Magic: The Basics

Michael D. Bailey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317610663
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Magic: The Basics is a concise and engaging introduction to magic in world history and contemporary societies. Presenting magic as a global phenomenon which has manifested in all human cultures, this book takes a thematic approach which explores the historical, social, and cultural aspects of magic.

Key features include:

• attempts to define magic either in universal or more particular terms, and to contrast it with other broad and potentially fluid categories such as religion and science;
• an examination of different forms of magical practice and the purposes for which magic has been used;
• debates about magic's effectiveness, its reality, and its morality;
• an exploration of magic's association with certain social factors, such as gender, ethnicity and education, among others.

Offering a global perspective of magic from antiquity through to the modern era and including a glossary of key terms, suggestions for further reading and case studies throughout, Magic: The Basics is essential reading for anyone seeking to learn more about the academic study of magic.

1 THE MEANINGS OF MAGIC

Some kinds of magic can be called “black magic.” Some can be called “white.” But the issue of what magic “is” is rarely so simple. Magic can be black or white, but it can also be high or low, elite or common, learned or simple. It can be ritual, ceremonial, sympathetic, or contagious. Magic can be performed by magicians, of course, but also by sorcerers, witches, wizards, warlocks, enchanters, shamans, conjurors, and illusionists. To be a victim of witchcraft sounds terrible, but to be bewitched by something sounds a bit better, and to be enchanted sounds quite nice indeed. The French philosopher Voltaire, writing in the eighteenth century, quipped that while the Christian church had always condemned magic, “she always believed in it” as well, and he noted more basically that the religious beliefs and practices of one sect were considered superstitious and magical by others.¹ At the opposite end of one possible spectrum, the twentieth-century science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s famous Third Law holds that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”²

Few things that loom so large in human culture are as hard to pin down precisely as the concept of magic. Most people know what magic means, or at least what it implies, in most general contexts, but scratch the surface of any discussion, and problems start to bubble up. In scholarly circles, certainly, no broad definition of magic as a category of academic study has ever been without controversy. This is not (just) due to the penchant scholars have for picking apart each other’s arguments. Rather, it stems from the fact that magic, throughout its long history in most human cultures, has been a deeply contested category and a very fraught label. While some people have explicitly claimed that they possessed magical powers, many others have stood accused of practicing magic, often by authorities intent on punishing them in some fairly severe ways. Naturally, they have tried to defend themselves against this charge, and they have frequently done so not by denying any particular actions but by claiming that those actions are not magic, as authorities understand it, or that they represent good magic rather than bad.

These dynamics mean that any thorough exploration of this topic needs to include some discussion of the various meanings that magic can convey and the many names that can be given to magical practices. Here, we’ll look first at the relationship of magic to other broad framing categories, namely religion and science, followed by an exploration of how scholars have tried to create general definitions of magic that can serve to differentiate it from these other categories. Then we’ll turn to the word “magic” itself and the multitude of other terms that have been used to label magical practices, limited first just to the context of Western, mainly European, civilization, and then addressing some of the further problems that arise when Western terminology is applied more broadly around the globe. Finally, I’ll suggest a solution to these dilemmas, which is to embrace this tangle of meanings as something that is essential to the definition of magic in all contexts.

MAGIC, RELIGION, AND SCIENCE

People around the world have struggled with the meanings of magic, and continue to do so, because understanding magic can be extremely important. In the broadest sense, it can provide a framework for thinking about both the physical world and the spiritual universe. Scholars sometimes use phrases like “magical thinking” or a “magical worldview.” As such, magic has often been set in contrast with other, equally capacious frameworks (and, one might add, equally fluid too), at least in Western thought.

Troublesome as fixed definitions of magic are, we must begin somewhere. Let’s start with the proposition that magic should be understood as a set of practices intended to influence or control either mystical, spiritual forces or physical properties that exist within nature but are hidden or occult, that is, not readily apparent or available to all people. This definition covers a lot of ground and might serve nicely in many ways, but immediately a problem is also apparent. Not all practices designed to do these things, either through the course of human history or in the present day, have been thought of as magical. Rituals to control, placate, or supplicate spiritual powers can be thought of as religious in many contexts, while the manipulation of often invisible natural forces can bring us into the realm of science. The opposition of magic to both religion, on the one hand, and science, on the other, has been critically important to how all three categories have been understood over the course of Western history.

