The Section for Etic understandings of Magic

This section is intended to encompass views on magic as it is understood by scholars (i.e. etic).

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1. The emergence and development of the academic study of magic

The enlightenment tradition with its continually growing secularisation of society and movement away from religion as something of a divine nature together with the scientific ideals of positivism, evolutionism, the new comparative studies of myths and language and an increase in ethnographic materials all made it possible for a ‘science of religion’ to emerge in the 19th century. The ‘science of religion’ was to be free from theological preconceptions and study the nature and history of all world religions in a comparative and objective manner. Some of the most important early scholars who helped found the ‘science of religion’ was Max Müller (1823–1900) and the Dutch theologians P. D. Chantepie de la Saussaye (1848–1920) and C. P. Tiele (1830–1902). Chairs for the study of the ‘science of religion’ were soon hereafter established in the western hemisphere and this led to the academic study of other religious phenomena such as magic, mysticism, etc.

Some of the first to focus on the nature of magic was the Victorian cultural anthropologists of the 19th century. The primary questions they dealt with were how magic should be understood in relation to religion and science and the development of human intellectual culture. There also emerged a sociology trend especially in France which focused on the function of magic.

I will in the following presentation and discussion primarily concentrate my attention on what I consider to be the three most influential theories on magic a. the evolutionist - intellectualist theory of magic, b. the sociological theory, c. the mentalist theory.

At first magic was primarily considered in relation to “primitive cultures” (usually meaning traditional societies, non-industrial societies or specimens of the first human societies still existing today), but later the existence of magic or similar ways of thought was discovered to have been crucially central and influential during the European renaissance.

The primary purpose for discussing the theories of magic here is not to define magic or to discuss the nature of magic, but to show how scholars became aware of a different way of thinking and acting contrary to modern rationalism since this in my opinion has contributed to the pre-development of the academic field of western esotericism.

a. Evolutionist - intellectualist theories on magic

The following theories are called evolutionist, because the framework in which they are constructed is the idea that human culture as a whole evolves both technically and mentally. Human tools become more and more advanced and human thought equally moves from what is considered to be “primitive thought“ to what is considered to be “modern advanced rationality´´. The following theories are also called intellectualist, because the ideas of these theories were primarily worked out deductively in an armchair or behind a work desk. The scholars never really engaged themselves in field work, but relied on descriptions and ethnographic material (unfortunately sometimes faulty).

E. B. Tylor (1832 – 1917)

E. B. Tylor was a brilliant, self taught, anthropologist who made some foundational and groundbreaking studies on human culture in the 19th century. His most famous major work called ‘Primitive Culture: Researches into the development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom’ first published in 1871 is still a classic in the field especially, because of its theories of cultural evolution from “primitive culture” to modern culture, in relation to his ideas of ‘survivals’ and ‘animism’.

The idea of ‘survivals’ is at the heart of Tylor’s theory of cultural evolution and development; it is therefore also relevant to his theory of magic. Tylor argued that a certain stage in culture contains elements of customs and beliefs from earlier cultural stages; these elements he called ‘survivals’. In the words of Tylor himself these survivals are ‘processes, customs, opinions, and so forth, which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home, and they thus remain as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer one has evolved.’[1]

In ordinary spoken language we for example still often use many words which essentially contain connotations from a distant past. In Danish we for example call a flue, ‘influenza’. What most people don’t know, however, is that this word originally implied: to be under the bad influence of the stars; an idea which of course goes back to the more astrological orientated worldview of the middle ages. The idea of ‘survivals’ is also essential to Tylor’s view of magic, especially because he argues that modern man still believes and acts out old magical superstition which to him belongs to “primitive culture”.

Another prominent idea which Tylor expounded was that of ‘animism’ especially in relation to religion. Tylor defined religion in broad terms as ‘the belief in spiritual beings’[2] and animism was the term he generally applied to the belief in spiritual beings or as he writes animism is ‘the deep-lying doctrine of Spiritual Beings, which embodies the very essence of Spiritualistic as opposed to Materialistic philosophy.’[3] The belief in spiritual beings or animism is at the root of religion. Animism is, however, not just the belief in other beings than oneself, but also includes ‘the belief in souls and in a future state, in controlling deities and subordinate spirits’[4]. In its full development Tylor specifies that animism, as a fully developed system, includes two primary doctrines: one ‘concerning souls of individual creatures, capable of continued existence after death or the destruction of the body;’ and the ‘second concerning other spirits upward to the rank of powerful deities’[5].

The idea of animism began with the “primitive races” of man and has thereafter gradually continued its existence in the various religions up till today in progressively modified, refined and expanded form or as Tylor writes:

‘Animism characterizes tribes very low in the scale of humanity, and thence ascends, deeply modified in its transmission, but from first to last preserving an unbroken continuity, into the midst of high modern culture’[6].

