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Hello everyone I’m Dr Angela Puca and welcome back to my Symposium. As you know I’m a PhD and a university lecturer and this is your online resource for the academic study of Magic, Paganism, Esotericism, and all things occult.
Today, I have a super special guest here with me. We are still in Pisa for the conference of the European Association the Study of Religions at the University of Pisa and I have here the pleasure of introducing you Dr Bernd-Christian Otto from the University… of Leipzig.
Dr Bernd-Christian Otto BCO: Leipzig.
AP: I was very scared of mispronouncing it but I will put it on screen. Bernd has published extensively on topics related to Magic and in the field of Esotericism. In fact, I will be putting on screen a few of his publications and also, don’t forget to check the info box because as always, you will find his publications and his website and contact details.
So, yeah, I’m really happy to have you here. Thank you so much for being on my Symposium.
BCO: Thanks for having me. Great opportunity.
AP: Yeah, and you also delivered a paper on the resilience of Magic and I have been following your work on the conceptualization of Magic and we also had conversations which obviously you weren’t part of but we had a couple of conversations on the concept of Magic. So, I guess, the first question that I’d like to ask you is about the concept of Magic. According to your study and your research, how did we develop the understanding of Magic that we have today and how the concept of Magic developed over time?
BCO: That’s a tough question, to begin with. So maybe I sketch out a bit my own process of engaging with the concept of Magic.
AP: sure.
BCO: So I started maybe 15 years ago with the question; why nobody was actually able to define Magic? That was my very first question while I was still a student. And there were so many theories and definitions of Magic, so I was quite puzzled. And then, that was actually my master thesis, I started, instead of defining Magic or theorise Magic, I started to historicise Magic. So to actually write a history of the term and that’s what I then later did in my PhD thesis. It’s a German book, a big German book which I published 2011. And what I attempted there was actually to circumvent the problem of defining Magic by going through the history of the concept of Magic. So the conceptual history of Magic, “Begriffsgeschichte” in German and instead of trying to find a semantic core or a unifying principle to do the exact opposite, namely to sketch out the extreme heterogeneity of the concept of Magic over time. And in that book, I started basically with the Persian Magus.
So this high priest during the Achaemenid Empire, which was then gracicised into Magus around 500 before Christ in classical Greece by authors such as Herodotus, Euripides and maybe poets and philosophers and that’s where the story began. So Magic started in the Western history as the concept of, so to speak, the priest of the enemy, okay.
AP: The priest of the enemy.
BCO: Yes the Persians were at war with the Greek city-states. The Persian Wars, the famous Persian wars and Herodotus’ account of the Persian wars is actually our first fully-fledged account of the Persian Magicians which were priests, in that case, which performed like rites for the kings and all sorts of rites also during the Persian wars. And quite quickly, one or two generations later, the term magician became like a bad word in Greek. So if you wanted to offend someone or discredit someone you used that particular term which used to be the priest of the enemy. But now suddenly, there were these wandering ritual specialists, or wandering around the Greek city-states, that offered ritual services to rich citizens of Athens, for instance, to purify themselves and to have advantages in the afterlife. And suddenly they were all also called Magicians but in a negative, in a negative polemical way and that’s basically where the conceptual history started, as a polemical history and anti-magical history. So the term was used to ‘other’ others and very quickly, already during the classical Greek period, three big anti-magical stereotypes emerged. Namely:
One: Magic is anti-religious. So it’s blasphemy, it’s not religion, it’s the opposite of religion.
Two: it’s non-efficacious. So it does not work.
And three: it’s anti-social.
And these three stereotypes are as old as the conceptual history of Magic. And they run through the history of, whether through Western cultural history until today? I would say so, there are still anti-magical polemics going on now, for instance, when you consider the book burnings of Harry Potter books in the Bible Belt, during the early 2000s. It’s still the same way of thinking. And there is also an inter-cultural, anti-magical debate, you could say. There are also anti-magical polemics in Islamic and in Jewish history and these are also interrelated all these polemics. So that’s part of the story, part of the history of Magic or the conceptual history of Magic is that there is a massive anti-magical discourse going on from the classical Greek period until today.
