A Phantom

In an early medieval Constantinople filled with pagan artifacts and dark histories, one man's writings would reveal a world in which sorcery, religion, and politics were inextricably intertwined. This episode brings you the story of a scholar, bishop, and savvy political survivor in an era of iconoclasm: the story of Ignatios the Deacon.

Researched, written, and produced by Corinne Wieben with original music by Purple Planet.

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Transcript

Pre-roll
You’re listening to Enchanted, a podcast on the history of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft. I’m Corinne Wieben.

Intro
Picture yourself in a courtroom in the middle of eighth-century Constantinople. Standing before the bench is a group of desperately poor women, all looking on with terrified faces. Their terror is understandable, since the accusers insist each of these women can dissolve their physical bodies and slip through the cracks in locked doors by night in order to strangle infants in their cribs. They are, the accusers say, gelloudes, a class of beings somewhere between witch and demon, ancient figures of nightmare whose name appears in exorcisms and folk charms alike.

The judge, hearing these accusations, considers for a moment and then does something remarkable. He opens the Gospel of Luke and reads aloud a passage from chapter twenty-four, in which the risen Christ appears to his frightened disciples and says to them, “a spirit has no flesh and bones.” The judge then declares that human bodies have mass. They are a fixed material reality. They cannot dissolve into spirit, slip through a locked door, and reassemble on the other side. He declares that the women are innocent and that the accusers are, most likely, the victims of demonic deceit.

The recorder of this story was a cleric named Ignatios the Deacon, whose writings would reveal a world in which sorcery, religion, and politics were inextricably intertwined. In this episode, I bring you the story of a scholar, bishop, and savvy political survivor: the story of Ignatios the Deacon.

The Enchanted City
Ignatios’s early life is largely a mystery. He was orphaned early on and taken in by Patriarch Tarasios, one of the most powerful men in the Byzantine church. Tarasios was appointed to lead the church in Constantinople in 784 and would preside over the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. This council officially restored the veneration of icons, devotional images of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the saints, after the first great wave of iconoclasm. Under Tarasios’s guidance, Ignatios received an excellent education, featuring deep immersion in classical Greek literature, rhetoric, and philosophy. He learned to write the elegant Greek of the educated elite and, more importantly, learned to move in the networks of power that ran through the church and the imperial court. He rose to the rank of deacon and was appointed keeper of the sacred vessels at the church of Hagia Sophia, a position that placed him at the center of Byzantine ecclesiastical life.

To fully understand what this position meant to Ignatios, it helps to understand the city he lived in. In the eighth and ninth centuries, Constantinople was more than a political capital. In the eyes of its inhabitants, it was full of occult power. The ancient pagan monuments that filled it had taken on new, strange reputations over time. In the great stadium of the Hippodrome stood a bronze column in the shape of three intertwined serpents. This Serpent Column was originally made to commemorate a Greek victory over the Persians in the fifth century BCE. By Ignatios’s time, it was said to be a talisman against snakes and venom. Nearby stood the Obelisk of Theodosius, thought by some to have a connection with the sun and with fortune-telling. There were statues said to protect the city’s streets, including a bronze turtle said to keep Constantinople clean and even a group of figures said to ward off sea monsters.

From this perspective, the city was rife with objects of occult power, all requiring careful management, but instead of destroying these objects, Church authorities decided to reinterpret them. Ancient statues were given new, often sinister histories that both explained their presence and firmly subordinated them to the power of the Church. The Serpent Column might have power, for example, but only because God permitted it. This was the city Ignatios the Deacon was born into, a place where the physical landscape carried spiritual significance, where the line between an ancient monument and a magical object was fuzzy, and where the Church’s primary job, in addition to saving souls, was to be an arbiter of the supernatural.

For a boy who had started with nothing, Ignatius’s rise to join this office was remarkable. Then it all became very complicated. In 814, Emperor Leo V “the Armenian” came to power and revived the iconoclast policy. Icons were forbidden once again, and the Byzantine Empire was again torn into factions of iconophiles, meaning “lovers of icons,” and iconoclasts, “breakers of icons.” The reigning Patriarch Nikephoros refused to comply with iconoclasm and was deposed and exiled, and Ignatios, the man who had built his entire career in service of the iconophile church, chose to abandon his conscience and side with the iconoclasts. His reward was a promotion to the office of the metropolitan bishop of Nicaea. He would spend nearly thirty years as a bishop under the iconoclast regime.

