Magic

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Magic

Magic is the ability to create desirable outcomes with means that seem—in terms of ordinary, everyday logic—to be incapable of producing those results. For example, a magical practitioner may believe that saying a certain sequence of words while dropping oil onto a cloth filled with newspaper clippings of want ads will cause her to succeed in getting a job she might otherwise fail to get.

So defined, magic is extremely common in cultures worldwide. Indeed, it could rightly be called a cross-cultural universal, if all that is meant by magic is the attempt to control events by way of ritual actions that do not have an obvious cause-and-effect relationship with the ends they are trying to produce. Such basic religious practices as prayer could be construed as magic, since a practitioner may believe, for example, that through prayer she can heal an illness that might otherwise yield only to medical interventions.

For such an apparently straightforward concept, the term "magic" has had a tortured history. This is due in part to an inherent difficulty in pinning down the precise differences between magic on the one hand and technology on the other. Both magic and technology aim at producing events through a regular, teachable set of techniques, and in fact what one culture considers magic another may regard as science. Some champions of magic go so far as to claim that magic is merely technology that science has not yet come to understand. For example, the herbs that a medieval witch tosses onto the fire in a sick person's home to burn the disease out of his body turn out to have healing properties that medical science only later comes to recognize. Thus magic is, according to some, the cutting edge of tomorrow's science. Others—particularly Victorian-era anthropologists such as Edward Tylor and James Frazer, who first turned attention to the "problem" of magic as it appeared cross-culturally—regard magic as simply bad (i.e., inefficacious) science. Magic is what happens when people, desperate to exert some control over events important to them, resort to techniques that have no hope of actually working. Once techniques that work—"scientific" techniques—become available to them, say these commentators, people give up magic as an inferior technology.

And yet most cultures, at whatever level of scientific development, make a distinction between what they regard as magic and what is mere technology, and they treat the two differently. It is not simply a matter of "our" science compared to "their" magic. Even contemporary Americans who believe that magic works know that it is not the same thing as technology. Psychic channelers and psychiatric professionals, for example, are recognized to operate out of different worldviews, and the former are thought of as exotic while the latter are thought of as quotidian. This distinction has led some commentators, such as anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, to see magic as being more like religion and less like science. Both religion and magic deal with "suprasensible" or sacred realities, while science, in contrast, is wedded to the profane world.

But here magic runs up against another stumbling block, this one religious in nature. The major religions of the West have generally been eager to disown magic, to contrast it explicitly to approved religious practices such as meditation, prayer, or ritual, which are seen as morally superior. This has been true from the time of ancient Israel, when the Hebrews denounced pagan idolatry. Interestingly, idolatry was not condemned because it was believed that invocations to pagan idols could not produce desirable results, but because such practices were not consistent with the covenantal relationship between God and his people. To practice magic was, in effect, to go behind God's back, to play at being God, and was therefore forbidden. This injunction against magic has persisted to the present in the biblical religions, which often make a loud (if not always clear) distinction between magic, which they regard as coercive and manipulative in nature, and religious ritual, which is seen as a set of intercessionary acts that seek harmony with the divine will. In other words, the faithful religious practitioner wants what God wants for her; she can negotiate, but she must finally submit. The magician, on the other hand, wants whatever she wants and will get it however she can.

Amid all this controversy, it is probably easiest to regard magic, as Ludwig Wittgenstein has, as a way of stating wishes in highly symbolic terms. What relationship these performances bear to the results at which they aim and how they are expected (or not expected) to produce results vary according to the practitioner or observer in question.

From a phenomenological or anthropological viewpoint, magic is everywhere in contemporary American culture, from the purchase and use of face creams purported to reverse the aging process to saying a quick prayer to catch one's train on time. But relatively few Americans of any religious stripe are willing to claim that what they are doing is practicing magic, even when they are quite obviously casting spells, complete with sacred objects and incantations. Those who do make this claim generally do so with the awareness that they are embarking on a bold and potentially dangerous enterprise that will cause other people's eyes to widen in shock or fear. Doing this intentionally, they sacrifice a degree of respectability (which they occasionally try to gain back through careful expositions of what magic "really" is) for power.

Apart from occult or Satanic groups that practice magic but that also value secrecy, the only Americans who practice magic and are vocal about its benefits are neopagans. (Some Afro-Caribbean religions occasionally use the term, but they are more likely to speak of "working the spirits," and reserve the term "magic" for the efforts of people misusing sacred forces to do harm.) Neopagans have a well-developed literature on magic, including both theoretical treatments of the worldview behind it and practical "cook-books" of magical recipes for every occasion. Neopagan explanations of how magic works vary, but most emphasize the thoughts and intentions of the practitioner to a greater or lesser degree. At one end of the spectrum, magic is held to work simply by changing the consciousness of the practitioner. Doing a spell for financial success changes his feelings about work and money at a deep level, and this in turn changes his behavior. It is through changed behavior, though—hardly something ordinarily thought to be magical—that he eventually achieves financial success. This might be thought of as the "power of positive thinking" version of magic. At the other end of the spectrum, magic is thought to work with lawlike certainty through the manipulation (whether clumsy or clever) of unseen levers that produce specific events in the world. In the middle of the spectrum are those who believe that magic works through a change in consciousness, but that this change is able to affect the universe directly without necessarily changing the practitioner's behavior. Many neopagans, for example, claim that "thoughts are things" and that using magical and symbolic means to focus thoughts makes them especially powerful, especially capable of triggering a desired chain of events completely on their own. Deities also play a role in some neopagan magic. A variety of gods and goddesses can, upon invocation or request, influence change in the desired direction. Neopagans differ on whether these deities exist as discrete entities or as mere symbols for certain types of "energy."

It is quite common for neopagans to conceptualize the world as consisting entirely of energy patterns, of which the magical efforts of the practitioner are only a part. But because this larger network of energy actually exists, the practitioner's ritual efforts, if the correct formula is followed, may be rewarded with success. This result may appear "magical," but it requires nothing apart from a sensitivity to the underlying structure of the universe and a determination to work within it. If neopagan explanations of magic frequently border on the technological, however, they are no less religious for being so. Indeed, neopagans are often as devoted as others to avoiding the implications of selfishness and irresponsibility that the term "magic" often suggests. They want what they want and will use magic to get it, but they go to pains to make sure that their desires are legitimate and that fulfilling them will harm no one. Most are quite scrupulous about not using magic for nefarious purposes. "What you send out returns three times over" is a common neopagan saying, and it expresses the conviction that so-called negative magic will only hurt the practitioner and is thus not worth pursuing. In many neopagan writings, magic is broadened and elevated to the point that the use of specific charms and spells gives way to a program of self-improvement that is indistinguishable from many other programs of spiritual discipline in religions of all types.