Why "manifesting" is far more irrational than using a medieval service magician

In the medieval past, people would routinely employ "cunning folk" or "service magicians" to help them. They were much more effective, rational, and ethical than many spiritual practices today.

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In 1637, Mabel Gray had a problem. Her spoons, one of her most coveted possessions—handmade, valuable, irreplaceable—had disappeared.

With no police force in London, no source of authority to deal with the uncertainty of her calamity, she turned to the obvious choice: service magicians, the “cunning folk” who could employ their uncanny powers to help her track down the missing spoons.

“Thus began a long journey across London,” explains the historian Tabitha Stanmore, “during which Mabel visited some of the seediest areas of the capital and met several wizards, in the hope of getting back what was hers.”

Eventually, for the price of a few shillings and some wine, a service magician named “Mr. Tunn” took the case, eventually informing her that she would get the spoons back, as they would miraculously return “in the same place from whence they were taken.” Four centuries later, we still don’t know whether Mabel found her spoons, a mystery forever lost to time.

But what we can know is that the service magicians of the medieval period—the cunning folk who professed an ability to harness magical forces to help others—were a more rational and effective form of recourse to manipulate the world to our whims than the modern multi-billion dollar industry of manifesting, the “laws of attraction,” and costly crystals allegedly infused with magical forces.

If we can understand why Mabel’s appeal to an avowed medieval magician could possibly be rational, we can more effectively probe our innate human impulse to control the world through superstitious schemes—and understand how and why our species has shifted its relationship to the supernatural realm with destructive and dangerous myths of modernity that too often prey on the vulnerable.

I: Loaves and fishes, but not the kinds you’d think

Before there was Tinder, there was seduction magic. It was deemed so powerful that a thirteenth century Christian theologian named William de Montibus felt it necessary to warn his fellow believers about the perils of consuming food prepared with a love spell, infused with the essence of a courting woman in, well, rather unique ways.

The first worry was that one might consume a loaf of bread kneaded not by hand, but by buttocks. Bread, a staple of a medieval diet also used in religious rites, could be a vector for an irresistibly magical feminine essence embedded in the dough, particularly if the cunning woman had sat on it and wriggled around in her natural state to prepare the loaf.

But it wasn’t just bread that one needed to beware. Another apparently common method of magical seduction involved inserting fish into the cunning woman’s vagina during preparation, then serving in to the intended man. If caught harnessing such potent forces, William de Montibus warned, such a mystical lady of lust must be forced to do penance for using culinary conjuring tricks to ensure that “his love will be more inflamed.”

Love magic was nonetheless prized—and robustly defended by its beneficiaries. As Stanmore describes in her book, Cunning Folk, the sorcerer John Prestall had developed such a reputation for the effectiveness of his love potions that he boasted that “he would never be hanged [for his sorcery]…for 500 gentlemen would have lain in the way to his execution.”

Such magical workers were not, however, witches. So explains Ronald Hutton in his definitive treatise, The Witch, in which he is careful to separate service magicians (including African witch doctors) from medieval witches, who were broadly defined by their efforts to harness supernatural forces to inflict harm on others. Mr. Tunn, by contrast, just wanted to help Mabel find her spoons.

II: Abracadabra, astrology, and the curative civets

Our desire to use spells, incantations, potions, and magical words to control an uncontrollable world is a seemingly universal impulse of Homo sapiens, stretching back to the earliest records of human culture. Even lingering modern tropes around magic—such as the word Abracadabra—bring us back through the mists of time. The first known utterance of the phrase dates to the second century AD, in which the Roman savant Serenus Sammonicus explained how carrying a written array of the phrase, organized in a diminishing triangular pattern could magically ward off fever.

