The Way Of Wyrd

"This addresses the relationship between magic and Christianity. Bates is a Professor of Sociology at Sussex University. Middle-Earth, and the world of Tolkien, fascinates him. The church wiped it out in the sixth and seventh centuries, but Bates wanted to understand what paganism was really like. He didn’t find any direct descriptions. But he came across some wonderful books, written by monks around the tenth century, telling of cures for the effects of Anglo-Saxon magic. By coming at it from the position of the victim, so to speak, Bates works out what magicians at that time could actually do. This extraordinary book is an encounter between a young Christian priest and a shaman. The priest has just finished his education and is travelling by boat around the English coast. He’s part of a group of Christians converting others. They arrive at a Saxon kingdom, whose king tells the priest: ‘You can convert me if you can convert my shaman.’ Of course, the opposite happens. It’s a fictional book with a factual basis beneath it. The way he interprets exactly how magic might have worked is incredible. It brings you close to the world of shamanism. Shamans relate with things and spirits from other worlds, which can help and cure people in our world. They exist on the boundaries. You need to understand various things to transfer across these two worlds – the spirits of plants, trances and dreams. Shamanism is all over the world but the book is about a particular kind of belief that existed in England until that time. Shamanism puts you into this strange half-mind: is this real or not real? You stand with one foot in this world and one in the magical world. The book shows you how it feels. That was the role of the Shaman. He was the miracle-maker for the tribe. You don’t get too many people in the modern world doing it because it can be very dangerous. You can buy books about shamanism, do the chanting with a pair of headphones on and get into a trance. I know people who have been quite badly harmed by doing this. The shaman is trained to do this but he’s not a social scientist. He does the daily miracles and cures people of diseases. Shamans die of terrible diseases too. What happened in England in the sixth century was that the Church rebranded all the sources that gave rise to miracles. The places where shamans could connect to the spirits had churches built on them. The holy well got a Christian name. The priest would go and talk to God at the altar in a similar way. But he wouldn’t turn round and do a miracle for the people in the church."