MAGIC

Stuart Clark

The word "magic" has been in widespread use throughout modern European history as a label to designate social phenomena. Precisely what it designates, however, remains elusive, for neither social scientists nor social historians have succeeded in defining it. This is partly because what magic has signified has varied from age to age and context to context; it is a classic example of a concept whose meaning and application are always a function of local circumstances. For late-twentieth-century historians, though not for many in the past, this makes any attempt to define it in a transhistorical manner not merely difficult but undesirable. Partly, too, magic has most often been something disapproved of, and "magical" a term of refusal. This is especially true in the sphere of religion, where magic has invariably been a concept employed either to stigmatize competitor faiths or to proscribe beliefs or behavior deemed to be irreligious. It is in this sense that magic has been the "other" of Judeo-Christian religious tradition from biblical times through to the present day. Western science has also had a major part in investing magic with oppositional meanings, in this case between the cogency and rationality of orthodox scientific or medical practice on the one hand and the error and irrationality of the magician on the other. Here magic has mostly been bad or pseudo science, as defined by the scientific establishment of the day.

One striking consequence of this for the social historian is that it can be difficult to find anyone in the past who accepted "magic" as a correct description of what they thought or did, let alone any who called themselves "magicians." A glaring example comes from the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. The two major leaders of Protestantism, Martin Luther and John Calvin, along with all their colleagues and successors, argued that Catholicism itself was merely a form of magic, with its many miracles, its exorcisms and votive prayers for the dead, and the transubstantiations of the Mass as the most prominent examples. One could hardly expect their Catholic contemporaries—or, indeed, Catholic historians of the Reformation since—to agree with this. But such has been the power behind this particular piece of labeling that only in the late twentieth century do we realize that to talk about pre-Reformation religion as "magical" is to use an essentially Protestant vocabulary.

There are some important exceptions to this principle, as we shall see; the Renaissance magus, the ceremonial magicians of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, and even the magical healers and diviners of the European countryside have not lacked self-recognition or been solely defined by those hostile to them. Nevertheless, magic has mostly been a term of attribution and its social history must, in consequence, be a history of how that attribution came to be made and how it has been contested. Some people have indeed been magicians and have practiced a magic they themselves have defined and developed. Usually, however, it is a question of which individuals or groups have used the concept of magic to label other individuals or groups and for what reasons.

Naturally, scholars too have indulged in the same labeling. The early academic history of anthropology in Europe, for example, was marked by the adoption, under the influence of the two traditions already mentioned, of distinctions between magic and religion and between magic and science that were almost entirely stipulative and dismissive of the magical practices of other cultures. Pioneer anthropologists like James Frazer and Edward Tylor tended to conceive of magic in terms of ignorance of natural causes and fear of inexplicable phenomena and to call any practice "magical" if it appeared, in their eyes, to control by supernatural means what could not be controlled by technological ones. Some historians of preindustrial European society and its culture have taken the same view, interpreting popular festivals, for instance, as attempts to cope magically with technological inadequacy and its consequent emotional tensions. Historians of science, too, have not always been careful to avoid the Whiggish sentiment that many aspects of medieval and early modern science were magical in nature. By the 1990s, however, to describe an aspect of any culture, past or present, as magical was thought to beg serious questions. Indeed, magic has come to be seen as a cultural construction, there being nothing in our attitudes to ourselves or to the world that is inherently magical. Once again, then, the task of social history becomes that of understanding how this construction came about and how it has been utilized and discussed in various sociocultural settings.

THE RENAISSANCE MAGUS

The intellectuals of the Renaissance are the most significant of those who very definitely enunciated their own theory of magic. Indeed, they had a very highly developed notion of the seriousness and importance of magic, which they called magia. With an illustrious pedigree stretching back to ancient Persia and to the mythical Egyptian philosopher Hermes Trismegistus, it signified the pursuit by adepts of a highly elevated and esoteric form of wisdom based on the perceived presence in the world of mystical patterns and intelligences possessing real efficacy in nature and in human affairs. In the cases of the Italian Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino and the German occultist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, causation was seen in terms of an organically related hierarchy of powers. Influences descended from the angelic or intellectual world of spirits to the stellar and planetary world of the heavens, which in turn governed the behavior of earthly things and their physical changes. The magician was, in consequence, someone who sought to ascend to a knowledge of these superior powers and then accentuate their normal workings by drawing them down artificially to produce wonderful effects. This conception of magic was reinforced by the further idea that man was a microcosm and that the proportions and harmony of his body therefore resembled those of the universe. Hence the well-known depictions of the human frame with the arms and legs outstretched to meet the circumference of a perfect circle.

