Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) THE MAGIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES BY VIKTOR RYDBERG _Translated from the Swedish_ BY AUGUST HJALMAR EDGREN NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1879 Copyright 1879, BY HENRY HOLT & CO CONTENTS. PAGE. I. THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY OF THE MIDDLE AGES, AND ITS HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT 1 II. THE MAGIC OF THE CHURCH 56 III. THE MAGIC OF THE LEARNED 95 IV. THE MAGIC OF THE PEOPLE AND THE STRUGGLE OF THE CHURCH AGAINST IT 158 I. THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY OF THE MIDDLE AGES, AND ITS HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT. INTRODUCTORY. It was the belief of Europe during the Middle Ages, that our globe was the centre of the universe. The earth, itself fixed and immovable, was encompassed by ten heavens successively encircling one another, and all of these except the highest in constant rotation about their centre. This highest and immovable heaven, enveloping all the others and constituting the boundary between created things and the void, infinite space beyond, is the Empyrean, the heaven of fire, named also by the Platonizing philosophers the world of archetypes. Here "in a light which no one can enter," God in triune majesty is sitting on his throne, while the tones of harmony from the nine revolving heavens beneath ascend to him, like a hymn of glory from the universe to its Creator. Next in order below the Empyrean is the heaven of crystal, or the sphere of the _first movable_ (_primum mobile_). Beneath this revolves the heaven of fixed stars, which, formed from the most subtile elements in the universe, are devoid of weight. If now an angel were imagined to descend from this heaven straight to earth,--the centre, where the coarsest particles of creation are collected,--he would still sink through seven vaulted spaces, which form the planetary world. In the first of these remaining heavens is found the planet Saturn, in the second Jupiter, in the third Mars; to the fourth and middle heaven belongs the Sun, queen of the planets, while in the remaining three are the paths of Venus, Mercury, and finally the moon, measuring time with its waning and increasing disk. Beneath this heaven of the moon is the enveloping atmosphere of the earth, and earth itself with its lands and seas.