Magic is hard to define because it is seen as deeply ambivalent. If we ask just who it is that sees it in such contrasting ways, we find that common views of magic are a strategy of exclusion. Magic is an important part of cultures around the world – past, present and future – so who finds it threatening and why? This post explores the possibility that magic is used as a label for certain ways of thinking that religion and science seek to hide in a space of darkness that they create.
The Ambivalence of Magic
Magic is natural and supernatural, profane and sacred, religion-like and science-like. It is stagecraft and sleight-of-hand; it is reality-altering technique and doorway to other-worldly power. It links seen and unseen, real and illusory, possible and impossible, gods and demons. It is older than history, yet it still shapes hopes and fears, cures and curses, in all cultures.
I am not saying that magic is real in the sense that the forces it claims to work with actually exist. (I am also not denying that.) It is important because people believe in it, and this gives it important social effects. That makes it worth a closer look.
Magic is doubly dark.
At one level, it is disturbing because it crosses lines. For religion, it appeals to illegitimate and evil forces. For science, it expresses an irrational and incoherent vision of the world and how we influence it.
At a deeper level, magic is dark and unsettling precisely because it is ambivalent. Anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that “uncleanness is matter out of place.” For Douglas, impurity happens when something does not fit neatly into the conceptual boxes that our culture provides for ordering reality. Anything that disrupts symbolic and social order is seen as dangerous. Magic – by blurring moral, religious and scientific boundaries – invokes this sense of impurity. Magic is spirituality and technology out of place.
Magic, Religion and Science
Some definitions of religion apply to magic: “belief in Spiritual Beings” (E. B. Tyler); “the recognition that all things are manifestations of a Power which transcends our knowledge” (Herbert Spenser). Sacraments, relics, and miracles in many religious traditions operate on principles indistinguishable from magic.
Some definitions of science also include magic: “the system of behaviour by which man acquires mastery of the environment” (J.G. Crowther); “accumulated and established knowledge, … of general truths or the operation of general laws… especially, such knowledge when it relates to the physical world” (Webster’s Dictionary). Quantum physics often defies intuitive causality in ways that resonate with magical thinking.
Early anthropologists made magic the poor cousin of science, not of religion. E. B. Tyler called it “occult science” and James Frazer “bastard science.” What are true magicians if not experts in deeper truths of how the world really works.... For Eliphas Lévi, magic is “the noblest and the truest Science that the world possesses.”
For Frazer and Tyler magic is primitive thinking, rooted in sympathetic magic, in which like produces like and contact alters the essence of things. In their view, cultures evolve from magic through religion to science. For Jacob Bronowski, magic is like religion: both deal with the sacred, where science deals with profane, observable reality. For Karl Popper, magic is failed science: both have the same goal – understanding and using the basic principles of reality – but magic gets it wrong. For Bronisław Malinowski, magic functions like religion: both use rituals to structure human activities, to mobilize resources and to address existential human needs. For Thomas Kuhn, magic is a protoscience that fails to play by the rules of scientific method.
Magic shifts back and forth, crossing and erasing the line between religion and science, depending on our goals and definitions. Its metamorphoses of meaning seem almost magical…
Other People’s Religion
Scholar of religion Gustavo Benavides writes “Magic, born always as the twin of religion, is invented by reformers.” People who take a religion in a new direction use magic as a negative label – like cult, heresy, conspiracy theory or disinformation – to disqualify views that they wish to replace with their own.
The history of magic gives us many examples of people with power using ‘magic’ as a label to marginalize, exclude or demonize others. In the European middle ages, religion was used to heal diseases, influence weather, ensure fertility and other important things. If priests were doing these things, it was religion; if individual, ‘freelance’ practitioners were doing them, it was magic. The distinction between miracles (God over-riding the rules of the world) and magic (demonic or fraudulent rituals) was used to prop up the authority of churches and priests in this way. Magicians were careful to insist that they worked with natural magic – God’s laws of the world – not angel magic, or, worse, demonic magic. As religion became more and more a matter of what goes on in people’s souls or minds, the ‘magic’ label was used to criticize the same sorts of practical, worldly uses of ritual that used to be mainstream religion. Protestants accused Catholics of believing in magic and superstition (another zombie word), because their view that certain rituals, the sacraments, were necessary to salvation implies that rituals act automatically, independent of faith and belief. These developments led to the most common modern distinction between religion, with its focus on faith and salvation, and magic, with its non-scientific ways of trying to manipulate reality.
We can see the dual rejection of magic, by both religion and science, in the marginalization of esoteric traditions. Leading scholar of esotericism, Wouter Hanegraaff, suggests that
Esotericism can be understood as a general label for all those traditions in Western culture that had been rejected by rationalist and scientific thinkers since the eighteenth century, the period of the Enlightenment, as well as by dominant forms of Protestant Christianity since the sixteenth century, the age of the Reformation.
