The Position of Race and Magic in the Spanish Margins, Or the Middling of Magique in the Late Medium Aevum

The following was presented as a paper at the 44th International Medieval Congress, WMU-K-zoo, MI, 7-10 May 2009 by Francis Tobienne, Jr.

The role of magic as a bridge between science and religion during the Middle Ages reveals the subject, not the mere object of magic as a viable, intellectual pursuit. Scholars of the past have posited and asserted that magic was the largest subject in history; according to James Thomson Shotwell, “it [magic] was the science and religion combined, much of the art, and most of the mode of thinking of our race for those stretches of centuries that we so lightly term the prehistoric.” Though the position of magic has always been a privileged and contested rung in the ladder of rationality, both in history and anthropology, Richard Kieckhefer has championed that magic, “to the people of medieval Europe […] thought of it as neither irrational nor nonrational but as essentially rational.” Following this train of thought and linking it to the geographical location known as the Iberian Peninsula, magic, I argue, was in fact the underlying foundation of much scholarship and led the way toward formative philosophy as well as Spanish, religious belief during fifteenth-century Spain.

Moreover, magic, as a legitimate, intellectual pursuit was to be classified as one of the seven liberal arts. If magic was a workable, cerebral quest alongside the training of the intellect in other fields of discipline, then who were its practitioners exactly? Who were its champions?

According to Samuel M. Waxman, “great magicians were reputed to have learned their art, at Naples and Padua in Italy, at Orléans in France, but the most renowned of all were in Spain at Toledo, Seville, Cordova, and Salamanca.” Taking the following selected Spanish texts: Vida de Santa María Egipcíaca, and select works from Alfonso X, el Sabio, I will argue that Medieval Spanish Literature of the thirteenth-century toward the fifteenth century presents both the magical practitioner(s) and the miracle worker(s), which in turn, displays the myriad of ideas re: magic, Christian propagandistic elements, and the tension, or anxiety for supremacy of the human subject/mind and la gloria de la Potencia Divina [the glory of the Divine Influence]. When applied to the work of La Celestina, the efficacy of magic, as E. Sanchez asserts: “dealing with magic must of necessity allow for the fact that […] magic played a greater role in the understanding of natural phenomena than it does for the modern reader” (Hispanic Review, 481). Still, the formation of the Medieval/Modern subject as reader of culture can be traced from such examination(s), from such exploration(s).

Again, to study magic in full is to examine magic in its bifurcated existence: black, nigromancia and white, miraculum. Such dual distinctions reveal the peculiar and the liminal explanations of (un)known phenomena in fifteenth century Spanish Studies.

We begin with some illustrations taken from both the Vida and from select works of Alphonso X, el Sabio.

Vida de Santa María Egipcíaca:

On examination the didactic and heavily sermonized poem, Vida de Santa María Egipcíaca (herein, Vida), reveals the dispensation of Divine grace and makes a didactic appeal to living an obedient life. We shall begin with a brief synopsis of the poem, and then proceed to a more careful analysis taken with miraculum, the Church’s central explanation of magic via phenomena, in tow, and privileging specific occurrences of this particular phenomenon through the life of the author’s protagonist, Santa María de Egipcíaca, [“Saint Mary of Egypt”]. Cruz-Saenz suggests that the poem “exists in whole or in part in one Old Spanish and eight Old French manuscripts ranging from the first years of the thirteenth century to the fifteenth century. This particular MS is currently preserved in the Biblioteca del Escorial. The Vida can be divided into four distinct sections; first, lines 1-205 discuss the grace and mercy of God, Mary’s disillusionment with her life in her parental home, and her lascivious and lustful life there, as well as her departure to Alexandria at the age of twelve; second, lines 206-453 discuss Mary’s journeying with pilgrims to Jerusalem to which she offers her body as payment of the trip and later the miraculous impediment to her entering the Church based on Mary’s sins of lust and prostitution; third, lines 454-1218 present a transformed Mary, upon being unable to enter the Temple, Mary fixes on the image of the Virgin Mary—repents, enters the Church, buys three loaves of bread, then crosses the Jordan to spend forty years in the desert; later, she is encountered by Zozimás of the monastery of St. John, whom she knows all about thanks to a vision of the Virgin; in their meeting each of them asks for the other’s mutual blessing, which takes place; lastly, in lines 1219-1452, Mary separates from Zozimás to continue her penance as he returns to the Jordan, Mary dies and Zozimás is entrusted with her interment through the assistance of a lion, and Zozimás in some final exhortations admonishes the Church in a reflection of the penitent life of now Saint Mary.

