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M A K I N G M A G I C :
R E L I G I O N , M A G I C A N D S C I E N C E I N T H E M O D E R N W O R L D
Styers, Randall G. Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
[ ABSTRACT : Since the emergence of religious studies and the social sciences as academic disciplines in the late nineteenth century, the concept of "magic" has played a major role in defining religion and in mediating religion's relation to science. Many of the most important scholars in these disciplines have debated the relation of magic to religion and science, yet traditional efforts to formulate distinctions among these categories have proved notoriously unstable, the subject of repeated critique and deconstruction. The notion of magic has remained stubbornly amorphous. This book seeks to account for the extraordinary vitality of scholarly discourse purporting to define and explain magic despite its failure to do just that. The book argues that the persistence of scholarly debates over magic can best be explained in light of the Western drive to establish and secure distinctive norms for modern identity--norms based on narrow forms of instrumental rationality, industrious labor, rigidly defined sexual roles, and the containment of wayward forms of desire. Magic has served to designate a form of alterity or deviance against which dominant Western notions of appropriate religious piety, legitimate scientific rationality, and orderly social relations are brought into relief. Scholars have found magic an invaluable tool in their efforts to define the appropriate boundaries of religion and science. On a broader level, magical thinking has served as an important foil for modernity itself. Debates over the nature of magic have offered a particularly rich site at which scholars have worked to define and to contest the nature of modernity and norms for life in the modern world. ]
C O N T E N T S
INTRODUCTION : Magic and Modernity • Magic and the Boundaries of Religion • Magic and the Modern Subject • Magic and Social Control • Magic and the Critique of Modernity • Magicians in Search of Revenge.
1 THE EMERGENCE OF MAGIC IN MODERN WORLD : Early Modern Witchcraft and Magic • The Reformation of Western Religion • Opposition to the Persecutions • Mechanical Views of Nature • Natural Religion and the Enlightenment War on Superstition • Colonialism and Comparative Theories of Culture • Theories of Religion and Religious Evolution.
2 MAGIC AND THE REGULATION OF PIETY : The Origin of Religion • Fetishism and Other Early Theories • Animism • The Despair of Magic • Primitive High Gods • Mana and the Magico-Religious • Totemism and Clan Gods • Decline of the Search for Origins • Recent Accounts of Religious Development • The Essence of Religion • Transcendence • Submission • Divine Volition • Morality • Conformity • “Where Your Treasure Is”.
3 MAGIC AND THE REGULATION OF REASON : Do Natives Think? • Theories of the Primitive Philosopher • Theories of a Primitive Mentality • Theories of Psychic Unity • Theories of Primitive Ingenuity • Theories of Primitive Expressiveness • Medieval Magic and Modern Science • Scientific Triumphalism • The Role of Religion • The Role of Magic • Science as Sui Generis • The Morality of Inquiry.
4 MAGIC AND THE REGULATION OF DESIRE : Desire and the Subject • Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts • Magic and Realistic Action • Magic and Intersubjective Power • The Desires of the Magician • The “Impostor Who Is His Own Dupe” • Magicians and Their Deviance • Desire and Social Order • Magic and the Birth of Order • Magic and the Stagnation of Culture • Magic and the Threat of Anarchy • Magic as Contemporary Menace • Magic and the Margins • Magic and the Channeling of Power • Magic and Colonial Control • Magic and the Domestic Terrain • Magic and the Subversion of Markets.
CONCLUSION
Introduction
Do not trust those who analyze magic. They are usually magicians in search of revenge. —Bruno Latour
This is a book about the making of magic. Its principal objective is to explore a body of literature devoted to the production of magic as an object of academic study. My focus is a range of texts produced by Western scholars since the late nineteenth century dealing with magic from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives. Magic has been a central theme in the theoretical literature of the modern social sciences and religious studies since the very emergence of these disciplines. Western scholars have engaged in extended debates on the definition and nature of magical thinking, and innumerable academic texts claim to tell us the truth about magic. The pages that follow will be occupied with that truth.
Yet as Bruno Latour warns, we should be wary of those who purport to analyze magic, since they are usually themselves magicians. 1 My objective here is to demonstrate various ways in which scholarly texts on magic have exerted potent forms of surreptitious—and often mystifying—power. The core of my argument is that these theories of magic are, in essential respects, magical. Modern scholars have been in the business of making magic.
And Latour's cautionary word extends even further: theoretical magicians of the sort encountered in these pages are rather inherently duplicitous, even prone to vengeance. Latour warns against too glib a reliance on any truth about magic, and he directs us to attend closely to the subtleties of the magician's craft, particularly the self-interests at its core. As these theories of magic unfold, we will see scholars assume a posture of detachment, transparency, and cool reason. But we will also find many interests in play—some petty, others malign. Perhaps the most significant subtext that will emerge from these theories is the scholarly effort to conjure—or conjure away—what it means to be modern. Debates over magic provide an extraordinarily rich ground for exploring the nature of modernity, its values, and its limits.
Magic and Modernity
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Europe experienced massive economic and political transformations. This era saw the fracturing of religious unity, the consolidation of the nation-state, and the emergence of new capitalist economic structures. During the same period, European powers launched an extended program of discovery and conquest of the non-European world that produced not only new riches but also a startling array of information from missionaries and explorers. Through this era, a distinctive form of “modernity” took hold within European culture. Scholars debate how this notion should be most productively understood—whether it should be seen primarily in chronological or economic or ideological terms, the role of secularization and rationalization in this cultural formation, the specific social and material forces in Western history that contributed to its rise.
