CHAPTER THREE

MAGIC AND THE BODY

In this chapter I argue that early modern magic expressed the intercon-
nectedness of the body physical and the body social. This embodiment
assigned cultural meanings to somatic states; for example illness could
be caused by witchcraft and cured by healing magic. Magic, in both
its malevolent and benign forms, worked upon the body. At the same
time, magic also worked through the body, as body fluids and body
parts played a central role in magical rituals. In this sense, the early
modern body and magic were both positioned within the total network
of social relations.
Magical discourse and practice reflected the permeability of the
body’s borders and the social regulation of exchanges between bodies.
Conflicts between neighbours were made visible by misfortune which
befell the bodies of people and animals in the households concerned.
To actively use magic to inflict pain on a victim by magically manipu-
lating some of their hair was as possible as preventing one’s enemies
from winning court cases by putting a spell on their livers and tongues.
The social could be experienced in a somatic way, with people feeling
a spell in their limbs as pain travelled through their bodies.
The scope of these social relations was exceedingly broad. In early
modern Europe, magic was rendered visible on the bodies of women,
men, children, and animals. Female and male bodies alike were affected
by magic, and many court records deal with children’s illnesses which
were attributed to witchcraft.1 In stories about witchcraft, there was
no absolute separation between human and animal bodies either, and
a number of people were accused of shape-shifting and assuming the
body of a cat or a hare. Animal bodily fluids—for example cow’s milk
or dog’s blood, or hair clippings from those animals—were employed
in magical rituals and believed to harm or heal the bodies of humans
or other animals. The question arises as to whether this link between

1
Witchcraft as a common explanation for children’s sickness in early modern Eng-
land is discussed in Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern
England 1550–1720, 241.
90 chapter three

humans and animals had gender-specific aspects. For example, were

men and women equally able to manipulate the bodies of animals
and was the appearance of the ‘second body’ of the witch, the so
called ‘familiar’ in animal form, an exclusively female phenomenon?
Furthermore, the existence of witches’ familiars, well known also in
English witchcraft, begs the question of how they related not only to
the body of the witch and her household but also to other bodies in
the community.
Magic affected both male and female bodies, and was committed by
men and women alike during the early modern period. Yet witchcraft
records reveal in great detail how some forms of body magic, such
as the wide-spread milk magic, were attributed only to women. We
therefore need to ask how women and men differed in their uses of
body magic, including the use of body fluids and body parts. Were
male magic and female magic mutually exclusive? Finally, we need to
explore whether perceptions of these magical exchanges between bodies
were transformed under the influence of the Enlightenment and the
body borders redrawn during the eighteenth-century.
The extend to which the body was embedded in social relations can
be considered via an examination of the use of bodily fluids in magic.
Physical productions such as blood, milk, and urine represented the
material means by which the social transactions between body and
society were encoded in magical rituals. Apart from the more com-
monly known use of blood or milk in magic, the latter of which will be
specifically discussed below, a whole range of other fluids—for example,
urine, saliva, and sweat—were employed in harmful and benevolent
magic. Since fluids were seen as magically potent, it is worth exploring
in some detail the views contemporary Europeans held about the powers
of body fluids. How did they imagine body fluids working certain forms
of magic? Were there any significant differences in the way female and
male body fluids worked this magic? And finally, what conclusions does
the widespread use of body fluids in magic allow us to draw about the
relationship between bodies and societies?
Blood was one of the body fluids widely accepted as carrying magical
properties in Sweden during the eighteenth century. Not only do we
find its magical application reported in trials of magic and witchcraft,
but also in the medical discourse of the time. For example, Carl Lin-
neaus, who was trained in medicine, discussed extensively the magical
properties of blood, as well as of other body fluids such as saliva and