A Comforting Enchantment
How we Took the Magic out of Agriculture, and Why we Should Bring it Back
If your garden is infested with caterpillars, here is a tip: have a menstruating woman do three laps around your field, barefoot and with her hair down. This neat little trick will make those garden pests curl up die.1
Or at least, so goes the famous advice of 1st century AD Roman agronomist Columella. While I cannot independently confirm the validity of the ritual, it is often repeated in Roman sources.
Their Farm Was the World
Ancient peoples lived by the fruits of the field, in a world imbued with magic; naturally, their farms became magical places. We now live in a world industrialized and disenchanted, antithetical to theirs. Their outlook is suitably alien, yet it should not be dismissed as merely irrational. It was, in fact, a reasonable reaction to the world as they experienced it, a holistic world yet to be segmented and categorized, easy for them to see yet near impossible for us to grasp.
Any discussion of historical magic must confront its imprecise definition, a contentious and longstanding sociological problem. Scholars have spilt gallons of ink on this issue since James Frazer’s first attempt at the topic in his 1890 study, “The Golden Bough.” Was ancient magic primitive science, folk religion, ritual power, sympathetic thought, or invocation of spirits? All of these or none? Is magic even a meaningful category?
To dodge these issues, I have limited my scope to “folk magic,” a set of practical magical practices most would easily recognize as magic today. It is an artificial category; many of these practices would have been categorized as “religion” or “science” by folk magicians. Yet these distinctions are always blurry, so we can at least start with category that is meaningful to us, if not them.
A Seed of Enchantment
Our ancestors weren’t gullible or foolish, transfixed by superstitious charms and the mumblings of charlatan magicians. They were salt-of-the-earth farmers, intimately engaged with the land and its workings. They knew what worked. In the words of Frazer: “what we call truth is only the hypothesis which is found to work best.”2 If you cast a spell for a good harvest, and a good harvest comes, it is only natural to conclude its efficacy.
That assumes magic as a distinct practice, layered on top of agriculture. But what if, in its earliest form, agricultural and magical practices were inextricably linked?
Among the first to suggest this was folklorist, poet, and health enthusiast Lewis Dayton Burdick, a frequent contributor to the Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette. There, his articles on “The Economical [sic] and Political Significance of Our Christmas Anniversary” and “The Goat in Mystic Rites and Medicine” ran alongside ads for “peptogenic milk powder” and a survey of the medicinal value of goose oil.3
In 1905 he published a little-known folkloric text, “Magic and Husbandry; the Folk-Lore of Agriculture,” where he posits that the origins of agriculture lie with with magical burial rights. Though his connections between “dungy” gods and fertilizer development or “primitive” human sacrifice and seed planting might not hold up to scrutiny, Burdick did preserve a multitude of agro-magical practices across history.4
His thesis, if adjusted and refined, also holds true; for it is not that agriculture and magic had common origins, but rather that premodern peoples didn’t share our compartmentalized worldview.
In his seminal (and extensive) ethnographic study, “Coral Gardens and Their Magic,” anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski came to a similar conclusion. While examining the farming practices of the Polynesian Trobriand Islander society he found that, for them, even the simple act of breaking soil for planting was cause for magical incantation. As classicist and farmer M.D. Usher explained, their farms became “intricate networks of spatial and linguistic artistry that encompassed, and in turn informed, their society’s entire worldview.”5
Robert Garland put it more simply in his survey of common life in the ancient world:
“There would have been something magical about farming in this period…farmers at the time would have sensed only very dimly the connection between cause and effect. Thus, all actions they performed were accompanied by ritual in order to secure the favor of the gods or, more likely, the spirits that were perceived as influencing natural events.”6
Evidence for these rituals is manifold, for as soon as a society develops writing, they wrote about their agrarian rituals.
The earliest fragments of written Chinese are the “oracle bones” of the Shang dynasty, dated as early as BCE 1200. Oxen scapulae and turtle plastrons were inscribed with questions, frequently concerning crop yield or proper planting time, then pressed with hot metal rods until cracking; the cracks were then used to divine the answers.7
Contemporary Egyptians worshiped Osiris as an agricultural deity. As a god who died, was buried, and resurrected, stood in for the cycle of grains grown, cut down, and buried for renewal each year.8 This equivalency of the cycle of rebirth to that of the crop cycle was a powerful metaphor, mirrored in the Greek Eleusinian mystery religion.
