back out of the lake. And then the books, okay, it's a miracle. And then he also kills the saint's foster son, and he stabs the saint's bell with his beard, brakes, and this point-run and has had enough. And so he recites this curse on him. He says, "You know, my curse on Sweeney, great, this is guilt against me, and it goes on for several more lines,

and as a result Sweeney is faded to die from violence, just like he kills the saint's foster child." But that comes back at the end of the tale. But before that point, the character goes to battle, and he goes mad in the battle. Some people have read this as a kind of PTSD. Some people have read this as the saint's curse or connection between the two. And it's a result he wanders around in the woods for many years, behaving like a bird. It starts actually like a bird,

an eating water crest, and perching on trees. And this again has biblical parallels, right? So this

is more or less what happens to the king Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel. It's always the book

of Daniel. I love the book of Daniel, who, in part, because he has been messing with God's prophets, takes leave of his senses and wanders around for seven years, believing he is an animal. So Sweeney eventually comes back to human civilization, but the curse is still waiting for him, and he does die when a Sweeney hurd killed some with his beard. Sweeney hurd mistakenly thinks he's been having a therapist's wife. So Saint Sweeney comes around. Women love it. Why do you pretend

to be a bird? I got to tell you that. That's clearly. Sweeney does die, but not before another saint has turned up and taken this confession. So he is ultimately saved. Well, I mean, there you go. There's there is a nice round moral to it, right? So you kind of have a logic that is developing. You know, there is a reason you get cursed. You do bad things to the nice Christian people, and there's still a way back for you. It's possible to still be

saved. And indeed, maybe the curse will help you come to your senses, even if you got to think

“her bird for a minute. It's a little bit like that. But I think also, you know, for modern”

audiences, it can be a little confusing. You know, why is a curse by non-Christians unacceptable,

using different words. But I suppose the point is, is where's the power coming from? Yeah, who's giving you the power to do this? What's your intent? And where do you fit in the larger cosmology of the world? Are you doing this on behalf of God? Well, okay, can you give me a curse that I could do today? What's an acceptable curse? Listen, well, maybe I need to smite someone

“Bridget. I know, I think that is quite literally between you and your God. I think you have to”

work that out for yourself. All right, okay, on the other side. There are some examples of um,

of curses in the book. Most of them are actually the first half. So they're ancient things

you can do. If you're worried someone's going to beat you in court, or if you want someone to fall in love with you, if you want someone to leave somebody else alone, so you can fall in love with them. Everybody's got to get the book. I'm telling you. There is a charm. I think I talked about the second half of the book from medieval Irish literature again. Important. If you want somebody to stay out of your house, if you've taken the house from somebody else, or if you have guests who

were staying too long, and you want to banish them. I'm not sure it's quite a curse, but it's similar idea. You can say, you proclaim that your enemies cannot return until Augma and his

hound come together until the Earth and heaven come together until sun and moon come together.

So it's one of these sort of impossibilities. The very end of time when all of these things have come together. I like that. So it's kind of east of the sun, west of the moon, sort of a deal. Yeah, okay, I love it. When you find those magical pronouncements that persist, you know, these ideas that you've got to find opposing elements, I find it nice that there's a symmetry to that. Yeah. So next time you know, you're holiday guests, don't worry. I should say that one

exists in in medieval literature as something that literary otherworldly characters say to one another, so whether anyone in the real world and thought this would work with their guests is sort of an unrelated question. Just wishful thinking. That's all. Yeah, okay. Well, I mean, these are things that I find really interesting because there are these holdovers. You know, this idea that, you know, you're worried about trying to think in a legal matter. You've got kind of annoying house guests. We

can all relate to these things. But another thing that you cover really extensively is something

