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- [00:02]
A
From long lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Elena Jarninger, 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 with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe. Insurance isn't One size fits all that's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's Name your Price Tool for years now. With the Name youe Price Tool, you tell them what you want to pay and they'll show you options that fit your budget. So whether you're picking out your first policy or just looking for something that works better for you and your family, they make it easy to see your options. Visit progressive.com find a rate that works for you with the name your price tool Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and Coverage Match limited by State
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B
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A
between AI and hands on editing so
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B
you end up with a site that actually looks the way you pictured it.
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Try it out for free@wix.com Harmony.
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B
Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga 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 gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research. From the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to Popes 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 from 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 your paternoster and drink that mixed with wine. So here the cure is 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 A practitioner's guide, Dr. Brigid Ehrmantraut 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 cross Christian worldview, with saints, prayers and sacred objects replacing earlier supernatural beings. Incantations, charms and talismans. Brigid shows that in medieval Ireland and Wales, what we might label magic was understood as faith 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 hunt I cannot wait to try out. Brigid, welcome to Gone Medieval.
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C
Thank you very much. It's great to be here.
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B
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 Sophie Page, my professor, who taught me medieval magic in my masters, used to do to us at the beginning of every master's seminar. And she would say, how do you define magic?
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C
Ah, this is a great question. 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 the natural world, usually involving the use of an occult or secret body of knowledge, which is a 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 clothing. You might not tell at some point, you know, where you hid the laundry detergent.
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B
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's 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, babe, it's magic.
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C
Absolutely right.
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B
You know, an electric eel 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 as a red here.
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C
Do I understand why one stain remover works on white and one works on colors? No, this is occult knowledge.
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B
No, I don't. I don't. And this is quite, I guess, similar to. Yeah. What you kind of see from. From guidebooks. Right. Because I do remember seeing in certain, like, magical manuals, for example, and written 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 a lot of it Good. Look, it's not all practical. I take that.
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C
I think the other really important thing to remember is, and this is true for some people today, as people in the past, be they medieval Christians or be they people in ancient Greece or Rome, Magic, one is not necessarily different from science. Two is 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. Yeah.
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B
And I mean, I suppose that that is true, that these things are possible within a universe that is considered to be ordered and created by God. Right. And that is the sort of practicality. So the working definition I use of magic, because I've got ptsd From Sophie Page, torturing me as a master's student. I use hers now, which is a practical way of ordering the universe.
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C
That's great, too.
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B
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 is a piece of string?
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C
Yeah.
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B
After a while, you know. But okay, so in. In your book, you actually begin in the ancient world. Right.
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C
Like, you're not.
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B
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?
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C
This is a great question. I think of the book as sort of a book in two halves with a big. Well, I guess 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 pre and post Rome in Gaul, are doing and things people are doing in Roman Britain. And the second half of the book deals with mostly medieval Ireland and Wales, but there's a bit of Brittany and Scotland and 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 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 people who speak Welsh are speaking a language fairly closely related to Irish. They think these are completely different. So 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 halves here, both in the ancient world and the medieval world. The main difference, obviously, is that most of the medieval 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, might still be muttering 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 you're using to think about these things very different.
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B
Okay, well, I'm going to be honest with you. I'm just going to think of the ancient part of the book as Asterix and Obelisk are doing it. And the second part of the book, St. Patrick is doing it.
- [11:36]
C
Yeah, that works great. One thing I do want to mention though 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 Lugh in medieval Irish texts like Cobmargatura, the Battle of Mort, 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 Hlae in the four branches of the Mapinogi in Wales. And you have this God who you see attested across the Celtic speaking world in antiquity called Lucus or Lukas. And these all shares a root 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 named Dennis or Denny or Denise out there? Right. Most of these people's parrots did not name them. Thinking, ah, yes, I'm going to name my kid after the Greek God of wine, Dionysus, 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 Denny or Denys or Dionysus. But that doesn't mean they're the same character. That doesn't mean there's 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 Lugh is 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 has implications for how they think about their history and how they think about their literature, but it probably doesn't tell us anything real about the pre Christian past.
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B
Yeah, I wish it did. That would be really nice and useful and then we'd have more information on the pre Christian past. But unfortunately not so much. Right?
