In this weeks reading, Rachel forgets all about the fanciful, dark, and magical adventure this book is supposed to be as she becomes very confused and frustrated at the arguments and opinions of various authors in the text. First of all, Burchard of Worms somehow ends up saying something about how magical acts cannot happen directly on the body, with no other sources but some examples where that thing doesn't happen, none of which appear to actually say it's impossible. Then, Ralph of Coggeshall implies near the end of his work that's it's better to renounce what you believe in out of fear of death instead of nobly standing your ground, but only when you're not Christian or Jesus himself. Finally, in chapter 3 Thomas Aquinas truly embodies the spirit of modern argumentative reading by using questionable sources and manipulative logic to ultimately create something genuinely boring and hard to read.
As for my opinion on Burchard's text, I will admit I've never actually read any of the stories he has referenced and therefore don't know for a fact that none of them explicitly related the impossibility of magical acts happening directly upon the body. However, Burchard introduces them in the context of the magical acts occurring in the soul as opposed to the body, but only that much doesn't matter because correlation does not equal causation SIR, and that is quite the leap of logic either way.
My anger towards Ralph probably stems from my deep, deep hatred of confirmation bias, of which this is a prime example. Obviously, since he, as well as many other people, believe Christianity to be the one true religion, when Christians do noble deeds it's seen as wonderful and Holy, but if someone else does something the exact same way it's seen as evil and misguided. Intolerance breeds hatred, so not cool bro.
Other than picking up a few instances of him making some major assumptions (such as the validity of his sources, but I won't go too much into that because everyone has to make that assumption to an extent), and watching him clearly play with his reasoning in a very particular way to make his point ("Planets can't affect intellect because they don't have brains" somehow doesn't seem like a very solid foundation when you're talking about MAGIC), I don't really have much to say about him because he was just so boring to try and read through his stuff that I really don't want to take the time and effort to sort through every painful detail of his painfully long text just to get even more irritated at him.
In the end, my nature as a math major who must know how to write proper logical proofs, as well as a logic puzzle aficionado, has clouded my eyes to the actual content of the material and made me unnecessarily angry at dead people not making sense because that's not a waste of my energy or anything. Now Rachel is going to go take some ibuprofen to quell the raging headache that has spurred from reading all of that and calm herself with a nice murder mystery.
I agree that Buchard is full of fluff and nonsense, he appears to be one of those people who thinks they are right because they are an intellectual. Uncool. He is literally like "hey you look at the moon to do work? Well, do you think of Jesus while doing it? No? You must do penance." Where is his reasoning? It is gone. He must have been drinking the bad stuff in the water. All of these ordinary things you do is because you worship Satan. Wrong. Oh do you listen to crows....you fiend!
ReplyDeleteI agree with you and Courtney. (Btw, Hi guys I guess I am in your group now!)
ReplyDeleteIf someone is going to tell me that I did X & Y while Z was in the sky at 2:30 is wizardry, they better explain to me why, not just tell me I'm guilty and make me do penance. That is the same as getting pulled over by a police officer for blinking while switching lanes on a Tuesday in February during leap year is a crime, but not explaining what the danger is. Or even better, googling the ridiculous laws that people kind of forgot about it random states--such as, in my lovely homestate, one must honk their horn before passing a car, motercycle, skateboarder, ect. ( You can look up more ridiculous rules here if you'd like for any state: http://www.dumblaws.com/laws/united-states/new-jersey).
That being said, I think a blanket statement of people of this time being wary of anything that is not Christian is a little problematic because we are raised in America to be accepting of different ideas and viewpoints (which clearly is a great thing).That wasn't the social structure, so to a certain degree, I won't hold that against them. Now, they may have taken it to a whole other level with these witch trails and killings.... but that's another story.