Quote from: RPGPundit;875810THEY BELIEVED IN MAGIC ALREADY.

so the fuck what? Magic wasn't real, isnt real, and their belief didnt change that. People werent assassinated by magic, crops werent ruined by magic, there were no actual effects from magic curses, plagues werent started by magic. Thats the point you don't seem to be able to grasp.

Oh...oh right, I just realized I'm debating with someone who does believe in magic. Fucking pointless.

Quote from: TristramEvans;875845so the fuck what? Magic wasn't real, isnt real, and their belief didnt change that. People werent assassinated by magic, crops werent ruined by magic, there were no actual effects from magic curses, plagues werent started by magic. Thats the point you don't seem to be able to grasp.

Oh...oh right, I just realized I'm debating with someone who does believe in magic. Fucking pointless.

I don't think Punidt's belief (or lack of belief) in magic is really the point here.  Nor is the fact that magic doesn't exist.

People were assassinated, crops failed, random bad shit happened to people, and plagues ravaged the populace.  At the time, people believed that these things were caused by magic, therefore they behaved in the same way that they would have if magic had been the actual cause.

People have always behaved in accordance with what their beliefs about the world, even when those beliefs are contrary to the reality of the situation.  This is as true today as it was in the Middle Ages.

Now, would the Middle Ages have looked radically different if every decent-sized city had a few guys living there who could toss fireballs and lightning bolts around?  Absolutely!  But that's because D&D magic doesn't work like medieval beliefs about magic.  If you had a magic system where magic worked the same way it was believed at the time to work, however, then people would have had the same beliefs and behaved the same way.  The only difference would be that their beliefs would have been correct instead of incorrect.

So maybe Pundit's belief in magic is the point after all.  He believes in it, therefore he behaves as though it's real.  Whether it actually is objectively real or not doesn't enter into the equation.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;874968That's easy.  First, instead of being a land grab under the guise of 'Heresy' (there's evidence that the Church picked targets entirely based on territory they wanted),

That's not mostly what the Witch Craze was. Some of that happened, yes, just like there were some cases that appeared to be about settling old feuds or local authorities making scapegoats for social problems, but the vast majority of cases had little to do with that.

And again "the Church" was not in fact the main instigator of the Witch Craze, though they were one player that was involved. When they were, it wasn't usually "the Inquisition" that was doing it. I don't know why you insist on using that as your term if it's historically inaccurate. Are you ill-informed? Or have you got an agenda that might be clouding your judgment?

Because trust me, I have (famously) no love lost for the Catholic Church (much less the Inquisition) and yet because I'm an historian, I have no problem with recognizing what the actual facts say. You should try that sometime.

 

Quotethe Inquisition would focus entirely suppressing magic.  

The Inquisition's main job was to root out heresy. In Spain, its second job was to root out secret Jews (people who had claimed to convert to Christianity to stay in Spain but were secretly still practicing Judaism).  Witchcraft was not one of their active objectives and something they only pursued incidentally if it came up.

As for whether anyone else would be 'suppressing magic', since they ALL BELIEVED IN MAGIC, I would say that this is pretty well exactly what they were doing. Or rather, the WRONG KIND of magic. Because the 'magic' of religion was fine (unless it was heretical) as was the magic of educated gentlemen Natural Philosophers (again, unless they were heretics). Giordano Bruno was not executed for magic, he was executed for heresy.

QuoteWitches and other spellcasters, would be resisting heavily, some secret, others obvious.  You'd have visible battles in the streets, where Divine fire (cuz you know, Clerics in the service of God and other Church aligned casters would exist, otherwise, the witches won hands down if it's D&D style magic) vs. Arcane fire blowing buildings and people.

You are supposing a power-level and commonality of magic that does not match it's actual levels in the medieval paradigm.

Quote from: Bren;875001It was real in the same way that other crackpot, harmful theories are real. "Different paradigm?" Sounds like you are treading perilously close to the sort of post modern relativism you claim to decry. The magic and monsters "paradigm" is wrong about how the world works. It is an ill-conceived doctrine, useless to predict or explain what happens, and it caused (and still causes) great harm. It is not real. People just wrongly thought (and some still think) it is and was real.