Among the aspects of the “modern” most relevant for our purposes here, Gustavo Benavides underscores its essentially comparative, oppositional nature. As he explains, “A condition of modernity presupposes an act of self-conscious distancing from a past or a situation regarded as naive.” The very notion of the modern depends on a mode of self-referential opposition to the nonmodern, a mode of difference and differentiation that leads, in turn, to the sense that the future is open—things can be otherwise. Western modernity developed distinctive forms of technical and institutional power that fueled its processes of modernization, but at its heart was this fundamental mode of reflexive differentiation. 2
In the early modern context of cultural contact and transformation, a new notion of “religion” gained
century, theorists have regularly invoked “magic” as a fundamental category of cultural analysis. In innumerable texts by the leading theorists of these disciplines—including such founding figures of modern anthropology, sociology, psychology, and religious studies as Tylor, Mauss, Durkheim, Freud, Malinowski, and Weber—understanding magic has seemed key to understanding human society.
One of the primary functions of magic in this scholarly literature has been to serve as a foil for religion. Some theorists have seen magic as standing outside the category of religion, others as marking religion's outermost boundary. But in either case, there has been widespread scholarly consensus that magic is “the bastard sister of religion.” 7 Magic has been configured as the illegitimate (and effeminized) sibling, and through contrast with this form of deviance, scholars have sought to give religion clearer definition. Magic has played a central role in scholarly efforts to define the nature of religion and to demarcate its proper bounds.
But magic has proved a remarkably pliable analytical tool in these academic texts, serving multifarious functions. Magic not only has offered a foil for religion but also has been positioned in the scholarly tradition as occupying some sort of middle ground between religion and that other great Western social formation, “science.” Science has proved no less difficult to define than religion. As Latour pointedly states, “`Science'—in quotation marks—does not exist. It is the name that has been pasted onto certain sections of certain networks, associations that are so sparse and fragile that they would have escaped attention altogether if everything had not been attributed to them.” 8 Yet given the centrality of these scientific networks to modern social organization, such an assessment has been untenable for many scholars, and they have again turned to magic as an invaluable foil promising to bring the boundaries of science into sharper relief. And with magic positioned as a middle ground between religion and science, it has functioned in the scholarly literature to mediate—even police— relations between the two. Throughout the history of modern Western social science and religious studies, numerous scholars have struggled to reify magic as a discrete entity and to map the precise relations among magic, religion, and science.
Yet the efforts to formulate distinctions among these categories have proved notoriously unstable, the subject of repeated critique and deconstruction. Edward Burnett Tylor was one of the principal architects of this analytical structure, yet as Wouter Hanegraaff has recently shown, Tylor himself demonstrated great ambivalence in demarcating the precise boundaries among the categories. In 1900, R. R. Marett challenged the efforts of British intellectualists such as Tylor and Frazer to differentiate religion and magic. More than a half century later, in The Savage Mind (1962), Claude Lйvi-Strauss rejected the notion that magic could be reified as a category analytically distinct from either religion or science. After considering various efforts at contrasting magic and practical action, Lйvi-Strauss concluded that attempts to see magical practices as fundamentally subjective—in contrast to practical and objective scientific behavior—are fallacious, since magic is based on the fundamental belief that humanity can intervene in the order of the natural world to modify or add to its system of determinism. Recognizing this aspect of magic, Lйvi-Strauss asserted, helps us better understand the proper relation between magic and religion. Religion consists in “a humanization of natural laws and magic in a naturalization of human actions —the treatment of certain human actions as if they were an integral part of physical determinism.” But, he continued, we should not see these two as alternatives or evolutionary stages:
The anthropomorphism of nature (of which religion consists) and the physiomorphism of man (by which we have defined magic) constitute two components which are always given, and vary only in proportion. As we noted earlier, each implies the other. There is no religion without magic any more than there is magic without at least a trace of religion. The notion of a supernature exists only for a humanity which attributes supernatural powers to itself and in return ascribes the powers of its superhumanity to nature. 9
Marett and Lйvi-Strauss are only two of the many prominent voices who have challenged the effort to reify magic and to fix clear boundaries among magic, religion, and science. Yet even as Marett and
Lйvi-Strauss critique the attempts of other theorists to circumscribe magic, they themselves are drawn to put forward new definitions of the phenomenon. Other commentators go even farther to argue that, given the inherently problematic nature of the concept, magic should be completely discarded as a category within scholarly analysis. In 1956 Erland Ehnmark asserted that the effort to differentiate magic and religion “is unpractical in its logical rigidity, exactly because it is built on opposites excluding each other”: each term only has meaning through the exclusion of its contrary. The following year Olof Pettersson argued that the debate over the relation between magic and religion is “an artificial problem created by defining religion on the ideal pattern of Christianity.” The proper response, in Pettersson's view, would be to give magic “a decent burial.” And in 1982, as he considered the notion of magic, Edmund Leach concluded that “after a lifetime's career as a professional anthropologist, I have almost reached the conclusion that the word has no meaning whatsoever.” 10
But despite the force of such arguments, scholars continue to invoke magic as a meaningful analytical category, and efforts to delineate the boundaries among magic, religion, and science persist. Introductory texts in religious studies and the social sciences regularly recount debates over the definition of magic and its relation to religion and science, and new theories of magic proliferate. In one bold example, Daniel Lawrence O'Keefe's Stolen Lightning (1982 ) rejects the argument that magic is a mere “construct” and sets out to formulate “a general theory of magica complete explanatory account of the whole thing, past and present, all the provinces, rather than a single hypothesis.” Scholars continue to put forward definitions of magic, particularly in connection with the broader effort to define religion as an object of study. Despite its indeterminacy and elusiveness, magic retains a tantalizing power. Many theorists seem to share the hope voiced by Stanley Tambiah that one day when magic is adequately embedded in “a more ample theory of human life,” its “now puzzling duality” will disappear. 11
This book was sparked by the persistence of theories of magic as a topos in European and American social theory. More than a century of thwarted attempts to reify and define magic—to contain and circumscribe this phenomenon—by many of the West's most prominent cultural theorists would seem to provide a rather clear indication that this enterprise might be suspect. But despite that troubled legacy, scholars continue in this endeavor. This very persistence signals that more than mere intellectual curiosity may be at stake in these debates. My purpose in the following chapters is to explore why a category as amorphous and indeterminate as magic has maintained such currency in the theoretical literature of anthropology, sociology, and religious studies. Given the problematic nature of magic as an analytical concept and the apparently insurmountable difficulties in efforts to define it, why has the category maintained such intellectual vitality?
