The Anthropology of Magic

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF MAGIC THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF MAGIC Susan Greenwood Oxford • New York English edition First published in 2009 by Berg Editorial offices: First Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford OX4 1AW, UK 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA © Susan Greenwood 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 1 84520 670 3 (Cloth) 978 1 84520 671 0 (Paper) Typeset by Apex CoVantage, LLC, Madison, WI, USA Printed in the UK by the MPG Books Group www.bergpublishers.com CONTENTS Introduction 1 SECTION ONE: EXPLAINING MAGIC 1 Mystical Mentality 19 2 Participation: A Key to Understanding Magic 29 3 Magical Connections and Associations 45 SECTION TWO: THE EXPERIENCE OF MAGIC 4 Magical Consciousness 63 5 A Mythological Language of Magic 75 SECTION THREE: PRACTICAL MAGIC 6 Webs of Beliefs 97 7 Magic in Everyday Life 111 SECTION FOUR: WORKING WITH MAGIC 8 The Nature of Reality 131 9 ‘Not Only, but Also’: A New Attitude toward Science 145 Index 161 For Pat Caplan and Olivia Harris INTRODUCTION The study of magic is central to the discipline of anthropology. Anthropologists have studied magic extensively, even when other social science disciplines have dismissed it as bizarre or peripheral, but it has not always been fully understood. Due to a scientific emphasis on reason, the actual experience of magic has often been reduced to terms and explanations alien to its processes. Many anthropological theories have implicit assumptions about the ultimate irrationality of magic or of the inferiority of magic when compared to science, or they reduce magic to its social or psychological effects, factors that can be understood more readily by the social sciences. But while magic is often explained precisely by what it is not, magic is at the heart of anthropology in terms of the issues it raises in relation to human experience, people’s lived realities and the meaning of science. The time has come to propose another understanding of magic, and it is the aim of this book to examine magic as an aspect of human consciousness. I shall show how magic can affect everyday conceptions of reality, and how magic can be an analytical category as well as a valuable source of knowledge. Offering a window into human processes of mind, this perspective can illuminate our understandings of a whole range of situations—from traditional anthropological contexts of witch beliefs and shamanism to how we conduct science—as well as chal- lenge our assumptions. Studying the experience of magic calls for a different anthropological approach. When I first started my doctoral research in the 1990s, I made the decision to study magic from the inside, as a practitioner of magic as well as an anthropologist. I wanted to discover what could be learnt through direct experience. Over the years, I have explored various approaches to magic with Western magical practitioners, and I have participated in many witchcraft rituals, trained as a high magician, and worked with shamans. Each of these activities contributed to my realising the im- portance of examining an explicitly magical attitude of mind. I have used my experi- ences of direct insider research on magic as well as those of others to illustrate how this magical attitude of mind works as a research strategy in my two anthropological ethnographies: Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld (2000) and The Nature of Magic (2005). 2 the anthropology of magic The dual positions of working with the subjective experience of magic and also as a trained academic researcher not surprisingly resulted in some challenging issues of translation, as the languages of the directly experienced magical field and the more distanced stance of traditional academic research are on opposite ends of a spectrum. Sometimes they seemed mutually incompatible and mutually incomprehensible. So in trying to create a bridge of communication between the two, my anthropological role has been as a translator between very different worlds: the conventional academic sphere, which still seems to be heavily ideologically influenced by the Enlightenment ideals of reason and rationality, and the world of magic, a supposed realm of unrea- son. The two domains of academy and field were, for most of the period of my early research, quite distinct, with little communication between them. My research since has concentrated on the examination of the process of magic to try to bridge the gap, to make magic understandable, not only for anthropologists, but also for those who practice magic and for a more general audience beyond academia. This last, more general domain of the public was addressed in my writing The Encyclopedia of Magic and Witchcraft (2001, 2002, 2003; 2006). In all of this work, I came to realise that despite varying and sometimes enormous cultural differences, there are also close similarities in the ways that people engage with the experience of magic—from such seeming extremes of so-called witchcraft, as practised in Africa,1 to the recent European revival of witchcraft as a form of spirituality. And while much has been written about African witchcraft and magic, much less attention has been given to Western approaches. However, there is currently a tremendous surge of anthropological interest in magic in Western cultures, which is largely due to its use as an analytical category to elucidate a wide variety of processes and practices to do with modernity. Magic covers a repertoire of related terms and has versatility and plasticity; in the past, it has been used as a vague marker of other- ness that freezes non-Western subjects in premodern time,2 but it is now increasingly being employed as a counterpoint to liberal understandings of modernity’s rational progress.3 Magic is also highlighted in a detraditionalisation of mainstream religions, whereby people turn from more orthodox practices and explore the direct experience of al- ternative spiritualities such as versions of esoteric Judaism and Christianity as well as various forms of paganism. Some of these Western magical practices have developed out of a significant and sustained history. While less obviously visible than surviving magical traditions in small-scale societies worldwide, historically, since Christian- ity became the dominant religion, there has always been a partly hidden and frag- mented presence of magic in Western societies as expressed in numerous folk beliefs and mythologies. The more formal expression of this dates from the Renaissance, when certain magicians were influenced by the Corpus Hermetica, a body of first- to third-century Greek texts, with strong Neoplatonic influences aimed at bringing the individual closer to deity.4 Since that time, there has been a substratum of magicoreli- gious ideas, cosmologies and ontologies incorporating Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, theosophy and liberal Catholicism. The occult tradition has been expressed in many ways, from the romantic cre- ations of so-called Celticity used in regional power confrontations against English nationalism—the most obvious example being the poet W. B. Yeats’s political cam- paign that invoked an Irish nationalist Celtic spirituality—to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (which sold 150 million copies) and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books (with more than 400 million copies sold), serving as just two recent examples of best-selling books5 on magic that have been turned into hugely popular films. The Western magical tradition has been associated with the upper classes and political leaders of the time. Take for example Cosimo de’Medici, who employed the Renaissance magician Marsilio Ficino to translate the Corpus Hermetica from Greek into Latin; or Queen Elizabeth I, who relied on John Dee, her court astrologer and adviser. More recently, during the twentieth century, it was said that Nancy Reagan, wife of president Ronald Reagan, and Princess Diana consulted astrologers. Magic has also been taken up by the middle classes: a revival in the nineteenth-century Her- metic Order of the Golden Dawn by leading Rosicrucians and Freemasons provided much of the impetus for the development of modern witchcraft, synthesized from various elements of high magic in the 1940s. Modern witchcraft in the early days of the 1950s was a middle-class pursuit, broadening its appeal from the 1980s on. Druidry likewise changed its image from an eighteenth-century gentlemen’s club to a nature religion, a form of spirituality based in the natural cycles and energies of the earth, allegedly open to all. Magic reached its most working-class expression in chaos magick, a derivative of chaos theory and punk rock. Incredibly, all share a magical world view that would be broadly understood in principle by those in non-Western magically oriented societies. It is this commonality of magic as a cosmological world view that enables us to make the comparisons between what might, on the surface, seem to be completely different practices of magic. A recent anthropological example that demonstrates this approach has compared African witch-doctors with Western political spin-doctors, as employed by U.S. president Bill Clinton and U.K. prime minister Tony Blair to ensure their continued political success.6 While the spin-doctors might not be consciously working with magic per se, they are using emotional processes of mind that work in a magical or occult (hidden) fashion. Magical processes of mind are fuelled through emotion. By connecting with the desires of the voting public, these politicians try to ensure their own popularity and the popularity of their political agendas.

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