In one particular scene, Mary is given power to walk on water and to arrive at the side of the bank where Zozimás eagerly awaited her; upon recognizing her miraculum, he notices she is dry and begins to worship her at her feet, pleading of her, a blessing. The poet suggests that before such “white” magic, it is proper for the saintliest of men to grovel and plead and recognize their status as subservient before such a craft; in short, her walking on water is a supernatural occurrence, and proceeds toward producing the performance of obeisance from Zozimás. Moreover, after having received the sacrament Mary returns to the desert charging Zozimás to come and look for her a year later alive or dead. Alas, it is to be in death—for Mary dies and the angels take her soul to heaven. Returning at the appointed time Zozimás, finds the corpse of Mary and the admonition written in letters scraped in the ground that he should bury the body (1373-78). It is with great difficulty that the frail, old Zozimás begins the task of digging the grave:

El alma es de ella sallida,
los ángeles la han recebida;
los ángeles la van levando
tan dulce son que van cantando.
Mas bien podedes esto jurar,
que el diablo no y pudi llegar.
Esta duenyaa da enxemplo
A todo omn’ que es en este sieglo. (lines 1333-40)

mas por amor d’esta María,
grant ayuda Dios le envia:
salió un leyón d’esa montanya,
a Gozimás faze companya; (lines 1385-88)

El leyón cava la tierra dura,
el santo le muestra la mesura. (lines 1397-98)
Her soul has departed from her,
the angels have received it;
the angels are carrying it
such a sweet sound as they are singing.
But one can well assure this,
That the devil was not able to come there.
This woman provides an example
to all mankind which is in this world.

But for love of this Mary,
God sends him great help:
a lion came out from that wilderness,
to Zozimás he made him company;

The lion digs the hard dirt,
the venerable one [Zozimás] shows him the correct
dimensions.

The representation of the lion as an assistant grave digger is reminiscent of the character of Christ as holding the title, “The Lion of Judah,” and again this naming plays into the theology of the poet as writer and orchestrator of Church authority. Further, God as provider even in death is an echoing theme throughout this poem; moreover, God’s power over a beast of prey, ordering it to co-exist with mankind is nothing shy of a miraculum. Evidently, if the Church relied on miracula to express the explanation of phenomena, and this is distinguished from say, other “arts” because of the source of the dispensation, then the Vida belongs to this example. The text privileges a worldly woman who enjoys the favor of God as the result of her austerities. In creating a story such as our poet has done where the beauty of a woman, itself a type of power, although presented as more of a trap than anything else, is trumped by an inner beauty that excels via God’s method of penance, the poet is arguing that God, who can forgive anyone, is playing for keeps when it comes to the soul. Mary of Egypt’s soul departs, but not until she is fully penitent and has lived out her penance with obedience. The ending of the poem returns in part to the sermonizing charge at the beginning, and utilizes the character of Zozimás, the venerable monk to do so. Zozimás and the lion return to the Monastery of St. John:

Don Gozimás comienca a fablar,
non se quiso más çelar;
de la Egipçiana que non se le olvida,
bien les contó toda su vida; (1423-26)

Don Zozimás began to tell the story,
he did not wish to hide it anymore;
of the Egyptian woman whom he did not forget,
told well all of her life.

These parts of the last 30 or so lines capture the essence of Mary’s purposeful life; i.e. her exemplary life applied to all, and that we would do well to remember the Saint because: “…ella ruegue al Criador / con qui ella hobo grant amor,” [“she prays to the Creator / for whom she had great love”] (1443-45). The poem’s final exhortation, toward a mimetic, penitent life, is an entreaty from Zozimás, the Church and of course the voice of God, wherein sin is regarded as a separator and God’s conditions for repentance are rewarded, even in death. As we conclude our analysis on the Vida, Jennifer M. Corry reiterates her position concerning the interpretation of magic along the lines of Church subjectivity, namely that which pertains to miracula. She states, “The Church believed that it had to compete with magical practice and as a result, created its own counterbalance of Christian ‘magic’” (Perceptions 137). She positions her explanation of Church authority concerning such a poem as the Vida and its saintly protagonist as a didactic example wherein, “the Church was able to suggest the immensity of God’s power,” as well as suppress and downplay the role of a woman’s sexuality by suggesting: “She [Mary] must lose her sexuality and definition as a woman in order to qualify for sainthood under the aegis of the masculine God” (138).