“that I think we're all pretty familiar with still, which is this idea that you could have a lucky”

charm or a talisman that is going to give you protection. And I need to listen to everybody knows about lucky rabbits feet, you know, or having, for example, tattoos that are supposed to have kind of like apopotrache proper, you know, tattoos that you've got in order to ward off evil. And you talking the book about the Celtic tradition about Laura K. We're Laura Kai. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about what those are? Yeah. So they Laura Kai. Literally,

this comes from a Latin word. It means some kind of armor you'd put over your chest and it's often translated as breastplate. But I guess you could also think of some sort of chain mail or something to here. And Laura Kai is a sort of breastplate protective device against evil forces, demons, what have you? And it's basically a prayer or a litany that you recite. And these often get associated with particular saints. So the the most famous one from medieval Celtics speaking

context is Saint Patrick's Laura Cup. This is almost certainly not actually written by Saint Patrick. It is in language that's clearly quite a bit later than the language that would have

been spoken when Patrick was alive. But that never stopped anyone. And this is something that

you could recite. And it's in Irish. So you might imagine that it had a wider audience than one of these in Latin. And you get them in Latin too. Although that again plenty of people are capable of reciting a char war prayer in a language they don't understand. You know, plenty of people could probably recite the paternoster or father without actually being able to speak Latin per se. But Saint Patrick's Laura Cup is in Irish. And it's a rather long text. It's a really fun one.

“If you want to go read it's on your own at some point. But it lists all of the things that”

that the speaker binds themselves to, all of the good things. So I bind myself today, the power of God to guide me, the might of God to uphold me, the wisdom of God to teach me. And it goes on for a while. And it lists all of the bad things that the saves you would dance. So against the snares of demons and the temptation of vices and the lust of nature and all of these things. And the idea here is that you could recite this. Or maybe you'd even even write it down. And this

action protects you from all of the bad things out there. Be they temptation, be they actual demons,

one that's variously associated with Lyton or Gildus, the historical Gildus probably didn't write

this question. But this one also has a lot of kind of medical language in it as well. So you recite it for my limbs and my entrails that you may thrust back for me the invisible nails of stakes which enemies fashion. And it asks God to cover with a strong course letter, a strong armor, shoulder blades and shoulders and arms and elbows and elbow joints and hands. So it goes through and recites all of these body parts that you want called to protect.

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What kind of a thing? No one's going to get the spike through you.

“I think you've been an important point here though about the fact that you don't a lot of the”

lorca that they're happening in Latin. And incredibly cool people like you and I speak Latin and I understand it because all the cool kids do, but not every single medieval person necessarily has a grasp of Latin at the time. So it doesn't matter if you actually understand what you're saying or is it more about faith in the protective powers of a lorca here? Lots of good questions. I suspect some of it depends on the individual person who's reciting this.

Do they think it's important to note it means? At the same time, magical spells and charms around

the world always include a fair amount of kind of magical language, so things like abricadabra,

various gibberish, words, and you can find us from antiquity to the present all over the world.

“So I think having words that you believe have power, even if you don't understand them,”

either because you don't understand Latin or because they're just gibberish, or because they're its mother language allows you some control over the ineffable. But the ability to say all the fist, it doesn't quite unravel into concrete meaning, let's you control the things that you can't say or can't see. And we get examples in our medieval texts. There's a charm against urinary disease in a manuscript that we have from Switzerland, but it's an Irish, so someone was traveling.

There are a lot of Irish monastic houses on the continent as well. And this charm has some things in Irish, it says, you know, I save myself from this disease. And then at the end, it has a sort of line of garbled, some of it's Latin, some of it is Greek, but it's been translated into the Latin alphabet. And what it really is is the beginning of Matthew 28, 18, go there for and teach all the nations baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. But you might

imagine the person writing this may or may not realize that these aren't even all the same same language here, or they might recognize, okay, I've heard this bit of Matthew, I've heard it in Latin many times, maybe, you know, you're a scholar on the continent, you've heard a little bit of it in Greek, but by using all of these words associated with the language that has power or this case, both Latin and Greek, which are a scripture of languages, and they both have power,

what you're doing is you're capturing some of that power, you're capturing some of the power of

the gospel language here. And now I said, I don't think you always have to know what the words mean,

“and I think sometimes just knowing what language they're in or what language you associate them with”

is almost as important. We have a couple examples of old Irish words turning up in old English medical charms, and then we have at least one example of old English words turning up in a medieval Irish medical charm. And these you look at and you go, is this a really multi-lingual world, do people hear speak both of these languages? Or at one point, did you get one of these charms, or somebody said it out loud, and you said this is great, and you copied it down, and later

people have no idea what this means, but they know it sounds like the sort of thing you ought to say, and so it's just fulfilling the mystical word function. But that is definitely something we still

sounds kind of spooky. You know, there are any number, for example, of video games where one

fights demons, and there's sort of like faux Latin, that is involved. And we still kind of think of that as having a specific revenance or magical property even now in a world where we don't really believe in magic. So I suppose that's really understandable, isn't it? Definitely. We like our words of power. Well, can we talk a little bit about relics? Well, I'm not in general, question is, can you ever talk a little bit about relics and not a lot? But you go into them

really extensively in the book, and in a way they are kind of a Christian version of talismans or tokens that we find in older magical traditions. But does that simplify it too much? Because I

think that really, when we're talking about relics, they do things that look kind of like magic,