And then, at some point, a second story emerged because suddenly and this begins much earlier than many people think, people started to identify with the term Magic and also, to begin with, the word Magic, and then also all sorts of ritual practices associated with that term and started to call themselves Magicians. And the first corpus of sources, where we actually have this is the Greek magical papyri, so late ancient Egypt suddenly we have tons of texts where ritual texts, where people start claiming that they are actually Magicians and practising Magic. And this is quite interesting, in itself, because it’s almost a thousand years after the polemical use started off. So we might say that the positive or the identificatory use of Magic started significantly later or after the polemical use but then it goes on.
So from the Greek magical papyri onwards, we have a continuous history of people identifying with the term. People doing practices like they call Magic and this history was actually the topic of my second big project. After I wrote the conceptual history, the German book, I started to focus exclusively on these what I call ‘self-referential Magicians’ and tried to reconstruct this history of their – I call it a tradition, I call it a textual ritual tradition – because for a long time you only have texts and rituals because it was forbidden. You have only pseudonyms and you can hardly reconstruct practitioners but you have the texts and you have the rites. And I call this tradition “Western Learned Magic” and this is a fascinating tradition, fascinating history. I started to work on that so, maybe seven years ago, and wrote quite a few case studies on aspects of this textural tradition of Western world Magic. For instance, I studied a huge collection of manuscripts, of Learned Magic, that, today, sit in the University Library of Leipzig in fact, so it’s 140 handwritten manuscripts from the early 18th century, many of them translated into German, and I wrote a book about this collection, for instance.
And I also worked on medieval manuscripts, also a bit on Arabic stuff so there is an inter-cultural exchange going on, basically, throughout the whole history and recently, over the past years, I have worked a lot on contemporary practitioners and tried to kind of sketch out a bit the modern history of Magic – today is often spelt with a K and many scholars would maybe consider it to be a new religious movement or belonging to New Age or modern spiritualities but when you look at the sources and when you have a long-term perspective, it is part and parcel of this long-term tradition of Western Learned Magic.
For instance, let’s take, for instance, Stephen Skinner, he works with the Goetia. Stephen Skinner is a contemporary practitioner and the Goetia was edited in 1904 by Aleister Crowley but the text itself in fact goes back to the mid 16th century. That’s where basically the text for the first time is graspable but parts of the texts go back to the 13th century and are clearly derived from Arabic and Jewish manuscript sources. And these, in turn, they have relations to the Greek Magical papyri. So it is really a fascinating continuity, history of continuity of certain things. But also a lot of changes and this is one of the core aspects of my own historical work, is to not reconstruct the history of Western Learned Magic as something that is always the same. The ‘same in green’ as we say in German, “Das gleiche in Grün”, no it changes all the time, it’s extremely adaptive, it’s extremely flexible, pragmatic. Magicians have always been on top of their, I don’t know, culture. They observed what’s going on, they were always highly adaptive and usually Western Learned Magic was an elitist tradition. I mean it still today is, many practitioners have university degrees. It’s not it’s not about irrationality here, okay.
AP: Many are watching in Academic YouTube channels.
BCO: Yes. But it was the same in pre-modern times so it’s a that’s why I call it ‘learned’ Magic because it’s a textual tradition and until the 19th century or maybe mid 18th century only five per cent of the population could write, depending on the milieu or the country where you look at, and in fact, these texts are so highly complex you often have to have multi-language competencies and you need to have time to practice, like 18 months of Abramelin. Or I don’t know, what have you and you need resources to create all these nice tools and ropes and swords, so it’s a rich man’s thing we might say. I’m not saying that all practitioners are always rich, actually, when you look into the modern history of Magic it seems to be the opposite. Money Magic seems to be one of the most difficult things.
AP: But what about witchcraft? Because usually like in Witchcraft and Folk Witchcraft they actually use very mundane things like herbs and things that you would find in the kitchen. So I guess that you’re referring more to the ceremonial aspect.
