On the Christianity of Incantations

Abstract

Although the use of charms has been one of the most obvious expressions of European Christian religious healing, such has been the influence of the official churches’ condemnations of charms that they are typically discussed as something other than Christian. Indeed, a key problem in defining and studying charms, or incantations, as popular forms of Christian belief and ritual has been that scholars have accepted definitions of the phenomena that originate in ecclesiastical polemics and criticisms of popular and alternative forms of Christianity. Mainstream Christian churches have, for the most part, abandoned the old supernatural world-view that supported the use of charms; and scholars, who use mainstream definitions of what religion is and is not, have often envisioned folk religion and its belief system as lying outside ‘religion’. Karen King demonstrates in her study of Gnosticism, for instance, that the standard scholarly model of the relationship of Gnosticism to the Christian churches arises from an uncritical acceptance of the views of early Christian writers as to what is and is not Christianity. For these early Christians, anything that was not part of the orthodox churches, such as Gnosticism, was heresy, and therefore something other than proper Christianity.¹ And these ancient ideas of what is and is not Christianity have, as King shows, influenced the modern study and definitions of Christianity.