“but it's more like they're doing it because you have a saint on speed dials, kind of how I think”

about it. Yeah. So they work because they let you ask the saint to intercede with God. So it's not even that the saint themselves is doing it. The saint is interceding with the divine audio of the half here, so it's sort of a speed dial to God via the saint. They're the operators, I guess that's a better way of winning it. And I think people often think of relics and they go, oh, this must be a body part, right? Like a saint's tooth or a finger or something. And you certainly

do get some examples of this, although you get fewer of these from the early Middle Ages in

Ireland as well as then you might in some other parts of the world. But you can have other objects

associated with the saint, too. So you can have, you know, the book of the saint at various points, books that were said do have been copied by saints or owned by saints became these really important objects. So one of our earliest manuscripts to survive from medieval Ireland is this book called the Catholic, the Bappler of Saint Colomba. And this is a book that is said to have been written by Saint Colomba, we'll put a little star by that and leave it for the most of these again,

probably were not written by the person that their association with. But the idea was this was Colomba's book. Colomba copied this book. And so a firmly keeps it they put it in it with calls

“a clove duck, so a book shrine, and they carry it into battle. That's why it's called the”

Catholic or the Bappler. And the idea is the saint will intercede with God on their behalf in battle because they're carrying saints book with them. And this is probably why it survives. The presence we have virtually no manuscripts from before the 12th century that survived from the medieval Ireland or manuscript survival, it's a really bad before then. And this survives probably because it's been put in this little box and it's been treated as a saint's relic. So it's this

really important to object. It's not books are important objects generally, but this one has great spiritual significance. And we have, if some people are doing this well into the later medieval, into the early modern period with this book, but we know that this is something that people were doing in the earlier Middle Ages with books associated with saints too, because again, Adifnons, Life of Saint Colomba tells us that people would take books at the Saint

Colomba to copy it outside and carry them around when they wanted it to rain. Now you might think on I heard it's you ever want it to rain, but there's a story about there's a drought and we need the rain so we carry the books around and the saint intercedes with God on our behalf at it rains. But Relsky usual are also in a healing capacity, right? Yeah, so you go touch a relic or you go pray in front of a relic often and this again you can find around the

world. This isn't unique to Celtic speaking areas. The idea that this will bring about healing that the saint will ask God to heal you. And we have, for all we have relics associated with saints from Celtic speaking areas, we also in the same areas have relics associated with, I guess you could say sort of more pan-European saints cults that you would find anywhere.

“So there's this really, I think there's a picture of it in the book, but there's a really,”

really cross that you can see at the National Museum of Ireland called the Cross of Kong. And it's was gorgeous early 12th century cross with all of this beautiful gold work on it. And the whole thing is meant to be a relic wary. So in the middle, in this little crystal container in the very middle of it, you have a splinter of the true cross. And you've got this is the cross that Christ was crucified on or at least believed to be the

cross that Christ was crucified on. And so here you have something that you could find anywhere

you also see the same kinds of saints cults. And some of the same attitudes towards relics,

“if holy matter, cropping up too. So again, I think we have to think of this as a medieval phenomenon,”

it's not specifically Celtic phenomenon. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a big way that you encourage the cults of varying saints. You know, the the Czechs do a good line in this one. They're promoting the cult of Saint Vagislas. There's there's a there are a lot of, oh, did you know that this blind person wasn't blind anymore? You know, and I, there is something here, I think, where people do really believe I suppose in the power of a pilgrimage

as as a healing practice as well. And certainly, you know, there are any number of springs that

are considered to be healing both in the ancient and medieval world. And it's like, and while you're

there, if you can also touch a relic, then you're your gold, right? You're going to be absolutely fine. Extra points. Yeah. So what is your favorite relic? Is it going to be, because now I'm, I'm going to have to update my my list of favorite, because I love this focusing clumber. That's the,

