Ritual Embodiment in Modern Western Magic

Becoming the Magician

Damon Zacharias Lycourinos

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351329958
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In the Western world, magic has often functioned as an umbrella term for various religious beliefs and ritual practices that seek to influence events by harnessing supernatural power. The definition of these myriad occult and esoteric traditions have, however, usually come from those that are opposed to its practice; notably authorities in religious, legal and intellectual spheres. This book seeks to provide a new perspective, directly from the practitioners of modern Western magic, by exploring how a distinctive mode of embodiment and consciousness can produce a transition from an 'ordinary' to a 'magical' worldview.

Starting with an introduction to the study of magic in the Western academy, the book then presents the author's own participant observation of five ethnographic case studies of modern Western magic. The focus of these ethnographic case studies is directed towards ideas and methods the informants employ to self-legitimise and self-represent as 'magicians'. It concludes by discussing the phenomenological implications and issues around embodiment that are inherent to the contemporary practice of magic.

This is a unique insight into the lived experience of practitioners of modern magic. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of the Occult and New Religious Movements, as well as Religious Studies academics examining issues around the embodiment and the anthropology of religion.

1
Western constructions of magic

1.1 Origins of the anthropology of magic

Definitions of magic have historically been involved with exercises in power marking magic as a category of exclusion designating both European pre-Christian and non-European worldviews and practices. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such definitions were developed discussing magic as an important, yet ambiguous, topic in cultural historiography and anthropology. These discussions were influenced by Victorian anthropologists’ search for the origins and development of human civilisation within an evolutionary framework inspired by the writings of Herbert Spencer,¹ Lewis Henry Morgan,² and Adolf Bastion’s notion that all people share a ‘psychic unity’.³

Early anthropologists, such as Edward Burnett Tylor, advocated the demarcation of magic, religion, and science as an anthropological theory for identifying stages of development from ‘primitive culture’ to ‘modern civilisation’. For Tylor, magic was a defining aspect of the culture and mentality of ‘primitive man’.⁴ Although Tylor viewed magic as a survival of a primitive past, he believed it was based on an intellectual propensity of a ‘pseudo-science’ seeking to discover the causality of certain events yet was based on the fallacious assumption that ideal and real connections are associated and influence each other through correspondences of ‘occult’ sympathies. The transition, though, from a magical worldview to a scientific one was because of ‘assigning new causes for the operations of nature and the events of life’.⁵

James George Frazer also situated magic at the earliest stage of evolutionary development and articulating it as a ‘pseudo-science’ having faith in the order and uniformity of nature. For Frazer, the magician erroneously believed he could subject the forces of nature to his power through the homeopathic and contagious effects of the sympathetic nature of magic. To support his theory, Frazer made speculative references to Aboriginal religious practices, which he believed represented the earliest stage of evolutionary development:

All men in Australia are magicians, but not one is a priest; everybody fancies he can influence his fellows or the course of nature by sympathetic magic, but nobody dreams of propitiating gods by prayer and sacrifice.⁶

These intellectualist evolutionary conceptions of magic were heavily criticised for ignoring decisive ethnographic data demonstrating that a rigid demarcation among magic, religion, and science is at times non-existent and that such observations are context-dependent. A notable response to the intellectualist evolutionary magic-religion-science debate that would reorient anthropological approaches to the study of magic derives from Bronislaw Malinowski’s ethnographic fieldwork. From his fieldwork he observed that his ethnographic subjects, the Trobrianders, did not distinguish between magic and religion, and neither did they lack ‘scientific attitude’.⁷ In Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays, Malinowski instead employed the terms sacred as acts and observances deemed as reverent and associated with supernatural forces and profane as relating to activities based on empirical observation of natural processes.⁸

As a theoretical model of response to the evolutionist projection of humanity’s psychic unity, the French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl observed that this evolutionary worldview should be defined by contrasting Western ‘scientific mentality’ with collective representations of non-Western ‘primitive mentality’, described as ‘mystical’ and ‘prelogical’.⁹ Lévy-Bruhl believed that these characteristics of primitive mentality are essentially affective in nature. The forces being represented are imperceptible yet are considered ‘real’ but ‘unclear’ as they arise from collective affective experiences represented as if they had another existence of their own. This understanding of primitive mentality was referred to by Lévy-Bruhl as ‘participation’, which is indifferent to the rule of non-contradiction, and constitutes the intermixing of sensory perception of physical things and the affective perception of the invisible power.¹⁰

Malinowski criticised Lévy-Bruhl’s theory by raising the question as to how anthropologists are to comprehend human participation in at least two modes of reality shifting from one context to the other and how we are to see these modes as complementary in relationship.¹¹ This compelled Lévy-Bruhl to revise parts of his theory to account for the coexistence of rational and irrational elements in humanity.¹² Whereas Lévy-Bruhl’s pre-revised theory asserted that culture imposed a mentality on to human minds, now he postulated that culture brought forth these modes from within the mind as the source of both the ‘rational’ and the ‘irrational’.¹³ As this mode of experience now existed universally in Lévy-Bruhl’s revisions, participation can surface in the ‘civilised’ West yet remaining ‘fundamental to the activity of the primitive mentality’.¹⁴