Later on, in the 8th century BCE, the poet Hesiod wrote “Works and Days,” one of the earliest works of Greek poetry. With it he achieved every brother’s dream: the poem, in which he lambasts his “foolish,” deadbeat brother Perses, is still read millennia later. Hesiod advises him on proper farm management, insisting that he pay careful attention to the movement of heavenly bodies and make frequent offerings and supplications to the gods.
While these early techniques might be categorized as magical if practiced today, they certainly weren’t considered so then: religion and magic were still yet to bifurcate.
Roman Anxieties
Let us turn, then, to the Romans, who had a less comfortable relationship with magic. Indeed, in the “Twelve Tables” law code of the 5th century BCE, the early Republic prohibited the use of magic to destroy a neighbors crop—an anxiety that carried over into the witch trials, and spawned an entire subgenre of apotropaic agro-magic.
The development of this magical anxiety is charted in the Roman agronomic tradition, as outlined in by Britta Ager’s excellent thesis: “Roman Agricultural Magic.”
Cato the Elder, the earliest Roman agronomist, shared Hesiod’s holistic worldview in his “De Agri Cultura.” He saw no distinction between agro-magical ritual and responsible farm operations. Indeed, Cato’s writing was sometimes too all-encompassing, and he often struggled to stay on topic. In his “farming” manual he included his recipe for fish sauce and an entire chapter extoling the health benefits of cabbage.
Later agronomists like Varro and Columella were more self-conscious of their magical inclusions, doubting and maligning these “peasant superstitions.” Yet, despite their trepidation, they included a plethora of agro-magical practices, including, Agar writes:
“Spells to promote the growth of seeds and crops, to avert mildew and sickness, to cure crop and animal disease when it occurs, to avert pests and storms, to affect the offspring of animals and the produce of trees and vines, to protect the harvest once it is gathered, to avoid weeds, kill bugs, and generally to smooth the farmer’s troubles through the year.”9
Weather was the foremost concern, vital to the harvest yet ungovernable by man. I must again emphasize the non-judgmental outlook. It is precisely because of this deep, experiential awareness that we should not automatically discount their prescriptions: just because it is “magic” doesn’t mean it is wrong. Ancient “magical” weather signs, from the flight of birds and retreat of bees to the color of the sky, are now acknowledged meteorological phenomena. Their astrological planting calendars, while less verifiable, had incredible staying power, originating (so the legend goes) with the ancient Chaldeans, and lasting well into 19th-century America.10
They had prayers, incantations, choral chants, sacred ceremonies for preparing the ground, and ritual hyena-skin containers for seed storage.11 Relatable to any fruit-grower is the spell forcing a lazy tree to produce fruit: the farmer should approach the offending tree, axe in hand, angry and ready to chop before an accomplice arrives last minute and talks him out of it. The tree, duly spooked, was said to produce soon after.12
Despite the apparent ubiquity of such rituals, there were eruptions of popular resentment against (alleged) users of them. Naturalist Pliny the Elder related the story of C. Furius Cresimus. A freedman with a small farm, Cresimus’ bountiful harvest attracted the jealousy of his neighbors who accused him of illegal magical practices. Cresimus beat the charges, but this event illustrates how magic could be used as a tool of social marginalization.13
Medieval Metamorphosis
Then along came Christianity, and with it a reimagining of magic and its mechanisms. What were once harmless, if foolish, superstitions became demonic remnants of a retrograde paganism. The transition was slow—early Christian historian Julius Africanus recommended crop magic in his writings—but, eventually, the ascendant church hierarchy distanced itself from magical practice.14
Certain rituals were overtaken by the new, increasingly “Catholic” religious paradigm, either through official avenues (e.g., priest’s field blessings and “Rogation” processions to protect wheat against disease) or unofficial ones (e.g., peasants stealing the eucharist and sprinkling it on the fields for a bountiful harvest).15
Yet agro-magical folk beliefs also survived outside the Christian spiritual paradigm. Some have been preserved in writing, including spells to recover lost cattle preserved among the 10th century Old English “metrical charms.”16 But most folk practitioners were illiterate, their beliefs preserved only in polemics. 9th century bishop Agobard of Lyons, for example, admonished his diocese for their heretical insistence that weather magicians collaborated with spirits inhabiting the sky kingdom “Magonia”—who, incidentally, travelled the skies in flying ships—to steal their crops.17
In the popular imagination, magical spirits had no definite morality. The fairies or fey-folk that inhabited the fields and forests were mischievous, between good and evil like the daemons of old, demanding offerings to ensure they didn’t sabotage the homestead with their shenanigans.18
There were, however, evil “witches,” and while inquisitors thought all magicians to be demonic, most peasants felt differently. Indeed, it was the responsibility of good magicians to combat the evil, and to protect the harvest.