“just about the most Irish thing I've ever heard in my life is, is the book that she copied”

to being a relic, but what, what, what would it be for you? This is a good question. I mean, I am, I'm a great fan of the Catholic part, because it's the earliest book we have. Obviously. So it's great to just be able to see what, really early medieval Irish book which looks like, that's from well before the 12th century. That's a very good one. You get to stay with other saints too. I'm a great fan of the book of our mom, which is various points. This is a

say with Saint Patrick and kept it, Saint Patrick's church in our mall. This one, you get people claiming that Patrick wrote it or Patrick wrote part of it. It does contain texts that Patrick was the author of, so it contains, you know, Patrick's version of Patrick's Confesio, the letter to Cronica's, but it also contains things like seven century saints lives about Patrick, which you might think Patrick did not treat that, so three centuries left. And indeed,

the manuscript itself is from about the 9th century, so well after Saint Patrick lives in the fifth century. But it's a great one. For this, again, the sort of connection to the saint, you know, here you don't even have something that the saint necessarily plausibly wrote

themselves, but there are texts in it by the saint, and there's always material about the saint.

And it's got bits of the Bible in it too, which again, you might say, you could look at a Saint Patrick, did not write this bit, or write, but it becomes so inexorably linked to the saint and to the saint's church at our mall, that it takes on a sort of larger than life, presence. [MUSIC] Nah, no one is going to be able to find a way to get the red captionalipeness world in Freiburg, with the world's most famous,

or with the channel, the top of the book, which is all about the story. It's our interactive exhibition by the elite tour with audio guide and a classic and the next parvillion, the whole world of red captionalipeness world, only a set of things. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]

“Look, Bridget, through god-all things are possible, okay, so, you know, who knows?”

A little bit of time traveling, but why not, you know? Okay, look, at the beginning of the show, I mentioned the chicken steak bite cure, which everyone at Goman evil are huge fans of, and I think that it's very fun to talk about, but also, it is useful to talk about because it shows us that superstition isn't necessarily at odds with what we now would call science at the time, because this is an attempt to use magic for

the purposes of healing, and to an extent, there is a kind of logic to it. I can understand why you might think that something could absorb this, and also, if you know about medieval magic, chickens are kind of like the opposite of snakes, and then somewhere in the middle you've got, you know, because there's the cockroach and there's the basilisk, and it makes sense if you spend all of your time being inert, like me, I'm like, oh, yeah,

you know, obviously you're going to just slap a chicken anis on that, you'll be fine, don't worry about it. But I do think that this is an important point because now we really do see the sciences and

of a spectrum, but that's an incredibly modern phenomenon.

Yes, I suspect it's more of a sort of interchangeable series of then diagrams for many people in the past, where some people might look at this and say, there's no way I'm strapping a live chicken to my snake bite, I don't think this would work, and some people might think it 100% works, and some of some people might think it works because God is acting through that chicken.

I'm just kidding.

“So there are a lot of different opinions about this even in the past, but again, I think”

one of my favorite examples, I mean, for all the chicken is such a great example, this is a fabulous thing, and I should say you find this in medical recipes from other parts of Europe, too.

This is not just for medieval whales, you can find it from England as well, so this

is clearly traveling between traditions, this idea that strapping the aim of a chicken to your plague boobo or your snake bite, or some sort of wound is going to draw out the poison. But there's also one here that I talk about, which I think for me, really encapsulates a lot of the perspectives here that we have working on what does heal you, how is magic

and religion and science and medicine all interwoven. And this one is pretty simple, it's a cure for fever, and it tells you to drink this concoction of various herbs, so juicive brew, and coriander, and wild celery, and greater plantain, and you mix that up with wind and water, and you do this while saying the potternoster.

So here you are, you're saying you're Latin fray, you're saying you're our father, and

you're consuming this plant mixture. And so the question here is, which part of this would a medieval medical practitioner, or someone with a fever, who is taking his care, which part of us today think is healing them, is it the drink, is it the process of grathering the stuff to put in the drink,

“is it saying the potternoster, is it all of these combined?”

But clearly, this is not incompatible with religion, it's something you do as part of saying the potternoster in this particular instance. So I think this, again, feels like a very different way of thinking about science and religion and magic than many people today have in the secular world, but is it actually that different, right?

