Magical Charaktêres in the Carolingian World: A Ninth-Century Charm in MS Vat. lat. 5359 and Its Broader Cultural Context

Abstract

There has been a common assumption among medievalists that the magical signs deriving from Eastern occult practices and known in Latin as caracteres first appeared in Western European manuscripts with the rise of “learned” magic in the high Middle Ages, and with the translation of relevant materials from Hebrew and Arabic. This paper questions this assumption by presenting a charm, hitherto overlooked, that contains occult signs of Eastern origin, recorded along with an exorcistic incantation deviating from normative Christian formulas, on the final page of a ninth-century Carolingian legal manuscript from northern Italy (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. lat. 5359, fol. 146v). Thereafter, the paper sets this unique charm within a broader cultural context of eighth- and ninth-century Western Europe, where both laypeople and clerics continued to deploy graphic signs originating from Eastern occult traditions for apotropaic and healing purposes, despite the repeated criticism of this practice in normative Christian discourse.