Subjective Experience and the Practice of Medieval Ritual Magic
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft June 1, 2012 Frank Klaassen
Modern psychological conditioning and ethnographic studies of contemporary magic can illuminate how medieval ritual magic affected its practitioners. A classroom experiment on dream divination, combined with analysis of primary medieval magical texts, suggests that these rituals produced genuine subjective experiences in practitioners. Understanding these experiences as psychologically conditioned phenomena allows greater sympathy with medieval copyists and practitioners and reveals subtle organizational patterns in the texts themselves.