My fundamental contention is that theoretical debates over magic have persisted in large measure because of their resonance with broader contemporary social concerns. Whatever the many areas of disagreement among scholars in their competing definitions of magic, one common feature throughout these debates has been the broad consensus that magic is an archetypically nonmodern phenomenon. Magic has offered scholars and social theorists a foil for modern notions of religion and science and, more broadly, a foil for modernity itself. As Benavides underscores, the very notion of modernity is based on an oppositional mode of self-referentiality. Debates over the nature of magic have provided scholars with a particularly apt occasion to articulate the nature of modernity through the process of differentiating the nonmodern. The plasticity of magic, its pliable and permeable nature, has made the concept readily adaptable as a polemical and ideological tool, especially when coupled with the long-standing stigma attached to the notion. The following chapters will explore various modern cultural disputes refracting through the debates over magic.
Magic and the Boundaries of Religion
At the most obvious level, theories of magic have provided a prominent site for scholarly elaboration of the modern concept of religion and the proper role of religion in the modern social order. Through
Evans-Pritchard need not have been so concerned with this sort of psychologizing. One of my objectives here will be to demonstrate that, regardless of scholars' personal motives, the dominant theories of magic have functioned to delimit religion in a manner that renders it increasingly extraneous to modern culture. Whether framed as a polemic against all beliefs in the supernatural or merely as a polemic advocating certain narrow religious norms, scholarly arguments against magic have commonly prescribed an increasingly limited role for religion, leaving it relevant—if at all—only as a tenuous source of private comfort or subjective validation. The dominant theories of magic have regularly served to untether religion from life in the material world, to configure religion as an ungrounded abstraction decidedly irrelevant to pragmatic affairs. These theories have reinforced a harsh antinomy between the natural world and the increasingly vaporous realm of religion. In this frame, religion becomes extraneous to the world of human experience. John Milbank has written at length on the efforts of modern social theory to “police the sublime.” 15 No more overt example of this policing can be found than these theories of magic.
This domestication of religion has proved an essential component of liberal social thought. Timothy Fitzgerald has recently underscored the crucial role played by the liberal containment of religion in producing a sense of the secular, a nonreligious world under the “rational” control of politics, science, capitalism, and “individuals maximizing natural self-interest.” This “separate `non-religious' conceptual space, a fundamental area of presumed factual objectivity,” can take shape only through delimiting the realm of the religious. The modern notion of religion has thus proved a central tool in “establishing the naturalness and ideological transparency of capitalist and individualist values.” As Fitzgerald states it, “The category religion is at the heart of modern western capitalist ideology.it mystifies by playing a crucial role in the construction of the secular, which to us constitutes the self- evidently true realm of scientific facticity, rationality, and naturalness.” 16 Modern modes of secularization depend on the construction of a discrete and autonomous religious sphere, a sphere that both constrains religion and clarifies, through contrast, the meaning of the secular. Throughout the traditions of social thought explored in this book, magic is invoked to demarcate and police the boundaries of the religious realm, a move that serves to reinforce the stability of modern social organization.
At the same time, magic serves even more subtle ideological functions. Throughout the theoretical literature, we learn that magic is preoccupied with social power, entangled in a web of improper and disruptive desires, murky relations with materiality, arrogant self-seeking. In contrast, these texts configure a model of religion insulated from contamination by any sense of power—it is abstract, rarefied, otherworldly. As Fitzgerald states, modern “`religion' constructs a notion of human relations divorced from power. One of the characteristics of books produced in the religion sector is that they present an idealized world of so-called faith communities—of worship, customs, beliefs, doctrines, and rites entirely divorced from the realities of power in different societies.” In a similar vein, Russell McCutcheon has powerfully attacked the efforts of religious studies scholars to configure religion “as sui generis, autonomous, strictly personal, essential, unique, prior to, and ultimately distinct from, all other facets of human life and interaction.” McCutcheon underscores that this construction of religion “deemphasizes difference, history, and sociopolitical context in favor of abstract essences and homogeneity,” a gesture with the insidious corollary that “certain aspects of human life are free from the taint of sociopolitical interactions.” Defining religion in this rarefied manner serves to mystify the material realities within which religious systems—and the production of knowledge about religion— function. 17
As we will see, the scholarly deployment of magic is a central component of this construction of religion. Magic is configured in these theories as obsessed with self-serving and vain power, but the very contrast with magic serves to deflect issues of power away from religion. This use of magic masks the values and material interests at work in the production of a delimited religious realm, and at the same time it also serves to occlude the power actually exercised by—and within—Western religious institutions. The dominant theories of magic offer a harmless, rationalized model of religion serviceable for liberal modernity.
Magic and the Modern Subject
These debates on the relation of magic to religion and the role of religion in liberal society have been only one aspect of far broader modern cultural agendas. Throughout the theories of magic, scholars have engaged in wide-ranging exploration of various aspects of modernity. So, for example, in disputes over the relation between magic and science, theorists have struggled to define the precise nature of modern forms of rationality and how that rationality might differ from other modes of thought. And the debates over magic have ranged far beyond issues of piety and rationality into broader considerations of the nature of modern subjectivity itself.