There is no doubt that men like Ficino and Agrippa, and other magicians of this kind, like the Italian Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and the Welshman John Dee, thought of their studies as the highest form of natural philosophy. For them magic had only positive connotations. But it is also easy to see why they aroused the hostility of churchmen, who often saw their work as demonic. Magia was as much an act of mystical illumination as a piece of science; here the magician aimed at a priestlike role and his wonders competed with the miracles of religion. In the early sixteenth century the Paduan philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi even argued that the secret forces studied by the magicians could explain away such miracles in naturalistic terms. Theologians and clergymen suspected that magical wonders were beyond nature altogether and, knowing that they could not be God's work, attributed them to the collaborative power of demons. Here is a good example, therefore, of the turning of a word with positive associations into a pejorative; magia became mere magic. Nevertheless, the three occult sciences that made up the practical applications of magia—astrology, alchemy, and natural magic, together with their derivatives in the field of medicine—enjoyed a great vogue in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, these were often considered the most demanding, most innovative, and most rewarding kinds of science to practice. Their concentration on hidden causes made them intellectually challenging, and their promise of marvelous effects made them exciting as observational and empirical practice and offered material and political rewards, as well as renown.

AGRIPPA ON MAGIC

Magick is a faculty of wonderfull vertue, full of most high mysteries, containing the most profound contemplation of most secret things, together with the nature, power, quality, substance, and vertues thereof, as also the knowledge of whole nature, and it doth instruct us concerning the differing, and agreement of things amongst themselves, whence it produceth its wonderfull effects, by uniting the vertues of things through the application of them one to the other, and to their inferior sutable subjects, joyning and knitting them together thoroughly by the powers, and vertues of the superior Bodies. This is the most perfect, and chief science, that sacred and sublimer kind of phylosophy, and lastly the most absolute perfection of all most excellent philosophy.

—From Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, first published in 1533. —

It was once normal to assume that Renaissance magia was inimical to proper science and that astrology, alchemy, and the like were pseudosciences that had to be swept away before modern science could develop. But this was to accept at face value the retrospective judgments made by modern scientists themselves, once magia had become outmoded and depreciated. Late-twentieth-century historians were much more likely to avoid this anachronism by recognizing the vital contribution the occult sciences made to natural philosophy throughout the early modern period and even to the kind that developed in later-seventeenth-century Europe. John Dee was the first major English exponent of Euclidean mathematics; Francis Bacon, the great propagandist for scientific reform on empirical lines, wished to make magia a central part of his program, once he had purged it of what he regarded as its more fanciful and esoteric practices; and Isaac Newton, it is now well known, pursued alchemy no less fervently than physics or optics. More fundamentally, historians are also far more aware of the difficulty in making any conceptual distinction between science and magic in this context. Throughout the early modern period, the concept of magic encouraged researchers in many disciplines to see their activity in the empirical and interventionist terms that defined science from the eighteenth century onward.

A good individual example of how magia had a crucial role in what we now think of as a classic scientific "revolution" comes from the field of astronomy. The heliocentricism of Copernicus, announced in his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium of 1543, was heavily influenced by a traditional magical reverence for the sun as a symbol of the divinity and of knowledge. During the Renaissance, this tradition found expression, above all, in the writings of Ficino, whose enthusiastic follower Domenico Maria da Novara was professor of astronomy at Bologna and an associate of Copernicus. Copernicus himself described the sun as "enthroned" in the heavens and as "the lamp, the mind, the ruler of the universe," citing Hermes Trismegistus on the same theme, and Neoplatonists like Giordano Bruno were among the keenest early supporters of the Copernican system.

