MAGIC

Early Magic

Broadly defined, magic is a system of non-canonical ritual practices aiming at changing reality. In early Jewish magic this system was based on the use of powerful verbal performative formulae – incantations – whose oral or written expression was realized in the framework of a ceremony. The purpose of the magical act was generally to compel metaphysical entities such as demons, angels, stars and celestial bodies, holy names, and even God Himself, to bring about for the user the reality he desired. Early Jewish magical literature is evidenced in magical writings and objects from the Land of Israel, Babylonia, and North Africa, dating from the third century until the 12^th (prior to the development of the Kabbalah and the change it effected in Jewish magic in the direction of practical Kabbalah). This literature enables us to trace the verbal elements of the adjuration as a magical text, such as the employment of the verbal root, šbʿ, addressing the metaphysical forces in the first person singular, the utilization of expressions of urgency, and threats towards them, indicating the client mentioned in the magical object by his first name and the name of his mother, and more. On this basis we can establish that as more of these textual characteristics are found in any given Jewish text, its magical tendency increases. From here we can also define all the Jewish magical cultural products. Texts that include adjurations, such as books of guidance for sorcery, are magic texts in a broader sense, and those that express beliefs and customs commonly found in texts of both these categories are magic texts in the broadest sense; objects upon which adjuration texts are found such as sheets of paper, leather, cloth or metal, or clay bowls are magic objects (amulets, magic bowls), and in the wider circle are included objects that serve as a means of ritual power in the context of the outlook expressed in the magical literature; ceremonies where adjuration texts are written or uttered, or where use is made of magical objects, are considered as ceremonies of magical character. This manner of definition of magic allows a flexible relationship between it and the other components of Jewish culture, and in particular the religion. Instead of an a priori culture-dependent dictionary distinction that strives to distinguish between what is magic and what is not viewed as such, one finds a dynamic system of phenomena characterized as possessing a greater or lesser magical essence, but not necessarily related to their place in the overall socio-cultural system of ritual power. Relinquishing the apposition of magic to religion in the phenomenological dimension allows us to divert the distinction between them to the social plane where the non-canonical position of magic finds expression. Texts, magical objects, and ceremonies generally do not have a routine place in the Jewish canonical system of practice for attaining ritual power. At the same time it is not impossible that portions of the latter, such as the biblical examination of the suspected adulteress, the recitation of the *Shema before going to sleep, and the *mezuzah, be defined as possessing a magical character. In this manner the cultural products of early Judaism itself testify to the gap between the official and explicit perception (in the Bible and the Mishnah) that prohibits sorcery and considers it as a capital sin and its firm place in the day-to-day lives of the people. Recognition of the existence of this gap is naturally related to the recognition of the distance between the inner-cultural definition of magic as an illegitimate form of ritual activity by its very essence, andits external, academic definition, based on sociological notions of religion, that views it as the non-canonical, marginal, and in most cases prohibited part of the overall activity aimed at attaining ritual power (which also includes a legitimate-canonical side, i.e., religion), repressed by the ruling religious center of society as concerns its struggle over power and control.