It’s impossible to know exactly what was going through his mind. His later writings frame this period as a lapse of judgment, but the pragmatic explanation is probably also the true one. He was a man who had clawed his way up from nothing, who had everything to lose, and who understood that in an empire where the wrong theological position could cost your freedom or your life, the ability to read which way the wind was blowing was not a moral failing. It was survival.

Then, in 843, the wind changed for the last time. The Empress Theodora, regent for her young son, reversed iconoclasm permanently. The Triumph of Orthodoxy, as it came to be called, is still celebrated in the Eastern Orthodox Church every year. Icons were restored, iconoclast patriarchs were deposed, and Ignatios the Deacon, former bishop, retired to a monastery and picked up his pen.

A Strange and Awesome Miracle
Ignatios’s writings would be some of the most influential of his era, and they reflected both his theology and Byzantine understandings of the occult. For Ignatios and his contemporaries, magic was a pervasive threat that required constant vigilance. There were the gelloudes: demons that preyed on infants. There was the evil eye, the envious gaze that could blight crops, sour milk, sicken children, and ruin a couple’s fertility. There were love potions, poisons, and the dark arts of the learned sorcerers who consulted with demons. Thankfully, there was a wide arsenal of protections to deploy against these threats. People wore amulets and coins, murmured charms and incantations over sick children, and buried small lead figurines at thresholds to bind an enemy. The Church’s official position on all of this was complicated. Most of it was thought to associated with paganism or demons and was therefore prohibited, but the fears that drove people to these practices were real, and the Church knew it.

The theological framework developed to manage this situation was relatively elegant. The distinction between a holy miracle and a magic trick came down to mechanism and source. A miracle worked through supplication. A person could humbly petition God, and God might choose to act. Magic worked through coercion. If sorcerers used the right words, the right substances, or the right rituals, they could force spiritual forces to obey them. As for the evil eye, the official Church position, hammered out by theologians from John Chrysostom onward, was that the envious gaze itself was not the real problem. The problem was that demons, who hate everything good and beautiful and thriving, would exploit a moment of human envy to turn a person’s gaze into a weapon. The evil eye was real because demons made it real. By reclassifying a piece of ancient folk belief as a form of demonic assault, the Church could acknowledge the reality of the threat while insisting that the proper defense was Christian prayer.

Then there were the gelloudes, those child-killing witches. Theologians held that human beings could not actually transform into demons, since demons were understood to be sexless, bodiless entities. Therefore, strictly speaking, the gelloudes did not exist as folk tradition imagined them. There were no women flying through the air at night to strangle infants. However, the exorcism prayers of the Eastern Church continued to include the gelloudes by name, because the demons that inspired the fear were real, even if shapeshifting witches were not. This is the intellectual world Ignatios inhabited and the world he helped shape.

When Ignatios retired to his monastery after the Triumph of Orthodoxy, he produced a number of works in a carefully targeted effort to define where supernatural power came from and who could legitimately claim it. His Life of Gregory of Decapolis shows this intervention at work. Gregory is a wandering ascetic, a holy man who travels through the Mediterranean world performing miracles and defeating demons at every stop. The text is full of supernatural incidents: exorcisms, healings, visions, and spiritual warfare of the most dramatic kind. At every turn, Ignatios distinguishes what Gregory can do from what a sorcerer does. According to Ignatios, Gregory’s power comes entirely from virtue, decades of self-discipline, and prayer. He does not coerce anything. He prays humbly, and God answers. Ignatios offers Gregory as an alternative to the supernatural economy of charm-sellers, local wise women, and dealers in amulets and love potions. Their wares, his text implies, come from demons and work through demonic mechanisms. Gregory’s miracles come from God and work through divine grace, which is more reliable and infinitely more powerful.