Of particular significance for social history, historians in the late twentieth century were also becoming increasingly aware of the great significance of the occult sciences in the political circles in which many magicians then moved and received patronage, notably those of monarchical courts and aristocratic households. Magic offered a vocabulary for rulership and the exercise of authority, just as it provided a pattern for science. The powers of rulers were often seen in divine and mystical terms in Renaissance Europe and their ability to provide solutions to political problems was regarded as thaumaturgical and charismatic. Magic provided a way of conceptualizing these ideals. It also worked in secret ways, as did princes in the realm of arcana imperii (secrets of state). The processes of alchemy, in particular, were often applied allegorically to the problems of maintaining order and harmony in societies divided by religious and other conflicts. Natural magic likewise helped to promote the keen interest in marvels and the setting up of Wunderkammern (cabinets of curiosities) that typified courtly and aristocratic notions of power and knowledge in this period. An example of the application of magic to government can be seen in Bacon's utopian work New Atlantis, which appeared in eight editions between 1626 and 1658. It contains the vision of a society ruled by men who combine the functions of politicians, priests, and natural philosophers. Another illustration is the sustained interest shown in the magical or "occult" sciences at the court of the emperor Rudolf II in Prague between 1583 and 1612. Above all, perhaps, it is the figure of Prospero in Shakespeare's last play, The Tempest, that best captures the relationship, ambivalent at times, between the art of ruling and the practice of magic. In some respects, Prospero is a Baconian figure, a natural magician seeking knowledge and control of nature's secret powers; he nevertheless renounces magic before returning to power as the duke of Milan.

THE REFORMATIONS AND POPULAR MAGIC

Whatever their differences, the religious Reformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—Protestant and Catholic alike—were fundamentally concerned to improve lay piety and morality. What historians now see as the social impact of religious change in this period consisted chiefly in this—getting ordinary men and women to take religious values and solutions more seriously in every aspect of their individual and communal lives. This applied in particular to the trials and tribulations of everyday life in the preindustrial countryside and to the more concrete steps often taken to prevent misfortune and alleviate distress. Study after study has shown how, all over Europe, ordinary people regularly appealed not to their own consciences or to the collective conscience of the church, as their priests urged them to do. Instead they turned to local practitioners skilled in healing, divination, exorcism, and astrology to help solve their everyday problems. They did this frequently in cases of suspected witchcraft but any kind of misfortune, anticipated or experienced, could justify a visit to the "cunning" man or woman. Alternatively, they might use their own traditional folk remedies, since the techniques employed by the specialists were, in principle, accessible to all.

Those who practiced these techniques presumably thought that they worked in a straightforward causal way; they were simply techniques for dealing with an illness, a bad crop, a theft, or an unrequited love. Although they themselves sometimes called them "magic"—and, indeed, "good" or "white" magic—they did so without any implication of inefficacy. Churchmen, by contrast, were convinced not only that they diverted attention from concepts like providence, sin, and repentance, but that they were also empty of all effect, appearing to work only because the devil intervened to make them do so. They were suspicious, too, of the scraps of real religion often mixed up in these folk techniques, especially religious objects and words (like holy water or candle wax, saints' names, and prayerlike incantations). Universally, they were known as "superstitions" by the orthodox, but "magic"—now "evil" or "black" magic—was also the label used to denounce them. By the end of the sixteenth century, vast areas of lay culture were, in principle, susceptible to the charge. It was made in countless sermons, catechisms, confessors' manuals, works of casuistry, and specialist books about witchcraft and demonism, and it could be applied to many popular forms of agriculture and domestic production; behavior to do with marriages and parenting; attempts to find lost goods or hidden treasure, or to be lucky in gambling; the widespread belief in omens and propitiousness; foretelling the future; the interpretation of dreams; and the casting of lots. Particularly prominent was the accusation that popular medicine was full of magic. For two centuries and more, disapproving clerics, and other intellectuals and professionals, condemned a vast array of traditional folk practices to do with protecting and preserving the body because they were irreligious and deemed not to work.

A LUTHERAN PREACHER'S DEFINITION OF MAGIC

This definition of magic was offered by the Lutheran preacher and writer Bernhard Albrecht in a book denouncing popular magic, published in 1628: Magic occurs "when anyone uses something in God's creation, such as herbs, wood, stones, words, times, hours, gestures and the like, or seeks to bring about some effect, other than God has decreed, with the assistance and support of devils, either to reveal hidden or future things, or to obtain unnatural things, supposedly to help a neighbor."