You know, you might have somebody who is really concerned because a family member is ill, who goes and says a prayer in church, or who says a prayer privately, or asks the rest of their community to help them pray on this person's behalf. So in most cases, isn't going to stop them from also seeking medical attention at hospital, right?

Absolutely. These things can go together. A big part of the book that I really liked, you wrote about the physicians of Muthby. Can you tell us a little bit about them who were there? So these are the physicians or doctors of Muthby, who are a family of Welsh physicians

to whom a lot of leader, Welsh medical material is attributed, and they at least supposedly descended from the sky named Sri Hwaslan, the physician, who was the sort of chief physician to three-scoring the prints of Dehaibarth, just in some Wales in the 13th century. You get all of these traditions claiming that Sri Hwaslan had a number of sons, often aimed to cudugan, Griffith, and Anian, who carried on and spread his medical teachings.

You get people who say they belong to the family, or who say that this family survives into the 17th century. But they sort of take on this legendary status, as these really great physicians of the distant past, and you get various texts attributed to them, or linked to them until recently various corpora of medieval Welsh medical recipes, where still sort of only existed in additions

that linked them to these guys. They have been re-edited largely thanks to the work of Diana left recently, and are available

“to open access online, if you want to go read more about chickens.”

Yes! But this is a very enduring idea that it was this particular family that controlled all of this, or this particular family that invented this, or at least popularized it. Now, if you go and look at the actual medical recipes, you find that, again, these belong to traditions that you can find throughout the rest of Europe, circulating in all kinds

of texts, and all sorts of languages, some of which could trace that to people like Opsena, so this again, is a very international tradition, but it does take on this sort of local identity in at least a bit of Kramer, I love that, listen, Wales is as much part of the world as anywhere else. It's very important.

to think of Europe as really cut off from other parts of the medieval world, and all you

“have to do is look at medical or magical traditions, and you see that that's absolutely”

just not the case. There's some great examples from the later medieval and early modern Ireland, too, where you will get texts that will attribute various things to characters from Irish prehistory or otherworldly characters in Irish literature, like Dean Kecht, who's this kind of otherworldly physician who turns up in some of the literary traditions, but you will also

get them attributed to people like Gayland and Obocrates, and even to people like Avacena, the great medieval medical writer coming out at the Islamic world who quickly gets translated into an adapted into other languages around the Mediterranean and in Europe. Alright, Bridget, we've come to a very important point, I'm going to ask you a huge favor. Can you give me a medieval hangover cure?

These are great. Are you now, okay, look, I am a professional, but on a Saturday morning, I could use it. No, so I could, in fact, give you sort of a progressive series of them, so if you want

“to go out, have a nice night, and avoid getting drunk, what you need to do is, in the”

morning, for you to drink an egg shell full of the juice of Bettany, just a plant. Oh no, you've gone out, you've had a bit too much, you forgot your egg shell of Bettany, you need to sober up quickly, now, and drive home. Don't do this. Please do not drink.

But you need to sober up quickly. You can crush up some saffron with spring water and drink that, not quick sober you up.

And finally, you've failed to do both of these things.

You've had a very nice diet out, but you have woken up the next day and you are hung over. So what you need to do is get some garlic, you're going to pound up the garlic and the onion, and the recipe in our 1945 medical collection says goat fat, but probably try butter or oil if you're vegan, pound it up, and then you're going to bandage it around your head, where it will remain for the next week.

You're going to leave it there for eight days. Come on. How long over here? You're going to be very hot, honestly. Then you're going to make sort of a porridge, you're going to boil some oats until they're

good in boiled and thick, and then you're going to wash the bandage off your head using this oat mixture, and then you repeat this until it gets hot. So practical. I'm sorry, everyone, that I said medieval magic is actually quite practical. I mean, until you're wearing a bandage of garlic for a week because you had too much beer,

but look, I do want to talk about one of my very favorite things, which is the use of a zodiac things in medieval medicine in particular, because this is not necessarily a uniquely Celtic practice. We see our little zodiac men all over Europe at the time. Can you tell us a little bit about them and how this international knowledge gets moved

around the Celtic speaking world? For sure, yeah, so the idea of the zodiac men is that different parts of the body, you get these diagrams that look like people, and different parts of their body, become associated with different star signs. So there's a great one from medieval whales where you've got these little fish on the

guy's feet to signify the sign Pisces, and then you have various others all the way up to his head. The idea is that at the time when these various star signs are in the sky, this is the time that you want to take care of these particular ailments associated with these bits of the body, or indeed that people who were born under these star signs might be people

who are particularly susceptible to having injury or having disease in these parts of the body. There are multiple ways of thinking about this.