As Voltaire noted, it has been common throughout history for one group of people to regard the religious practices of other groups as magic. In fact, the root of the word “magic” in Western languages originated with the ancient Greeks and was used to describe the practices of the Persian priestly class, the magoi. People in ancient polytheistic cultures believed that the world was inhabited by multitudes of powerful spirits. Foreign gods were typically thought to be strange and perhaps more disreputable than one’s own, but they were real and powerful nonetheless. Likewise, the priests of other cultures could be considered somewhat nefarious, but their practices could still be regarded as effective. The Greeks had their own gods of magic, including Artemis, known as Diana to the Romans, but most especially Hecate, a goddess of the moon, magic, and witchcraft. She was (or became) a horrifying figure. The third-century BCE poet Theocritus describes her, in his Idylls, creeping through burial sites while frightened dogs quake at her approach, and she is also depicted killing women in childbirth.³ Among her priestesses was the foreign princess Medea, a sorceress who performed monstrous deeds during her unhappy marriage to the Greek hero Jason, including in some versions of the myth killing her own children.

The ancient Hebrews also often ascribed what could be called magic to the priests of foreign cultures. In the biblical Book of Exodus, for example, Moses and Aaron challenged Pharaoh to release the Hebrews from bondage in Egypt. They performed a number of wondrous signs (or the Hebrew god performed wonders through them), such as transforming rods into serpents or causing the Nile to flow red with blood. These were initially matched by the “wise men and sorcerers…the magicians of Egypt” through their “secret arts.”⁴ On the eve of a major battle against the Philistines, the Hebrew king Saul consulted a diviner, later known as “the witch” of Endor, only after he had tried to consult his own priests but “the Lord did not answer him.”⁵ Similar parallels are found in other cultures. Practices subsequently considered to be magic in ancient India were often associated with gods, mystics, or holy men. In ancient China, the kinds of rites that would be labeled magic in the West were thought of as various kinds of “arts” (shu), some of which were the special purview of shamans or monks. As late as the eighteenth century, a major “sorcery” scare in China (although Chinese lacks that specific word) focused in part on Buddhist monks and Taoist priests.⁶ In Mesoamerican societies prior to Spanish conquest, gods and spirits were typically seen as ambivalent figures, not entirely good or evil. After the conquest, native people themselves readily identified some of these figures with Christian demons or the devil, and hence with Christian ideas of magic, but still worshiped or at least invoked them through traditional rites.⁷

Monotheistic cultures tend to draw more fundamental distinctions between magic and religion, and none has done so with more enduring consequences than Christianity. In the strict dichotomy of the Christian universe, God worked miracles and edifying wonders. All other marvelous actions were magic, which Christian authorities resolutely linked to the devil. As the seventh-century bishop Isidore of Seville would write, all the “magic arts” had “issued from a certain pestilential alliance of humans and evil angels.”⁸ When it came to categorizing different actions – such as a healing rite, a spoken blessing, or a muttered curse – as either magical or religious, this distinction was not always so easily drawn by Christian authorities, nor so readily understood by many Christians. But in theory, the separation was absolute. Eventually, Europeans would export their ideas of magic not just as something foreign or vaguely mysterious but as profoundly evil and corrupt around the world. The process is still ongoing today, as some Pentecostal missionaries in Africa or Latin America proclaim that anyone practicing traditional forms of medicine, divination, or other arts is in fact ensnared in diabolical witchcraft. In some cases, though, people have fought back, reasserting (or claiming for the first time) religious validation for various practices. For example, Vodou, which began as condemned voodoo and sortilège in Haiti, now has the status of an official religion. And in both Europe and North America since the mid-twentieth century, self-proclaimed Witches or Wiccans have crafted a religious system that incorporates practices that they explicitly deem to be magical.