Paradigms are real things. It explains, for example, the rift between Islam and the West. Or for that matter, the rift between African Christianity (where they still actually really believe in things like salvation, miracles, demons, witchcraft, etc) and the rest of Christianity (which mostly doesn't).
Paradigm doesn't actually change reality. Reality is reality. But it changes cultural assumptions ABOUT reality.

And it takes a lot of practice to be able to actually slip into the mindset of a paradigm that is not your own, rather than consciously or subconsciously think that 'those people couldn't possibly seriously believe this'.

QuoteIf you aren't claiming that magic and monsters are real than your use of the phrase "really seen" appears chock full of post-modernist, absolute relativism world view.
If you think medieval or early modern people really heard animals talk or saw women have sex with the devil then I suggest a little less wacky tobaccy in your pipe is in order.

That was what they really SAW.  That doesn't mean that this is what it really was.  But that makes little difference. If everyone sees a miraculous healing, and is absolutely certain that this healing was miraculous and obvious, then they will base their cultural standards on that.  And the person who doesn't believe what is obvious to everyone else will be seen as the dangerous madman.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;875003Indeed.  But once you actually start introducing magic, things begin to change.  It starts being taken seriously much sooner.  Especially once the true power of it is discovered.  Instant reading of locations, the ability to destroy settlements (one Fireball, which is just level 5 would decimate a small village.)  

Fireball is level 3. But if you're trying to make a literal fantasy Europe, you don't want to include it in your spell list, because it didn't happen in medieval Europe.

QuoteThe odds of someone not being 'guilty' are suddenly lower when you have magicians who can charm, beguile or able to read the thoughts or spying at a distance.

Medieval witches and magicians were known to be able to do all of those things. People knew for certain that this was so, and when pursuing witches took precautions about this.



Here's the thing, there is evidence that this 'modern secularist' thought isn't all that modern.

QuoteIt sounds to me that you're missing that Pundit was talking about D&D style magic, the title claims that it's all D&D.  

I was talking about modifying D&D to make it fit medieval Europe. Like I did with Dark Albion, where you have my word (and experience from two different lengthy campaigns and various one-shots) that it works just fine.

Couple of reasons

1) Too much work in order to maintain an acceptable level of historical verisimilitude.
2) Playing any setting where Christianity is important does not appeal to me. Too much baggage. Sure I could substitute the faith with some made up form of monotheism, but then it wouldn't be fantasy Europe.

Quote from: TristramEvans;875090Maybe you should pick up a book or two on the history of Basque.

Basques were disproportionately suspected of witchcraft (not unsurprising, given their differentness and their considerably higher level of cultural pagan survivalisms). And so they were disproportionately targeted as witches, and many of those cases fell to the Inquisition. It doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of the witch trials in Europe were NOT conducted by the Inquisition and that the vast majority of the Inquisition's cases were NOT about witchcraft.

QuoteTheir belief isn't the issue. It's the effect of people actually being able to learn magic from the devil, having the power to curse their enemies, talk to animals, fly about on ergot and bat-blood smeared sticks, etc. Its the capability of these people to actually change the course of history, easily, by actually doing these things instead of being blamed for natural occurances.

The people doing these things for the most part were absolutely sure they could do them. The people who saw them doing it or saw the effects of it were absolutely sure the former people could do it. Nothing would actually change.

QuoteNo, I'm making assertions based on quite a bit of research spanning two decades. The fact that there were people that believed witches existed does not change the fact that an excessive amount of accusations of witchcraft and resulting trials can be traced back to political motivations and the acquisition of land. Hell, even the Salem Witch Trials have evidence of this; try reading up on Thomas Putnam some time.

I've studied this subject for 20 years too. I'll admit my focus was Europe and not America, where there were hardly any witch trials (but of course the Salem trials were a very famous exception, and very late in the era of witch trials). But the Salem Witch Trials from all I have read about it began with utterly sincere accusations of witchcraft (inasmuch as any of these accusations are sincere, by which I mean people actually believed it).  The opportunism came in after.

QuoteNo, that wasn't the analogy. What you're not understanding is that it's not the belief that matters, its the actual effects of these things actually existing. The ACTUAL effect of extraterrestrials interfering on earth. The ACTUAL effect of people using magic to curse their enemies, cause crops to wither and animals to sicken and die.  