BCO: Yes, some people call that ceremonial Magic. I call it ‘learned’ Magic and what I try to indicate that this is a textual tradition. So I’m not with this, I’m not focusing on oral traditions, which have always been around, okay. And there is always in a mutual exchange and mutual influences but these are hard to reconstruct because we don’t have any basis for reconstructing pre-modern oral traditions, you know. We often only have descriptions from the outside which are often polemical and only Western Learned Magic we have, as it were, descriptions from the inside from the practitioners themselves who wrote it down. And therefore, I mean, of course, I’m interested in the history of Witchcraft also the persecution history which is fascinating from a historical viewpoint and it’s also fascinating when you interrelate the history of the Witch hunts or Witch persecutions to the history of Western Learned Magic because both had a peak at the same time. So when you think of the “Hexenhammer’ (Hammer of Witches) being published I think in 1486 and it’s on almost exactly in the same year Marsilio Ficino published “De Vita Libri Tres” which is like the foundational work of the early modern discourse on Magia Naturalis which then kind of completely captured the mind of Humanists for almost a century. So many people were publishing about Magia Naturalis, thinking that, finally we have found a fundamental force in nature which they called Magia Naturalis and which is the force that makes the lodestone attract metal, that makes seeds develop into flowers and maybe also which makes the wandering stars move across the sky and actually, I mean in the history of ideas, some people say that Magia Naturalis is like the predecessor of Sciencia Naturalis so there was a gradual development and it’s just interesting to see that at the time of the peak of the Witch hunts, which is between 1480 and maybe 1620, exactly at the same time we have these very learned Humanists talking about Magic all the time often, also, under dangerous conditions. And the final example is, of course, Giordano Bruno. But Marsilio Ficino, for instance, and Agrippa of Nettesheim that they had to defend themselves sometimes. But they kind of got out of it even though they publish really strong stuff I would say.
AP: Also Tommaso Campanella, yeah.
BCO: Yeah, yeah. So is this is interesting and this also indicates that this learned discourse was of course a male thing, okay, and the Witch stereotype was rather female and rather illiterate. So we have two different notions here going on at the same time which are, however, strongly related of course. Yeah.
AP: Yeah, yeah and also this idea, that you were mentioning, about the fluidity of Magic and how adaptive it is, reminds me of one of the concepts that you talk about in your work which is Magic as a floating signifier. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
BCO: Yeah, so when I started working on the conceptual history in my German book, I started off with the hypothesis that Magic is an empty signifier…
AP: which comes from Foucault I guess.
BCO: Yes, it comes from Foucault and Derrida and I thought that Magic actually means nothing – because it means so many things and it changes its meaning all the time depending on the speaker and the context and the discourse he or she belongs to. So I was kind of overwhelmed and thought, oh well let’s just argue that Magic is an empty signifier and let’s just discard the term even as scholars. Everybody uses it but we should not use it because it’s so difficult to grasp. But then I changed my mind almost 180 degrees over the last 10 years, I would say, and my compromise would be that it’s a floating signifier which still basically says the same thing, namely, that Magic can change its meaning depending on the context all the time but still there are structures of stability which you can actually pinpoint and reconstruct. And these are not arbitrary so there are fixed meanings, as as I said, in the polemical discourse there are these big three stereotypes which are almost constant over two and a half millennia and they don’t even change, it’s always the same, I don’t know, boring accusation. So here we have some clear stability but the even more interesting thing is, when you look at the practising Magicians, what they understand under Magic from late antiquity over the let’s say Arabic middle ages, early modern times, then maybe 18th -19th century, when the enlightenment kicks in, and then of course from the late 19th century onwards when the so-called, I mean it was never a revival or revival according to my perspective, I think it just went through… but yeah things changed in the 19th century and then in the modern time. There are so many different ritual techniques, groups, currents, that is, obviously highly heterogeneous and changeable all the time. And I find it very interesting to look at this history as a history of change and also a history of innovations, ongoing innovations so you can actually trace innovations almost every 50 years in pre-modernity, okay.
So it starts off in the Greek Magical Papyri as an art of conjuring spirits and the spirits are a vast array of gods and you have all sorts of basic techniques which, of course, continue but then in the Arabic middle ages you suddenly, or quite quickly, have a completely different idea, that namely, that you draw down the power of the stars in an almost mechanical manner into an object which is then the talisman. And there you don’t need any spirits and so it goes on. You have alphabets of characters these weird ring letters suddenly kicking in at some point. And then, yeah, many techniques, over the centuries, fascinating complexity and heterogeneity of techniques especially in the Leipzig collection, which I mentioned previously, there are so many different recipes it’s just
overwhelming, again, to even map and typologise this heterogeneity. It is possible and I find this the most interesting thing to do because then Magic is not just a label that you can latch onto something, indicating that it’s weird but in fact, it is extremely multifaceted and has tons of sub-techniques and sub-schools.