Tylor argues on this account that all belief in spirits, souls or ‘animation’ originates in “primitive society”, when the “primitive philosopher” sought, in his “childlike manner”, to gain a comprehensive understanding of nature[7]. What is different with Tylor in comparison to his predecessors is that he argued that primitive thinking is based on rational thought. Animism simply arose from a primitive rational understanding of the relationship between cause and effect – spirits are nothing but personified causes[8]. Animism (religion) still exists today in all belief in anything spiritual and is to be seen as a survival from “primitive culture”.

Magic is similarly to be regarded as a survival from “primitive culture”. In Tylor’s early work magic and religion was more or less ‘separate in their nature and origin’[9]; at first he saw magic as a primitive form of science, not religion, and we therefore often find him using the terms ‘magic’ and ‘occult science’ synonymous, but he later realised that the distinction was close to impossible to maintain[10].

Even though magic is to be regarded as an early form of science Tylor saw it to be grounded in a scientifically faulty view of the relationship between cause and effect, since as he wrote ‘Man, as yet in a low intellectual condition, having come to associate in thought those things which he found by experience to be connected in fact, proceeded erroneously to invert this action, and to conclude that association in thought must involve similar connexion in reality’[11].

Magic acts and rituals for example often build on similarity between two things. A walnut might be used by the magician to either curse or cure the brain of another simply because it looks like the human brain. Because of this Tylor saw magi as a pseudo-science; magic does not realise that the link between the act and the result is physically invalid and only based on a subjective association of ideas; a fact now realised in modern science.

Magic, Tylor later argued, as mentioned above, could however not be separated from religion because many aspects of the efficacy of magic relied on spiritual beings which was defined to be the domain of religion. There were on the other hand also aspects of magic which does not depend on spiritual beings but rather ‘on imagined powers and correspondences in nature’[12].

Tylor therefore at last maintained that magic and religion are complementary parts of a single cultural institution and that they are not merely stages in the evolutionary development of mankind.

Tylor’s work and theory of magic, as a mistaken application of analogy, soon set the stage for further anthropological discussion for almost a century and is still perceived as groundwork on the subject even though nearly nobody would subscribe to it full heartily today.

James G. Frazer (1854-1941)

Frazer is one of the best known British anthropologists of the 19th – 20th centuries, especially because of his voluminous work ‘The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion’ first published in 1890, enlarged to 12 volumes in 1911–15; with a supplementary volume in 1922. The Golden Bough had a wide impact on European thinkers especially because Frazer synthesized a wide range of material from religious and magical traditions, myths and texts from around the world hitherto unknown or inaccessible to the wider public.

Frazer ordered all this information into his general theory of cultural evolution. Frazer argued that the mental history of man can be divided into three major stages successively following each other through a process of overlapping: 1 magic, 2 religion, and 3 science.

Magic is the most primitive stage in the mental history of man and can be viewed as an early form of science. But, when people realized that magical procedures were ineffective in their attempt to control the world they thought there might be some controlling agencies behind the physical world such as gods and spirits which through worship might help them in their attempt to gain control over the world. When man finally realised that this didn’t work either and that the existence of gods could not be verified he realised the nature and existence of natural laws through scientific experiments.

Frazer was highly influenced by Tylor and continued his primary statement about magic as a false application of analogy – in which the primitive mind of man mistakenly thought that the association of cause and effect in the mind is equal to the relation between cause and effect in the physical world. Frazer, however, sought to specify the nature of magic as formulated by Tylor. Frazer stated that all magic is based on what he called the ‘law of sympathy’[13] or the assumption that there exists a subtle link between certain things by which they can influence each other even at a distance. This definition of magic served Frazer’s assumption that magic is something different from religion, because where religion is based on the belief in spiritual beings magic is founded on the belief in a hidden sympathy between natural things[14].

According to Frazer the magical or subtle link which exists between natural things can be found in two general forms. Sympathy is either do to a similarity or likeness between to things or because two things have once been in physical contact with each other. Frazer called the first form homoeopathic or imitative magic and the second form contagious magic[15].

Homoeopathic magic is quite well known. One has often heard about practices where the magician creates an image of his opponent or beloved and thereby is able to effect the person in mind to whatever end is desired. Contagious magic is where the magician for example seeks to obtain some part from a person he seeks to effect, like a hair or finger nail, and with this part he believes he can affect the person in mind because the parts are understood to still maintain a subtle link even after the physical connection has been broken.