Charles Taylor has highlighted the role played by the suppression of magical thinking in the emergence of modern Western forms of subjectivity and individual identity (which developed, he says, from a post-Reformation sense of “inwardness”). As Taylor explains, in the earlier magical worldview the boundaries between the self and the natural world were seen as essentially permeable. But with the arrival of “a new moral/spiritual stance to the worlda new piety,” those boundaries were reinforced, bringing in their wake “a new notion of freedom and inwardness.” This new, disenchanted sense of freedom stands in sharp contrast to the confinement of the past: “The decline of the world- view underlying magic was the obverse of the rise of the new sense of freedom and self-possession. From the viewpoint of this new sense of self, the world of magic seems to entail a thraldom, an imprisoning of the self in uncanny external forces, even a ravishing or loss of self. It threatens a possession which is the very opposite of self-possession.” 18
Taylor is surely correct in his claim that modern notions of subjective autonomy and freedom have been constructed through contrast with past forms of magical thought (much as the modern sense of social progress has tracked this liberatory narrative). Yet as Lyndal Roper has asserted, the triumphal tone of Taylor's account of the consolidation and stability of this modern sense of autonomous identity is rather thoroughly unwarranted. Michel Foucault and the generation of his followers have amply demonstrated that the consolidation of the modern subject is far less secure than Taylor implies and, further, that the maintenance of modern subjectivity turns on complex new forms of repression and constraint. Building on Foucault's insight, Roper rejects Taylor's simplistic account of the effects of historical and social conditions on individual subjectivity. Not only have magic and the “irrational” been far more integrally involved in the emergence of the modern bourgeois subject than Taylor recognizes, but also the disciplinary processes that produce this subject often contradict the very values they espouse. 19 As I will discuss in later chapters, while “freedom” from magic is certainly invoked as a constitutive element of modern modes of subjectivity, this freedom is purchased only at the price of potent new forms of social control and regimentation.
The dominant scholarly theories of magic have had as a central theme the prescription of idealized norms for modern subjectivity. The modern subject configured in these theories demonstrates properly delimited forms of religious piety, properly rationalized modes of thought, and properly disenchanted relations with the material world. This subject conforms to distinctive norms of individual agency and autonomy (seeing itself as fundamentally independent from other individuals and the natural world), while tempering that autonomy with a suitably submissive attitude toward the social order. This subject demonstrates a requisite respect for the abstract regularity of the material world, while repressing any awareness of the mystifications of the commodity form. Subjects who fail to conform to these norms are denigrated as trapped in decidedly nonmodern and subversive forms of magical thought.
These theories of magic are permeated with overt forms of moralism, a mode of social discipline comparable to what Stuart Clark has called “acculturation by text.” Max Weber's term for the modern disenchantment of the world was Entzauberung —“removing the magic”—and the dominant theories of magic have as their objective an insistence that the modern subject conform to an emphatic
feature prominently in the theoretical literature on magic. Near the conclusion of his 1948 study of magic, the sociologist Hutton Webster encourages “white settlers” (including missionaries, traders, and European administrators) to use ridicule and contempt in the effort to eradicate forms of magic disruptive to colonial interests and to institute more manageable forms of piety. Throughout the various permutations of this scholarly preoccupation with magic, the theories have formed an important component of what Said calls the broad Western “imagination of empire.” 25 As numerous cultural theorists have underscored, the modern Western social sciences emerged in the context of Euro-American colonial exploration and conquest, and these disciplines provided invaluable resources to colonialist efforts to define and control non-Western peoples and territories. Orientalist tropes and rhetoric have permeated the literature of the social sciences, particularly theoretical formulations of magic.
Yet magic could not be so stably consigned to the colonial frontier. In Primitive Culture (1871 ), Tylor wrote of magic as a cultural “survival.” The very notion of survival underscores central tensions that have haunted Western theories of magic. By definition, survivals persist; they refuse to be contained in the chronological or geographic distance. In fact, Tylor's own charting of where magic is to be found provides an instructive example both of the obvious difficulties in seeking to consign magic to distant times and locales and of the pressing domestic concerns that animate his theory.
In Primitive Culture Tylor asserts that magic is primarily a problem of the colonial periphery, but it is clear that he also sees magic as an issue for contemporary domestic policy. Tylor attributes the pernicious and delusional belief in magic “in its main principle to the lowest known stages of civilization, and the lower races.” But he immediately affirms that magic persists even in “modern cultured nations.” Magical practices can thus be traced from “the lower culture which they are of, to the higher culture which they are in.” The very prevalence of these magical survivals so confounds Tylor's evolutionary principles that his cartography is threatened with inundation: “For the stream of civilization winds and turns upon itself, and what seems the bright onward current of one age may in the next spin round in a whirling eddy, or spread into a dull and pestilential swamp.” 26
Tylor finds examples of magic not only among “savages high and low like the Australians and Polynesians, and barbarians like the nations of Guinea,” but also within the population and folklore of Europe. Indeed, Tylor finds a surviving European equivalent for almost every form of symbolic magic. Divining with animal entrails and bones is common, he tells us, among Malays and Polynesians, Peruvians and central Africans, North American Indians and ancient Romans, but these practices survive in Brandenburg, Ireland, and England itself. Palmistry, which “flourished in ancient Greece and Italy as it still does in India,” “has its modern votaries not merely among Gypsy fortune-tellers, but in what is called `good society.'” Magical thought is shared by “the negro fetish-man” and “the modern clairvoyant,” and comparable magical practices appear among “the Red Indian medicine-man, the Tatar necromancer, the Highland ghost-seer, and the Boston medium.” As Tylor strings together examples of the symbolic magic and superstition of “the lower races” of the Zulu and the Obi-man of West Africa, he acknowledges that these examples are “fully rivalled in superstitions which still hold their ground in Europe” among such types as the “German cottager” and the “Hessian lad,” sailors and the “Cornishman.” This exotic and animated landscape encroaches near at hand: an astrologer, we are told, has opened shop within a mile of Tylor's own door. 27
Tylor is dismayed by the persistence of magic within the heart of Europe, and his concern with this social threat has been echoed throughout the scholarly tradition. While the primary discussions of magic focus on its non-Western manifestations, theorists also regularly assert that particular groups within the West demonstrate strong proclivities to magic. It is little surprise that these are groups posing the specter of social disruption: women, children, people of color, members of lower social classes, other deviants. There has been a widespread, explicit consensus among scholars that magic incites antisocial appetites and subversive passions among the dispossessed and thus places good order at risk.