It’s in his account of the death of Patriarch Tarasios, the man who had rescued him and made his career possible, that Ignatios gives us one of his most vivid pieces of supernatural writing. As Tarasios lay dying, Ignatios describes him engaged in a “mighty war,” writing: “At that very time a strange and awesome miracle took place that filled us who were present with amazement and fear; for, we saw him in ecstasy and wrestling against invisible opponents. Indeed, his contest was not against blood and flesh, but he was struggling against principalities, against the heavenly powers, against spiritual wickedness.” This scene reflects a belief that was becoming increasingly influential in Byzantine Christianity: the aerial toll house. This belief states that, after death, the soul passes through a series of stations, each presided over by a different class of demon. If the accusing demons find a real, unrepented sin, they can claim the soul, but if the soul’s conscience is clear, it will pass through unharmed. In Ignatios’s telling, the demons at Tarasios’s deathbed are powerless. He writes, “It was not possible for his enemies with their misplaced zeal to get him even a little under their control or make him concur with this disgusting pollutions; but he drove them to such a state of impotence by his absolute and awesome denial that they were unable to utter any plausible accusation against him.” Tarasios’s encounter with these challengers is the exact opposite of sorcery. Where the sorcerer cultivates demons, the saint endures them. Where the sorcerer seeks power through dark alliances, the saint finds protection in virtue. According to Ignatios, this scene proves which kind of supernatural relationship actually holds.

But Ignatios wasn’t finished. The Life of Patriarch Tarasios includes a postscript that is genuinely startling. In 820, Emperor Leo V, the iconoclast who had reversed everything and set in motion the crisis that derailed Ignatios’s career, reportedly experienced a vision. In it, the dead Patriarch Tarasios appeared and ordered a man named Michael to run Leo through with a sword. Six days later, Leo was assassinated by Michael the Stammerer, who seized the throne. Ignatios presents this as a miracle, divine justice delivered from beyond the grave by a persecuted saint. But it is also Ignatios, writing in the aftermath of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, explaining why the iconoclasts lost: not because of armies or court politics, but because a dead patriarch sent a vision to an emperor and arranged his assassination. It is spiritual warfare as the ultimate political reality.

True Flesh
There is one more piece of occult lore in Ignatios’s writings that was arguably the most politically explosive of all: the question of whether icons themselves were magical objects. The iconoclast emperors said yes. They pointed to specific practices among the icon-venerating faithful that looked, to them, uncomfortably like magic. Devotees had been known to scrape paint from icons and mix it into the Eucharist. Some had used icons as godparents at baptisms. Others had placed the consecrated Eucharistic bread directly into the painted hands of an icon to be “received.” Icons were kissed, adorned with lamps and incense, processed through the streets, and credited with miracles of healing and protection. From the iconoclast perspective, this was idolatry, the treatment of a physical object as though it has inherent supernatural power, which was exactly what the Church condemned when it spoke against amulets and talismans. The iconoclasts argued that these images created confusion between the object and the power, bypassing God in favor of a material object.

Ignatios’s response to this accusation was careful and deliberate. His hagiographies of Tarasios and Nikephoros both worked to establish a precise theological distinction between icons and talismans. He argued that an icon is not a source of power. It is a window, a point of contact between the believer and the archetype, whether that’s Christ, the Virgin, or a saint. The icon does not, cannot, act on its own. It is the opposite of coercive magic; it is a focus for prayer and petition. In this framework, icons possess the same power as saints’ relics. They channel divine power through the authorized channels of the Church, at God’s discretion only. The person who venerates an icon is doing the same thing as the person who begs a saint to intercede. With the Triumph of Orthodoxy in 843, the icon was officially defined as an intermediary, not a talisman. Its power was relational and conditional, not inherent and automatic. The wild, individualistic, quasi-magical practices that had scandalized the iconoclasts were quietly set aside. With Ignatios’s help, the icon had been tamed.

Which brings us back to that courtroom with its impoverished women and the judge with his Gospel of Luke.