And especially then, in the modern period, you have group formation which really kicks in in the 19th century with the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor emitting out of the Golden Dawn and the Martinist Order, the Fraternitas Saturni, other groups. This is also an innovation, it’s a social innovation certainly, a magician’s group. I would say, for the most part of the history of Western Learned Magic it was rather a soloist thing, okay. In the historical sources, in the pre-modern sources, it is hard to detect groups or even early teacher-pupil relations. You can sometimes find instances but it’s not what it’s about. But then in the 19th-century group rituals are developed, kind of out of the blue or from scratch – like what Mathers did with the rituals of the Golden Dawn. I mean they basically invented them and then many other groups followed and wrote their own rituals and this is also a very interesting innovation. There’s tons of modern innovations, I could talk about those for hours but I make a break here.
AP: You also, keeping up with the theme of the conference which is about resilient religions, you gave a paper on the resilience of Esotericism.
BCO: Yeah. So Magic in particular.
AP: Yeah, sorry, Yeah, I was thinking about our panel which was on resilient Esotericism but you gave a paper on the resilience of Magic. So can you tell us a bit more about that? How come Magic is so resilient even though, you know, we live in a society and we have been living for a very long time in a society where Magic is not particularly welcome. How come it still exists and persists?
BCO: Now that’s a good question. That was actually the topic of my lecture yesterday here.
AP: That’s why I’m asking.
BCO: Yes and it’s also an interesting question that has kind of occupied my mind for a bit because there has been a debate in the study of Western Esotericism, why Magic survived the disenchantment of the modern world. That’s a famous article written by Woulter Hanegraaff in 2003. He basically formulated the question for quite a few people who then also wrote about this and they developed different answers, I would say, and one particularly, I would say, ‘successful’ theory is the so-called ‘psychologisation’ of Magic. So Magic survives the secularization, whatever it is, I mean in academia there is no consensus as to what secularization actually is and…
AP: Or whether it actually occurred.
BCO or whether it actually happened or how it happened – but that’s another story. Now for instance there is a famous fieldwork by Tanya Luhrmann, “Persuasions of the Witchs’ Craft” from 1989. She was one of the first anthropologists who did fieldwork in Britain among Wiccans and also followers of Dion Fortune’s Fraternity of the Inner Light and she formulated the ‘interpretative drift’ theory claiming that practitioners start practising and then their whole worldview and mindset changes. Step by step, they start checking whether the rituals might have worked or not and they kind of discard negative…
AP: What doesn’t work.
BCO: Negative data and kind of begin to filter and she calls this interpretative drift…
AP: Sorry, so you mean that they discard the things that are not in accordance with their beliefs?
BCO: Yes, yes, it’s like a gradual process. That’s how she explains how you can actually start believing in Magic, even if it doesn’t work.
AP: By ignoring the time she didn’t work.
BCO: Yeah, I’m exaggerating a bit. She’s more open to the ending perspectives but in the end, it comes down to the idea of self-delusion in one way or the other and this is not my impression. That’s also why I work on this because I’ve also worked on Chaos Magic and I know quite a few practitioners. I’ve talked to them and these people don’t delude themselves. As you probably all know because you watched her video on Chaos Magic. Chaos Magicians, they are highly akin to science and experimentation and systematic approaches. They all write ritual diaries since the 1970s so there’s tons of actual data and they write down, they are even forced to write down negative results because that helps you improve the technique. Chaos Magicians didn’t invent that because that was already recommended by Aleister Crowley, who was very experimental, very systematic. He wanted to throw out the religionist stuff and really make and turn it to a science even though he’s also ambivalent because he has religion or religionist aspects in his understanding of Aiwass and his Holy Guardian Angel et cetera. That’s also a longer story but the point is the psychologisation, as I then thought, is certainly one process which is important. Also, when you look at Sigil Magic it’s a completely secularized technique and you even only take your wish and use the letters and rearrange the letters and then you suck it into your subconsciousness and believe that it works. This is a purely 20th-century psychological technique it’s an invention of the modern period, clearly. Already, as Austin Osman Spare conceptualized it. And yeah, that’s that. I think I lost my track.