The scholarly discourses on magic have regularly conformed to the interests of the dominant classes of Europe and America seeking to regulate and control both their colonial possessions and their domestic populations, especially the troublesome groups on the margins of society. In the context of colonialism, non-Western cultural systems were regularly configured by scholars so as to provide a contrasting foil that could bring Western modernity into clearer relief. Particularly in anthropological and ethnographic literature, this juxtaposition of cultures could produce a heightened sense of cultural difference, rendering non-Western societies an “oppositional Other.” 28 Through the scholarly production of “primitive” or “traditional” culture, nontraditional culture itself takes form. But the alleged magical proclivities of this primitive Other could be used not only to contrast the enlightened West with its primitive possessions but also to naturalize distinctions between the enlightened and elite social classes in Europe and their less privileged compatriots within the metropole.
These scholarly theories of magic provide a powerful example of the ways in which notions of cultural difference can be constructed and deployed in the effort to exercise social control. As Foucault underscores, one of the principal strategies of modern Western disciplinary technologies has been to reify the identities of marginal groups. Many forms of deviation have been configured as deviance and consigned to specialized modern institutions (prisons, hospitals, mental institutions). The modern era has also given rise to a range of new scholarly disciplines working to classify and normalize modern subjects. While magic proved more amorphous and less pressing a concern than the forms of deviance that Foucault studied, it has taken its place nevertheless among the markers of cultural difference.
One of the most effective tactics in this reification of deviant identities has been the deployment of various codes of stigma and marginalization intersecting in a mutually reinforcing overlay, gaining strength through association. Through these intersecting rhetorics, the cultural weight of discourses on gender, sexuality, race, and various other forms of marginality is powerfully amplified. 29 As we will see, the dominant scholarly theories of magic echo and reinforce the rhetoric of various modes of deviance, most notably the rhetoric of sexual nonconformity. The effort to consolidate Western social norms has been an abiding subtext of these theories. Through a complex interweave with other stigmatized identities and behavior, magic has been configured as one further marker in the chain of Otherness against which the ideals of modern social order have been articulated.
Magic and the Critique of Modernity
Throughout the dominant modern theories of magic, the category has served as a foil for use in the self-fashioning of modernity. Yet magic has proved far too elusive and indeterminate to remain a stable and contained rhetorical tool. Modernity itself has always been fractured, contested, and ultimately illusory. As Bruno Latour emphatically declares, “we have never been modern” at all. 30
Latour argues that one of the foundational gestures of Western modernity has been the effort to formulate and police a heightened antinomy between nonhuman nature and human culture. Modernity has been constituted on this ideology of purification, on an insistence that we disentangle the nonhuman from the human. To be modern, we are told, is to recognize the essential differentiation between these “two entirely distinct ontological zones.” Yet as Latour demonstrates, the modern bifurcation of nature and culture has always been thoroughly ambiguous and contradictory. Despite the ostentatious efforts to police their separation, to configure the nonhuman and the human as if they were separable, the perverse success of Western modernity has actually depended on the ingenious and profligate intermingling of nature and culture. Under the ideological cloak of their ontological differentiation, nature and culture have interwoven to produce astounding networks and “mixtures between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture.” Latour concludes in fact that the dualistic rhetoric of a separation between nature and culture has actually played an indispensable role in their intermingling: “The more we forbid ourselves to conceive of hybrids, the
And beyond this broad secular magic, a variety of more supernaturally inclined magical subcultures have thrived in Europe and America throughout the modern period. These subcultures are a prominent feature of the alternative religious and spiritual landscape that has emerged since the 1960s, and new information technologies (particularly the Internet) have fueled their growth. Like Victorian occultism, these groups are deeply informed by central ideologies and values of modernity, and again like their Victorian predecessors, they often directly address alienations and tensions within the contemporary world.
