Defining Magic: A Reader (Critical Categories in the Study of Religion)

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Matthews, W. 2016. ‘Wisdom’, ‘knowledge’, and the ‘Yi Jing thought model’: two perspectives on the proper uses of the classics in contemporary Hangzhou. Paper presented at the Joint East Asian Studies Conference, SOAS University of London, September 2016. Building on the reports of missionaries and explorers, Victorian-era anthropologists (of the mid- to late-nineteenth century) busied themselves with creating hierarchically organised taxonomies of social facts they had second-hand knowledge of, and that corresponded, in their view, to more or less well-defined ‘steps’ in an evolutionary ladder of human cultures. Influenced by the styles of reasoning of their time, these scholars classified magic, religion, and science in different categories, corresponding to progressive ‘stages’ of cultural complexity, with magic attached to ideas of archaism and childlike irrationality. From a magical stage, human groups would progress to a religious stage, followed by science supplanting religion at the top of the evolutionary hierarchy.

The Azande, however, were perfectly aware of non-magical causal links. Witchcraft was not meant to explain all aspects of how a certain misfortune occurred. For example, when a building collapsed and killed somebody, any Azande could easily figure that its supporting structure had been weakened by termites. However, magic offered a framework to explain why something happened to a particular person and not someone else. Evans-Pritchard famously described this as the theory of the ‘second spear’. If a man is killed by an elephant, the elephant – the direct cause – is the first spear. Maleficium (causing evil through occult means) is the second spear. The elephant rammed into him, and not someone else, because he, not someone else, was bewitched. Orsi, R. 2002 [1985]. The Madonna of 115th Street: faith and community in Italian Harlem. New Haven: Yale University Press. Silverblatt, I. 2004. Modern inquisitions: Peru and the colonial origins of the civilized world. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. It is impossible to omit the role of anthropology itself in construing the idea of magic that was to become dominant in the modern era. In other words, we must consider that anthropology as an academic discipline has greatly contributed to establishing what counts as magic and what does not in today’s mainstream consciousness, including amongst many practitioners of magic.Later scholarship, based on ethnographic fieldwork and extensive time spent in the company of magic practitioners observing how magic is carried out in practice, became more interested in understanding magic rather than debunking it. Resulting approaches tended to call into question the notion that clear-cut divisions, let alone hierarchies, between magical, religious, and scientific worldviews can be objectively established. Furthermore, a consensus has emerged amongst anthropologists and religious studies specialists that deciding where religion (e.g. belief in spiritual beings), folk knowledge (e.g. non-biomedical healing systems), or ‘natural philosophy’ (e.g. astronomy) end and magic begins, has more to do with cultural boundary-making and social normativities than with any ‘objective’ reality. In innumerable historical and socio-cultural settings, drawing clear lines would be impossible. In Renaissance Europe, magic was performed by clergymen, scientists, and philosophers, while twentieth-century occultists, guided by a keen interest in scientific discoveries, moved in a grey area between science and magic producing ambiguous yet highly successful concepts such as ‘animal magnetism’, ‘mesmerism’, or ‘psychic energy’. In colonial Africa, sorcery was part and parcel of communities’ everyday religious and ritual life (Evans-Pritchard 1937). In 1980s Euro-America, witchcraft was rediscovered by tight communities of college-educated urbanites. These cases invite us to abandon the deeply ingrained stereotypes about magic as spiritually aberrant, irrational, and irredeemably ‘other’ that influenced early anthropology. Importantly, accessing the etheric dimension required sophisticated training of one’s imaginative and affective faculties. This involved rigorous spiritual discipline, encyclopaedic knowledge, articulated ceremonials, and the craft of handling matter according to its occult, etheric properties. In what is known as ‘desire magic’, for instance, Renaissance magicians would use their ability to discern and activate ethereal interconnections between objects, including persons, to influence the latter’s psychic life. Wiener, M. 2003. Hidden forces: colonialism and the politics of magic in the Netherlands Indies. In Magic and modernity: interfaces of revelation and concealment (eds) P. Pels & B. Meyer, 129-58. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Stratton, K.B. 2013. Magic discourse in the ancient world. In Defining magic: a reader (eds) O. Bernd-Christian & M. Strausberg, 243-54. London: Routledge. Religious practitioners of contemporary Western paganism recognize multiple types of magic, but all of the types have an underlying concept in common. In the scholarly sense of the word, magic is a continuum of practices that run from small-scale informal ritual acts to large-scale events in sacred buildings, both inside and outside of sanctioned religions. Pels, P. 2003. Introduction: magic and modernity. In Magic and modernity: interfaces of revelation and concealment (eds) P. Pels & B. Meyer, 1-38. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.Pike, S.M. 1996. Forging magical selves: gendered bodies and ritual fires at neo-pagan festivals. In Magical religion and modern witchcraft (ed.) J.R. Lewis, 121-40. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Lewis, G. 1994. Magic, religion and the rationality of belief. In Companion encyclopaedia of anthropology (ed.) T. Ingold, 563-90. London: Routledge. Magliocco, S. 1996. Ritual is my chosen art form: the creation of ritual as folk art among contemporary pagans. In Magical religion and modern witchcraft (ed.) J.R. Lewis, 93-120. Albany: State University of New York Press. If drawing clear boundaries and establishing hierarchies with respect to magic may be difficult, how does contemporary, fieldwork-based anthropology go about understanding it? Especially after anthropology’s methodological revolution in the 1920s that established ethnographic fieldwork as the paramount avenue to investigate social and cultural life, anthropologists have become particularly interested in understanding magic in and through practice – in other words, in figuring out what people do exactly, when they do magic.In common usage, magic evokes some sort of change in the physical world through non-scientific means. In occult and esoteric circles, "magic" can take a wider meaning involving spiritual change. Practitioners of some branches see their practices as having very little in common with other branches. Mr Scott Whitby also offered special praise to his colleagues within the School of Architecture, Computing and Engineering. As it did for the Persian priests, modern magic involves behaviors, actions, and methods intended to interact with and influence the supernatural world, usually involving the use of an occult or secret body of knowledge—but the boundaries that define what is religion and what magic are variable, and to an extent are set by a practicing sect or even an individual. When created with set_facts’s cacheable option, variables will have the high precedence in the play, Many consider the Renaissance the golden era of European ceremonial magic. From the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries CE, polymaths and thinkers such as Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, Isabella Cortese, or John Dee devoted considerable energy to the investigation of both the visible and the invisible dimensions of the universe. These figures, at once proto-scientists, theologians, and explorers of the occult, played an important role in defining the field of ‘erudite’ Western magic, drawing on repertoires as different as astrology, Christian theology and ethics, Greek mystery religion and philosophy, and Jewish mysticism (Yates 1964, 2001; Culianu 1984; Jütte 2015). The Renaissance model of the cosmos featured an ethereal dimension, called pneuma, existing between the physical and the spiritual realms. All persons and things, although materially separate from each other, were understood to be invisibly interconnected at the ‘pneumatic’ level, clinging to each other in secret correspondences that escaped the base senses. Anthropologists working on magic have identified comparable models of reality in a vast number of societies. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl has classically defined this model ‘participatory’ (1999); more recently, Philippe Descola has proposed the notion of ‘analogism’ to describe models of the world in which all things are thought to be invisibly interlinked (2013).

