THE OCCULT DESK
Medieval Necromancers' Fasts Were 'Technology,' Not Piety, Reddit Author Argues
A poster on r/occult contends that bread-and-water regimens in 15th-century grimoires were designed to exhaust the analytical mind before scrying.
THE INTERNET — A Reddit user posting to r/occult has advanced a theory that the harsh preparations demanded by medieval books of ritual magic were less a matter of religious devotion than of practical method. The post, published on the first of November, concerns texts such as the Munich Manual of Demonic Magic and the Heptameron.
According to the author, those works require days on bread and water, nights spent awake, long repetitive prayers and complete isolation before a practitioner may take up a dark mirror or polished blade. Readers, the author says, commonly take these rules as a religious matter. The author once did the same, attributing them to lingering Catholic guilt.
That view changed, the author writes, after attempting a strict three-day fast before a dark mirror session some years ago. The author now holds that medieval practitioners used physical exhaustion to quiet the conscious, critical mind, which would otherwise dismiss any faint distortion in the glass as a candle's reflection or a trick of imagination.
The post sets out a proposed mechanism. By the third day of fasting and broken sleep, it claims, the blood sugar falls and the brain slips into a waking theta state, weakening the filter between inner imagery and outward sight. Chanting long, monotonous names then supposedly lets the tired brain project unfiltered impressions onto the reflective surface. The author offers this as the author's own interpretation; no study is cited.
In the author's telling, the old clerks lacked modern terms for hypnagogic states or sensory deprivation and so framed their instructions as spiritual purification. The author calls the result an engineered biological hack.
The post closes with a question to fellow members about their own experience with grueling preparations. The author reports rarely going to such extremes now, since recovery takes days, but describes the improvement in visual clarity over casual modern methods as undeniable.