Many people seize on magic specifically because of what they see as its political valence. Magic and witchcraft have been most notably invoked by feminists and gender activists as tools in their efforts to subvert dominant systems of social power. As Starhawk explains: “Magic is another word that makes people uneasy, so I use it deliberately, because the words we are comfortable with, the words that sound acceptable, rational, scientific, and intellectually correct, are comfortable precisely because they are the language of estrangement.” 35 Generations of social theory dismissed belief in the supernatural with the broad brush of Marx's assertion that religion is the “opium of the people.” Yet in recent years various cultural theorists have expressed a renewed interest in the operations of magic and religion on the margins of society. 36 Michael Taussig, a prominent example of this new critical perspective, has built on the thought of Walter Benjamin to explore the ways in which various magical practices can function as forms of social critique. In Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987 ), Taussig distinguishes the magical rites of the indigenous Indian and peasant inhabitants of the Putumayo region of southwestern Colombia from the religion of state Catholicism imposed on the Indians by Western colonialism. He demonstrates the important subversive functions served by the Indians' magical practices. Not only do these practices provide the peasants a vehicle through which to articulate the antagonisms they experience at the hands of capitalism and alien Western social structures, but these forms of magic can also serve as lines of empowerment for marginal groups in response to oppressive social structures. As Taussig frames it, his work is focused on “the possibilities and even necessities for reconceptualizing the power of imageric and magical thinking in modernity.” 37
Starhawk and Taussig offer valuable examples of the deployment of magic as a tool in the critique of modernity. Their efforts have been joined by activists and social critics from a range of perspectives. Theologians have worked to rethink disembodied norms for religious practice and to break down artificial barriers between the natural and supernatural in order to make religious life more tactile, concrete, and engaged. Other cultural and political theorists have recognized the power of magic as a mechanism for challenging the estrangements and alienations of European and American cultural structures. With magic configured as the epitome of the non-Western and the nonmodern, it has proved a potent medium with which to contest the hegemonic social structures and norms of modernity.
Since the 1950s, postcolonial theory has emerged as one of the most prominent academic resources for interrogating the ways in which Euro-American modernity has defined itself in opposition to cultural Others. The first generations of postcolonial theorists often painted starkly Manichean portraits of Western appropriation of this Other, seeing Orientalist scholarship as uniformly objectifying and derogatory and Western scholars as sharing a narrow and monolithic set of objectives. But in recent years these images have become increasingly nuanced, with theorists recognizing the important variety and complexity of Western depictions of the non-Western Others.
John MacKenzie, for example, has shown that in many contexts the Orient could be invoked rhetorically by Western writers for the purpose of critiquing and challenging Western self-identity, for the formulation of “a counter-western discourse.” As he explains, while Western scholars regularly deployed the tropes of Orientalism to bolster imperial hegemony, many scholars could also join with colonized writers to contest colonialism through counterhegemonic practices. As MacKenzie concludes:
A fascination with Orientalism was as likely to be oppositional as consensual in relation to established power structures, a promoter of a ferment in ideas as in artistic innovation. It is difficult to discover in any of the arts at whatever period sets of clearly delineated binary oppositions, sharp distinctions between the moral Self and the depraved Other. Rather has the whole experience been one of instabilities and fusions, attraction and repulsion, an awareness of characteristics to be peremptorily rejected as well as devoutly embraced. 38
MacKenzie might well underestimate the degree to which this mode of self-critique depends on a reifying Orientalist appropriation of the non-Western Other. Yet he makes an important contribution to the growing body of literature demonstrating the variable, contingent, and ambivalent nature of colonialist representational practices. The discourses of colonialism—like all discourses—are marked by fluidity and heterogeneity; as Reina Lewis has argued, that very fluidity proved an essential component of their power. 39 And the discourses of colonialism—like all discourses of difference— have remained a site of shifting and contested struggles for power. These discourses could be readily deployed in the effort to confirm Western self-identity, but they could also be used to expose the frailty of that identity. They could legitimate colonial hegemony, but they could also puncture the pretensions of the colonizer.
The broad colonialist representations of the non-Western Other proved an important arena for Western self-critique, and so also the theories of magic have provided an important occasion for questioning and contesting Western cultural norms. This mode of critique has turned on a cultural logic that frames magic as alien, subversive, and nonmodern, but within that frame scholarly debates over magic have provided valuable resources for challenging reified and idealized notions of modern identity and for interrogating the insidious binary logics and dualisms on which modernity has been founded.
Magicians in Search of Revenge
My basic argument in this text is that debates concerning magic have maintained a great appeal for social theorists in large measure because they provide such a rich site for articulating and contesting the nature and boundaries of modernity. In the context of these debates, scholars have found a ready opportunity to articulate norms for modern modes of identity and subjectivity and for the relation of those subjects to the social and material worlds. But magic has also offered particularly useful resources for contesting those norms—for challenging modernity's hegemonic narratives of autonomy, rationality, and progress. Modernity might conceal its wizardry behind a naturalizing veil, but magic tantalizes with a peek behind the curtain.
This book seeks to excavate the genealogy of modern Western theories of magic and to explore their operations, with particular focus on the most influential theories in religious studies and the social sciences. Chapter 1 examines the social and intellectual context in which academic theories of magic emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Beginning with a discussion of witchcraft and magic in early modernity, the chapter explores a number of the cultural factors crucial in shaping Western understandings of magic and modernity.
The remaining chapters explore major themes in the scholarly literature on magic since the late nineteenth century. Chapter 2 examines the construction of magic in relation to liberal religious piety, chapter 3 in relation to modern scientific rationality, and chapter 4 in relation to modern social order and capitalist economic relations. These chapters seek to address a basic set of questions: How has magic functioned in modern thought to demarcate the limits of religion? How have constructions of magic served to give definition to science and scientific rationality? Finally, with magic positioned as a buffer between religion and science, what social and political norms have been promoted through these theories?
range of disciplines have taught us, the fetish is a focus of inordinate and immodest attention, regularly invested with magical import. Yet as Apter points out, scholars themselves have fetishized the concept, seeing it as a key to religion, psychology, art. In seeking to account for this ironic preoccupation, Apter looks to the power of the fetish to destabilize our normal modes of thought and representation—and to do so in an eminently pleasing manner:
Desublimating the aura of falsity and bad faith in consumer consciousness; unmasking the banal sexisms of everyday life; undercutting aesthetic idealism with the seductive spectacle of kitsch, camp, or punk; exposing the postmodern infatuation with transgression, “gender trouble,” and erotic fixation; smoking out the Eurocentric voyeurism of “other-collecting”—fetishism as a discourse weds its own negative history as a synonym for sorcery and witchcraft (fetiзaria ) to an outlaw strategy of dereification.a consistent displacing of reference occurs, paradoxically, as a result of so much fixing. Fetishism, in spite of itself, unfixes representations even as it enables them to become monolithic “signs” of culture.