The sources documenting early Jewish magic may be divided into two kinds: primary sources, those originating in magical culture itself, and secondary sources, those found in texts that are not, in essence, magical. Primary sources from the biblical era are rare. Noteworthy among them are silver amulets from the end of the seventh century b.c.e., found in a burial network in the Hinnom valley in Jerusalem, and upon which the priestly blessing is inscribed. In the Bible itself, sorcery and divination are prohibited and those who dealt in them were persecuted. It would appear, however, that this prohibition, closely tied in the Bible to the religious-ethical uniqueness of the people of Israel and its distinctiveness from the surrounding nations, well testifies to the perpetuation of these ritual practices that priestly and prophetic circles aspired to marginalize in favor of those that they themselves offered and to which they attributed canonical status. Nevertheless, at least in one outstanding case, that of the ordeal for examination of the suspected adulteress (Num. 5:11–31), one suspects the acquisition of a magical practice (which underwent an intercultural, priestly, oicotypification) by the religious establishment. The result bears testimony to the belief in the performative power of curses among both that priestly establishment and the people as a whole. Metaphysical beings central to magical practice such as angels, Satan, and demons are indeed mentioned in the biblical literature, however in a way that is unconnected to the overall system of typical magical beliefs and practices in which they were to function later. First and foremost, they are not introduced as being under any kind of vigorous human manipulation. In the only case where Satan is mentioned as being expelled by words that may reflect an exorcistic formula, it is by God Himself, and from His presence (Zech. 3:2). Human power to manipulate concrete reality is admitted in the bible in both the hands of foreign sorcerers, such as the Egyptians, or Balaam, and God's prophets. In any case, it is always subservient to God's will and force. Even the marvels manifested time and again by God's prophets are not performed on account of their own power. Being men of the one and only omnipotent God, their miracles are viewed mainly as a didactic performance of what He Himself executes.

The apocryphal literature in general, and particularly the writings of the Dead Sea sect, increased immeasurably the angelological and demonological deliberations and well reflect the metaphysical expansion of society within Judaism in this period. The figure of Satan (also called Belial or Mastema) has evolved into the head of an army of evil spirits and the lord of the demons. The origin of these demons, imageless and highly harmful spiritual beings, was perceived as the product of the impure hybrid coupling of rebellious angels with the daughters of Adam (a tradition alluded to in Genesis 6:1–4, and expanded in I Enoch and in the Book of Jubilees). At that time, it is told, sorcery was brought down to the world and given to women. Alongside it the Book of Remedies was delivered to Noah, according to God's command, for protection against the wicked demons that had attacked his children. The Qumran scrolls reveal to us a well-developed demonological perception. Qumranic Psalm fragments testify to apotropaic ritual practices against demons. The works of Josephus and the New Testament reflect a similar reality in the first century c.e. Demons were perceived as the cause of both corporal and mental disorders and their removal through rituals that featured magical objects, roots, and verbal formulae was a common method of healing. Comparing the depictions of exorcism and healing performed by Jesus according to the New Testament with the Greek magical papyri reveals his place as a Jewish magician within the intercultural tradition of Late Antiquity as well as his uniqueness within that tradition (both in terms of his actions of healing and exorcising, and in utilizing them as a means of his religious mission). According to the testimony of the Gospels, Jesus was accused by his Jewish opponents of using the power of Beelzebub, the prince of the demons. In other words, he was accused of being a sorcerer, i.e., possessing considerable supernatural power, but that this power was derived from an impure source and was therefore illegitimate. His followers naturally saw him as a holy man who was performing miracles through divine power.

The apocryphal literature and the Dead Sea sect literature also demonstrate the considerable angelological expansion of social reality; only here human magical power visàvis the angels is not yet reflected. Their assistance to men is judged a gesture of good will, a divine mission, or preordained reality, but not the result of their compulsion to act in this way through human efforts. This notion appears in full force in the primary sources of early Jewish magic: amulets and incantation bowls that were geared primarily for protection, healing, and success and which document actual magical activity for the clients mentioned in them by name, and magical recipes collected in compositions and books of recipes. The magical recipe literature presents to us the notion that magic is a part of normal life. It is hard to imagine an area of life for which no magical assistance is offered in this literature. The amulets and magic bowls connect this theoretical literature to the actual day-to-day lives of the Jews of Late Antiquity.