Take Carlo Ginzburg’s account of the 16th-century Friulian Benandanti, a north Italian folk-cult illuminated in inquisition records. These cultists had vivid out-of-body experiences in which they, armed with fennel stalks, fought evil sorghum brandishing witches. These battles, the Benandanti said, secured the harvest against occult sabotage. 19
A similar account came out of Livonia (modern Estonia), with the heresy trial of Thiess of Kaltenbrun. Thiess was a self-proclaimed werewolf who claimed to have traveled to hell, there fighting demons and witches to reclaim the barley, rye, and animals they stole and, again, ensure a bountiful harvest.20
The church, of course, didn’t differentiate good and evil magic; all magicians were servants of the devil, and thousands of them were killed in the witch trials.
American Remix and Magic’s Last Gasp
This same flat view of all magic as demonic persisted into the new colonies in America. Yet, in the “New World,” this couldn’t be further from the truth: folk magic there was staggeringly diverse, drawing from traditions of Hoodoo, Brujeria, Pow-Wow, Water Witching, planting signs, Southern Cunning, Native American and African traditional religion, and folk Christianity, all of which were deeply agrarian.21
Among the most prominent of these was the aforementioned Pow-Wow, a system formalized in John George Hohman’s “Pow-Wows; or, Long Lost Friend.” First printed in German in the same chapbook format as Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” this Pennsylvania Dutch spell book is even more scatterbrained than “De Agri Cultura.”
“Long Lost Friend” caters to every concern a Pennsylvania yeoman might have. There are recipes for beer and fish bait, instructions on making a divining wand, a list of the unluckiest days of the year, a charm to prevent guns from rust, and a catalogue of cures for everything from toothaches to stomach ulcers. These cures were so well renowned that George Washington paid for one of his retinue to receive treatment from a Pow-Wow doctor.22
Hohman was also sure to cover farm concerns, with charms to make your chickens lay and protect wheat from disease, as well as the following “Good Remedy for The Bots in Horses:”
“Every time you use this, you must stroke the horse down with the hand three times, and lead it about three times holding its head toward the sun, saying: ‘The Holy One saith: Joseph passed over a field and there he found three small worms; the one being black, another being brown, and the third being red; thou shalt die and be dead.’”23
The Pow-Wow practitioner held the holistic view of Hesiod and Cato, long abandoned by the literate classes. This agrarian outlook persisted unwritten for centurie—passed down in folktales, charms, and recipes—in villages across Europe and the Americas.
It seems to be the nature of such rural communities to foster these beliefs—and the nature of the city to break them. In their study of rural Stringtown, Illinois, sociologists Herbert Passin and John Bennet recorded how folk beliefs persevered well into the 1930s were broken by the encroachment of cosmopolitan thinking; a once comprehensive system of planting signs became scattered and disorganized.24
Reimagining Re-enchantment
Over the last 50 years, the internet has thoroughly metropolitanized American culture and industrialized global agriculture has alienated us from the land. While disenchantment is still incomplete—water dowsing and other ancestral practices linger in fragmented traditions and farmers almanacs—we have lost the magical holism of our ancestors.
But perhaps there is something we can learn from it.
That is not so suggest that we fall into vulgar, unexamined superstition. Becoming Pow-Wow doctors will do us no good. Instead, we need a re-enchantment on our own terms, a new, earnest, post-postmodern folk tradition.
So, then, what is worth saving?