So yeah you have psychological, but then…
AP: So the real technique, reasons why…
BCO: Yeah, but then I thought no that’s not the whole story when you look at the modern history of Magic and I attempted to map like the multiplicity of groups, currents, practitioners – it’s an ongoing project. And then, when you look at the groups, the majority of them, they are not psychologised, they clearly believe in the external reality of certain spirits. So there is a religious element there which is, I mean that’s one of the core demarcation lines, do you believe in the external reality of a spirit or do you think it’s only an aspect of your psyche or even only a brain process as even Crowley himself suggested. But still, there are many modern practitioners who believe in the external reality of Magic. There are many so-called traditionalists who just think that the older grimoire is the better because it’s more authentic and more efficacious. There are very well known traditionalists such as Frater Acher, Joseph Lisiewski maybe, also Steven Skinner and others. And there are groups who clearly have a religious agenda, I would say.
So there is psychologisation but there is also enchantment or re-enchantment as modern scholars also would maybe say. So secularization comes, there is something out there but then there is a backlash or a reaction, in many modern people, to stick to religion and this also happens in the realm of Magic. So there are many religionist groups, traditional groups, for instance, Martinists – they practice their rituals as they were in the 18th, 17th century or even earlier. Freemason-based – before secularisation ever happened. So then, I would say, there is an ambivalency, some people like the tradition and from this perspective, Magic just went through. When you look at these groups it is a continuous history and secularization didn’t even change much. So you have many traditionalist magical groupings.
You have today people practising medieval Astral Magic, people practising stuff from the Greek Magic Papyri or the Picatrix. So people find it attractive to try out this stuff. And so this is not psychologisation. Yes, so here are already two sides of the coin but the coin has even more sides because then there is also clearly something like popularization, of course, in the 20th century. So Magic gradually enters mainstream culture or subcultures or what Christopher Partridge would call ‘occulture.’ More and more fantasy literature over the course of the 20th century with a peak of in the past two decades, starting with Harry Potter. So Harry Potter was clearly a global game-changer. Harry Potter valorised Magic even in a very basic, everyday language way. So Magic is probably the most used trigger word in advertisements since the late 90s. When you enter amazon.com and choose the category of electronic products and to imagine you have 50,000 computer products that have Magic in the product title, this is a new thing, okay. Magic is so positive we have a positive feeling that marketing specialists use it to tap onto our feelings and this is completely new. And this is also interesting from the perspective of the polemical discourse and the identificatory discourse which I still differentiate.
The polemical discourse, I would say, the anti-magical discord was dominant throughout most of Western history maybe even until the mid 20th century, I would say. But then in the 50s 60s, maybe starting with “Lord of the Rings,” but then especially the hippie movement and the feminist movement and all these movements from the 1960s, when they started to proclaim that Gandalf should be the President, you know, a magician should be or yeah, a wizard should be the President things changed. And it became even more severe with Harry Potter and today I would say that the discourse of, the positive discourse, the identificatory discourse is now dominant – at least in pop culture. You know it is still difficult for practising Magicians I mean to run around in their robes…
AP: Or say to their boss, “you know I practice magic.” That’s not something that is acceptable.
BCO: Yes it is. Still, I would say it changes slowly but it’s it is still, for some people, necessary to live a double life, you know. But I would say in the big cultural, from the bird’s eyes perspective on the development of this, I would say that these are unique times. So for the first time in the Western history of Magic, so conceptual history, the positive discourse has become dominant and this is quite fascinating. This is also an interesting thing to think about. Why is it so now? How could Harry Potter be so successful? You know and yeah and this is also another explanation which I tried to present yesterday when talking about the resilience of Magic.
Magic in the 20th century was able to tap onto something like Zeitgeist, you know. It reflects many aspects of how modern societies developed in total, in the 20th century, at least in the West. What is often considered as modern or modernity is experimental approach, focus on the self, self-empowerment, de-traditionalisation, privatization of religion, individualization, everything that you can find in modern spiritualities, new religious movements, New Age. It’s all this aspect that people, that religion becomes much more individual, much more self-focused, self-improvement and Magic is like the perfect manifestation of this. It’s still at the margins, it’s still may be considered to be weird even by New Agers who kind of fear power or maybe they would say it’s egocentric.
