Magic has not really been understood but rather judged and it’s always been judged in relation to a Judeo-Christian belief system or a scientistic world view, so it’s either evil or it’s false basically.
[Music]
Hello everyone, I’m Angela and welcome back to my channel. Today we will discuss magic and religion and how the conceptualisation of magic has changed through the ages in relation to religion. Of course I won’t be able to cover all the authors that have spoken about magic and religion but I will just cover a few from the 19th and the 20th century that can help us understand the progression of how magic has been conceptualized in relation to religion. So let’s start with Crawford.
Crawford states that there are three views of the relation between magic and religion. The first one is that magic is a degraded form of religion. The second one is that magic is somehow related to religion and the third one is that the two are mutually independent and mutually unrelated systems.
On the other hand, Tyler deems magic and religion as distinct, different modes of thought and ritual performance. So magic is basically considered an intellectual error of the rudest savage and basically a hurtful superstition. In addition Tyler believes that magic is a form of pseudoscience, so like a false kind of science. Although, he thinks that there are still some level of rationality in magic because it is still based on rational analogy but on a low intellectual condition. This is due to the symbolic principle of magic, the idea that there are symbols and things that can somehow connect two separate things. But there are still somewhat rational analogy that connects the two.
Next, we have James Fraser. Fraser is quite well known even among pagans and practitioners of magic and witchcraft in the contemporary world. His main book “The Golden Bough” is still quite [well] read and well known in the community. Fraser is now considered an “armchair anthropologist” which means that, basically, he never went there and stayed with the people he was studying (Bar-Tal, 1990). So all the information he collected in his book is basically drawn from archives and other sources of information but not from a fieldwork experience based on participant observation. Such an approach fosters what is called an “ethnocentric approach” which means that basically, you are judging other cultures and other peoples from your point of view, from the point of view, from [the] perspective of your own culture and from the perspective of your own belief system. Fraser thinks that there is a progression in the history of humanity, which goes from the primitive stage to an advanced stage. So he thinks that magic is the first stage. Then we have religion and then we have science, which is the most advanced. Magic is therefore depicted as something related to a primitive stage of humanity. Similar to Tyler, Fraser believes that magic is a form of proto or pseudoscience. Proto means something that comes first and pseudo means something false, basically.
Well it’s interesting to notice is that according to Frazer, magic and religion are different because the magician claims to use his or her own powers, whereas the religious man defers to a supernatural being. In “The Golden Bough”, Fraser identifies the two principal laws in magic; the law of similarity and law of contagion. So the law of similarity means that like attracts like and the law of contagion means that if two things have been in contact they somehow retain the energy or the force of the other of the other element. So for example, according to the law of similarity a walnut, which resembles a brain, may be used in magic to affect someone’s brain: so, for example, to heal a mental condition. Likewise with the law of contagion. Basically, if you have a hair from the person, the hair, even though it’s removed and it’s not attached to the person any more, it still retains somewhat the energy and a connection to the person it’s been in contact with. Which means you can use that hair to affect the person it’s been in contact with.
Moving forward. Durkheim adopted the view of magic developed by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. So it’s not really like magic is empirically inaccurate or logically fallacious but rather is considered to be an evil and blasphemous perversion of religiosity. So there’s a very negative connotation attached to magic with Durkheim. Another reason why Durkheim has a negative connotation attached to magic is that, although what magic and religion refer to the sacred as opposed to the profane, magic is more divisive and individualistic in his opinion because religion basically creates a community. So religion unites people in a community whereas magic is divisive and it’s just about the person acting upon the world and other people.
In their article, Wax and Wax argue that magic is best comprehended not as a right or as a quote but rather as a worldview quite different from the rational views of the world distinctive of a Judeo-Christian perspective, as well as from the Western science. Max Weber even deems [it] to be a distinctive feature of Western civilization, a hostility towards magic and he also believes that it is rooted in Judeo-Christian religion. Now we’ll read you a passage from this article by Wax and Wax (which, of course, I’m linking down below) which I think it’s quite interesting and we can reflect upon it afterwards. So they say;
‘The scholarly literature contains two principal approaches to the definition and study of magic: an intellectual and a moral. In both, magic is compared with institution of Western civilization is judged as inadequate and ranked as negative. Thereby the student learns something about magic is “not”, but relatively little of what it “is” and what it means and has meant to the peoples in whose life it has played so great a role. A clear distinction can be made between “magic” and “religion” when the latter is Judeo-Christian in nature; likewise, a clear distinction can be made between magic and science of the Western variety.’
