U of S professor investigates history of black magic

Frank Klaassen has been studying magic for years. His interest was sparked as an undergraduate student. He had queries about cosmology and how people understood the world in the Middle Ages.

Twenty years later Klaassen, an associate professor in the University of Saskatchewan's Department of History, is a specialist in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. He is also the leader of a Societas Magica — an international group of 200 people, from scholars to fiction writers to lay people, who study magic.

It actually tells you how to sell your soul to the devil,- Frank Klaassen

Klaassen said despite common perceptions about magic, it is still alive and well in the modern world.

"If we are taking hardcore modern science as our standard ... there's all sorts of things that we do that don't square with that," he said. "Things like wearing crystals, homeopathy, aromatherapy, reading newspaper horoscopes, we could even say modern psychotherapy. There's just no basis in scientific evidence."

Klaassen, who views himself as a skeptical magical historian, is currently researching the evolution of magic from the medieval times to the 17th Century. In 2013, he received a $53,000 grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 

A sinister shift

Klaassen said he makes frequent trips to Europe to visit old libraries for the work — admitting the information he has amassed is so great it will likely fill three books. It was on one of these trips that he encountered a book unlike any other he'd seen before.

"My current project was promoted by a text that I encountered some years ago in a British library," Klaassen said. "Its the only text of magic that ever creeped me out."

Klaassen explained that the book is a reference guide on how to conjure ghosts from their resting places in order to use them for one's own purposes.

It helps us to think about the myths that we construct about our rational, western view of the world,"- Klaassen

"It says the best kind of ghosts to conjure are people who have recently died and especially children," Klaassen said. "You should go to a graveyard ... dig up the body, rip out the heart and cut off the little finger ... make something you can burn from this, which you use in a ritual to conjure up a demon and ultimately a ghost which you can use as your spiritual slave."

Klaassen said he believes the book holds clues to the western world's turn to black magic. He said it caused him to question what he knew about magic.

"Where in the world did this come from? I started wondering what happened in the middle of the 16th Century that this changed," he explained. "So somewhere in the space of about one hundred years we have a dramatic transformation where essentially a form of modern magic is created.

Klaassen said this marked a shift in magical practices in Britain and Germanic areas of Europe, and the birth of a new, darker form of magic. That in Klaassen's words is a 'kind of inversion to Christianity'.

"Where it actually tells you how to sell your soul to the devil," Klaassen said. "And how to try and trick him out of it after you get what you want. Again, this was very much not a medieval way of thinking."

Klaassen said he believes that the shift is connected to the reformation period and the disruption of religious sensibilities at the time.

Klaassen said he believes his work is relevant because people can use it as a tool to examine the way they look at the world.

"It helps us to think about the myths that we construct about our rational, western view of the world," Klaassen said. "And maybe its not half so rational or scientific as we like to think it is."