Its influence grew for millennia. Before it became the catchphrase of stage magicians, the word was written and hung in doorframes during the 1665 Great Plague of London to ward off pestilence. The writer Daniel Defoe of Robinson Crusoe fame remarked on the fools of London, “people deceiv’d…Papers tied up with so many Knots; and certain Words, or Figures written on them, as particularly the Word Abracadabra.” (Defoe was involved in a get-rich-quick scheme in which he harvested an apparently cure-all medicinal scent from the anal glands of civet cats, so we may take his aloof superiority with a grain of salt).

Today, our collective belief in the ability to bend magical forces to our whims, to unlock the secrets of the world through stars or superstitions, and to control the world through active magic, persists as a near-universal feature of every society on Earth.¹

Globally, roughly 40 percent of humans still believe in witchcraft, defined as “an ability of certain people to intentionally cause harm via supernatural means.” Four-in-ten Americans believe in the power of psychics, with a similar number agreeing that spiritual powers can be embedded in physical objects. A quarter of Americans believe in the power of astrology and the global astrology industry was estimated to be worth $12.8 billion in 2021, growing to $22 billion by 2031.

More recently, the practice of “manifesting,” in which aspirational thoughts are said to exert causal power on the physical world, has exploded. TikTok videos attest to the power of “scripting”—similar to the usage of Abracadabra in the distant past—in which writing down desires for wealth, or a crush to text you back, is said to bend reality to the power of the word and the mystical force of mental energy. Every year, billions of dollars are spent on “healing crystals,” a practice that dates back to the writings of Plato and, perhaps, the Sumerians.

Interest in such methods of asserting supernatural control over the natural world surged during the coronavirus pandemic, as can be seen from Google search results below for, respectively, “manifesting” and “crystals.” Both spiked after March 2020—with manifesting remaining extraordinarily popular today.

But, as we’ll soon see, there are strong reasons to believe that we were better off relying on service magicians.

III: The enchanted universe, trial by combat, and the rationality of hiring a holy man to find your linens

For the overwhelming majority of human history, our species agreed on a core belief: that the world was one of immanence, in which the divine, the spiritual, and the magical inhabited and shared the planet with us. In a worldview laced with immanentism, any supernatural presence is never other-worldly on some distant invisible plane, but surrounding us, waiting to be called to action, to make its presence known in human affairs.

As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins wrote in The Enchanted Universe, for virtually all premodern humans, “all the world…was a zone of immanence. Here the myriad metahuman powers were not only present in people’s experience, they were the decisive agents of human weal and woe—the sources of their success, or lack thereof, in all variety of endeavors from agriculture and hunting, to sexual reproduction and political ambition.”

Whether it was the ghosts of ancient Mesopotamia, or sprites and spirits and fairies of folk religions, or the lingering presence of ancestors watching over us, this much was clear: they were here and they determined our fates. Causality was magic. And in such an enchanted universe, Sahlins notes, “the natural/supernatural distinction becomes meaningless.”

Then, during a period sometimes referred to as the Axial Age—from the 8th to 3rd century BCE—the world began to morph, slowly but steadily, toward a transcendental worldview, in which supernatural forces exist outside the natural world. There was suddenly a barrier between us and them, which may only sometimes be breached. Today, a few major transcendental religions dominate, with just 5.7 percent of the global population adhering to so-called “folk religions,” previously the only supernatural game in town.

However, old habits die hard, and incarnations of medieval Christianity blended the two worldviews. Throughout the period, God was not always conceptualized as an other-worldly being, but also as being, itself, present everywhere and in everything. By the Scientific Revolution, that had changed, as the Christian God was clearly a separate agent in a separate universe, whom Isaac Newton saw as someone “very well skilled in Mechanicks and Geometry.”

Nonetheless, immanence remained part of popular beliefs—and was embedded in religious society. And here is where service magicians were able to develop genuine causal power to change the world.