“So again, none of this is particularly Celtic, right?”

You can find these all over medieval Europe, and the Mediterranean world more broadly. These are ultimately drawing off of Greccarem and star signs, at least brought in in the

medieval west, and you can tell we don't always necessarily know exactly which manuscripts

of which tech somebody is reading and translating into, say, well, it's for Irish to particular time. But you can tell that they're clearly looking at diagrams and other books, they're talking to other people, they're reading things that have variety of languages, be that, you know, Welsh, Irish, French, Middle English, Latin, or even further afield.

But you do sometimes get fun little horoscopes, two in texts. Again, I'm not sure if you didn't know that this horoscope was from medieval whales. I don't think there's anything in it to specifically say, this is a medieval Welsh horoscope.

in the newspaper, and someone who read it today.

But there's a great Welsh text on astrology called the "Leather and Atteriai", the book of nature, sort of book of disposition, which lists all of the different signs and tells you various things about the personality, life expectancy, health, career of people born under its signs. And it normally segregates it by gender, so if you were a man, born, under Leo, the lion,

you're going to be skillful and generous and amiable and merciful, and you're going to live to be 84. And if you are a woman born under the same sign, you're going to be very strong, you're going to be fair, you're going to be merciful, your speech will be feminine, you will have children with three different men.

And until you turn 36 things, you're going to start getting better for you. That's helpful. I like that. Okay. Yeah.

I remember the first time I read this text, it was so funny because these feel exactly like

“the sort of horoscopes that people read today, right?”

You know, sometimes they're weirdly specific, you're going to live to life's going to get better for you after the age of 36, but sometimes they're so generic that anything could fall into it, right? For example, if you're a boy who's born under Virgo in this Welsh text, you're going to be mild and calm and feminine and no one's going to fear you, but you're also going

to be bitter and stubborn, where your speech is going to be really fair, right? There's so many characteristics here that you can look at and go, oh, yes, one of these fits me definitely. Oh, I love that, it's, it's the same as sort of, you know, the newspaper horoscopes that you see, where I just say a general platitude, and I think it will be fine.

Not to make everyone sad about the Sunday horoscopes.

Sorry, everyone. Sorry. Indeed. And I suspect attitudes towards this much like attitude towards modern horoscopes is very a lot in the middle ages too.

And some people will go, yes, this is cutting-edge medical science. This is how I understand how to treat my patients. I know this person is more under this star science, that tells me this about their bodily composition and their personality. And some people will read this and go, yes, this explains everything about me and some

people will probably look at it and say, either, no, I like my other text with the different side of horoscopes, description, better or they'll look at it and go, this is silly. So I'm sure there's a great variety in the past, just like today.

“Well, speaking of great variety in the past, you know, I think one of the big things that”

we do now, you know, is we kind of exercise a bit of choice in terms of what we believe. And you know, we can pick up or put down particular religious beliefs or superstitions, you know, certain people will use particular prayers or rituals regularly. Did you say that that's also true of the medieval Celtic world, like is there the same sort of flexibility in terms of choice and practice both religiously and magically?

Certainly. I think you see this a lot in various authorial attitudes towards the supernatural and the other world, the literature, especially, and I want to just preface this by saying that of course, when we have written texts that tell us these things, these texts are probably being produced by and written for social elites or people who at least have access to a fairly

elite, often clerical education, especially in the earlier part of the Middle Ages, but still in the later Middle Ages, you know, if you have a book and you can read the book, you're already sort of not the every man, right? So on some level, we can only see so far into what various medieval societies, both Celtic speaking and not Celtic speaking, look like.

And we have some ideas, but we don't know that everyone of all social echelons would necessarily treat this material the same way. You know, we know what the written down medical cure says, but we don't necessarily know what someone who couldn't read thought about that is in, are they doing the exact same things, are they doing something different?

“We have to remember again that our sources really bias us to elite literary culture.”