It is their fearlessness, their dauntless conviction that, even in the face of a chaotic and unpredictable world, individuals can alter reality. All the amenities and empty comforts of modernity cannot supply the peace and certitude that such brash, unrepentant magical thought might bring.
A bit of magic might help us feel better.
Fans of Terra Preta might also enjoy my Rooted in St. Louis column in Washington University in St. Louis’ Student Life
Ager, p. 53
Frazer
Hygienic and Dietic Gazette, Vol. 28
Burdick, 27-29
Usher, p. 15
Garland, Lecture 2
Bary, Bloom; 8, 11-12
Ziegler, p. 71
Ager, p. 50
Ibid, p. 71
Ibid, p. 147
Ibid, p. 188
Natural History, 18.41-43
Kieckhefer, p. 41
Ibid, p. 58
Rider, p. 320
Medievalists.net
Kieckhefer, p. 46
Ibid, p. 53
Ginzberg, p. 1, 3, 6, 22, 77
Ibid, p. 29
Hedera, p. 24
Hygienic and Dietic Gazette, Vol. 28
Hohman
Passin, Bennet; 98- 106
Works Cited
Ager, Britta K. “Roman Agricultural Magic,” 2010.
“A Glimpse into the Ancient Practice of Water Witching.” Modern Farmer, October 2, 2018. https://modernfarmer.com/2014/07/water-new-gold/.
Burdick, Lewis Dayton. Magic and Husbandry, the Folk-Lore of Agriculture; Rites, Ceremonies, Customs, and Beliefs Connected with Pastoral Life and the Cultivation of the Soil; with Breeding and the Care of Cattle; with Fruit-Growing, Bees, and Fowls. Binghamton, N.Y.: The Otseningo publishing co. , 1905.
Burdick, Lewis Dayton. “Primary Economical and Political Signifigance of Our Christmas Anniversary .” Heigenic and Dietetic Digest 28, 1912.
Burdick, Lewis Dayton. “The Goat in Mystic Rights and Medicine.” Heigenic and Dietetic Digest 28, 1912.
Garland, Robert. The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World. Chantilly, VA: Teaching Co., 2012.
Ginzburg, Carlo. The Night Battles. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.
Hedera, Via. Folkloric American Witchcraft and the Multicultural Experience: A Crucible at the Crossroads. Winchester, UK: Moon Books, 2021.
Hesiod. The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Works and Days. Cambridge, MA.,Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1914.
Hohman, John. John George Hohman's Pow-Wows; Or, Long Lost Friend A Collection Of Mysterious And Invaluable Arts And Remedies, For Man As Well As Animals. With Many Proofs, 1820. Retrieved from sacredtexts.com
Kieckhefer, Richard. Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Medievalists.net. “Farming with Charms in the Middle Ages.” Medievalists.net, June 28, 2020. https://www.medievalists.net/2020/06/farming-with-charms-in-the-middle-ages/.
Mosko, Mark. “Malinowski’s Magical Puzzles.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 1 (2014): 1–47. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau4.1.001.
Pliny the Elder. The Natural History. John Bostock, M.D., F.R.S. H.T. Riley, Esq., B.A. London. Taylor and Francis, Red Lion Court, Fleet Street. 1855.
Passin, Herbert, and John W. Bennett. “Changing Agricultural Magic in Southern Illinois: A Systematic Analysis of Folk-Urban Transition.” Social Forces 22, no. 1 (1943): 98–106. https://doi.org/10.2307/2571461.
Rider, Catherine. “Common Magic.” Chapter. In The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West: From Antiquity to the Present, edited by David J. Collins, S. J., 303–31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. doi:10.1017/CHO9781139043021.015.
Sebald, Hans. “Franconian Witchcraft: The Demise of a Folk Magic.” Anthropological Quarterly 53, no. 3 (1980): 173–87. https://doi.org/10.2307/3317824.
Sources of Chinese Tradition, compiled by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 8, 11-12. © 1999 Columbia University Press.
Usher, M. D. Plato's Pigs and Other Ruminations: Ancient Guides to Living with Nature. Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Ziegler, Grace M. “Agricultural Magic.” The Scientific Monthly 27, no. 1 (1928): 69–76. http://www.jstor.org/stable/7967.