As Stanmore recounts in Cunning Folk, in 1473, a certain Mrs. Byng had her linen stolen from her house in a village outside Canterbury. The local Christian vicar, William Dardus, pledged to help, boasting that he possessed the rather useful trait of being able to summon the dead and “ask them questions.” Word quickly spread around the village: the local holy man would soon communicate with spirits, unleashing demons if need be. As the locals chattered, Dardus proclaimed that Mrs. Byng need only leave a window open and wait for the linen to reappear.

Astonishingly, his prophecy came true, as “the linen conveniently reappeared through the open window.”

The most likely explanation for his success isn’t supernatural, but rather the verifiable power of shared human belief. In medieval England, it was widely believed that priests could perform exorcisms or interact with spirits and demons. If the thief got word that the local priest was about to use those abilities to discern—and punish—the criminal who stole the linen, it would have terrified them. Better to return the linen than risk the wrath of a recently awoken demon.

Similarly, medieval trials often used ordeals to determine guilt. As the economist Peter Leeson notes, “for 400 years the most sophisticated persons in Europe decided difficult criminal cases by asking the defendant to thrust his arm into a cauldron of boiling water and fish out a ring. If his arm was unharmed, he was exonerated. If not, he was convicted.” This seems like an absurd mechanism, but it worked—without supernatural forces.

Precisely because of a shared belief in iudicium Dei (judgments of God), those who were guilty would refuse—or hesitate—to partake in such rituals. Meanwhile, the innocent believed they would be exonerated by the ordeal, so they swiftly agreed. In effect, criminals told on themselves based on their hesitancy to undergo an ordeal. Leeson suggests that the practitioners of ordeals would adjust their methods accordingly, lowering the temperature of the cauldron for those who willingly plunged their hands into the apparently magical liquid, but keeping it boiling for those who were most hesitant.

Similarly, during trials by combat, fighters would sometimes be known to stitch pieces of paper with incantations and spells written on them inside their clothing. If discovered, it could give them a genuine advantage, as their opponent believed that it would work, a psychological blow before a high-stakes battle. (A similar causal dynamic existed more recently during the Liberia/Sierra Leone civil war, in which General Butt Naked’s brigade of unclothed fighters—who claimed to have magical protection that rendered them immune from bullets—were an effective military force because rival soldiers believed that their protections were real and therefore ran away from them during battles).

Magical or not, from tracking down lost linens and beyond, there is no doubt: medieval service magicians often produced the goods. They provided a surprisingly rational recourse to solve daily problems for which there was no other institutional mechanism available. Without a police force to track down stolen spoons, Mabel was smart to seek out a kindly wizard who, at least some of the time, would work his magic—not through supernatural forces, but through the verifiable power of collective belief.²

IV: Causal uncertainty, the amulets of World War I, and the aspirational rituals of cargo cults

There is a likely apocryphal story in which a visitor arrives at the house of Niels Bohr, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics. The visitor spots a horseshoe hanging over the door. They ask whether Bohr, an empirical physicist, really believes in such superstitions. “Of course not,” Bohr allegedly replies, “but I am told that they bring luck even to those who do not believe in them.”

Humans have an innate craving for certainty and control. Peril lurks within uncertainty and chaos. However, in the past, there were no equations or forecasting models to make sense of calamities that blindsided us; we only had spirits and sprites and deities and stars to explain our world. Superstition was as rational a mechanism as any other to deal with causal uncertainty.

As I wrote in Fluke:

Superstition is the daughter of the unexplained and the apparently random…Superstition is not, as many unfairly believe, the providence of simpletons. Instead, it is an understandable and nearly universal way that humans assert control when they feel that ordinary, rational methods of manipulating the world have become fruitless. In the words of Theodore Zeldin, superstition functions the same as the ‘modern car-driver, who does not know how his car works, but trusts it all the same, interested only in knowing which button to press.’ The lucky amulet may not work…but have you got any better ideas?”