Many other scholars have followed in the footsteps of both Tylor and Frazer, both critically and affirmatively. Some of the most important names who followed the psychological – associative approach, which that of Tylor and Frazer has been called, are R. R. Marett, (1866-1943), Andrew Lang (1844-1912), A. E. Crawley (1869-1924), Alexander A. Goldenweiser (1880-1940), Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890-1950, and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939).

Most of these later scholars were primarily concerned with two questions: 1. whether or not magic was separate from or apart of religion? In this connection we find Marett coining the term magico-religious as an in-between notion. 2. How magic originally arose in human thought and behavior; was it emotionally grounded, was it grounded in ‘make believe’ or simply neurotic behavior? The important thing here is that scholars became increasingly aware of what they saw as a different way of thinking, whether false or not.

 

b. The Sociological - functionalist theories of magic
Another trend which made some influential studies on magic was that of sociology. I will especially concentrate on this trend as it emerged in France with Henri Hubert (1872 – 1927), Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) and Émil Durkheim (1858-1917). These authors focused more on the function of magic in a society and on magic as ritual action than on an abstract intellectualist definition of magic as we have seen with Tylor and Frazer.

 

Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss

Hubert and Mauss were two groundbreaking sociologists of the 19th century who already in 1902 devised what was supposed to be a complete theory of magic in their essay entitled ‘Esquisse d’une Théorie générale de la Magi’.

The primary strategy for discussing the nature of magic was to contrast it with religion, however, not in the same manner as Frazer did (see above).

They connected magic with what is individual and religion with what is collective on a sociological level, but because many aspects of religion, like prayer, are individual religious acts they defined magic as ‘all rites which are not part of an organized cult, and consequently are either individual rites or secret mysteries, with a trend towards the forbidden’. Magic is therefore in their view something separate from religion.

Furthermore magic is ultimately founded on sentiment, not reason like science and not faith like religion. Magic supplies certain “look alike” technical acts or solutions in order to gain whatever one might need as an individual. Magic is in this way different from religion, because whereas religion is concerned with the sacred, common ideals and values in a collective manner, magic is concerned with fulfilling the more profane everyday desires and needs of individuals.

 

Émil Durkheim

In his ‘Formes élémentaries de la vie religieuse’ (1912) Durkheim followed the work of Mauss and Hubert since he generally argued that magic and religion are hostile to each other and that magic is anti-religious in the sense that the magician manipulates sacred objects. Durkheim could do this, because he like Mauss presumed that magic is individualistic whereas religion is a collective of people gathered around what they believe to be sacred. ‘There is no Church of magic’ he wrote[16]. The fieldwork of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) in his ‘among the Andaman Islanders’ (1922) has, however, shown that magic also can have a communal dimension. Radcliffe-Brown was one of the great British functionalist followers of Durkheim, the other was Bronislaw K. Malinowski (1884-1942) who in his ‘Argonauts of the Western Pacific’ (1922) merged Tylor and Frazer with Durkheim with his continuation of the idea that magic essentially is concerned with gratifying the psychological needs of the individual through the “technical” manipulation of spiritual powers.

c. The mentality theory of Magic

The mentality theory of magic does not really exist, but the French philosopher and anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939) came up with a theory, in his most important book, Les Fonctions Mentale dans les sociétés inférieures (1910), that primitive thought is what he termed ‘pre-logical’ and ‘mystical’. Primitive thought is not governed by the ‘law of causality’ and formal logic, but by the ‘law of mystical participation’, a concept signifying the association of things to the point of identity and consubstantiality. After having examined numerous missionary reports and ethnographic literature, about the mental functions of “primitive cultures” he concluded that the way people think may vary from one culture to another. There are different forms of thought or mentalities. Lévy-Bruhl especially distinguished between the mind-set of the modern western world and the “primitive” traditional societies. The main difference he argued is that whereas western thought can distinguish between the supernatural and the natural this is often taken to be one and the same reality in ‘pre-logic’ ways of thinking. Lévy-Bruhl later revised his theory as seen in his Carnets (notebooks), but his idea of different mentalities and participation has, however, had wide influence ever since as a tool to understand other systems of thought especially magic. The idea of mentalities has for example still been discussed in an expanded form as late as 1984 as a tool to understand renaissance magic and occultism in Brian Vickers (ed.) ‘Occult & Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance’.

d. Later developments and conclusion on Magic

The three main theories discussed above has been discussed up till our time in various modified versions, but along with the post-modern trend the discussion has generally come towards a dismantling of the category magic.

The British anthropologist Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973) already argued in 1937, in his ‘Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande’, that the distinction between magic and religion is difficult to uphold and that they rather should be regarded as two sides of a ‘closed system’. Magic makes a completely coherent rational system to the Zande which offers plausible explanations of all personal fortunes and misfortunes.