Apter argues that this “unfixing,” this dereification, has been the persistent function of the fetish. Refusing to stay in its allotted place as the property of the Other, the fetish has worked its way through bourgeois curiosity cabinets and the European literary imagination as a potent talisman through which Europe has “made itself strange to itself.” 41 The fetishized process of estrangement and transgression has proved extraordinarily pleasurable through a double movement that reinscribes and subverts norms.
Magic has functioned in modernity with the very estranging and destabilizing vitality that Apter sees in the fetish. Magic has demonstrated a novel capacity to reinscribe and simultaneously to subvert modernity's self-representations. And further, modern theories of magic have exercised the paradoxical and expansive magical power of words, a power with its own distinctive satisfactions and one to which we will return. These theories have prescribed a reified modern identity, even as they have displayed the fictiveness of that reification. They have rigorously declared the fixity of scholarly representation, even as they have evanesced and dissipated. They have mocked the efficacy of “mere words,” even as they have conjured powerful spells. As we will see, these theories have boasted of a pious will to truth, even as they have served a distinctly modern will to power “precisely because of their capacity to disguise themselves as transparencies.” 42
1 The Emergence of Magic in the Modern World
It is natural, that superstition should prevail every where in barbarous ages, and put men on the most earnest enquiry concerning those invisible powers, who dispose of their happiness or misery. —David Hume
Magic has a long and complex history. And crucial to any recounting of that history is an awareness of the broader context within which magic takes shape. The effort to mark off a region of the conceptual and social terrain as magical involves, at the most basic level, an act of demarcation, a juxtaposition of magic with other social practices and modes of knowledge. As the social context shifts, so also magic is transformed, assuming new forms and exerting new powers.
The nature and role of magic in Western society have changed profoundly over recent centuries as the social order itself has changed, the most significant of these developments involving transformations in economic and political structures and concomitant shifts in the demarcation and social position of religion and science. By the latter decades of the nineteenth century, a range of major Western thinkers struggled to define and explain the nature of the modern cultural formations that had taken shape around them. But this focus on the modern also gave rise to an intense cultural preoccupation with the nonmodern. As discussed in the introduction, the very notion of modernity involves a sense of self-referential differentiation from, and opposition to, the nonmodern. One of the central strategies in efforts to define modernity has been the attempt to reify nonmodern, superstitious thought and social practices in a manner that configures them as modernity's foil. In scholarly literature this foil has commonly assumed the form of magic. The position of magic within the intellectual and cultural terrain of the modern West has thus been a product not only of the distinctive confluence of social and material factors that gave shape to modernity but also of modernity's need to consolidate its own identity.
My primary objective in this book is to chart the role of magic in influential modern discursive structures since the late nineteenth century, to explore the significance that magic has held in modern thought. In order to approach this task, it is important to begin with an account of the social and intellectual context within which definitions of magic emerged in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Three major epistemic changes profoundly affected the shape of magic in the modern world. First, through the course of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, religion came increasingly to be seen as properly a matter of the private intellect, a view deeply informed by generations of religious reform—and particularly by Protestant polemics against Catholic ritual and devotional practices. Coupled with this development was the astounding proliferation of capitalism and modern science, social practices sharing related forms of mechanistic and rationalized manipulation of the material world. Finally, the late nineteenth century saw the consolidation of European control over much of Asia and Africa, and colonial conquest and exploitation gave rise to new forms of scholarly analysis of “primitive” culture. These three developments exerted profound influence on almost every aspect of European and American culture. But for our purposes here, they particularly altered cultural perspectives on the natural world and the proper role of religion and science within modern society. As various thinkers struggled to come to terms with the norms for life in this seemingly disenchanted new world, to articulate appropriately modern forms of piety, efficiency, and rational control, magic emerged as a remarkably useful analytical tool. A host of social theorists, philosophers, and scholars of religion turned to magic as a central theme in their efforts to delineate the nature of the modern.
As Gustavo Benavides has asserted, the differentiation between magic and religion must be approached historically—“in the context of state formations and the centralization of political power.” 1 The purpose of this chapter is to explore the social and intellectual context within which magic took shape as a category of modern cultural analysis. In order better to understand this context, it is productive to excavate important elements of Europe's past. The chapter begins with an examination of central aspects of the history—and historiography—of early modern witchcraft and magic,
controversy.
Early modern concern with witchcraft and magic provides a useful entry into the study of modern constructions of magic for three major reasons. First, far from being a primitive or medieval throwback or survival, belief in witchcraft and natural magic flowered in the very era in which Europe began its move toward modernity—the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the age of early modern philosophy, science, and capitalism. The witchcraft persecutions were a prominent feature of the social landscape as early modern thinkers explored the nature of rationality and superstition. The brutality of the witch-hunts also provides a vivid demonstration of early modern concerns with the identification and containment of deviance and of the social conflicts and antagonisms that can underlie a preoccupation with magic. Moreover, demonology and iconography from the witchcraft persecutions have lingered in the modern cultural imagination, and various tropes from the traditions of natural magic thrive in contemporary popular culture. 5
Second, intellectual disputes over the witchcraft persecutions and natural magic proved a central site for the negotiation of new boundaries concerning the place of religion and the supernatural within the emerging modern world. As I will discuss later, many prominent early modern philosophers responded directly to issues raised by the witchcraft persecutions, a fact often occluded by the ways these philosophers are studied in disregard of their historical contexts. Arguments against the witchcraft persecutions by various philosophers, social thinkers, and theologians were a significant factor in the development of modern discourses concerning nature and religion. These arguments reflect the shift in Western culture toward modern forms of rationality, a rationality often constructed in explicit contrast to the superstition of magic beliefs. Yet even as various skeptical voices challenged the violent persecution of alleged witches, they also pointed toward new forms of social control. These critics themselves began to formulate new medical and psychological theories of who might be prone to irrationality and superstition, a theme greatly amplified in nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of magic. Debates over the witchcraft persecutions provided a prime opportunity for articulating new notions of magical thinking as irrational, benighted, and pathological.