Ancient Jewish magical praxis was based on a system of beliefs that concerned the connection between physical and metaphysical reality and the manner by which language is capable of connecting between them for human profit. Social reality was expanded to include metaphysical beings that were divided into four categories: (a) God; (b) celestial beings such as angels, stars and planets, divine names, etc.; (c) various demons and evil spirits (including personifications of harmful sorcery); (d) the dead. The correct use of an adjuration (mostly by a suitable person within a well-defined ceremony) was viewed as being able to subordinate any one of the above to obey the adjurer's will. Generally the adjurations were aimed at activating the celestial beings, principally angels or demons. The magical use of God or the dead is rarely documented. Magical compositions such as the Book of Mysteries (Sefer ha-Razim) or the Sword of Moses (Ḥarba de-Moshe) reveal to us a highly developed angelological perception. The names of the angels, their order and relative powers are placed at the disposal of whosoever wishes to manipulate them. Divine aid, in the form of a command that God sent to his angels, is what allows man to take power over them through the use of incantations and divine names and to manipulate them at will. Magical practice is therefore portrayed in these works as a part of the Jewish monotheistic belief and not as anomalous to it. Alongside this angelology a rich demonology is also revealed in the magical literature. Demons were perceived as responsible for every misfortune in human life and in particular when it affected the body. Protection from them and their removal from the moment they penetrated someone's life space was a central purpose of Jewish magical activity. However, the magical literature testifies to the use of magical means for dealing with many other matters. These include the relations between people such as marriage and sexual relations, success in litigation, control over one's fellow being, injuring someone, protection from injury, victory in battle, and so on. They appear to be further used in such daily cares as improving the products of labor and agricultural produce, fishing, trade, and even minor objectives such as kindling an oven in winter or the expulsion of crickets or mice from the house. Besides all this, another area of great importance was served by magic: knowledge. Angels, demons, and the dead functioned in the Jewish magic culture as agents of almost limitless knowledge that could be adjured to reveal to man whatever he desired toknow. Summoning angels for this purpose was associated on occasion with the practice of the dream request. Thus, while divination is not identical to magic, there is much evidence of Jewish magical divination practices based on utilizing adjurations as well as other magical means.

As noted, the basis of early Jewish sorcery was in the use of adjurations. These verbal formulae, which were defined with precision and adapted individually for their specific objectives, were mostly uttered or written in a ceremonial framework. The ritual state of all the participants in the ceremony was also well defined and almost always entailed the purity (in halakhic terms) of the performer. The conditions of the performance of the ceremony and its verbal, material, and behavioral components varied with each case. On more than one occasion they were borrowed from Hellenistic magic. Professional terms loaned from the Hellenistic magical jargon testify, too, to the intercultural relationship in this field, the other expression of which was the penetration by indubitably Jewish elements into Hellenistic magical practice. It is not easy to chart with precision the elements of the magic ceremony. However, beyond the variety of means one central mechanism, which constitutes a system, stands out: the sympathetic mechanism. In early Jewish magic it is usual to find attempts to bring about a reality by means of juxtaposing it to another based on the principle: "Just as A, so B." The depiction of one reality (A) may be done simply and freely, or it may be through similitude (for example, "Just as the sky is suppressed before God and the Earth is suppressed before people… so may the inhabitants of this town be suppressed and broken and fallen before Yose son of Zenobia"). Often, serving this purpose are biblical verses whose meaning, or words appearing in them, are relevant for the desired effect (for example, "Noah found favor with the Lord" (Gen. 6:8) is quoted for attaining "grace and favor"; "I will not bring upon you any of the diseases that I brought upon the Egyptians" (Ex. 15:26) is quoted for healing). The choice of magic materials necessary for the sorcery may also reflect this aim (for example, a round bowl would serve for protection from all sides, a heart of a young lion for attaining courage). Often, the ceremony includes the preparation of a magical object, that is, an object which has adjuration texts on it. This will serve the client over a length of time. Amulets were worn on the body or were buried in the house or even in the synagogue. Incantation bowls were buried in the corners of rooms or below the threshold, dwelling places of demons against whom the bowls were intended. Occasionally the verbal adjuration was sunken into a piece of food or a liquid that the client would have to swallow or to rub over his body. In this way the magical quality of the words passed into the client's body and strengthened him from within.