Shifting toward Alfonso X, we discuss a life, Las Siete Partidas (selections) and el Lapidario:

Alfonso X (1221-1284), known as el Sabio because of his rigorous attempts to bring Spain into an informed, cultural sphere of learning, was king of Castile-León in the third quarter of his life. He held extensive literary activities and in particular, his adoption of Roman Civil Law, to thirteenth century Spain in Las Siete Partidas (herein, Partidas). As one critic has noted, “He had many scholars in his traveling court, and he was an active participant in their writing and editing.” Further, Alfonso aligned himself with those scholars who were well-versed on Roman law, which prepared the king for his understanding to assemble a uniform code for his lands. The work—known as Las Siete Partidas, or the “Seven-Part Code” was in part responsible for an ethic of behavior describing the way the human future should look like, as opposed to the behavior described in the Chronicles. Among his other important works are his Crόnica General, a history of Spain from the beginnings to the thirteenth century, and the Grande y General Estoria, an incomplete attempt to describe his history of the world from creation to the time of St. Anne. Further, Alfonso X compiled a Lapidario, a Libro de las Formas y Imagenes and a book on Astrology, El Libro Cumplido en los Indizios de las Estrellas. His own literary output consists of poems to the Virgin Mary: Cantigas de Santa María. Still, how is it exactly that such a king and his court was able to write in the vernacular tongue and privilege its syntax as a worthy language of intelligent and discursive, literary form?

Historically, the scholars that were invited to the court of Alfonso X, wrote in the Castilian tongue, and by regularizing the syntax, made in the process a literary language. The Partidas as we have already mentioned were in part based on Roman Civil Law, and provided codes on manners, morals, the concept of the king and his people as an universitas, or union (corporation of sorts), within which the king existed as agent of both God and the people. Enduring a Moorish uprising in 1264, Alfonso, stimulated his cultural vita in the latter part of the thirteenth century, relying on l'histoire commander son passé. Although he may have been considered learned, wise, and to some extent a progressive intellectual, Alfonso was a poor politician; his focus on learning was unquestionable, but his ambitions to become Holy Roman Emperor were too self-seeking and locally, counter-intuitive with respect to any national unification. He advanced the existing schools of both Seville and Salamanca, and provided a tolerant atmosphere for both Muslim and Jewish cultural existence. Such cultural tolerance did not last as the pogroms of 1391 demonstrate. In Castille the laws of 1412 confined Jews to ghettos and regulated their dress. Similar legislation was passed in Aragon, and the final expulsion of the Jews came in 1492—beginning with the Edict of Expulsion of the Jews, 29 April 1492. George D. Greenia in her review of, “The Lapidary of King Alfonso X the Learned by Ingrid Bahler” suggests, “Alfonso X was certainly one of the great monarchs of his age and an independent scholar who enjoyed the means to turn the fruits of his research pastimes into luxury objects of conspicuous consumption” (791). Regardless of Alfonso’s motives for spreading knowledge and the “texture of the medieval world, where concrete reality and fantasy have equal standing and mix freely,” Greenia reaffirms, rather than discredits, such a time period in which the ambiguities of belief and belief systems (including magic) were able to co-exist. What is more, the more detailed an explanation of the supernatural there was, the less credible it seemed. Alfonso’s interests as king and curious intellectual went hand-in-hand, and his support of Arabic translations into Castilian was to him a worthwhile investment. The Lapidario is a good example of such a work based on classical sources. It contains a list of almost 500 stones, each with accompanying signs of the zodiac, assorted stars, letters of the alphabet and other “pertinent” information. Further, it relies on Ptolemy’s astrological treatise, the Almagest. Alfonso had also created his own astronomical texts and charts based on the meridian of Toledo. Greenia asserts:

