Picture magic
As Glamor (lat. Invultuatio ) refers to an old, already Indian, Chaldean, Greek and Roman magicians practiced magic using an image that is painted or molded from clay, wax or metal to interact remotely to the person depicted . In some cases the image is prepared for this by procedures.
basis
It is a worldwide form of magical thinking that is based on the idea that the picture represents a real part of the person. Because of this idea, ethnologists often had great difficulties in their field research when they wanted to photograph people because they believed that part of their personality would be stolen as a result (see ethnographic photography ).
A communication by the Germanist Friedrich Thiel (1938) about the historian Eduard Meyer , who found it very uncomfortable to have his portrait painted by Lovis Corinth publicly exhibited in the Hamburger Kunsthalle , shows that comparable ideas can also occur among Western educated people .
Applications
Depending on whether you tormented such a picture, pricked with needles, beheaded, drowned or melted it by slow fire, you believed you were tormenting the person in question, instilling love (with a stab in the liver), hurting them with a shot ( see lumbago ), to kill or to deliver a slow infirmity (→ Black Magic of Voodoo ).
For the magic of love , one also made pictures of the two people to be connected and manipulated them accordingly.
In the Meleager saga , this motif was used poetically; ancient poets often mention the magic of images in an erotic context. In the Middle Ages and in the witch trials , the magic image called Atzmann in German , vols or vouts (Latin vultus ) in French played a major role, and the popes issued numerous bulls against its use.
Later the accusation of killing the king by means of wax paintings ( envonter ) became the subject of numerous political trials at the French court, which were almost uninterrupted by the reign of Charles IX. up to the Louis XIII. lasted and cost the lives of various unpopular statesmen, notably the Minister Concini.
According to the view of the Middle Ages, parts of the so-called mummy of the living person, namely hair, skin or shavings of nails, which were added to the picture, or a church baptism in the name of the same belonged to it, in order to inseparably match his fate with that of the picture unite.
In the same sense it was also believed that the person concerned could be harmed by using the shade or cutting out and smoking his footprint in the ground. One was therefore very careful not to let any waste matter in the body fall into the power of strangers, and medieval writings are full of means for averting the magic of images.
Oversight (oversight spell)
For as long as the image magic was considered to be effective, the by-mistake was understood to be an inverse phenomenon, so to speak: One thought that a visual impression (image) could have a physical effect on people - especially in pregnant women, it can influence the womb, and mostly negative. The sight of a hunchback could make the child hunchback, a conflagration could cause a fire mark, and so on. Like - the positive effect appears less often and already metaphorically, according to which a servant knows what to do with her master, so that her son is just as eager to hunt as he is.
literature
- Wolfgang Brückner: Thoughts on the theory of magic. About magic with pictures . In: Leander Petzoldt (Ed.): Magic and Religion. Contributions to a theory of magic. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1978, ISBN 3-534-05755-4 , pp. 404-419
- Peter Eschweiler: Picture magic in ancient Egypt . Universitätsverlag, Freiburg / Switzerland 1994, ISBN 3-7278-0957-4
- Friedrich Pfister : picture and picture magic . In: Concise Dictionary of German Superstition Vol. 1, Berlin / Leipzig 1927, Sp. 1282–1298