But with that in mind, you could have a lot of different ideas about what magical characters are and what magical creatures and otherworldly beings and literature are. So for example, to go back to some of our druids and demons and say pasture can things, you have some, you've got this early 7th century texts where your wizard characters are evil, although not or demobly so, some of them can convert or they can help to say show their

power to other people in later texts, some of them become very helpful though. So there is one fabulous kind of tradition that you get represented by a series of texts where King Concoverve of Ulster has been injured in battle. He's got this little, the ball stuck in his head, but about aggression, but if you need

has like, boom, concentrate it down to make a slingshot ball and this has gotten stuck in

“his head and his doctors tell him that he cannot go fight people, get up suddenly, have”

vigorous sex, anything like that, or it will fall out and he will be to death and die. And this whole thing is set in the pre-Christian path, so this is set before Patrick has come to Ireland and one day he sees all of these portents and signs and omens and gets really concerned and asks what's going on and one version of the text, his droid tells him, because his droid has divine knowledge or has been divinely inspired, the droid tells

him that this is all happening because Christ is being crucified.

And Cogiver, who at this point, we conjecture, has never heard who Christ is, is so taken

by this and feels such an emotional responsibility, gets up to go fight those people responsible and save Christ and as a result, the ball falls out of his head, he plays to death and we are told that he is baptized in his own blood and is the first of the Irish to be baptized and get to have it. Okay.

And so, you know, you can have these characters around the one hand in the seventh century saved life, Patrick has to fight the droids or the wizards and then on the other hand, become these divinely inspired conduits for what in a medieval context would call natural grace, right? So the idea that even in the pagan past or even in places where the news of Christ have

not reached yet, you have people who are divinely inspired to do the right thing, to live in a Christian way, to be as Christian as they can and sometimes to get glimpses of the divine. And so here through a natural grace, through the grace of God, the droid is able to tell the king what is happening and the king is able to sort of take it upon himself and be baptized in his shower of blood.

I absolutely love this because I'm not quite sure what to make of it because on one hand I'm like, is this an elaborate way of justifying why all of the worthy pagans are in

“hell? Is this a way of allowing people to enjoy their mythologized, juridic past, right?”

You know what I say? Oh, well, we're not so bad. Some druids were pretty alright. Or is it just a cracking story, you know, about being a pretty good person? Probably some combination, honestly. You get this too about other worldly characters, so characters from the other world that you can interact with. And you get some texts that tell you these are demons. These are bad. Don't interact with them. They're leading you astray.

And you get somewhere, you have these characters in the other world telling, kind of, the mortals in usually the pre-Christian setting of the tale, that they are unfallen. And, you know, they escaped at him's sit. And they are these sort of unfallen humans or sort of pseudo angelic beings who exist to show how this perges a columnist allegorical other world exists and waits for humans as a reflection of paradise, a reflection of heaven.

So again, you have wildly different ideas. You know, they're demons, they're horrible,

they're leading you astray, or they're unfallen. They never send originally. And they

live in this kind of paradise still. And they can help you spiritually reach the other world. So clearly different authors are having a lot of fun with different ideas. There are many diverse options available to you as a medieval reader. Definitely. And it's, again, it's a little bit unclear with some of this material. Do you actually believe this is the case in the past? Do you believe these things are real? Is this just a useful way of thinking

about the past and of thinking about religion? Is this just a good story? Are you just enjoying this on the level of the story? And again, I suspect that there is no one answer to this because different authors and different texts and different readers will all see different things in this material. Well, you know, it's literature, right? Maybe, you know, you can pick up or

put down whatever it is you want, ultimately. And I suppose to an extent that extends to belief.

“Well, Bridget, one way or another, I enjoyed the hell out of this conversation. And I think that”

ultimately, that is enough. And also on a personal level, I just love this book. So thank you so much for all of your work and research because it is absolutely brilliant. Great. I'm glad. Bridget, thank you so much for coming on today to talk to us. It's just been an absolute delight. Thank you very much for having me on. Thanks to Dr. Bridget Irman-Trout and TU for listening to Gohamedevil from History Hit.

If you've enjoyed our chat today, there are so many more magical episodes in the Gohamedevil Arcade, including Lizard shampoo, potions and remedies, and prophecies of Merlin. So do go back and indulge yourself with those. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning

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