Intellectually, then, the two Reformations were an attempt to reinforce the boundary between what was deemed to be religion and what was deemed to be magic (although as we saw earlier, religious enemies accused each other of performing magic, too). The social consequences associated with this campaign have been the subject of many studies of early modern communities going through what can only be described as a process of acculturation. Some experts, like the French historian Robert Muchembled, have attributed the upsurge in witchcraft trials to the social strains that resulted. The European countryside became divided by commitment to the new religious ideals, projecting onto witches the fears, anxieties, and guilty feelings aroused by the cultural revolution being imposed from above; thus, witches were creations of the attack on magic. Other historians have concentrated on the issue of whether this revolution actually succeeded in changing lay behavior and eradicating magic from people's lives. The most pessimistic verdict in this debate was that of Jean Delumeau, who argued controversially that even in France the population had not become fully Christianized on the eve of the Revolution in 1789. Whatever its successes or failures, however, the attack on popular magic between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries was a crucial part of probably the most sustained attempt ever made in European history to change fundamentally the beliefs and behavior of the general population.

Easily the most authoritative and influential attempt to absorb the whole subject of magic into the mainstream social history of early modern England was Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). By borrowing the method of thick ethnographical description from social anthropology Thomas was able to show the embeddedness of magical practices, especially those to do with personal fortune and misfortune, in the daily lives of ordinary men and women in the period. The book provided an immensely rich panorama on the subjects of magical healing, the work of the "cunning men" and other magic professionals, the popularity of astrology, and the fears about witchcraft. More than this, Thomas juxtaposed the history of popular culture in these areas with the Protestant Reformation in England, showing how deeply interrelated the two were and how concerned the religious reformers were to take every suggestion of magic out of religious belief and practice. Most controversially Thomas offered an account of the decline of magic not solely in terms of intellectual criticism, or in relation to technological improvements that made contemporaries gradually less vulnerable to an environment they had hitherto had difficulty in managing, but as an aspect of the development of the notion of self-reliance and of faith in unaided human capacities.

TRADITIONAL FOLK PRACTICES

Typical instances of traditional folk practices are diagnosis by measuring a person's belt or girdle; healing by charms or other forms of words or by symbols (especially the misuse of religious words or symbols); healing by wearing amulets; the belief in the evil eye and in illness by bewitchment or by being touched; the attribution of various powers to body parts or substances (notably blood and semen); many practices to do with determining the sex of a child during gestation; the opening of chests or doors to relieve labor pains; and the curing of a wound by treating the weapon that inflicted it.

MAGIC AND MISFORTUNE IN MODERN EUROPE

Partly as a result of Keith Thomas's thesis, evidence that popular faith in magic has continued down to the present is often presented as a case of the "survival" of superstition after it was supposed to have disappeared under the influence of better religion, better education, and better insurance policies. This is a further instance of the labeling that invariably accompanies the concept of magic. Even in Judith Devlin's pioneering study, The Superstitious Mind, where the peasants of nineteenth-century rural France were reported to have beliefs in magical healing, apparitions, witchcraft, possession, and prophecy that were scarcely different from those of their medieval predecessors, magic was still associated with intellectual irrationality and confusion and with emotional trauma. During the twentieth century it was sensationalized and exoticized in newspaper reports, collected and treated as an archaeological relic by folklorists, and explained away by rationalist and functionalist anthropologists. Once again, however, what the social historian has to recognize is that magic has gone on being appealing not as an archaism or a substitute for better solutions but as applicable to specific situations deemed to be directly relevant to it. This is especially true of the misfortunes associated with witchcraft and of the management of health, love, and money.

Witchcraft has been a continuous presence in modern European societies even though the last legally sanctioned executions of witches took place in the eighteenth century. Communities have gone on fearing the witch's malice, have gone on identifying witches in their midst, and, in consequence, have gone on resorting to counterwitchcraft. Magic, always a powerful apotropaic in this area, has thus retained its relevance, and "unwitchers," cunning men and women, "witch doctors," and other magical specialists have kept their clients. In the Netherlands, in the province of Drenthe, both the church and civil authorities took action against magicians of this sort long after they had ceased to punish witches. In France, the studies of historians like Matthew Ramsey and Bernard Traimond have shown how crucial to the moral and social economy of rural communities were the devins and other healers who diagnosed illness by witchcraft and treated its symptoms. Traimond looks, in particular, at the stories of a Basque barber-surgeon in Bayonne around 1750 and of three unwitching specialists, two of whom were unfrocked priests, in Bordeaux in the 1800s. The folk magic and rural superstitions of Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have likewise been the subject of the studies of the social historian Eva Labouvie.