Finally, early modern concern with witchcraft and natural magic provides a useful entryway to this discussion of modern views of magic because the very historiography of the early modern period itself provides a vivid demonstration of the themes of this study. Various twentieth-century attempts to account for the cultural logic of the early modern period run headlong into a thicket of terminological confusion. Historians struggle to distinguish various forms of social practice and belief, often turning to categories and concepts far removed from those used by their objects of study. As G. R. Quaife rather succinctly expresses the situation, “Magic is a label applied to phenomena which have certain characteristics in common. There is little agreement on the phenomena or the characteristics.” This difficulty is evident even in one of the most substantive and influential scholarly works on the witchcraft persecutions, Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). While Thomas's work provides invaluable historical insight, numerous scholars have properly pointed out that Thomas himself sometimes lapses into an uncritical use of the notion of “magic,” paying insufficient attention to the ways in which our modern understanding of the term is itself a product of the very social conflicts he is excavating. 6
Thomas is far from alone in such problems. Efforts to uncover the social history of the witchcraft persecutions often turn on the formulation of a whole range of problematic distinctions, distinctions first between religion and magic and then among various types of “magical” behavior and belief. The scholarly attempt to untangle medieval and early modern social practices is regularly confounded. Historians find themselves plagued by the ambiguity of the historical record, particularly trial records and demonological literature that hopelessly contort testimony and evidence. And historians often appear at a loss in their efforts to translate modern notions of religion and magic onto social contexts that refuse to conform to these concepts. The range of practices designated as “magic,” “witchcraft,” “superstition,” and the like has varied greatly through European history. The elasticity and imprecision of these terms makes early modern social history profoundly difficult.
One point on which there is a wide degree of scholarly consensus is that the persecution of witchcraft flared only when notions of simple sorcery and popular magic were overlaid with a demonological theory in which these practices were seen as involving socially threatening, diabolical, and heretical pacts with Satan. There are long traditions of Christian condemnation of magic, but through the early medieval period it appears that secular and religious authorities were relatively unconcerned with practices of simple sorcery or folk magic. Citing particularly the position of Augustine on these issues, theologians and church officials taught that witchcraft was illusion or fantasy, a form of pagan superstition. The influential Canon Episcopi (dating perhaps from the tenth century) codified the doctrine that folklore concerning the exploits of witches was based only on illusion or phantasm inspired by the devil. 7
While medieval secular and ecclesiastical authorities viewed a broad array of folk practices as manifestations of residual paganism, these practices were regularly ignored. When they came into conflict with church teaching, the common penalty was merely a stiff penance. Various forms of folk healing appear to have been widespread, particularly in a culture in which effective alternatives were practically nonexistent and in which the predominant philosophical and medical systems taught that analogies and sympathetic correspondences existed among various parts of the created order. While alleged maleficium might prompt private vendetta, public authorities rarely intervened. Over time maleficium came to be associated with heresy, but well into the twelfth century the usual prescription for such behavior was excommunication rather than execution. 8
Scholars regularly note that many aspects of popular folk magic were commonly incorporated into Christian religious practices, and various layers of European society engaged in behavior that would later be considered superstitious. Popular Christianity included active devotion to miracle-working shrines and holy relics, and the medieval church promoted its power as a conduit of divine blessing. Keith Thomas points out that while medieval theologians maintained a distinction between proper religion and “superstition,” the notion of superstition was used in an extremely elastic manner to designate ceremonies or practices of which the church disapproved and which fell outside its control. As he states: “The difference between churchmen and magicians lay less in the effects they claimed to achieve than in their social position, and in the authority on which their respective claims rested.” 9
Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a tone of Enlightenment positivism shaped much of the analysis of the witch persecutions. Scholars portrayed alleged witches as the unfortunate victims of mass superstition and false confessions elicited by torture. Such superstition was defeated only by the march of modern scientific reason as Western culture moved toward a progressive secularization. By contrast, an influential counteranalysis with roots in nineteenth-century Romanticism asserted that witch beliefs had their origin in pre-Christian folk religion. This line of argument is most prominently associated with the Egyptologist Margaret Murray, who claimed that the victims of the witchcraft persecutions were actually members of a wide spread fertility cult constituting the predominant popular religion in Europe until the seventeenth century. 10
Murray's work gained great popular appeal, and aspects of her argument, particularly concerning witchcraft practices as a form of resistance against Christian hegemony, repressive social structures, patriarchy, and exploiting landlords, were pursued by a number of subsequent historians. Scholars read various forms of social critique within the alleged practices of witchcraft subcultures. For example, Mircea Eliade claimed that European witch cults engaged in prohibited sexual practices in the effort to return to an archaic cultural past—“the dreamlike time of the fabulous beginnings.” 11 Others suggested that witchcraft practices constituted inchoate forms of feminism or the early modern inklings of gay and lesbian identities. And in a striking example of the interaction between historical text-making and the texts' social field, Murray's claims concerning the existence of organized early modern witchcraft have been often invoked by various twentieth-century neopagans to establish a venerable lineage for their practices. The “history” developed by Murray and her successors helped stimulate a proliferation of witches' covens in Europe and the United States. 12