Bremmer, J.N. 1999. The birth of the term ‘magic’. Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 126, 1-12. Boyer, P. 2002. Religion explained: the evolutionary origins of religious thought. New York: Basic Books.Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1937. Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande. Oxford: University Press. Luhrmann, S. 1989. Persuasions of the witches’ craft: ritual magic in contemporary England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Stephens, W. 2002. Demon lovers: witchcraft, sex, and the crisis of belief. Chicago: University Press. As far as the second source of influence – the Hellenic tradition – is concerned, Classical Greece grouped what we today call magic (understood as the occult manipulation of invisible forces) together with philosophy, the manipulation of concepts, and medicine, the manipulation of bodily substances. These activities were quite distinct from the sphere of religion understood as the worship of the Gods. While the first realm was characterised by an inquisitive, experimental attitude, the realm of divinity was not seen as an arena of human disputation. Stanley Tambiah (1990: 8-11) has argued that, given the prestige of Hellenic traditions in Western academia, a separation between magic and religion ended up influencing Victorian anthropologists such as James Frazer. In his pioneering research into magic, Frazer came to consider magic a failed attempt at science, as both systems were thought to share the idea that the universe is regulated by impersonal forces that can be intervened upon, harnessed, and manipulated. However, magic was understood to be based on incorrect ideas about these forces, as well as distorted and incomplete factual knowledge of the world (Jarvie & Agassi 1970). Greenwood, S. 2013. Magical consciousness: a legitimate form of knowledge. In Defining magic: a reader (eds) O. Bernd-Christian & M. Strausberg, 197-210. London: Routledge.