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C
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 that it's just a matter of who you are interested in and whose voices you want to hear. So. 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 pre Christian Ireland worshipped 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, let's hope for the pre Christian past, here what you're doing is denying the agency of these great dynamic medieval authors. You have all sorts of exciting ideas. So it's really just a question of whose voice do we have and whose voice can we hear or listen frankly,
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B
here we are always pro hearing the medieval voices. So great, great news for everybody. Actually, one of my favorite things that the book addresses is the story of St. Patrick battling the Druids. And 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. 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 Chris, like 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, Bridget.
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C
Yeah, absolutely. So when we look at these early lives of St. Patrick from the 7th century, or 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 that look really like episodes in the Bible, be it the Old Testament or the New Testament. So, for instance, in Murray's Life of St. Patrick, there is this great scene where St. Patrick and one of it's a Latin text, so it says that this guy is a magus, a wizard. Although later authors have said, later scholars have said, really, this guy's a druid. So we can call him a druid for now, but just keeping in mind that in Latin it doesn't say that, at least in the seventh 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 he can't. He 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 gradually escalates. And eventually they decide to have this competition to really work out, okay, whose God is real. And they do this. It's rather elaborate. They build this structure in the text, it's 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, it'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 setup, but they set the whole thing on fire. And when it's all burned down, Patrick's disciple, of course, is sitting there, happy as a clam, although now he's taken because the druid's 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 an elaborate story. Some people of earlier eras have connected this to the sort of wicker man sacrifice that Caesar talks about the Gauls doing. But we don't have to look for something like that because this is just out of the Bible. So this is the bit in the book of Daniel where the three youths get thrown in the oven and they pray and Daniel prays. 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 Testament Daniel, various Israelites versus other pagan kings in the area story. And similarly, we get a lot of things in these early patrician lives, that is lives about St. Patrick, lives of Patrick, that 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 text associated with the New Testament about the apostles and Simon Magnus, Simon the wizard who in various apocryphal texts calls up this chariot or calls up the winds and levitates himself above the forum. And then Peter, or sometimes Peter and Paul, depending on the text, are 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 of the at least apocryphal tradition surrounding the New Testament.
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B
It's also the way the Antichrist is defeated. Right? Because Antichrist is supposed to ascend into heaven. He's trying to ascend into heaven to prove that he's a cool guy. And then he falls very hot 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? Like, the argument is not that magic is real. The argument is that God can control magic and God can overcome anything that is seen as sort of demoniac. I'm right there. Right? Like, wait a minute, Bridget, you're the expert.
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C
Yes, absolutely. So the idea here is that ultimately all of this power comes from God. Right? And God can do it, and God, saints 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 triumph over it. And we know this from the texts themselves. So there's one fairly influential life, the life of St. Germanus, who's not a saint from a Celtic speaking area, but this is read 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 can defeat them. And you see this kind of thing all over the place in medieval saints lives. So you see it with St. Patrick, you see it in the life of Saint Columba, Adipton's life of Columba, which is another, in this case, late 7th century saint's life from medieval Ireland. And in this too, you have an evil magus who's calling up a storm and Columba phrase And it goes away. And so the idea here, again, really is that God sometimes allows evil magicians to do magic or evil magicians to do, especially weather magic, often involving demonic aid. And the reason for this is so that the faithful can triumph.
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B
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 got to have a heel. Absolutely, says God. And I think that's so important. But, you know, I suppose one of the things that you would think, given. Given this, if bad magic exists, so that the faithful can triumph over it, is that the faithful are then always doing nice things with magic, which is what we see, you know, with triumphing 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, but they're. They're nice Christian curses. I'm thinking in particular about the story you share about as Saint Ronan. Can you talk about that a little bit?
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C
Definitely. So saints can cause all kinds of things to happen. They can cause bad things to happen through invoking God's aid, just like they can cause good things to happen, like the horrible weather to go away. Sometimes you get angry saints who will fast against people, often in Irish literature.
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B
Oh, I love it. It's like a hunger strike.