If boundaries between magic and religion have proven to be fluid and uncertain over time and across cultures, are distinctions between magic and science any more stable? Modern Western science has sought to distance itself from magic just as much if not more than modern Western religions have. The vehemence of committed partisans can be just as extreme. Physicist Robert Park declares, for example, that “science is the only way of knowing – everything else is just superstition.”⁹ Into this category, one must presume that Park would group anything he considered to be magical (and probably a good deal of religion as well). Such attitudes have a long pedigree. In antiquity, too, educated elites often derided magical practices in light of what they regarded as sound scientific knowledge. Perhaps no early “scientist” is more famous, in this regard, than the Roman writer and natural philosopher Pliny the Elder, who died while observing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. In his great compendium the Natural History, he castigated many practices that could be considered magical, including the explicit “magic” of Persian magoi, whom he considered charlatans. In particular, he condemned what he regarded as false healing practices, contrasting this “magic” to the true power of legitimate medicine.

Pliny, however, was not really distinguishing between two entirely separate approaches to healing; rather he was just labeling those practices he thought were effective and appropriate as “medicine” and those he thought were inefficacious and foolish as “magical” or “superstitious.” Later physicians and scientists would come to consider many beliefs and practices of which he approved to be misinformed and magical. For example, he maintained that anyone stung by a scorpion would never thereafter be stung by any other animal, such as a hornet, wasp, or bee, and he also felt that spitting on epileptics could help cure their seizures. Against snakebites, the spittle of a person who was fasting was especially efficacious.¹⁰ Similarly, Pliny contrasted many false and “magical” forms of divination with what he thought were appropriate methods of prognostication, but few of these would survive scientific scrutiny today. Throughout subsequent centuries, educated elites continued to deride various forms of magic as foolish superstition, even as they were deeply fearful of other kinds of magic, and even as they may have practiced some kinds of magic themselves.

Even in the era of Europe’s Scientific Revolution, in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, proponents of new scientific methods might castigate certain kinds of magical practices that they thought were grounded in erroneous knowledge or a false understanding of the natural world, but they did not proclaim any absolute separation between magical and scientific thought. In fact, just as in Pliny’s day, they often still supported what would later come to be regarded as profoundly magical beliefs. One example of this is Joseph Glanvill, an English clergyman but also a natural philosopher and early member of the Royal Society. In his work Saducismus Triumphatus (Sadducism Conquered), published in its final form in 1681, he defended the existence of spiritual forces in the physical world from a scientific viewpoint, drawing in part on witch trials as his empirical evidence. Another member of the Royal Society, Robert Boyle (1627–1691), considered to be one of the fathers of modern chemistry and famous for Boyle’s Law of gas pressure, could just as easily be labeled an alchemist. He corresponded with many other famous adherents of alchemy in this era, including the political philosopher John Locke and mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton. Now often regarded as the culminating figure of the Scientific Revolution, Newton’s reputation was not quite so set in his own day. His famous theory of gravity, for example, was derided as an “occult” notion by the rival German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz because it posited an invisible force that operated by unseen mechanisms over great distances.

Beyond these individual examples of major scientific figures blurring any clear or absolute boundaries between magic and science, it is useful also to consider one of the major shifts that occurred in the realm of “science” during Europe’s early modern era. Much of the revolutionary work of the Scientific Revolution was achieved through startling new empirical observations and measurements. This was no longer the straightforward Aristotelian observation and categorization of the visible world that had characterized ancient and medieval natural philosophy, however. Now carefully designed experiments were needed to expose the “secrets” of nature, that is, aspects of the natural world that were not immediately observable except under very specific conditions. This development was accompanied by a shift in how European intellectuals regarded natural curiosities and wonders – anything from unusual mutations in plants to monstrous births in animals to comets blazing across the otherwise well-ordered heavens. Whereas before these had been taken as demonstrations of supernatural intervention in nature, they now came to be regarded as evidence of the entirely natural but heretofore hidden workings of the world. As “occult” properties in nature, such phenomena had long been associated with the realm of magic. In a sense, early modern science, rather than distancing itself from magic, had invaded and taken over part of magic’s former domain.

None of this should be taken to dismiss the obvious distance that now separates modern science from most conceptions of magic, but it does demonstrate that this sharp separation is quite a recent development and that such distinctions were more complex through most of human history. We tend to misread history, in fact, by projecting the label of “science” back onto only that portion of premodern natural philosophy, medical art, or other forms of learning that conform to our current notions of what science is. This habit developed in E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: a magical world
• 1 The meanings of magic
• 2 Magical acts
• 3 Magic contested and condemned
• 4 Magical identities
• 5 The reality of magic
• 6 Magic in the modern world
• Glossary
• Further reading
• Index