If an entire society is already modeled around a certain belief that these things really do happen all the fucking time, then having them actually happen would  change extremely little, so long as the things that can happen are mostly similar to the things the society already believes happens.

QuoteNope, not making that mistake at all. The mistake you're making is the same as the people who think that people pre-Columbus all thought the world was flat.

No, because that is largely a misconception that arose in people long after the fact (which is to say, that almost no one in medieval europe believed the world was flat, that idea came up because of a book written hundreds of years later that basically pulled that claim out of its ass).  Whereas the Wars of Religion pretty well prove that medieval/early-renaissance people almost all took the works of god and demons damn seriously.

Have to agree with Pundit and nDervish here. It seems to me that if you put the work in to make D&D magic look more like what people believed at the time was possible for magicians, then you get a medieval world that looks much like the one that actually existed. Magic happened all the time, as did demonic possession, hauntings, and sightings or experiences of the weird, the occult, and the miraculous. Just because we know that a lot of this evidence for magic was due to mass hysteria, mistaken chains of cause and effect, trickery, or plain wrongness, doesn't mean that we can't just accept the occult explanations for these phenomena in our games, in line with what people believed at the time. The Secret History version can be assumed to be true, for the purposes of gaming, and damn if it isn't fun!

By the way, it's not like the Enlightenment put paid to all of this stuff either. There were renegade priests and sorcerers putting spells on each other and attacking each other at a distance or invoking the protection of divine and diabolical forces in late nineteenth century France. The shenanigans described in JK Huysmans's Là bas were based on the author's own real experiences, to cite just one modern example. Were he and all the people involved deluded and neurotic? Yes indeed, but it doesn't change the fact that they not only believed in magic but were fully convinced they had seen it in operation.

Tristam is right. Believing in magic doesnt make it real. And all that ancient belief didnt do anything other than get people killed by the believers. Which isnt magic either.

BUT.

Alchemy on the other hand is real and THAT has had an impact on the whole world over time since it is based on real world chemistry when not side tracked by beliefs in magic.

Which brings up the following back on topic.

A relatively real world setting where the only "magic" existing is in the form of potions and some specially treated items.

Not-Quite-Example: One of my AD&D 1st level magic users tricked orcs into believing he was a much higher level mage via use of flasks of oil and some flash-bang powder and a whole lot of crazy charisma checks.

Quote from: Omega;875882Tristam is right. Believing in magic doesnt make it real. And all that ancient belief didnt do anything other than get people killed by the believers. Which isnt magic either.
.

But no one is making that argument. I think Pundit does believe in magic, but he isn't saying that a belief like that shapes reality. He is saying it shapes the culture and the perceptions of the people in it. It isn't a commentary on whether religion is good, whether the witch craze was good or bad, it is just trying to understand what people were thinking during it. In terms of gaming, I think it is pretty good argument for keeping things largely the same if the magic you are introducing largely aligns with what people believed at the time. Obviously, it being real could have created completely different historical outcomes because belief and reality are not the same. I mean if someone summoned a demon and killed Elizabeth in 1558 that would most certainly have changed history. But all the GM has to do to avoid that kind of issue is say: no one ever summoned a Demon to kill Elizabeth the first, the only magical events that occurred up to this point, were those that people living in the time thought were a result of magic. As a player I find this perfectly plausible for the purpose of game (and same with movies or books).  That said, if the GM wants to create an alternate history around the presence of magic, I would totally be behind that. That can be a lot of fun and interesting as well. But it also creates its own plausibility concerns because a lot of GMs are going to come up with historical timelines that fail under scrutiny. To me both the alternate history and the secret history path are perfectly viable here.

For a game, I have no problem if someone takes all the religious and supernatural assumptions from a given era, says they are true, and keeps the history largely the same. Now, once the rubber hits the road, once the players are actually involved in historical events then I might expect to see some changes in the course of history, because at that point it gets a lot harder to hand wave. To me that is the much bigger issue in any historical game. Not what came before the players started (I can always come up with an explanation for why a magic missile spell was used at the Battle of Hastings and why this didn't change history as we know it). But when the players are involved and it is happening at the table, things may actually deviate in a way from history that gets much harder to explain.