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C
It is exactly like a hunger strike. That is the idea. And you fast against the person. And as a result of this action, presumably 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 hunger strike. But this also has metaphysical power. And so you get a famous example of this in Irish literature, Saint ruidon, who fast against the king, Diarmund Maciral, and sits there reciting the Psalms, ringing some bells, and eventually tells the king that his kingdom's gonna fall and his descendants will not rule after him. So this is 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 St. Ronan. So this is from a text in Irish called Bulahivna or Bulahini, probably best known by James Heedy's translation of it as Sweeney Astray, or the Frenzy of Sweeney. And the titular character here, Swivna in medieval Irish, or Sweeney in modern Irish, upset Saint Rhodan, so he steals a book of Saint Ronan's, a psalter, so a book of the Psalms, and he throws it in the lake, it's okay, it's fine. And Otter brings it back out of the lake and then the book's okay, it's a miracle. And then he also kills the saint's foster son. And he stabs the saint's bell with his spear and it breaks. And at this point Ronan has had enough and so he recites this curse on him. He says, my curse on Sweeney great is his guilt against me. And it goes on for several more lines. And as a result, Sweeney is fated to die from violence, just like he killed the saints 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 as a result, he wanders around in the woods for many years, behaving like a bird and starts acting like a bird and eating watercress 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. They 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 swineherd kills him with a spear. Swineherd mistakenly thinks he's been having an affair with his wife. So saint's vengeance comes her out.
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B
Women love it when you pretend to be a bird, I gotta tell you that. That's, you know, clearly.
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C
So Sweeney does die, but not before another saint has turned up and taken his confession. So he is ultimately saved.
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B
Well, I mean, and there you go. 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 a think you're a bird for a minute.
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C
Indeed.
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B
Or something 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, but a Christian curse acceptable? And I mean, to an extent, you're doing the same thing but you're using different words. But I suppose the point is, where's the power coming from?
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C
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?
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B
Well, okay. Can you give me a curse that I could do today? What's an acceptable curse? Listen, maybe I need to smite someone. Brigid, I know.
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C
I think that is quite literally between you and your God. I think you have to work that out for yourself.
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B
All right. Okay. I'm jotting.
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C
There are some examples 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, or if you want someone to leave somebody else alone so you can fall in love with them.
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B
Everybody's got to get the book. I'm telling you.
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C
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 are staying too long and you want to banish them. I'm not sure. It's quite a curse, but it's a similar idea. You can say you proclaim that your enemies cannot return until Oghma 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.
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B
Okay, 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. I like 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.
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C
Yeah. So next time, you know, your holiday guests, don't you need to get back to work and clean the kitchen? You can give it a try. I should say that one exists in medieval literature as something that literary, otherworldly characters say to one another. So whether anyone in the real world thought this would work with their guests is sort of an unrelated question.
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B
Just wishful thinking, that's all. Yeah.
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C
Okay.
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B
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 triumphing 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 can have a lucky charm or a talisman that is going to give you protection. And, you know, listen, everybody knows about lucky rabbit's feet, you know, or having, for example, tattoos that are supposed to have kind of like apopetraic properties.
- [28:44]
C
Sure.
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B
Tattoos you got in order to ward off evil. And. And you talk in the book about the Celtic tradition about loricae or lorici. Can you tell us a little bit about what those are?
- [28:57]
C
Yeah. So a lorica, literally, this comes from a Latin word that 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 chainmail or something too, here. And a lorica is a sort of breastplate, protective device against evil, horses, 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 Celtic speaking context to St. Patrick's Lorica, this is almost certainly not actually written by St 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. You get them in Latin too. Although then again, plenty of people are capable of reciting a charm or a prayer in a language they don't understand. You know, plenty of people could probably recite the Pater Noster, Our Father, without actually being able to speak Latin per se. But St. Patrick's Orica is in Irish and it's a rather long text. It's a really fun one if you want to go read it on your own at some point. But it lists all of the things 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 then it lists all of the bad things that this saves you against. So against the snares of demons and the temptation of vice and the lust of nature and all of these things. And the idea here is that you could recite this or maybe you could even write it down. And this action protects you from all of the bad things out there, be they temptation, be they actual demons, be they misfortune. We have other examples of this, again, often associated with other saints. So there's one that's variously associated with lichen or gildas. The historical Gildas probably didn't write this, 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 from me the invisible nails of stakes which enemies fashion. It asks God to cover a strong corselet or 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 God to protect.
