Religion and the Decline of Magic

Keith Thomas examines the systems of popular belief that flourished in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including magic, astrology, witchcraft, prophecy, and related supernatural ideas. The study reconstructs the mental world of ordinary people and explains why these beliefs rose to prominence and eventually declined.

Thomas begins by establishing the material conditions that made supernatural explanations attractive. England's population grew from roughly two and a half million in 1500 to five and a half million in 1700, yet the economy remained primarily agrarian and precarious. Life expectancy at birth was strikingly low, even among the nobility. The food supply depended on harvests that failed roughly one year in six. Bubonic plague recurred periodically, killing tens of thousands in London alone. Medical science offered almost no effective therapy, surgeons operated without anaesthetics, and most of the population could not afford professional care. Fire devastated towns built with thatched roofs, and no organized insurance existed until the 1680s. In this environment, people sought explanations for misfortune and practical means of redress that available technology could not provide.

The medieval Catholic Church filled much of this need by functioning as a reservoir of supernatural power. Its rituals of benediction protected houses, cattle, and crops. Holy water drove away evil spirits. The Mass acquired mechanical efficacy in the popular mind, and saints specialized in curing particular diseases. Relics, images, and consecrated objects were credited with healing and protective powers, blurring the boundary between religion and magic that theologians attempted to maintain.

The Protestant Reformation dramatically altered this situation. Beginning with the Lollards, pre-Reformation critics who attacked Catholic ritual practices, and accelerating under the Tudor reformers, Protestants systematically dismantled the Church's magical repertoire. They rejected holy water, consecrated bells, exorcism, and the intercessory power of saints as empty superstition. The Mass became a commemorative rite rather than a miracle. The reformers drew a sharp distinction between prayer, which supplicates God without any guarantee of success, and spells, which claim automatic efficacy. This theological revolution stripped the Church of its capacity to offer supernatural remedies, but the practical problems those remedies had addressed remained unsolved.

In place of Church magic, Protestant theology offered the doctrine of divine providence: the teaching that nothing happens without God's permission and that misfortune reflects his inscrutable purposes. Preachers interpreted plagues, fires, and personal calamities as divine judgments on sin, compiling anthologies of cautionary tales about the fates of sabbath-breakers, blasphemers, and the sacrilegious. The doctrine consoled by assuring sufferers that their fate was not random, but it provided no certain means of relief. Prayer might help, but God retained the right to deny any request. The doctrine also proved self-confirming: If the wicked prospered, God was testing them; if the godly suffered, they were being refined.

This vacuum created space for cunning men and wise women who provided a comprehensive range of services. These village wizards healed the sick through charms, prayers, and herbal remedies. They detected thieves and recovered stolen goods through techniques such as divination by sieve and shears, key and book, or crystal-gazing. They told fortunes, made love charms, and diagnosed witchcraft. Their methods derived largely from medieval Catholic formulae, and though condemned by the Church as implicitly diabolical, they attracted clients from every social level. Thomas emphasizes that the wizards' popularity rested not on fraud but on genuine psychological utility: Their consultations helped clients focus anxieties, confirm existing suspicions, and arrive at decisions.

Astrology represents the most intellectually ambitious of these alternative systems. Thomas traces its practice from educated elites to the popular level of almanacs, which sold in the millions and were the best-selling publication after the Bible. The case-books of practitioners like William Lilly and John Booker reveal clients seeking advice on missing persons, stolen goods, business ventures, marriage prospects, and political questions. During the English Civil War, astrologers served as propagandists for both sides: Lilly and Booker supported Parliament, while George Wharton wrote for the King. Astrology's appeal lay in its comprehensiveness: It offered a coherent explanation for human diversity and a promise of control through foreknowledge. Its decline after 1700 reflected the triumph of the mechanical philosophy, the view that nature operates through impersonal physical laws, which eliminated the Ptolemaic distinction between immutable celestial and mutable terrestrial realms on which astrological theory depended.

Thomas's treatment of witchcraft distinguishes sharply between the continental concept of witchcraft as devil-worship and the English popular concept, which centers on maleficium, the power to injure others by occult means. Most English witch-trials arose not from allegations of diabolical compact but from specific accusations of harm: A neighbour's child fell ill, cattle died, butter would not churn. The total number of executions over the entire period is estimated at under 1,000.

Thomas argues that accusations typically followed a specific pattern: The future witch requested food, drink, or some small favour; was refused; muttered a curse; and some misfortune subsequently befell the person who denied her. The accused were overwhelmingly poor, elderly women, often widowed, whose dependence on neighbourly charity made them vulnerable. The accuser, Thomas argues, had violated traditional norms of mutual aid and felt guilty about the refusal. When misfortune struck, that guilt found expression in an accusation of witchcraft, which simultaneously explained the disaster and shifted blame from the uncharitable householder to the aggrieved beggar. Witch beliefs thus reflected the tension between older communal ethics and the increasingly individualistic economic behaviour of the period.

The Reformation intensified this problem by removing the protective Church magic that had previously kept the threat of sorcery manageable. Medieval parishioners who feared witchcraft could resort to holy water, the sign of the cross, or clerical exorcism. Protestants prohibited all these remedies, leaving believers with no legitimate defense except prayer, which carried no guarantee. The only remaining solution was judicial prosecution, which Thomas argues explains why systematic witch-trials coincided with the Reformation rather than preceding it.

Thomas also examines ancient prophecies, which served as validating charters for political action by presenting revolutionary change as the fulfilment of ancestral predictions. Prophecies attributed to figures such as Merlin and Bede were invoked in virtually every rebellion from the Pilgrimage of Grace, a 1536 uprising against Henry VIII's religious reforms, through the Civil War. Ghost beliefs and fairy beliefs receive similar treatment: Thomas shows how ghosts enforced obligations toward the dead and fairies reinforced standards of domestic behaviour.

The book concludes by arguing that the decline of magic reflects a combination of intellectual change, technological improvement, and shifting social aspirations. The scientific revolution destroyed the animistic universe that provided the theoretical foundation for magical thinking. New institutions, from fire insurance to the penny post, reduced dependence on supernatural remedies. The development of probability theory and early social sciences offered alternative frameworks for explaining human fortune. But Thomas emphasizes that magic declined before adequate technical substitutes were available. The fundamental change was one of aspiration: People came to believe that technical solutions would eventually be found, and this faith in future progress made magical solutions seem obsolete. Thomas closes by observing that no society will ever be entirely free from magic, since there will always be areas of life where effective techniques are lacking and substitute rituals provide psychological comfort.