Right Brendan, no one is arguing that believing in magic makes it true. I think the waters are muddied somewhat by the fact that Pundit isn't shy about the fact that he's a practising magician and does believe that magic exists! I for one think that this adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the fact that he's our host here .... But he's not arguing that point in this thread. He's also a historian and that seems to be the hat he has on here. I can't get away from the fact that some people seem just offended by the idea that a guy who believes in magic should have anything coherent and non hippy dippy to say about the place of magical belief in real world history. But I find his arguments here about paradigm and belief to be pretty convincing.

Also, who's to say that someone didn't summon a demon to kill Queen Elizabeth? Just turns out she had some serious magical protection going on. But it all occurs behind the scenes - in our Secret History version of history - and none the wiser. Except those Initiates who are In the Know. I can't get over how antagonistic people seem to be to something that is just such plain fun ...

Quote from: RPGPundit;875811The Inquisition didn't run most of the witch trials. In fact, it ran a tiny minority, and witch-trials were a tiny tiny minority of what the Inquisition did. It wasn't their job. Their job was heretics and hidden jews.

That was the job of the Spanish Inquisition along with ferreting out false converts among the Moriscos. Spain had a huge fetish about false converts and about whose ancestry was pure enough and/or could be traced back to the Visigoths. Inquisitions outside of Spain had other jobs. IIR, the Roman Inquisition was heavily involved in book approvals and bannings, but not too concerned with ferreting out lapsed converts.

Quote from: RPGPundit;875869The Inquisition's main job was to root out heresy. In Spain, its second job was to root out secret Jews (people who had claimed to convert to Christianity to stay in Spain but were secretly still practicing Judaism).

And Moors. The Reconquista was only completed in the late 15th century. Moors raided the coasts of Spain (and England and Ireland) through at least the 17the century. It would be difficult to overemphasize how much their war with Islam was a key concern for the Spanish.

Quote from: RPGPundit;875872Paradigm doesn't actually change reality. Reality is reality. But it changes cultural assumptions ABOUT reality.

Yes. This is exactly what I was saying. And that is why it is ontologically incorrect to say that people saw witches fornicating with the devil. Because that is not, in fact, what they saw. It is what they thought they saw.

QuoteAnd it takes a lot of practice to be able to actually slip into the mindset of a paradigm that is not your own, rather than consciously or subconsciously think that 'those people couldn't possibly seriously believe this'.

Lots of people believe lots of stupid shit. That's not news. Astrology and magic are two of the stupid things people have believed in the past. Sadly, they are also two of the stupid things some people believe in the present.

QuoteThat was what they really SAW.  That doesn't mean that this is what it really was.

Then they didn't actually SEE the devil. They thought they saw the devil. Just like the time I THOUGHT I saw a strange old woman sitting in a rocking chair at night in my bedroom. But what I really SAW was a jumble of clothes on a chair that, in the dark, looked like the silhouette of an old woman.

QuoteBut that makes little difference.

It makes all the difference as far as reality goes. In one case a ghostly apparition exists. In the other case it doesn't exist and in the light of day (and one's reason) one can clearly see the clothes piled on the chair.

Quote from: RPGPundit;875819John Dee was a noted mathematician, an astrologer ... ... a practiced alchemist, and routinely had conversations with and believed he received guidance from angels he summoned using a complex system of so-called magic.

Fixed that for the rest of us.

Quote from: RPGPundit;875875Here's the thing, there is evidence that this 'modern secularist' thought isn't all that modern.

Yes it goes back at least as far as some of the pre-Socratic philosophers in Greece.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;875892But no one is making that argument.

Quote from: markfitz;875896Right Brendan, no one is arguing that believing in magic makes it true.

It is not clear that no one is making that argument. Pundit is ambiguous in his use of language. That ambiguity may be intentional and caused by his personal paradigm including some kind of magic. Or he may just be sloppy in his language either due to laziness or for polemical effect. In any case, his beliefs and his imprecise use of language does muddy the water about what, precisely, he means when he repeatedly says people back then saw the devil, talked to angels, received practical advice from angels, killed people via curses, and practiced magic that had an affect on the world.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;875892For a game, I have no problem if someone takes all the religious and supernatural assumptions from a given era, says they are true, and keeps the history largely the same.

