At this point, you might be wondering, "Okay, but does this kind of magic work on things other than humans? Can it influence the weather or the behavior of animals and plants, as various sorcerers and shamans worldwide are said to do?"
It's a legitimate question, and the answer lies in understanding that this type of magic typically operates within a cosmological context vastly different from our own. The pagan Norse and other Germanic peoples believed that spirit could be found in numerous entities throughout the world, extending beyond humans. This encompassed even objects that we currently perceive as nonliving and inanimate. According to their belief, if something possessed a spirit, it possessed a form of consciousness and a will of its own. Consequently, humans were not the sole entities susceptible to the effects of magic. If a storm, a cat, or a ship contained an element of spirit, it, too, was subject to the workings of magic.
For the ancient Germanic peoples, magic constituted a relatively ordinary aspect of daily life. Practitioners of magic worked in harmony with the fundamental principles believed to govern the cosmos, rather than in opposition to them. If they were set apart from others, it was primarily due to their depth of knowledge regarding the cosmos in general and the entities they worked with. It's essential to note that this aligns with Bruno's perspective as well: the person who successfully binds is the one who possesses the most comprehensive knowledge of the beings to be bound and their desires.
The Old Norse lexicon related to magic primarily revolves around concepts of knowledge. As explained by Professor Catharina Raudvere, an expert in Norse magic, the verb "kunna," which means both "to know, to understand, to know by heart" and "to have insight into old traditions and lore," is central to this semantic field. The most common and general term for "magic" is "fjölkyngi," derived from "kunna," and it means "great knowledge."
In addition to the knowledge of magical techniques and knowledge of the beings involved in the working, another form of knowledge at the heart of traditional Germanic magical practice is the knowledge of fate. In Raudvere’s words:
The importance of destiny must not be understood to mean that the Norsemen held purely fatalistic beliefs. Rather it must be understood in terms of knowing the future, in order to keep it under some kind of control. Divination rituals and the performance of seiðr [a type of Norse magic discussed below]… were expressions of ways of finding the keys to hidden parts of reality and measuring what was given. The results of divination marked the limits of individual free will and after the divination ceremony strategies could be made for acting within these limits. Hence, prophecies, dreams and dream interpretations, and curses were treated with the greatest concern. … They reveal a tension between freedom and dependence. Nevertheless, there can seem to be a contradiction in terms: the conceptions of destiny could also be viewed as a definition of personal freedom. On the one hand, the limits are set and it lies within the human condition to identify them and act within the given space; on the other, choices and their consequences over a longer period of time is an important theme in the sagas. …
Destiny was in one sense given, but there were still opportunities for developing different strategies… in connection with the fundamental structure of the perception of time.
Magic, therefore, is (amongst other things) the ability to discern fate and work with it to accomplish one’s purpose.
When modern people speak of magic, they often make a distinction between “white magic” and “black magic,” the former being “good” magic and the latter being “evil” magic. This is as common in anthropology as it is amongst the general populace. Such a taxonomy, however, is nowhere to be found in the conceptions of magic held by the pre-Christian Germanic peoples, who had radically different moral standards than those of what we today call “morality.”
Were there any truly indigenous categories or divisions within Germanic magic, then? There were, but we know frustratingly little about them today. The only type of Norse magic that is clearly marked off from other kinds of magic in Old Norse literature is seidr, a form of “high” ritual magic practiced only by women and “unmanly” men such as the god Odin. Men who practiced magic typically delved into the amorphous complex of “warrior shamanism” practiced by initiatory military societies. The Old Norse word galdr, derived from galan, “to crow,” denotes magic that centrally involves the use of runes and incantations, and may have referred to another particularly organized magical system, but, due to the absence of sufficient evidence, this must remain an intriguing speculation.
Magic was an integral part of the Western world up to and including the Renaissance. However, that “Rebirth” of Classical culture, arts, and sciences was crushed beneath the boot of the fearfully pious and reactionary elements of the European society of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which included the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the Inquisition, and the Witch Trials. Out of understandable concern for their own safety, philosophers and scientists – formerly among the most likely to be avid practitioners of magic – stripped their crafts of anything that might seem “magical,” rebranding them as the study of inert, mechanistic phenomena. This brought their disciplines into harmony with the dominant strains of Christian theology, wherein the visible, tangible world is an unthinking, unfeeling artifact created by a god who is utterly separate from his creation. Consciousness was dismissed from the world – except, conveniently, from the human mind, but even the workings of the human mind were reframed in mechanistic, as opposed to animistic, terms. Magic had been banished from the world – and, it should be noted, for purely ideological reasons.
Or, at least, polite society demands that we speak as if this revolution had actually been successful in removing magic from Western civilization.
Politeness aside, however, the “mechanistic philosophy” of René Descartes, Isaac Newton, and their ilk has utterly failed to erase magic from the modern world, or even to diminish its influence. Magic occupies as prominent a place in modern society as it ever has. We just prefer to call it things like “psychology,” “sociology,” “advertising,” “marketing,” and “personal development” rather than “magic.”