The judge was George, the father of Tarasios, future patron of the orphaned Ignatios. In the midst of theological wrangling acbout the meaning of icons and the power of demons in the world, Ignatios recounted the story of this trial in his Life of Tarasios and gave it a moral. The theological argument George made at the trial was rooted in Christ’s humanity. His claim was that a human body cannot dissolve into spirit, because flesh and spirit are categorically different things, as Christ himself pointed out to his disciples when they mistook him for a ghost. The women could not have done what they were accused of doing, because the physics of the Christian cosmos do not permit it. The gelloudes are not real, at least not in the form the accusers imagined. What is real are the demons who inspire such fears, and demons, as the Church taught, operate within limits set by God. Ignatios writes, “It is indeed a myth related by the Greeks that a certain woman, Gello by name, after meeting an early death, is in the habit of visiting babies and new born children in the guise of ghosts and plotting against their life. Deceived by the same evil spirit of the myth, those who give credit to such things attempt in some way to confer this abominable power upon women as though it were true and ascribe the cause of untimely death to these [women] who are transformed in to spirits. What insensibility, what blindness of the eyes of the heart… Yet truly Christ Himself, who assumed true flesh and verily confirmed to his disciples that the spirit has no flesh and bones, cannot be described as a phantom with no substance.” What Ignatios knew and what he wanted his readers to understand is that this is not just a story about a witchcraft trial. It’s an argument about the material body of Christ.

As Ignatios saw it, the iconoclasts had a problem with embodiment. Their theology implied that, after the resurrection, Christ’s physical humanity had been absorbed into or dissolved by his divinity, that the resurrection was fundamentally a spiritual event, an abandonment of the flesh. This was catastrophic for the iconophile argument, because if Christ no longer had a physical body after the resurrection, then it was impossible to make a legitimate image of him. An icon of Christ would be either an image of a body that no longer existed, or an image of the divine nature alone, which was, by any reckoning, impossible to depict. So Ignatios presents George’s ruling at the gelloudes trial with a gleam in his eye. If, he argues, you hold that a human body can dissolve and be “contained in a spirit,” as iconoclast theology seems to require, then you are logically committed to believing that the same transformation could happen to these women. You are forced to believe in child-killing witches who shed their bodies in the night.

The absurdity is the point. Orthodox Christology and sound demonology turn out to be the same argument: the body is real. Christ’s body was and is real, which is why you can make his image. The gelloudes are not real in the way the accusers think, which is why the women go free. Ignatios highlighted this story because it did three things at once: it exonerated innocent women, defended the icon, and made the iconoclasts look like people who believed in witches.

Conclusion
Ignatios the Deacon died around 848, just a few years after the Triumph of Orthodoxy. By then, his literary project had largely succeeded. His hagiographies depicted him as a defender of the right cause, and his letters circulated among the educated elite as brilliant, sometimes sardonic, accounts of his own life. His life and works reveal something important about how magic and witchcraft actually functioned in the early Middle Ages: not primarily as things people did, but as political instruments. Accusations of sorcery could neutralize a sophisticated theological opponent or dramatize the defeat of a regime, the way Ignatios characterized the emperor’s assassination and the fall of the iconoclasts as a divine verdict.

At the same time, Ignatios’s world was genuinely enchanted in ways that went beyond rhetoric: the Serpent Column in the Hippodrome, the demons at the dying patriarch’s bedside, the exorcism prayers that listed the gelloudes by name. These were not metaphors. The people of ninth-century Constantinople lived in a city they understood to be densely populated with supernatural forces, and the Church’s job (part of it, anyway) was to manage those forces.

Ignatios clearly understood all of this. He knew that the line between miracle and magic was not grounded in fact but authority, a question of who controlled the story. He spent the second half of his life making sure that story was told correctly, by the right people, with the right theological conclusions attached.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, he made sure to preserve the story of a judge in Constantinople who looked at a group of frightened women accused of flying through the air and strangling children and used the Gospel of Luke to set them free.

In a life full of complicated choices, that seems worth remembering.

Outro
If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe to Enchanted wherever you listen. This episode was produced by me with original music by Purple Planet. You can find them at purple dash planet dot com. If you want to learn more be sure to check out the sources link in the show notes. Special thanks to Enchanted’s Patreon patrons for supporting the production of this and every episode. If you want to support Enchanted, please visit patreon dot com slash enchantedpodcast. If you’re looking for a way to support the show that won’t cost you anything, you can always give Enchanted: The History of Magic & Witchcraft a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, Audible, or wherever you listen and recommend it to your friends. You can get in touch with me via email at enchantedpodcast at gmail dot com or follow on Bluesky at enchantedpodcast. As always, for more information and special features, visit enchantedpodcast dot net. I’m Corinne Wieben. Thank you for listening and stay enchanted.