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

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We talk a lot about appropriation, about who inspires what, who owns it, who copies it, who leases it, who honours it, who exploits it.

However, the extent to which this transformation was successful is disputable: as we have seen in the previous section, modernity remains far from magic-free. 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. Recent interpretations (Stephens 2002; Silverblatt 2004) suggest that the reasons for this lie in an attitude of scepticism and inquisitiveness as well as a novel bureaucratic rationality, which began to pervade early-modern European society.The European fascination with the magical traditions of the ancient Middle East was extended to those of East and South Asia when Europeans made contact with these regions in the early modern period. Durkheim, one of the key figures of the early social science of religion, defined religion as a set of beliefs and practices concerning sacred things and shared by a moral community: a ‘Church’. Often you’ll want to set variables for an individual host, or for a group of hosts in your inventory.

They have proposed concepts such as ‘interpretive drift’ (Luhrmann 1989) and ‘magical consciousness’ (Greenwood 2013; 2014) to characterise changes in magicians’ thinking styles. In any case, scholars have argued that magical spirituality should not be considered any less genuine just because religionists do not ‘sit in pews’ nor ‘believe in systematic theologies’ (Partridge 2005: 2). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Emile Durkheim Part III: Mid-Twentieth-Century Approaches to Magic Introduction 15. As Greenwood put it, while participating in magical consciousness, the question of belief in the ‘real’ existence of spiritual forces and beings frequently becomes ‘irrelevant’ (2014: 203). There is also evidence of courtly interest in magic, particularly that involving automatons and gemstones.

Mainstream ideas of magic and sorcery are linked to the stereotype of the broomstick-riding witch that crystallised during the Euro-American witch-hunts (fifteenth to seventeenth centuries). Right-hand magic exists outside of social conventions and ignores taboos, often even gaining power from breaking them.