The scientific lore of the Middle Ages is all too often bypassed now as foolish
speculation, yet it has a great deal to teach us about the conscientious systematization of natural history, the conceptual architecture that supported a sophisticated world view, and the continuity of natural white magic (including geology, medicine, astrology and casting horoscopes) with black magic and demonology. (791)

Such an analysis suggests that Alfonso X, though conflating myth and fact and knotting together astrology and folklore, may have still produced or rather, commissioned, “smartly commodified cultural goods that would impress both his unlettered countrymen and learned diplomats from abroad” (791). Here, the king privileges his role as educator of his eclectic people (Christians, Muslims and Jews), and applies such intellectual energy toward the fashioning of his Lapidario.
The Lapidario of Alfonso X which was begun in 1250 and completed in 1270, opens with “Del Signo De Aries,” [“The sign of Aries”] (Lapidario 13) and involves the “piedra a que llaman magnitat en caldeo y en arabigo, y en latin magnetes, y en lenguaje castellano aymant,” [“rock or stone called magnitat in Chaldean and in Arabic, and in Latin magnetes, and in the Castillian tongue Imán”] (13). Moreover, the remainder of the text is sectioned by the remaining 11 zodiac signs. There are too many stones to list which have properties than can heal, kill, provide the love, or the lust of a woman, produce good[s] or maleficium. Some stones appeared only at specific moments of planetary alignments and in the sea; one such example is a stone associated with Saturn and the sign of Aquarius. It is only discovered when the sea is heavily undulated, tumultuous and unsettled. Alfonso notes, “Hay en ella una virtud muy mala: que si la mira alguno cuando Saturno esta bajo tierra, ciega, y mirandola mientras esta la estrella sobre tierra, no hace mal,” [“There is in this stone a very harmful power: that if someone should look at it while Saturn is under the Earth, is blinded, and observing it [the stone] when the star is above the Earth, no harm will come”] (224). Such belief in the rising and setting of planets dictated a symbiotic link to one’s birth and Saturn is held, in astrological terms, as a planetary birth charter. Though the Lapidario provides a look into the scholarly interest regarding Astrology and Astronomy, Alfonso X took it upon himself to extend such academic and intellectual zeal into a codified representation for a civil Spanish society. The emergence of Las Siete Partidas is the result of such attempted “codification.”

In his massive Las Siete Partidas (c.a.1256-65; herein, Partidas), an attempt at literary exchange involving a code of manners and socio-political synergy, albeit a biased one as we shall soon note, Alfonso X in title I to his first Partida opens with:

A Servicio de Dios, e a pro communal delas gentes fazemos este libro, segun que mostramos enel comienço del. E partimos lo en siete partes, en la manera que diximos de suso: porque los que leyessen, fallassen ay todas las cosas cumplidas, e ciertas, para aprovechar se dellas. (I.3r)

We make this book for the service of God and the common benefit of nations, as we have shown in its beginning. And we divide it into Seven Parts, in the manner which we have mentioned above, in order that those who read it may find therein all things complete and certain, in order to be able to profit by them.
And so begins the opening to the first volume or Partida, which is comprised of XXIV Titulos, or “titles;” each title contains varying numbers of laws. The first three titles concern themselves with what the laws are, in what manner and manners are these laws to be observed beginning with the Holy Trinity and the Catholic Faith. The first Partida deals with Church doctrine as well as the behavior of the clergy and the structure and the democracy of Church hierarchy. The second Partida concerns the king’s behavior and his ability to add laws. In this sense the king is not above the statutes, but surely not beneath them. What concerns us here is how the community or people are to behave accordingly and civilly with one another; these are to be found in Partida II, titles XII-XIII respectively. In this second Partida then Alfonso continues to engage in the issue of war and how to handle one’s enemies, or prisoners of war (POWs), while Partida III deals with legal procedures, the roles of lawyers, oaths, evidence, judgment, concluding with property and possession. The fourth Partida deals with family laws, slavery and vassalage and the fifth Partida deals with commercial and maritime law. The sixth Partida deals with the laws of inheritance while the final and seventh Partida concerns crime and criminals, sexual transgressions, magic, those in adultery, then: the Jews, the Moors, heretics and blasphemers. The final Partida concludes with titles on prisons, torture, and punishment while the 34th title lists 37 rules or maxims necessary for the successful conduct of the Law. This brief overview surveys Alfonso X’s vast mind concerning the central focus of an informed, thirteenth century medieval community, and aids in the cementing of a Medieval Spanish intellectual history that would carry well into the fifteenth century and beyond.