Yeah and I think that’s also, I mean Magic and modernity they actually make a good match. That was one of my claims. There is no reason to argue that Magic fades in modernity or that there’s a decline of Magic or that there’s even a disenchantment going on “Entzauberung”, you know, in the sense of Max Weber. So many scholars might have assumed that in the early 20th century or even still in the mid-20th century but it clearly did not happen, to the contrary, Magic is alive and well. It’s still not super huge, okay, we’re talking maybe about a few million people when you count Wicca as a magical group, which I do because Wicca is just embedded in the history of Western Learned Magic. So Gardner was a pupil of Crowley and his rites that he implemented, rites from the traditional Western Learned Magic then, of course, many things developed further on its own right but so Wiccans, maybe depending on the counting, one to two million of adults and then that’s quite a lot. The other groups they are not so big, OTO, for instance, as far as I know, has 4 000 active members worldwide now, which is small. It’s very present in the scene and so but when you actually look at the members, not so much so from the viewpoint of the history of religion or any study of religion this is a small movement. I’m not saying that Magic will conquer the world but it survives at the margins of modern spirituality and maybe it grows but it does not decline.
AP: Yeah I see one of the interesting things about Magic and Magic practitioners is that it’s not solely reducible to the numbers because even a small number of people can be very influential beyond the numbers themselves. And the other thing, it was really interesting what you just said about when you type in ‘Magic’ in the section of electronics on Amazon you find lots of things come up and that made me think that actually you have so many Magic or Witchcraft themed products now. You know, even makeup or I don’t know, there are lots of things like… or even clothes and bags and so I think that perhaps there’s, apart from the Magic practice so the fact that she said because I was thinking when you said this is the first time in history that Magic has become positive. You know, the positive idea of Magic has become prevalent. That made me think that is not only true for the practitioners but also for the culture in general because for instance with social media there is also the rise of certain aesthetics. They become like a subculture so you have a lot of these aesthetics based on witchcraft and Magic even on Instagram and TikTok and on social media more generally and so they also, in a way, contribute to putting Magic in a positive light to the culture at large and so it’s like Magic is not only being portrayed positively by practitioners but also by you know those who are not really practitioners but just have a sympathy, in a way, for Magic. Even in music and you know there are many different ways in which Magic has become pervasive in a more positive light.
BCO: Yeah it seems to have become more and more, right. So over the past decades, this process has taken over whole subcultures, which is what Christopher Partridge calls ‘occulture’, it’s like the merging of previously esoteric, hidden traditions with pop culture so it’s really a pop thing. But it is, of course, a resilience process because the more established these things become and the more they become part of a symbolic language which is used in everyday culture, the more likely it is that it stays and flourishes and that actually people become interested in doing the real thing. So it started with, of course, many start with literature or movies or television series, shows like Buffy, Sabrina and there is… actually there has never been major thorough research on this but a few people have realized that these series alone Buffy and Sabrina they have heightened the number of people who asked Wiccan and Neopagan groups if they could participate. And I think..
AP: There’s Charmed as well.
BCO: Charmed yes, Charmed and then came Harry Potter and today Magic is all over the place in television and also in computer games and as far as I know. So I know a few scholars who have done fieldwork and who have done interviews and usually what the practitioners say is that they got into it through this series or this computer game. They became interested and only, I would say the minority says, oh I’ve started reading Crowley. So this is rather the exception. How would you come across Crowley? I mean we’re still trained in regular schools where Crowley is not part of the curriculum and where Magic is not considered to be something which works and which could kind of enrich your life. So it’s always as a secondary socialization and the more pop culture there is around, the more likely it is to attract people. I think this process accelerates and now we have like the first generation of grown-ups who have read Harry Potter in their childhood. So let’s see what happens now. You know the assumption would be that more that the community grows, I would say, or modern Magic thrives but I don’t know. There is not enough research, especially not on the contemporary developments. It’s also so much material.
AP: Yeah, there are so many traditions…
BCO: And groups, so much literature and websites and I tried a bit to map this but it’s even difficult for one person to do it.
AP: You would need specialists in every single subsection.
BCO: Oh no. Who pays for that? But I mean it’s even big data, okay. From from scholarly perspective, it’s so much data that you actually have to handle it in…. you cannot handle it in a classical way. Just like collecting, writing papers and then you have a card-board. It doesn’t work like that anymore.
AP: Yeah, that’s very true. So we will see what happens in the future. Definitely, I feel very encouraged because the panels on Esotericism, at this conference, at the European Conference were very well attended and I really enjoyed all of the papers. So you know I don’t know how representative this conference is on the field at large but it seems promising that perhaps the field of Esotericism is growing and hopefully in the future, we will have more research and more university willing to pay scholars to study these kinds of things.