- [31:53]
A
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- [33:11]
B
Oh, I love that. It's very kind of like anti voodoo doll kind of a thing. Yeah, no one's, no one's gonna get the, the spike through you. You made an important point here though about the fact that you know, a lot of the lorica, you know they're happening in Latin and you know, incredibly cool people like you and I speak Latin and, and understand it, you know, because all the cool kids do, but not every single medieval person necessarily of Latin at the time. So does it matter if you actually understand what you're saying? Or is it more about faith in the protective powers of a lorica here?
- [33:55]
C
That's a Good question. I suspect some of it depends on the individual person who's reciting this. Do they think it's important to know what 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 abracadabra, various gibberish words. And you can find this 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, the ability to say all of this, it doesn't quite unravel into concrete meaning, lets you control the things that you can't say or can't see. And we get examples. In our medieval text, there's a charm against urinary disease in a manuscript that we have from Switzerland, but it's in 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 saved myself from this disease. And then at the end, it has this sort of line of garbled. Some of it's Latin, some of it is Greek, but it's been transliterated into the Latin Alphabet. And what it really is is the beginning of Matthew 28:18. Go, therefore, 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 language here, or they might recognize, okay, I've heard this bit of Matthew. I've heard it in Latin many times. Maybe 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 a language that has power, or in this case, both Latin and Greek, which are scriptural languages, and they both have power, what you're doing is you're capturing some of that power and you're capturing some of the power of the Gospel language here. And as 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 medieval Irish medical charm. And these, you look at and you go, is this a really multilingual world? Do people here 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.
- [36:40]
B
But that is definitely something we still sort of feel today. You know, I think that there is a tendency for people to think that Latin sounds kind of spooky. You know, there are any number, for example, of video games where one fights demons, and they're sort of like faux Latin that is involved. And we still kind of think of that as having a specific revenants 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?
- [37:11]
C
Definitely. We like our words of power.
- [37:14]
B
Well, can we talk a little bit about relics? I mean, 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 dial is kind of how I think about it.
- [37:59]
C
Right. 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. It's the saint is interceding with the divine on your behalf here. So it's sort of a speed dial to God via the saint.
- [38:17]
B
They're the operators. I guess that's a better way of putting it.
- [38:21]
C
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. You get fewer of these from the early Middle Ages in Ireland and Wales than you might in some other parts of the world. But you can have other objects associated with the saint, toot. So you can have, you know, the book of the Saint. At various points, books that were said to 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 Cathach, the Battler of St Columba. And this is a book that is said to have been written by St Columba. We'll put a little star by that and leave it for the moment. Most of these, again, probably were not written by the person that they're associated with. But the idea was this was Columba's book. Columba copied this book and so a family keeps it. They put it in what's called Clydagh, so a book shrine, and they carry it into battle. That's why it's called the Cathe or the battler. And the idea is the saint will intercede with God on their behalf in battle because they're carrying the saint's book with them. And this is probably why it survives the present. So we have virtually no manuscripts from before the 12th century that survived from medieval Ireland. Our manuscript survival rates are 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 object. It's not. Books are important objects generally, but this one has great spiritual significance. And we have 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, Adavnaan's Life of Saint Columba tells us that people would take books that the saint had copied outside and carry them around when they wanted it to rain. Now, you might think on Iona, do you ever want it to stop, not 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 and it rains.
- [40:32]
B
But relics get used a lot also in a healing capacity, right?
- [40:38]
C
Yeah. So if 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 is a really pretty cross that you can see at the National Museum of Ireland Called the cross of Kong. And it's this gorgeous early 12th century cross with all of this beautiful gold work on it. And the whole thing is meant to be a reliquary. 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 was crucified on. And so here you have something that, you know, you could find anywhere in medieval Europe. You could find a reliquary with a spoiler of cross. So even in a very Irish context, you also see the same kinds of saints, cults, and some of the same attitudes towards relics of holy matter cropping up, too. So, again, I think we have to think of this as a medieval phenomenon. It's not a specifically Celtic phenomenon.
