Psalm Charms as Aids against Illness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The praying of psalms is the subject of Chapter 2. Psalms are frequently sung in charm rituals. They are carefully prescribed to help heal human and animal illness. Acute and painful diseases, such as diarrhea and carbuncles, are treated with psalms, as is fever. Even madness and “fiend-sickness” might respond to them, it was hoped. Psalms have great resonance for the English. They lie at the core of medieval liturgies, both monastic and public. They give hope to the suffering during the Visitation of the Sick. They were offered more generally as personal prayers and as penance. Chapter two establishes the petitionary nature of the psalms used in charm remedies. It demonstrates how psalms structure and organize charm performance with regard to other incantations. Psalms serve as practical prayers, the functionality of which arises out of each psalm’s generic form. They seek God’s assistance by asking the Lord directly or indirectly for aid. Psalms that use figurative language relevant to a charm’s objective employ metaphor and simile that act as vehicles for sympathetic magic. Charms render psalm incantations as powerful medicine for those in need.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".