Causal uncertainty abounds in calamity, which is why searches for manifesting and crystals surged during the pandemic. But superstition also spikes during famine or war, when death comes seemingly at random, and the only recourse available is to try an amulet, or a talisman, and hope for the best. Superstition and mysticism became so widespread during World War I, for example, that governments outlawed them (with little success), as Malcolm Gaskill explains:

“In Germany soothsayers were banned (apparently exceptions were made if they predicted Britain’s defeat). Mediums and fortune-tellers in Britain were prosecuted under the 1824 Vagrancy Act, and, increasingly, under the 1735 Witchcraft Act, which forbade pretending to conjure spirits…Talismans were universal. Soldiers wore heart amulets, sprigs of heather, four-leafed clovers, rabbits’ feet, miniature horseshoes, pebbles with holes in them (traditionally a witch-repellent), as well as Catholic medals depicting saints, angels, Christ and the Virgin. Germans carried Himmelsbriefe, copies of letters supposedly written by Christ.”

When the war ended, causal uncertainty soon returned. During the Great Depression, astrology became a feature of the press, developing widespread acceptance.

Similarly, after American forces departed temporary bases in the Pacific after World War II ended, many local communities developed “cargo cults,” in which they tried to mimic the conditions that previously had led to Western goods and other newfangled riches arriving on planes. So, they built wooden replicas of American warplanes, constructed air traffic control towers out of bamboo, and radar dishes made out of mud and straw. Perhaps, they supposed, recreating the original conditions of their newfound wealth could cause it to return.

These practices, which some may dismiss as useless and backward, often form a patchwork of valuable, meaningful rituals for the participants. They have intrinsic value as a social bonding exercise and a way of articulating shared aspirations. It doesn’t really matter, per se, if they work.

But the crucial point is this: scared soldiers carrying talismans in trenches, or islanders constructing fake radar dishes to erect physical embodiments of their hopes, do not directly harm others, nor do they cast blame on victims for lived misfortune.

The same is no longer true of our mysticism.

This creates an upside-down interpretation of how we normally consider the superstitious past, in which we wrongly presume that we, not our ancestors, are the rational ones. But from service magicians to ordeals, medieval superstitions were both more rational and less harmful than many spiritual practices that dominate modern culture.

V: The Secret is malicious and crystals destroy lives, but that doesn’t mean superstitious ritual is worthless

In 2006, Rhonda Byrne published The Secret, a self-help book that claims to unlock in readers a clandestine force that they can unleash with the power of positive thinking. It was called “the law of attraction.” According to Byrne, our “thoughts are sending out that magnetic signal that is drawing the parallel back to you.” (You may, like many elementary school children, recall that magnets famously attract their opposite, not their parallel, but this is the level of scientific precision we’re dealing with here).

Worse, according to Byrne’s secret, “the only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts” and “Our physiology creates disease to give us feedback, to let us know we have an imbalanced perspective, and we’re not loving and we’re not grateful.” To be clear, Byrne is implying—quite strongly—that poor people just didn’t think enough positive thoughts and that cancer diagnoses are brought upon sourpusses.

What a shame that enslaved people two centuries ago didn’t just imagine themselves differently! Their chains were but manacles in their minds. In Byrne’s mumbo jumbo, victims of terrible misfortune only have themselves to blame.

This would all be darkly comical except that The Secret sold thirty million copies, was translated into fifty languages, is widely believed by vast swaths of humanity, and netted Byrne at least $300 million.

The religious version of The Secret is the prosperity gospel, in which megarich megachurch megagrifters rob poor people of money by promising them that their financial “seed” donated to the pastor will grow into riches. The proof offered by these religious predators is their own wealth—mansions and private jets—showcasing that it works. But their extravagant lifestyles are grown not from divine seeds, but from their congregational victims.

Kenneth Copeland, an anti-vaccine televangelist grifter with a net worth of $750 million and a fleet of private jets, likened flying commercial to getting “in a long tube with a bunch of demons” and told his congregation that “one indicator of a weak spirit is a lack of success.” Another prosperity gospel evangelist and charlatan, Paula White, provided the invocation at Trump’s inauguration and led prayers before the January 6th attack on the US Capitol.