- [42:04]
B
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a big way that you encourage the cults of varying saints. You know, the Czechs do a good line in this when they're promoting the cult of St. Wegeslaus, is there's a. There are a lot of, oh, did you know that this blind person wasn't blind anymore? You know, and there is something here, I think, where people do really believe, I suppose, in the power of a pilgrimage 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 gold. Right. You're gonna be absolutely fine.
- [42:49]
C
Extra points. Yeah.
- [42:51]
B
So what is your favorite relic? Is it going to be. Because now I'm gonna have to update my list of favorite. Because I love this book of St. Columba. That's just about the most Irish thing I've ever heard in my life. Is the book that she copied being a relic. But what would it be for you?
- [43:07]
C
That's a good question. I mean, I'm a great fan of the Catholic in part because it's the earliest book we have, obviously. So it's great to just be able to see what a really early medieval Irish book would look like. That's from well before the 12th century. That's a very good one. You get this associated with other saints, too. I'm a great fan of the book of Armagh, which at various points is associated with St. Patrick and kept it at St. Patrick's Church. armoire. 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 Patrick's versions of Patrick's confessio and the ledger to Prodicus. But it also contains things like 7th century saints lives about Patrick, which you might think Patrick did not write until two centuries later. And indeed the manuscript itself is from about the ninth century, so well after St. Patrick who lives in the fifth.
- [43:59]
B
Listen, Bridget.
- [44:00]
C
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 all this material about the saint and it's got bits of the Bible in it too, which again you might say, you could look at this and say St. Patrick did not write this bit in the title. Right? But it becomes so inexorably linked to the saint and to the saints church at Armagh that it takes on a sort of larger than life presence.
- [44:51]
A
You're listening to this podcast, so I know you've got a curious mind. Here's a helpful fact you might not know yet. Drivers who switch and save with Progressive save over $900 on average. Pop over to progressive.com answer some questions and you'll get a quick quote with discounts that are easy to come by. In fact, 99% of their auto customers earn at least one discount. Visit progressive.com and see if you can enjoy a little cash back. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. National average 12 month savings by $946 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2024 and May 2025. Potential savings will vary.
- [45:40]
B
Look Bridget, through God all things are possible. Okay, so you know, who knows, A little bit of time traveling, why not, you know, okay, look at the beginning of the show I mentioned the chicken steak bite cure, which everyone at Gone Evil are huge fans of. And I think that a. 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 cockatrice and then there's the basilisk and it makes sense. If you spend all of your time being a nerd like me. I'm like, oh, yeah, word. You know, obviously you're going to just slap a chicken anus on that. You'll be fine. Don't. Don't worry about it. But I do think that this is an important point, because now we really do see sciences and magic at total opposites of a spectrum, or indeed, religion and science at opposite ends of a spectrum. But that's an incredibly modern phenomena.
- [47:17]
C
Yes, I suspect it's more of a sort of interchangeable series of Venn 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 similarly, some people might think it works because God is acting through that chicken. Thank you. 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 from medieval Wales. You can find it from England as well. Well, so this is clearly traveling between traditions, this idea that strapping the anus of a chicken to your plague bubo or your snake bite or some sort of wound is going to draw out the poison. But there's also one in 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, juice of rue and coriander and wild celery and greater plantain, and you mix that up with wine and water, and you do this while saying the paternoster. So here you're saying your Latin prayer, 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 this cure, which part of this do they think is healing them? Is it the drink? Is it the process of gathering the stuff to put in the drink? Is it saying the Pater Noster? Is it all of these combined? But clearly this is not incompatible with religion. It's something you do as part of saying the paternoster 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 says a prayer privately, or asks the rest of their community to help them pray on this person's behalf. But this, in most cases isn't going to stop them from also seeking medical attention in a hospital, right?
- [50:01]
B
Absolutely.
- [50:03]
C
These things can go together.
- [50:04]
B
A big part of the book that I really liked you wrote about the physicians of Mudbai. Can you tell us a little bit about them? Who were they?
