![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
MAGIC: A TIMELINE (PART 1): 1880S – 1930S
Dec. 27th, 2021 10:50 am Magic has been studied by the ancients such as Pliny and Plato. In his “Natural History,” Pliny tried to distinguish between “magic” and “religion.” Later, Church fathers (St. Augustine and St. Thomas among others) debated whether the miracles of Christ were either magical or religious. Finally, it became a subject for study by the emerging disciplines of sociology and anthropology in the late 19 Century. Western intellectuals sought to define “magic” in the light of the Scientific Revolution.
One of the first to do this was Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917, English). In “Primitive Culture (1871),” he struggled to differentiate magic from religion. The first phase of religious development, according to Tylor was “animism” (a concept he reintroduced). (Note 1) He regarded magic to be the most fundamental of all spiritual beliefs. However, Tylor thought it was a primitive belief since magic promoted pernicious delusions.
After reading Tylor, James G. Frazer (1854-1941, Scottish) decided to delve further into myth and magic. His book “The Golden Bough (1911)” presented the progression of human civilization from primitive magic to modern science. (For him, magic was a bastard science.) Frazer provided the standard rule for defining magic and religion. He said, “Magic attempts to compel the powers of the universe, religion supplicates them.”
Meanwhile, Marcel Mauss (1872-1950, French) wrote in his essay, “A General Theory of Magic (1902),” that magic, religion, and science overlapped. According to Mauss, magic used the forbidden secrets of society to meet an individual’s ends. Religion, on the other hand, was organized by society for the community.
The French sociologist, (David) Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) influenced Mauss and other anthropologists (Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Bronislaw Malinowski) in their studies of magic. Durkheim was preoccupied with how traditional societies reacted to modernity. He theorized in “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912),” that magic and religion pertained to sacred things but that each governed their separate realms. The two differed in how humans saw their world, with magic being anti-social.
In “How Natives Think (1910),” Lucien Levy-Bruhl (1857-1939, French) introduced the concept of “the primitive mind versus the modern mind.” He believed that the primitive mind used magic to make things happen. Meanwhile the modern mind uses logic and reflection to achieve the same goals. Levy-Bruhl cautioned that even Westerners could possess the primitive mind since they too could be “pre-logical.”
After his studies in Melanesia and Australia, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942, Polish-British) published the “Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922).” Observing the cultures of the Islanders of New Guinea and Australia, he understood that their magic served basic human needs. Expanding on that idea, Malinowski reasoned that magic was “a means to an end.” Since it was used in meeting specific goals, magic was practical.
Notes:
Note 1. Tylor defined animism as “faith in the souls of all things.”
Works Used:
Bowie, Fiona, “The Anthropology of Religion: An Introduction.” 2008. PDF. https://www.academia.edu/331603/Anthropology_of_Religion.
Davis, Owen, ed. “The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft & Magic.” Oxford University Press: Oxford. 2017.
Dobler, Gregor, “Fatal Words: Restudying Jeanne-Favret-Saada.” Anthropology of This Century, Issue 13, May 2015. http://aotcpress.com/articles/fatal-words-restudying-jeanne-favretsaada/.
Greer, John Michael, “The Occult Book.” Sterling: NY. 2017.
Hutton, Ronald, “The Witch.” Yale University Press: New Haven. 2017.
—, “A Framework for the Study of European Magic.” Grey School of Wizardry Class Materials. Dell.Urgano, Ombra, “The Development of European Magic.”
Moro, Pamela, “Witchcraft, Sorcery, and Magic.” International Library of Anthropology. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1915 .
Seligmann, Kurt, “The Mirror of Magic.” 1948. Inner Tradition: Rochester (VT)