BCO: So, I would say the field is growing. So I’m also in the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism. And the conferences, they grow every year, I would say, more and more of that. And so there is something going on, the academia opens up, I would say, and my impression is that this is also speeding up a bit. More positions, more people interested, more PhD students. Yes, that’s Zeitgeist. It reflects, the popularity in the population is reflected by the scholarly field which is, of course, exactly what it should be like. So we should study what’s going on out there, right. I think when we look at the study of Magic, in particular, I would also say that since the last 30 years there was an extreme acceleration of research in all disciplines, especially history. So suddenly classicists, who have neglected the sources for like 50-60 years, in the 90s they suddenly start doing one conference on ancient Magic after the other. And also in medieval History, in Egyptology even in Judaism Studies, in Islamic Studies they also start now like the past 10 years. So in all these disciplines more and more study of Magic. But it’s still very historical and what I’m actually waiting for is that there’s also sooner or later, at some point, also more psychological study, anthropological study and maybe even in some weird future experimental studies. You know evidence-based study of Magic. Why not? So many people have alleged successes with sigils, so why not sit 30 people in a room let them draw sigils and have an experimental setting and see what happens.
I’m open to that but in the academia, this would be maybe even a paradigm shift. You know academia constituted itself, maybe even in the explicit neglect of Magic. So science is not Magic, and modernity is not Magic but so many people practice Magic.
AP: And they are still modern.
BCO: Yes. They’re modern they’re educated they are certainly not always self-deluding individuals. So there is something, there is much more to explore. I would say.
AP: Definitely.
BCO: Yes.
AP: On these positive notes I guess that we can end our interview here and thank you so much for this interview, Bernd. I think it was fantastic – so much information. Yeah, I’m sure that my audience is gonna love it but, obviously, don’t forget to leave us a comment in the comment section because I definitely want to know what you think about what we said, especially what Bernd said. And yeah thank you again.
BCO: Thank you, Angela, that was fun. Thanks for the invitation and have fun watching, okay.
AP: Thank you for watching.
BCO: Thank you for watching? You just watched it.
AP: Indeed. Thank you for sticking up to this point.
BCO: Okay.
AP: Bye for now.
BCO: bye.
Dr Bernd-Christian Otto Contact Details:
Bernd.otto1@gmail.com
https://uni-erfurt.academia.edu/Bernd…
https://www.uni-erfurt.de/max-weber-k…
REFERENCES PROVIDED BY DR OTTO
(1) Otto, Bernd-Christian, Magie. Rezeptions- und diskursgeschichtliche Analysen von der Antike bis zur Neuzeit, Berlin: De Gruyter 2011.
My PhD book on the conceptual history of magic
(2) Otto, Bernd-Christian and Stausberg, Michael, Defining Magic: A Reader, London: Routledge 2013.
A reader with important historical and academic sources on how to define and theorise magic
(3) Bellingradt, Daniel and Otto, Bernd-Christian, Magical Manuscripts in Early Modern Europe. The Clandestine Trade in Illegal Book Collections, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan 2017.
A co-authored monograph on the extensive collection of magical manuscripts today stored in Leipzig university library (Ms. Leipzig Cod. Mag. 1-142)
(4) Otto, Bernd-Christian and Johannsen, Dirk (eds.), Fictional practice: Magic, narration, and the power of imagination, Leiden: Brill 2021.
A NEW co-edited anthology on the relationship between fiction and practice in the history of magic
(5) Otto, Bernd-Christian, “Historicising ‘Western learned magic’: preliminary remarks”, in: Aries 16 (2016), 161–240.
Maybe the most important text I have ever written, a programmatic article on how to conceptualise and historicise ‘Western learned magic’
(6) Otto, Bernd-Christian, “The Illuminates of Thanateros and the Institutionalization of Religious Individualization”, in: Martin Fuchs et al. (eds.), Religious Individualisation: Historical Dimensions and Comparative Perspectives, Berlin: de Gruyter 2019, 759-96.
An article on Chaos magick and the ‘ice magick war’
Further references mentioned during the interview:
Hanegraaff, Wouter J., “How magic survived the disenchantment of the world”, in: Religion 33/4 (2003), 357–380.
Luhrmann, Tanya, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989.
Partridge, Christopher, The Re-enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralisation, Popular Culture, and Occulture, 2 vols., London: T & T Clark International 2004/05.