Despite his criticisms of Lévy-Bruhl, Malinowski was convinced that participation and magic are identical.¹⁵ Malinowski observed that the internal structure of magic consists of the exploitation of both words and acts that have an intrinsic power, mana, to impregnate objects and gestures with magical potency. Here the magical practitioner would participate in a ‘sacred’ realm through these words and acts deemed as reverent and associated with supernatural forces.¹⁶

The Dutch anthropologist Jan van Baal, who discussed magic in terms of the cause and effect of the ‘spell’, developed a similar approach to Malinowski’s understanding of the effective internal structure of magic:

It evokes the weird atmosphere of mystery, in which things have power, in which things are more than they are and hold out to man danger and promise at the same time’.¹⁷

Participating in this mystery through the cause and effect of the spell, the harshness of life’s uncertainties may be alleviated by evoking the presence of some mysterious yet intentional agency of power. This, in turn, formulates what may be portrayed as magic within a religious worldview, represented and reinforced through myth and symbolism ‘as a means of expressing this experience of and against an uncertain power-charged world, which makes its mystery felt in that uncertainty’.¹⁸

1.2 Western esotericism and modern magic

From the anthropological discussions presented so far there appear to be certain factors and mentalities that postulate the existence of a polythetic class of phenomena referred to as ‘magic’, which is neither science nor religion, but merges aspects of both as a specific mode of mentality and a participatory worldview of cause and effect shaping conceptions of both spirit and natural forces. In terms of magic being discussed in the context of a mentalities debate and construed as a participatory worldview, contemporary studies of magical beliefs and practices in modern and late modern Western society have come to challenge the notion of magic as either ‘primitive’ and ‘irrational’, and therefore the ‘Other’ in contrast to progressive and secular modern Western society. More specifically, Wouter J. Hanegraaff argues from the perspective of the academic study of Western esotericism that magic can be seen as rejected knowledge and a ‘shadow side of our own official identity’.¹⁹ Henrik Bogdan further clarifies this argument:

The term magic has typically been used to describe non-mainstream beliefs and practices – non-Christians, heretics, non-Westerners, indigenous, ancient or ‘primitive’ cultures – any that might be considered ‘Other.’ The image of magic as inherently linked with the Other has functioned as an important factor in the construction of the self-identity of Western culture, for by defining magic as something alien, exotic, primitive, evil, deviant or even ridiculous, our society also makes a tacit statement as to its self-perceptions.²⁰

Olav Hammer observes that strategies of legitimating esoteric positions in modernity consist of an appeal to tradition, an appeal to science, and an appeal to experience.²¹ Regarding the appeal to tradition, Egil Asprem and Kennet Granholm view this notion of ‘tradition’ as constructed around emic claims to ‘hidden’ or ‘perennial’ lineages of esoteric thought and practice. Central to legitimating these claims, Asprem and Granholm argue from the perspective Paul Heelas’s concept of ‘detraditionalized religion’ that modern esotericists also turn to subjective experiential validations as means of legitimating strategies in response to the societal and philosophical transformations of modernity.²²

In his book The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, Ronald Hutton presents the classic argument that magic is designed to bring supernatural forces under the control of the magician:

Critical to this definition was the human will, for it did not depend upon the existence of independent supernatural beings, and one could term magical the effecting of physical changes or the gaining of knowledge by the exertion of the human mind in supersensual and uncanny ways.²³

According to Hutton, modern Western magic is a constellation of esoteric ideas and ritual practices from four historical periods. The first is identified as the ancient, encompassing symbols and practices from the Near East, the ancient civilisations of the Mediterranean, and the period of Late Antiquity. The legacy of antiquity provided many tools and habits that would come to define Western magic:

The consecrated circle within which some magicians worked, the importance attached to cardinal points of the compass, the concepts of the elements… and of elemental spirits, a belief in the existence of angels and demons, and use of ritual tools, amulets, spells, and invocations… the use of sacred geometry such as pentagrams and triangles, and the drawing of spirits or deities into human bodies.²⁴

Hutton argues for the importance of the medieval period with its emphasis on instructional manuals referred to as ‘grimoires’²⁵ for the purpose of communing with and/or compelling the activity of spirit entities from angelic, demonic, and elemental realms. The content of grimoires display elements of continuity with antiquity, such as the combination of the circle, the quarters, tools, and invocations, but located firmly within a Christocentric framework. The third phase of the early modern period exemplified the Renaissance stress on the hidden potentials of the human mind and self, emphasising ideas of spiritual development inspired by the revival of Neoplatonism and the advent of Hermeticism from an esoteric Christian perspective. In relation to the medieval phase, ‘the third phase… retained this medieval magic but drew upon the ancient hermetic texts to put new emphasis upon the figure of the person w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: interpreting the modern practice of Western magic
• 1 Western constructions of magic
• 2 Liber V vel Reguli
• 3 The Ninth Key of Gabriel and Levaniel
• 4 The Blessing of Wōđanaz
• 5 The Apollonian invocation
• 6 The Mithras Liturgy
• 7 Anthropology of ritual and the body in modern Western magic
• 8 Phenomenology of ritual in modern Western magic
• 9 Phenomenology of the body in modern Western magic
• 10 Ritualisation and the subtle body in modern Western magic
• Conclusion: becoming the magician and the logic of Western magical ritual
• Bibliography
• Index