So what they’re trying to say here is that magic tends to be valued and accessed from perspectives created from worldviews that exclude magic to begin with or deems it to be evil or unacceptable. So how can we understand magic then, if we cannot use the Judeo-Christian or the scientistic perspectives as as a reference. We cannot use those perspectives, because they exclude, by their very nature, magic. How can we understand it? Because in order to understand something you need to relate that thing to something bigger and wider and something else that helps you define the shapes of what you’re trying to understand. Whether it be a concept or thing or even an identity. (Wax & Wax, 1963)
Levi Strauss or Levi Strauss: he said that, basically, if we try and understand magic from a subjective point of view and consider it to be a cross-cultural concept, but understand it from a subjective point of view, it bears little to no meaning. (Lévi-Strauss, 2016)
So I’d say that the matter of the meaning of the concept of magic is still out for debate and it can be quite tricky to define magic. We will have a whole video about the definition of magic in history – so stay tuned for that. But let’s end with a question; can magic be really compared with religion? Versluis [?] thinks that it doesn’t really matter whether there’s a distinction between magic and religion. What really matters is the distinction between magic and non-magic. Conversely, Bremmer provides four reasons as to why the comparison between magic and religion is not possible. The first one is that the debates, regarding the relation between magic and religion, always focus on the definition of magic and they tend to overlook, somehow, the definition of religion and, of course, if we want to understand the relation between the two we should analyse both definitions. The second reason is that when we try to understand a concept we should be sensitive to its semantic development and of course, the understanding of magic has changed quite a bit for the ages and the concept of religion, as well, is still changing nowadays and it’s still being debated among religious studies scholars. The third reason, he provides, is that in ancient times magic was not opposed to religion so nobody really thought about whether the two were different or not. It was just practices, we may call them religious practices or magical practices, it was just how people, a way of people to interact with the sacred. The fourth reason is that magic has been more historically constructed in relation to what magic is not and when it comes to religion it’s been compared to the normative religions, rather than the concept of religion’s core. (Bremmer, 1999)
In conclusion, I personally agree with Wax and Wax and the idea that, so far, magic has not really been understood but rather judged and it’s always been judged in the perspective, in comparison and in relation to a Judeo-Christian belief system or a scientistic world view. So it’s either evil or it’s false, basically. It’s something that only the delusional people can really invest themselves into. Personally I think that, since there are so many religions that incorporate some form of magic in their practices, there is indeed a relation between the two. Of course what religion is and how can we define religion maybe still up for debates but we will talk about this in the next videos.
So if you like this video and would like me to make more content like this, smash the like button, subscribe to the channel, activate the bell, so that you are always notified when I upload a new
stay tuned for the academic fun.
Bye for now.
[Music]
References:
Bar‐Tal, D. (1990), Causes and Consequences of Delegitimization: Models of Conflict and Ethnocentrism. Journal of Social Issues, 46: 65-81
Bremmer, J. N. (1999). The Birth of the Term ‘Magic‘. Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Bd. 126, pp. 1-12.
Crawford H. T. (1899). Relation between Magic and Religion. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 20, pp. 327-331.
Frazer, S. J. G. (2003) The Golden Bough, Abridged Ed edition., Mineola, N.Y, Dover Publications Inc.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (2016) ‘The Sorcerer and His Magic’, in Brown, P. J. and Closser, S. (eds), Understanding and Applying Medical Anthropology, Routledge, pp. 197–203.
Wax, M. & Wax, R. (1963). The Notion of Magic. Current Anthropology, 4 (5), pp. 495-518.
Wax, M. L. (1967) ‘Magic, Rationality, and Max Weber’, The Kansas Journal of Sociology, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 12–19.