Counterwitchcraft by no means exhausted the repertoire of magic in these and other countries. Treasure seeking (a male preserve), divination, and techniques for enhancing love also figured prominently. But a diminution in the role and scope of witchcraft cases and their narrowing social complexion—they became restricted to the countryside, to the lower socioeconomic classes, to nonprofessionals, and to women—did mean a corresponding reduction in the importance of magical remedies. Even so, and whatever its precise form, or the sex or social position of those involved, popular magic has proved to be a rich resource for the historian interested in the social and cultural dynamics of modern communities.

Twentieth-century versions of magic of this sort were certainly not lacking. Unwitchers were still practicing their skills virtually everywhere in Europe, well-integrated in witchcraft "systems" and, indeed, occupying a key position in them. This was nowhere more dramatically shown than in the Bocage in the 1970s, when the French anthropologist Jeanne Favret-Saada found herself "caught" so personally in the witchcraft episodes she was studying that she came herself to be seen as both bewitched and an unwitcher. A witchcraft case in the Dutch town of Sliedrecht in 1926 involved a prominent and widely consulted witch doctor, Lambertus Lelie, and in 1954 in Sarzbüttel, northwest of Hamburg, a witch doctor named Waldemar Eberling who had been seeing clients for decades was put on trial accused of illegal medical practice.

A DANISH WITCH DOCTOR

In Drenthe in 1862 newspaper accounts of a witch doctor named Sjoerd Brouwers reported that he recommended that an eighteen-year-old girl suffering from nausea, headaches, backache, and stomachache should rub her toes between twelve and one o'clock at night with pig's blood in which a cock's head had been boiled. After this her father had to ride her around the house three times in a wheelbarrow. The medicines were to be buried and every other day before sunrise they were to be smelled. Two weeks after this report, the newspaper announced that the girl had been delivered of a chubby boy. (Gijswijt-Hofstra, 1999, p. 111)

LEARNED AND CEREMONIAL MAGIC FROM THE EIGHTEENTH TO THE TWENTIETH CENTURIES

Eventually the occult sciences of the Renaissance were overtaken in the scientific mainstream by different assumptions about nature and different styles of natural inquiry. Astrology, alchemy, and natural magic decisively lost ground, the first not least through its seventeenth-century links with radicalism. Most of the natural effects previously ascribed to magical or occult causation were explained away by eighteenth-century physics and chemistry. It became customary in "enlightened" circles to ridicule the magic of previous eras as the product of superstition, irrationality, and ignorance. The French philosopher and historian Voltaire declared magic to be "an impossible thing" and thought that magicians were mostly imposters. It is important to see this disparagement as a social and ideological phenomenon, as well as an intellectual one, with magic becoming a point of reference for a whole set of assumptions about modernity and progress. It was said to be the product of "enthusiasm" and deception—precisely the sorts of things most troublesome to increasingly commercialized societies. Denouncing magic was a way of establishing the values of order and politeness and other cultural boundaries appropriate to such societies. In effect, it was an aspect of ideological changes driven by conflict. Above all, it was a way of making a social distinction between the classes thought to be most and least committed to the new enlightened values.

On the other hand, we should not be misled by the language used by the "enlightened" crusaders against magic into thinking that the European elites could not continue to mix what were proclaimed to be incompatible beliefs. The occult and the supernatural had a posthumous life in the art and literature of this period. Suppressed, they returned, migrating into the world of the Gothic and into romanticism, where the supernatural could be made sublime and its terrors enjoyed without risk. The "decline of magic" is also seriously compromised by the presence in European high culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of new forms of occult science—labeled "pseudo" sciences by the dominant Newtonianism. Alchemy and astrology survived enough to continue to appeal, alongside new studies like animal magnetism, physiognomy, and phrenology. Franz Anton Mesmer, whose "mesmerism" resembled the magnetic theories of the Renaissance natural magicians, for whom magnetism was always the classic occult quality, behaved like a magus and even a shaman, though always protesting scientific respectability. The physiognomical teachings of the Swiss pastor Johann Kaspar Lavater were likewise reminiscent of the magical traditions of the past.

