i just know there was a weird little girl in the middle ages out there stealing snake’s eggs and putting them in her family’s chicken coop in the hope of hatching a basilisk
Reading about medieval magic like “Oh hey turns out a lot the fathers of the church wrote extensively on magic. I wonder where they got these ideas from they sound kinda familiar.“ Then you get to the translation footnotes at the bottom like
Source: Pliny the Elder
Like, I’m a huge proponent of the idea that a lot of classical magic actually had an underlying empirical method and that much of what modern scholarship disregards as folk practices and mysticism actually has a consistent and comprehensible logic that is more than worthy of study.
I also think Pliny the Elder enjoyed just kinda making shit up.