Neither do I. That is more or less what I do in my Honor+Intrigue campaign.

RE: Witch trials

While the focus in the Trier witch trials was initially aimed at Protestants and Jews, it later turned toward those accused of using witchcraft (which the two aforementioned groups had roundly been accused by the Jesuits of practicing). In fact, it is suggested that this is one of the first documented cases of genocide in Europe.

The Bamburg and Würzburg persecutions took place during the Thirty Year War. Unlike the Trier witch trials, both were well-documented. Modern scholars likened it to an epidemic, where it became fashionable to blame the supernatural for the spread of pestilence and famine. Scholars strongly suggest that the Catholic church conspired to spread propaganda of the supernatural among the poor to take their attentions away from what was really happening.

The Inquisition, on the other hand, was a very different beast. I don't know enough about it to speak on the subject.

Quote from: Bren;875906It is not clear that no one is making that argument. Pundit is ambiguous in his use of language. That ambiguity may be intentional and caused by his personal paradigm including some kind of magic. Or he may just be sloppy in his language either due to laziness or for polemical effect. In any case, his beliefs and his imprecise use of language does muddy the water about what, precisely, he means when he repeatedly says people back then saw the devil, talked to angels, received practical advice from angels, killed people via curses, and practiced magic that had an affect on the world.

Neither do I. That is more or less what I do in my Honor+Intrigue campaign.

My reading is he is saying this what people thought. He may be leaving himself room for his own perspective. But I don't believe in magic, I don't believe that belief in magic makes it real, but I do think he has a point about how real those experiences feel to the people experiencing them. Obviously I don't think anyone was actually effectively using magic, but I do believe when I read the primary source material and I go back and look at my standard secondary source books from my coursework on this, that most of the expressed belief in magic was genuine. Just to take a line from my Brian Levack book on the Witch Hunt in Early Modern Europe, there is a whole chapter devoted to understanding the intellectual foundation of the craze where he says "By the end of the Sixteenth Century most educated Europeans believed that witches, in addition to practicing harmful magic, engaged in a variety of diabolical activities....". The rest of the chapter painstakingly goes over the development of this belief. Looking at my primary source book (which is filled with documents from the era) I find document after document that supports the notion that these were real beliefs.

That doesn't mean there were not people being cynical or folks on the fringe who were skeptical perhaps. And there are always folks willing to exploit disasters and crazes to their advantage (even if they believe they are genuine). But if you spend much time reading material from this period you do see plenty of evidence that there was a worldview which assumed God was real and magic was real. Once you accept that this was how a significant portion of the population understood the world, you really can't analyze their behavior with the same assumptions you might about a person in the modern world doing something similar (if I don't believe in god or believe that magic is real, yet you see me participating in or spearheading a witch craze, you know something is up).

In my own life, my wife believes in spirits and I don't. She'll tell me some mornings that she saw a ghost, or she was visited by a dead relative. When she and I talk about these experiences, it turns out we both have the same or similar sensory experiences, but what she calls a ghost, I call seeing something out of the corner of my eye. What she calls being visited by a dead relative, I call sleep apnea. Now I believe I'm correct but I don't think she is lying about what she saw. I think she believes she saw a ghost just as strongly as I believe I stopped breathing in the middle of the night and woke up gasping for breath. That is the sort of paradigm difference Pundit is pointing to. Heck I've even hallucinated little green men dancing on my stomach after a surgery once. When I looked it up, it turns out that is a common hallucination when people are sleep deprived (so it made sense to me that it was a product of the anesthesia and the lack of good sleep). But that does point to something important. The brain can play really powerful tricks on you. Sometimes it isn't just that you are projecting explanations onto vague sensory experiences. You can also hallucinate things, even if you are otherwise not prone and totally sane. I mean, if I,as someone who doesn't believe any of this stuff can see little green men dancing on my belly in the middle of the night, then imagine what a person in the medieval world, similarly sleep deprived or under the influence might have seen.

Uruguay is unusually secular for South America, isn't it?


I have not read any pertinent research on the matter, but my impression is that belief in the reality of miracles is fairly common in most of South America. It certainly seems to be among the immigrant population here.  
Again, I have no research before me on this count. I could be much mistaken.