To the Zande there is no struggle between any notion of religion, magic or science, as constructed in the west, and it is not so that they are unable to reason rationally. What Evans-Pritchard discovered is that their mode of thought is determined by certain cultural patterns within which they do think rationally. Their reasoning rests on certain fundamental structures, which to them are irrefutable facts and without them their social order would break down.

Evans-Pritchard writes that ‘their blindness is not due to stupidity, for they display great ingenuity in explaining away the failures and inequalities of the poison oracle and experimental keenness in testing it. It is due rather to the fact that their intellectual ingenuity and experimental keenness are conditioned by patterns of ritual behaviour and mystical belief. Within the limits set by these patterns they show great intelligence, but it cannot operate beyond these limits. Or, to put it in another way; they reason excellently in the idiom of their beliefs, but they cannot reason outside, or against, their beliefs because they have no other idiom in which to express their thoughts.’[17]

The work of Evans-Pritchard provoked later scholars to question our own cultures fundamental and hitherto unquestionable beliefs and the categorical distinction between magic, religion and science.

The structuralistic anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-) has also done much to deconstruct the notion of magic. Magic is an empty word in itself which westerners for example have used to make a distinction between themselves and the supposed superstition of others.

The problem with the early theories of magic is that they lacked any sensitivity to contexts. They claimed that magic exists in all cultures, as proven by their comparative method and thereby defined for themselves what magic is supposed to be, beforehand, and through this lens they deducted their analysis of other cultures. This means that they took our own frameworks as universal and natural criteria for understanding reality and thereby judged what was perceived to be “other” from modern standards of science and rationality. Science and the rational way of thinking was conceived to be the right way to regard reality; religion was treated with a traditional respect, but still there existed something third and “other” in human history which they choose to call magic. But the term magic was laden with anachronistic and pejorative meanings. It was not a neutral category, it was in fact uncritically taken over by enlightenment scholars from theological herisiology discourses. The church has long used the term magic to describe all that which is not religion and dangerous to religious values. The term magic had also been a practical term during the European imperialism and colonialism to describe all that which looks like religion or Christianity, but “really” is something “superstitious.” The concept of magic as something different from both religion and science does interestingly enough not have any equivalence in other cultures than the western, which shows just how much it is a term and distinction culture specific to ourselves.

However, with the constructed distinction between magic, religion and science and the evolutionary development of these, hegemonic accounts of the past were constructed in favour of enlightenment discourse. Anything “other” was unconsciously equated with inferiority.

But to understand foreign beliefs in their own terms requires a different approach as later realised by post-modern and post-structuralist scholars.

Post-modern scholars such as Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah and Hildred Geertz, under the influence of anthropologists such as Victor Turner (1920–83), Clifford Geertz, and Marshall Sahlins have therefore challenged the older anthropological notions of magic and the narrative of western culture as a “progress paradigm” of magic-religion-science which tells the story of the "rise" and "decline" of magic and religion, finally culminating in the triumph of science. None of these terms are any longer simple terms and distinctions between them, if at all necessary, are much more difficult. It has been argued that if magic is to be retained as a scholarly category it would probably be most fruitful to use it to discuss how different groups of people have used the term through history either about themselves or to distinguish themselves from others.

What we call science has actually coexisted and in part arisen from the “third other” or renaissance experiments in magic. Furthermore much of what has been perceived as magic especially the idea of participation, analogy and sympathies can been seen as parts of what is now called western esotericism.

Tim Rudbøg, Aug. 2006

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[1] Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1891 [1871], Vol. 1, p. 16.

[2] Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1891 [1871], Vol. 1, p. 424.

[3] Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1891 [1871], Vol. 1, p. 425.

[4] Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1891 [1871], Vol. 1, p. 427.

[5] Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1891 [1871], Vol. 1, p. 426.

[6] Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1891 [1871], Vol. 1, p. 426.

[7] Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1891 [1871], Vol. 2, p. 108.

[8] Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1891 [1871], Vol. 2, p. 108.

[9] Tylor, in: MacMillan’s Magazine 34, 1876, p. 1.

[10] Tylor, Magic, in: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed, vol. 15, 1883, 199-206.

[11] Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1891 [1871], Vol. 1, p. 116.

[12] Tylor, Magic, in: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed, vol. 15, 1883, 199.

[13] Frazer, The Golden Bough, 1993 [1890, 1911-15], p. 12.

[14] Frazer, The Golden Bough, 1993 [1890, 1911-15], pp. 49-50.

[15] Frazer, The Golden Bough, 1993 [1890, 1911-15], pp. 11-12.

[16] 1912, P. 61

[17] Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande, Oxford England, Claredon Press, 1937, p. 338.