At the same time, ceremonial or ritual magic, another former ingredient of Renaissance neo-Platonism, enjoyed a fresh popularity, especially among the members of the secret societies and benefit clubs that flourished to an extraordinary extent from the eighteenth century onward. Freemasonry, in particular, was committed to magical rites derived from the wisdom of ancient civilizations and the transmission of secret skills and crafts down the ages, and designed to initiate members. Its key symbols included the pentagram, the five-pointed star central to magical tradition. Ronald Hutton writes that "it is difficult to overvalue the importance of Freemasonry in nineteenth-century British culture. It was patronized by royalty, existed in every part of the nation and in town and countryside alike, and was an accepted part of local life" (p. 5). Magic also appealed strongly to the antirationalist trends in nineteenth-century society, and a revival of learned interest in it occurred in the final decades, notably around the French enthusiast Alphonse Constant ("Eliphas Levi"), the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (founded in 1866), and, from 1888 until about 1900, the Hermetic Order of the the Golden Dawn, which actually practiced a ritual magic based on Greek, Hebrew (cabalistic), and Christian traditions. Among the best known members of this last order was the Irish poet W. B. Yeats.

One other aspect of the nineteenth century's interest in magic should be noted, though it has nothing to do with the practice of magic. This is the emergence of many attempts to explain the place of magic in human thought and society, and not simply to condemn it as wrongheaded as the eighteenth-century thinkers had done. Magic became more and more the subject of academic investigation—by theorists of cultural change and secularization, by folklorists, antiquarians, and anthropologists, even by psychopathologists. Chief among the sociological theories that emerged was that of the "positivists" Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, both of whom argued that human consciousness had progressed through successive stages in which first theology, then metaphysics, and finally science had a dominating influence. This kind of metanarrative historicized magic by giving it a historical role at an appropriate moment of human development, much as Émile Durkheim later suggested a social-functional role for it. Such scholarly explanations have in fact had a profound effect on the historiography of magic ever since; they testify to magic's power to resonate in the minds of Europeans even when they neither believe in it nor seek to perform it.

MAGIC AND PAGAN WITCHCRAFT

Twentieth-century Britain saw a remarkable development of pagan witchcraft, known as Wicca, in which magical elements are prominent. As Ronald Hutton has shown, these elements stem partly from the traditions of ceremonial magic already discussed and partly from the continued practice of magic into the modern age in its popular form by cunning folk, conjurers, charmers, and users of "natural medicine." This last tradition bequeathed to modern pagan religion not only a store of operative magical techniques but a number of those who practiced them as well. From the first, Wicca was portrayed by its followers as a vehicle for magical powers and with rituals designed to release and manipulate them. It was inspired in part by Aleister Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice (1929), the most important exposition of the techniques of ritual magic from the early part of the century, but it also included elements from traditional grimoires, descriptions of witchcraft practices by the anthropologist Margaret Murray, and initiation ceremonies borrowed from Freemasonry and from the Golden Dawn. During the 1950s the leading Wiccan, Gerald Gardner, was continuously revising its rituals by drawing on these and other sources. The second main branch of the movement, the Alexandrian, after Alex Sanders, was likewise based on cabalistic and other forms of ritual magical working. More recently still, pagans have looked more critically at the sense in which Wicca continues the practices of an "Old Religion," but still its magical core remains. As Hutton has said, "at the heart of its mysteries lies a particular notion, and experience, of the transformative power of something which is called magic" (p. 71).

The central aim of this magic is not just personal development and self-knowledge but concrete powers—powers to see and know, to create and move, and to heal. These are acquired both by releasing and expanding abilities thought to lie hidden in each individual and by tapping into the workings of the cosmos, much as magic has always been conceived to operate by synchronisms between the microcosmic and macrocosmic levels of things. In Hutton's view, Wicca is thus a religion that negotiates with supernatural beings in a way normally reserved for magicians; that is, by seeking to direct forces that would in conventional religious contexts be seen as beyond human control. For this purpose deities are drawn by ritual means to join with the individual, who is seen both as a priestess or priest, passively serving and praising the divine, and as a witch, constraining the divine to cooperate. In social terms the practice of magic by modern Wiccans reveals the capacity for independence and organization characteristic of the small group of religious enthusiasts, while also exemplifying what Hutton calls the "privatization" of religion in the mid- to late twentieth century. However, unlike other manifestations of the phenomenon known to sociologists of religion as New Religious Movements, pagan witchcraft does not, according to Hutton, "depend heavily upon one or a few charismatic leaders. It does not appeal overwhelmingly to a particular age group or cultural group. It does not offer a radical break with existing family and social relationships; and it does not challenge the wider culture as a whole" (pp. 77–78).