The question is: “who is labelling magic in negative terms and why?”
Magical Thinking
A particular way of thinking is closely associated with magic, and it is often a target of critique from both religion and science. Psychologists suggests that magical thinking – a magical view of reality – is characterized by a belief in non-scientific causal relationships, where causes and effects are linked by similarity or contiguity rather than material energy transfer. In Magic and the Mind, Eugene Subbotsky points to four aspects of magical causation:
mind-over matter magic – moving or creating physical objects with your mind
animation magic – inanimate objects moving on their own
nonpermanence magic – objects transforming into other objects, moving through walls etc.
sympathetic magic – action and influence at a distance, not by physical contact, but through similarity or contagion
Research in this area suggests that magical thinking is normal, evolved way of thinking, and that thinking in complex religious and scientific ways is learned behaviour. Here are other findings:
magical thinking is beneficial for children’s cognitive development: it helps them to think creatively, out of the box (Subbotsky)
“psychological stress ... results in increased frequency of magical thinking” (Keinan)
The issue of whether children think magically and adults grow out of it is complex. On the one hand, “magical thinking decreases steadily across adulthood” (Brashier and Multhaup). On the other hand, “magical thinking is to be found among young children and adults alike” (Bolton and colleagues). This decline in adults holds more in some cultures than others, and the reason seems to be that science and religion actively attack magical thinking:
science and religion are united in their efforts to exterminate NIMBs [Noninstitutionalized magical beliefs]. Science denies magic on the grounds of both theory and empirical evidence. … In contrast, religion rejects NIMBs on moral grounds by associating this kind of magical belief with bad powers (the devil, evil spirits, and paganism). While acknowledging the power and use of magical beliefs, religion demands a monopoly on these beliefs.... Chased by science and religion, NIMBs descend into the subconscious. … In contrast to Western educated adults, uneducated participants from developing cultures will endorse magical beliefs both in their verbal explanations and in their nonverbal behavior … [because, given their often different education] NIMBs are not suppressed by science and religion and remain in the domain of consciousness. (Subbotsky)
Conclusion
Magic is prominent in modern media and entertainment as a form of cultural expression around the globe: check out fantasy and magic in K-dramas for a glimpse of its enduring appeal. It remains a powerful form of cultural resistance, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where it bridges traditional and post-traditional worldviews. Yet even in popular culture, magic is portrayed as having a dual nature: light and dark, creative and destructive, chaotic and structuring, familiar and alien.
Magic’s ambivalence tells us that it is being pulled in different directions. In this tug-of-war, magic is stretched between profane and sacred, rational and irrational, as religion and science define themselves against it. The word magic tells us more about the people using it than about what they are pointing to. It reflects prejudices about the power of religion and science to reflect and shape the world. If we boil magic down to one particular characteristic – a certain way of thinking – we still find the prejudices of religion and science pushing it away. But, if we follow the science, it seems that magic – often seen as a primitive relic – is a normal part of human thought, and the rigid boundaries of science and religion are learned constructs.
P.S. In case you are curious about how prone you are to magical thinking, here are some questions from the Magical Thinking Questionnaire (MTQ) (by Derek Bolton and colleagues). Which of these point to magical causation and which to material causation?
Is it possible to make tomorrow a sunny day by drawing a picture of the sun?
Is it possible to crash your bicycle by going too fast?
Is it possible to make something good happen to you or someone else just by thinking about it?
Is it possible for stones to float in water?
Is it possible to show you are happy by smiling?
Is it possible to move an object across a room just by thinking about it?
Is it possible to prevent a plane crash just by touching wood?
Is it possible for you to lift an elephant?
P.P.S. If you think this post includes rhetorical over-generalizations about the nature of both religion and science, you are right. Check out some of my other posts for more nuanced views:, for example, Religion and Science in SF; Are Sports a Religion?; Stop Asking “Which Religion Is True?”; or Religion as Dirty Work.
References
Bolton, Derek, Pamela Dearsley, Richard Madronal-Luque, and Simon Baron-Cohen. “Magical Thinking in Childhood and Adolescence: Development and Relation to Obsessive Compulsion.” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 20, no. 4 (2002): 479–94.
Brashier, Nadia M., and Kristi S. Multhaup. “Magical Thinking Decreases across Adulthood.” Psychology of Aging 32, no. 8 (2017): 681–88.
Keinan, Giora. “Effects of Stress and Tolerance of Ambiguity on Magical Thinking.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67, no. 1 (1994): 48–55.
Subbotsky, Eugene. Magic and the Mind: Mechanisms, Functions, and Development of Magical Thinking and Behavior. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Zusne, L., and W. H. Jones. Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking. 2nd ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1989.