- [50:11]
C
So these are the physicians or doctors of Mithvai, who are a family of Welsh physicians to whom a lot of later Welsh medical material is attributed. And they at least supposedly descended from this guy named Hrihuajlan, the physician who was the sort of chief physician to Fryscalig, the Prince of Dehebarth, just in southern Wales in the 13th century. And you get all of these traditions claiming that Frihwa San had a number of sons, often named Cadogan, Gruffydd and Aenian, who carried on and spread his medical teachings. And you get people who say they belong to this 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 were still sort of only existed in editions that linked them to these guys. They have been re edited, largely thanks to the work of Diana Luft recently, and are available open access online. If you want to go read more about chickens and science. 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 in all sorts of languages, some of which you could trace back to people like Galen, some of which you could trace back to people like Avicenna. So this, again is a very international tradition, but it does take on this sort of local identity in at least a bit of Carmarthenshire.
- [52:00]
B
I love that. Listen, Wales is as much a part of the world as anywhere else. It's very important. Yeah. But I do think that that is a really important point, because there is this false tendency 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.
- [52:22]
C
There is some great examples from 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 sort of otherworldly physician who turns up in some of the literary traditions. But you will also get them attributed to people like Galen and Hippocrates, and even to people like Avicenna, the great medieval medical writer coming out of the Islamic world, who quickly gets translated into and adapted into other languages around the Mediterranean and into Europe.
- [53:00]
B
All right, Brigid, we've come to a very important point, and I'm going to ask you a huge favor. Can you give me a medieval hangover cure?
- [53:11]
C
These are great.
- [53:11]
B
Not for use now. Okay, look, I am a professional, but on a Saturday morning, I could use it.
- [53:19]
C
No. So I could, in fact, give you sort of 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 before you go out, drink an eggshell full of the juice of betony. Just a plant. Oh, no, you've gone out. You've had a bit too much. You forgot your eggshell of betony. But you need to sober up quickly now and drive home.
- [53:44]
B
Please do not do this.
- [53:45]
C
Please do not drive home, but you need to sober up quickly. You can crush up some saffron with spring water and drink that and that quicksilver you up. And finally, you failed to do both of these things. You've had a very nice night out, but you have woken up the next day and you are hungover. 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 medieval Welsh 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. Week. You're gonna leave it there for eight days.
- [54:23]
B
Come on.
- [54:24]
C
How hungover are we, really? Very honestly. Then you're gonna make sort of a porridge. You're gonna boil some oats until they're good and boiled and thick, and then you're gonna wash the bandage off your head using this oat mixture. And then you repeat this until the headache goes.
- [54:40]
B
So practical, like, 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, though about one of my very favorite things, which is the use of zodiac things in medieval medicine in particular. 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?
- [55:24]
C
For sure, yeah. So the idea of the zodiac man 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 Wales 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. And 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 susceptive 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 Greco Roman star signs at least brought in the medieval West. And you can tell, we don't always necessarily know exactly which manuscripts of which text somebody is reading and translating into, say, Welsh or Irish at a particular time. But you can tell that they're clearly looking at diagrams in other books, they're talking to other people, they're reading things in a variety of languages, be that Welsh, Irish, French, Middle English, Latin, or even further afield than that. You do sometimes get fun little horoscopes too, in text texts. Again, I'm not sure if you didn't know that this horoscope was from medieval Wales. I don't think there's anything in it to specifically say this is a medieval Welsh horoscope. Indeed, you probably could make the prose sound a little bit more modern and stick it in the newspaper and someone who would read it today. But there's a great Welsh text on astrology called the Lever Natiriaet the book of Nature, sort of book of disposition, which lists all of the. The different signs and tells you various things about the personality, life expectancy, health, career of people born under signs, and it normally segregates it by gender. So if you are 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 until you turn 36. Things are going to start getting better for you.
- [58:01]
B
Oh, that's helpful. I like that.
- [58:03]
C
Okay.
- [58:03]
B
Yeah.
- [58:03]
C
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. Sometimes they're weirdly specific. You're going 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 the 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, but 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.
- [58:40]
B
Oh, I love that. It's the same as sort of the newspaper horoscopes that you see where just say a general platitude. And I think it will be fine not to make everyone sad about the Sunday horoscope. Sorry, everyone, Sorry.