MAGIC AND SATANISM

The second part of the twentieth century also saw the creation of groups who call themselves "satanists." A huge mythology concerning their supposed devil worship also arose, but it bore no resemblance to the actual beliefs and behavior of satanists. Among these groups magic has had a role as both practice and ideology, though the numbers involved make this a marginal social phenomenon. Ironically, it is the mythology that has been of greater interest and significance to social historians and anthropologists of religion. A leading analyst of both the American and British manifestations of satanism is Jean La Fontaine, who said that modern satanists are yet further practitioners—if self-taught—of the learned and ceremonial (or ritual) magic that we have seen to be so crucial to the European Renaissance, the development of Freemasonry, the nineteenth-century occult revival, and twentieth-century enthusiasts like Aleister Crowley (for whom magic was "magick" and a way of rescuing the self, in both its spiritual and bodily manifestations, from the burdens of social convention). The Church of Satan founded in California in 1966 by Anton Szandor LaVey, for instance, proclaimed a threefold magical power in its rituals—the power to attract love and desire, the power to give help, and the power to destroy—while the rituals themselves depended heavily on the magical symbol of the pentagram and the magical god Baphomet. Its offshoot, the Temple of Set, as its name makes clear, has proclaimed strong links with ancient Egyptian magic and its beliefs include the magical idea of the transformative power of the subjective will aided by rituals.

THEOSOPHY

Theosophy, a movement founded in 1875 and inspired by the Russian noblewoman Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, was popular in North America, Europe, and India. Its main belief, like that of the pansophical claims of the Renaissance magi, was that a single wisdom lay behind the differences in world religions and philosophies. Blavatsky herself also practiced magic, in the sense of attempting to make voices and objects appear from nothing (psychokinesis), and also popularized the notion of reincarnation in the West. (Hutton, 1999, p. 10)

The mythology surrounding satanism crystallized in the modern world in accusations of devil worship accompanied by child abuse and led to well-publicized cases of intervention by social work professionals and would-be prosecutors. What is of interest to social historians here, once again, cannot be an actual magical practice since no independent evidence to corroborate the accusations has been found. Instead, it is the social phenomenon of such accusations that is itself under scrutiny, preeminently so in La Fontaine's authoritative study of the subject, Speak of the Devil (1998). Mainly, the analysis has fallen on the emergence in recent decades of revivalist and fundamentalist "New Christian" movements, anxious, like their Reformation predecessors, to brand all other religions as unbiblical and satanic. For these movements devil worship has always been a historical reality rather than what it is for historians—a social and cultural construction extending back through the ages to embrace medieval heresy, early modern witchcraft, and modern Freemasonry, and now active again in the form of all sorts of supposed modern depravities. First in the United States and then in Europe, these have come to include the ritual sexual abuse of children, accusations being fueled by the testimony of new converts remembering their own satanic pasts, by other adults "satanically" abused in childhood, and by children suggestively interviewed by "experts." The uncanny resemblance between these sources of "evidence" and those that led to the witch-hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has now become apparent. We return, then, to the distinction that has been constitutive of the social history of magic in the modern world, the distinction we started with—between actual practice and the allegation of practice.

See alsoThe Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Reformation (volume 1); and other articles in this section.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Clark, Stuart. "French Historians and Early Modern Popular Culture." Past andPresent 100 (1983): 62–99.

Delumeau, Jean. Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the CounterReformation. Translated by Jeremy Moiser, with an introduction by John Bossy. London, 1977. Translation of Le catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire.

Devlin, Judith. The Superstitious Mind: French Peasants and the Supernatural in theNineteenth Century. New Haven, Conn., 1987. Argues that the escapism and anxiety evident in the magic of rural France are not incompatible with cultural modernity.

Favret-Saada, Jeanne. Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Translated by Catherine Cullen. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1980. Translation of Mots, la mort, les sorts.

Gijswijt-Hofstra, Marijke. "Witchcraft after the Witch-trials." In Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Brian P. Levack, and Roy Porter. Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, 5. London, 1999. Pages 95–189.

Hutton, Ronald. "Modern Pagan Witchcraft." In Willem De Blécourt, Ronald Hutton, and Jean La Fontaine. Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Twentieth Century. The Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, 6. London, 1999.

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Ramsey, Matthew. Professional and Popular Medicine in France, 1770–1830: TheSocial World of Medical Practice. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1988. Pages 229–276. Considers folk healers, magia, and witches.

Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1990. Examines magic as a concept in the intellectual history of Western thought.

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