Manifesting, which has its own purported causal mechanisms that make no sense—the Nazar amulet emoji, the numbers 1111 and 444 as “angel numbers” and 528 hertz as a “love frequency—isn’t as insidious as the prosperity gospel grifters, but it has no causal power beyond positive thinking. But as Vox’s Rebecca Jennings writes: “There are decades of scientific research and dozens of studies proving that, often, positive thinking actually makes us more complacent and therefore less likely to muster the effort to achieve our goals.”

The darker side of manifesting is that the underlying premise can create a philosophical justification for blaming victims of oppressive social systems. Poor? Should’ve manifested riches! Like The Secret or the prosperity gospel, the magic being pushed isn’t the kind that tries to track down spoons, but instead implies that the victim wouldn’t have lost their spoons in the first place if they had only sent out more positive thoughts. Shouldn’t have been such a downer, Mabel Gray!

Today’s new age practices exist on a spectrum. Some are just for fun, others cause people to make horrendous life decisions based on misguided superstition. Some people swear by them. Great! There’s nothing so wrong with a person finding comfort or joy by injecting a bit of ritualized and directed thought toward specific goals. For some, positive thinking and visualization are effective tools. But superstitions are at their least harmful when considered as metaphors, not imagined to be causally effective panaceas.

Or, as Alice Tarbuck writes of her love for casting spells: “There is nothing lovelier than the little nudge in your worldview that pulls you toward witchcraft, that opens the world up to you, and you up to it. It’s hard to love a world you’re closed off from,” and for Tarbuck, her ritualized mysticism invites her to feel a little closer to that beautiful world. For her, there is intrinsic, not instrumental joy in trying one’s hand at magic. Fair enough.

But then, there are crystals. Influencers peddle them. Kim Kardashian swears by their healing powers. Today, crystals have become a multi-billion dollar industry. Many come from the fascinating, but deeply impoverished island of Madagascar, where exploited children toil in horrific conditions, often earning just $1 per day. The industry is destroying the environment there, too, in one of Earth’s most fragile—and important—biodiversity hotspots.

If crystals embed mystical energy within them, does the suffering of the malnourished young boy who ripped the gem out of Madagascar’s red earth to ship it to Arizona not undercut its aura? For those Malagasy children who die from breathing in deadly quartz particles deep into their tiny lungs, touching healing crystals—all day, every day—somehow didn’t save them.

This, then, is the paradox of our modern world. We are the richest, most educated people to ever exist—with the vast sum of human knowledge at our fingertips and in our pockets, endless flows of information that dwarf the Library of Alexandria, available to everyone, anytime, for free. And yet, our innate human impulse for superstition hasn’t just persisted; it has taken on a more consumerist, harmful incarnation—that blames victims for their suffering, takes advantage of desperate people to plant “seeds” for their future wealth, and destroys the lives of unseen impoverished children while forever poisoning their irreplaceable environment.

Next time my spoons go missing, count me out of crystals and manifesting and the law of attraction.

Instead, I’ll be in the market for that more rational mystic—cunning folk and service magicians—so long as they don’t try to serve me any freshly baked bread.

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1. I’m a naturalist/materialist, meaning that I believe that everything in the universe can be explained by natural forces and the laws of physics (which we only partially understand). That certainly doesn’t mean that I reject awe, or wonder, or embracing the extraordinary unknowns that define our reality—from the origins of consciousness to the mind-bending nature of quantum mechanics to the extraordinary improbability of our existence. I respect how others solve those puzzles in ways that help them make sense of the bewildering world, but I don’t believe in superstition or supernatural forces.

2. In a previous essay, I wrote about the Big Gods hypothesis and how the power of collective belief in omniscient “big gods” arguably reshaped the world.