- [58:54]
C
But indeed. And I suspect attitudes towards this, much like attitudes towards modern horoscopes, vary 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 born under this star sign, so 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 a different set of horoscope descriptions better, or they'll look at it and go, this is silly. So I'm sure there's great variety in the past, just like today.
- [59:33]
B
Well, speaking of great variety in the past, I think one of the big Things that we do now 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. Would 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?
- [60:12]
C
Certainly. I think you see this a lot in various authorial attitudes towards the supernatural and the otherworldly in 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 everyman, 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 every one 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 medicine. Are they doing the exact same things? Are they doing something different? So we have to remember again that our sources really bias us to elite literary culture. But with that in mind, you get a lot of different ideas about what magical characters are and what magical creatures and otherworldly beings in literature are. So, for example, to go back to some of our druids and demons and St. Patrick and things, you have some. You've got these early 7th century texts where your wizard characters are evil, although not irredeemably so. Some of them can convert or they can help show their power to other people in later texts. Some of them become very helpful, though. So there's one fabulous kind of tradition that you get, represented by a series of texts where King Concaver of Ulster has been injured in battle. He's got this little ball stuck in his head. Bit of a digression, but if you need to know, this ball is made out of the calcified brains of one of his enemies, that someone has like concentrated 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 bleed to death and die. And this, this whole thing is set in the pre Christian past. 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 druid tells him, because this druid has divine knowledge or has been divinely inspired. The druid tells him that this is all happening because Christ is being crucified. And conqueror, who at this point we conjecture has never heard who Christ is, is so taken by this and feels such an emotional response that he gets up to go fight those people responsible and save Christ. And as a result, the ball falls out of his head, he bleeds 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 go to have it.
- [63:22]
B
Okay.
- [63:24]
C
And so, you know, you can have these characters who, on the one hand, in a 7th century saint's life, Patrick has to fight the druids or the wizards and then on the other hand become these divinely inspired conduits for what in a medieval context, you would call natural grace. Right? So the idea that even in the pagan past, or even in places where the news of Christ has 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 natural grace, through the grace of God, the druid 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 this shower of blood.
- [64:08]
B
I absolutely love this because I'm not quite sure what to make of it, because on the 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 druidic past? Right. You know, say, oh, well, we're not so bad. Some druids were pretty all right. Or is it just a cracking story, you know, about being a pretty good person?
- [64:38]
C
It's probably some combination, honestly. You get this too, about otherworldly characters. So characters from the otherworld 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 some where you have these characters from 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 Adam's sin and they are these sort of unfallen humans or sort of pseudo angelic beings who exist to show how this paradisical, almost allegorical otherworld 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 sinned originally, and they live in this kind of paradise still. And they can help you spiritually reach the otherworld. 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 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 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.
- [66:16]
B
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 believe. 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.
- [66:42]
C
Great, I'm glad.
- [66:43]
B
Bridget, thank you so much for coming on today to talk to us. It's just been an absolute delight.
- [66:49]
C
Thank you very much for having me on.
- [66:52]
B
Thanks to Dr. Brigid Ehrmantraut and to you for listening to Gone Medieval from History hit. If you've enjoyed our chat today, there are so many more magical episodes in the Gone Medieval archive, 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 original TV documentaries, including my recent film the Dead of Winter, Medieval Ghost stories and ad free podcasts by signing up@historyhit.com subscriptions. Remember, you can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.
- [68:02]
A
You're listening to this podcast, so I know you've got a curious mind. Here's a helpful fact you might not know yet. Drivers who switch and save with Progressive save over $900 on average. Pop over to progressive.com, answer some questions, and you'll get a quick quote with discounts that are easy to come by. In fact, 99% of their auto customers earn at least one discount. Visit progressive.com and see if you can enjoy a little cash back. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates national average 12 month savings by $946 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2024 and May 2025. Potential savings will vary. It's tax season, and at LifeLock we know you're tired of numbers, but here's a big one you need to hear. Billions. That's the amount of money in refunds the IRS has flagged for possible identity fraud. Now here's another big number. 100 million. That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, we'll fix it.
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C
Guaranteed.
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A
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B
Terms apply.