this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Alastair Crowley? Gardener? Eta: The Catholic Church?
Weren't both of those people English?
Do English people think the Catholic Church is magic? I know they sometimes wear dresses, but their hats are round, not pointy. Completely different thing.
And yeah, they say they are turning wafers into human flesh, but I've had the wafers and trust me, they don't taste like chicken at all.
The perception may come from old writings for medical tinctures and the like including the instruction to "say three Hail Marys". This wasnt a magic incantation; it was a way to measure time for people who did not have watches.
A few years ago I heard about some folks who found a very ancient recipe to cure MRSA. The strain evolved away from being affected by that recipe in the past and it was abandoned, but this much later that recipe worked on modern strains. Included were the instructions to say five(?) Hail Marys, which translated to "wait five minutes".
My grandma was a matron and used tricks like those when I was a kid.
You guys keep giving me anecdotes about how the anglosphere mistook common latinsphere practices for mystical ancient spells as a response to my post about how the anglosphere mistakes common latinsphere practices for mystical ancient spells.
I get how it would have become fancy-sounding shorthand to them, I'm saying that using it as pop-culture shorthand for mysticism feels ethnocentric and silly to me.
Oh, it definitely is. As I said elsewhere, for some reason it's only Catholics who see demons and actually invented ways to deal with them.
@MudMan
I think this is an interesting topic
This comment from an old Reddit post seems to contain some knowledge, imo
https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/1SHtAFS093
As noted in that comment, in reading Goethe’s Faust I remember distinctly that line, ERITUS SICUT DEUS, SCIENTES BONUM ET MALUM.
Something about its oldness, religiosity and simplicity make it magical to me
Sure. I guess what I'm saying is that perception is fundamentally anglocentric.
Obviously, by being retained as a liturgical language romance language speakers associate it as much to demonology as they do to... you know, your cousin getting married or a nerdy college student having obnoxious debates at the pub.
I'm also saying that it sounds dumb to me. Just culturally it immediately flags somebody copying their homework or resorting to things that sound fancy to them when they're not.