The Partidas reveals not only a king and his court, but perhaps illuminates a Spanish society, and its attempts to convey the times via its literary output—where the subject of magic, either “black” or “white,” could be privileged and communicated to a large readership. By aligning magic and its aberrant practices as against the Faith, but allowing non-Christian traditions to continue, one could argue that a “controlled,” Alphonsan society, with competing traditions of Christian, Muslim and Jew existed; this type of quasi-tolerant community may have subsisted and most certainly may have flourished, especially in the communicative form of a literary exchange. As segway into the life of conversos who wrote themselves into history via the vehicle of the literary, we turn to one of its more famous authors Fernando de Rojas, and his Comedia o Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, or La Celestina (herein, Celestina).

La Celestina:

Originally published in 16 acts as the Comedia de Calisto y Melibea (1499; “Comedy of Calisto and Melibea”) and shortly thereafter in an expanded version with 21 acts as the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (1502), the work has been popularly known since its publication as La Celestina after its chief character, the bawd who serves as the go-between for the young lovers Calisto and Melibea. Celestina’s deeply explored personality dominates the plot, ostensibly tragic, of the uncontrolled passion of the lovers, which ends in disaster after its consummation. Calisto is killed in a fall from the ladder to Melibea’s window; Melibea commits suicide. Celestina’s coarse humour and ironic commentary, however, undercut the tragic potential of the situation; the vivid depiction of her character overshadows the philosophical significance of the work in its theme of the vanity of the human struggle against the forces of fate. Further, authorship of the work, which was published anonymously, is generally attributed to one Fernando de Rojas (c. 1465–1541), a converted Jewish lawyer about whom little else is known. La Celestina was widely imitated and reprinted in Spanish more than 100 times by the mid-17th century. It was translated into many languages, including English (The Spanish Bawd, 1631), French, Italian, German, Hebrew, and Latin. Often considered the first European novel, La Celestina was profoundly influential in the development of European prose fiction and is valued by critics today as much for its greatness as literature as for its historical significance. For this section I am concerned with naming of the character Celestina, as well as the position and influence of magic: rhetorical and object. For Celestina, her “power” is from a different source altogether, and problematizes the general divide between Divine agency and Satanic agency (i.e. her power is Plutonic).

In the last century there have been over 450 entries (books, articles, operas , et cetera) on Celestina and Spain. Within the last decade, approximately half of these are references to the Spanish, cultural backdrop regarding Spain. However, only one text examines closely the subject of Celestina, Spain and magic. Juan M. Escudero’s “La ambigüedad del elemento mágico en La Celestina,” taken from Jesús M. Usunáriz’s edited El mundo social y cultural de La Celestina is guilty as charged. This is not to say, that the critical output has been deficient by any means, but the critics have not treated all three elements within their respective discourse(s). As far back as 1954 Inez Macdonald’s “Some Observations on the Celestina” was in vogue, and this was followed by: Frederick A. de Armas’s 1971 “The Demoniacal in ‘La Celestina,’” Ciriaco Morón Arroyo’s 1994 Celestina and Castilian Humanism at the End of the Fifteenth Century, Louise M. Haywood’s 2001 “Models for Mourning and Magic Words in Celestina, and followed by a slew of dissertations still yet to be published on such subjects as: women and gardens as well as deflowering textual boundaries. The point here of course is that Celestina is very much alive, but discussion of magic within the text not so much. In Act I, scene iv, Celestina is described as an astute witch; in scene v, she becomes “desta pecadora de vieja,” or [“this sinner/transgressor of old”]; when asked by Calisto in what capacity had he served Celestina, Pármeno takes up most of scene vii describing what things she carried in her house: various potions, relics and oils of cow, of bear, of snake, of rabbit and so on (or what he extends to: “y otras mill cosas”). These ointments are to alleviate the sufferings of mankind. Time, however, does not permit that we continue along this road, but suffice it to say that magic of this type was indeed in practice and reflected the Spanish world and realm throughout. Taken together, the Vida as well as selections from Alphonso and Celestina, have allowed us to begin and continue the discourse involving magic as a viable pursuit into explaining the [un]known as an epistemological end.