Looking at attitudes to magic and transformation in the Middle Ages, before the 13th century in particular, the scholarly implication seems to be that these beliefs are discredited and therefore they can be studied as something very much in the past, cut off from us by the Enlightenment and the advances of modern scientific understanding.
‘We’ don’t believe this stuff anymore. Those medieval figures who argued that transformation was impossible were obviously ‘well ahead of their time’.
The recent coverage of the American election should qualify that attitude and raise questions about who that ‘we’ excludes. What do 'we' believe?
(Ignore the ignorance behind the claims that we’d be better off as ‘medieval peasants’ or that there is a pure ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ethnicity.)
So far, I’ve read reports in the mainstream papers that in America there are people who believe that hurricanes can be ‘weaponised’, to the point where meteorologists have received death threats. One prominent politician is reported to not only not believe in vaccines, but to believe he suffered memory loss because a worm eat part of his brain and died inside it. Another is reported to have claimed to have been attacked by a demon while he slept, and was left scratched and bleeding after the assault.
The paper reported the last two as objective facts, without comment.
This is the twenty first century.
And yes, you can buy spell books on Amazon and their buyers seem to be upset if the spells don’t work. You can hire people to cast love spells for you to enchant the object of your desire. You can even pay for transformation spells.
And this is the twenty first century.
If there is a twenty fifth, will historians of these times, working through the archives, dismiss beliefs like these as fringe lunacy, or take it as mainstream belief?
What will they say ‘they believed’?
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