The secondary magical sources, the rabbinic literature, and early Jewish mystical works demonstrate that the magic outlook was not confined to the more boorish classes of society. The early Jewish mystical literature testifies to the central place of performative ritual power in two areas: (a) as a means to overcome the hostile angels in the course of a mystical journey to God's Throne of Honor; (b) as a social advantage in the possession of the mystic in this world following his return from his heavenly journey. The magical matter is so pronounced in the early Jewish mystical literature that some of the scholars judge this aspect (and not the experiences of the ascent to the higher realm and the sight of God) as the kernel unifying all the writings that constitute this literature. Rabbinic literature, too, indicates the place of the magical and demonological outlook, and the accompanying practices, in the social-religious elite. Three approaches are reflected in it alongside each other (as is typical of this polyphonic literature), and all are founded on the very recognition of the efficacy of sorcery: (a) an official halakhic position that associates sorcery with the "Ways of the Amorite," meaning the gentile customs prohibited for Jews on account of the Jews' distinctiveness from them, prohibits it in every way, and punishes those who dabble in it by stoning (while distinguishing the real acts of magic from acts of deception that are not judged as the sin of sorcery); (b) a pragmatic approach that permits the use of those magic objects and verbal means (that are not, of course, denoted as such) whose benefit has been proven (primarily for medicinal purposes), permits the study of sorcery (as opposed to its operation), and even requires of those taking a seat in the Sanhedrin to be "masters of sorcery"; (c) a narrative approach that uses, in the manner of the talmudic homiletic story, magical motifs for didactic purposes. Here a dual tendency is noticeable whereby on the one hand the ritual-magical powers of the sages themselves (which naturally are not identified with sorcery but rather with holiness based on a life of Torah and observance of the divine commandments) are extolled, while on the other hand accusations are leveled at the "other," primarily women and heretics, for acts of sorcery. This labeling is intended to mark out these "others" as dangerous people who act with illegitimate power, and to marginalize them, placing them far from the desirable-legitimate focus of power, that of the sages themselves, who are both the narrators and the heroes of the narratives. The climax of this dual tendency is found in the stories that describe struggles between sages and sorcerers or sorceresses, which, as is to be expected, end in the sages' victory, and in this way exemplify their worthy socio-religious model. It would appear therefore that the contradiction between the halakhic and narrative approaches toward magic is not to be resolved through distinguishing between the "rabbis' genuine viewpoint," which was negative and deprecatory by virtue of their religious beliefs and the laws deriving from them, on the one hand, and their "lip service" to the beliefs of the ignorant masses (which originated in the penetration of foreign influences), through lack of choice, and for didactic purposes, on the other hand, as was done in the past, but by recognizing the aspirations of the rabbis for a social monopoly over ritual power. The rabbinic demonological stories are to be understood in a similar way. They, too, should be seen as a narrative shaping of motifs that rest upon popular beliefs in both their own circles as well as amongst the masses, with a didactic objective. More than the stories are concerned with demonic reality in itself, they are about the relations between this reality and that of the sages, and more specifically the relative superiority of the sages and their disciples over all that affects the ways of the demons. This includes protection from them and control over them by the power of their holiness, their legal authority, and ritual-magical means. Thus, the demonological stories join the magical and mystical ones in revealing a ramified system of beliefs and ritual practices relating to angels, demons, and sorcery in the Jewish culture of Late Antiquity. Primary magical evidence completes the picture by tying the literary testimony to day-to-day experience and exposing the actual praxis of ancient Jewish magic.

[Yuval Harari (2^nd ed.)]

In Medieval Hebrew Literature

terminology

The terms "magic" (kishuf), "magician" (mekha shef), and "witch" (mekhashefah) are relatively rare in medieval Hebrew literature, especially when compared with the frequency with which magic practices are mentioned. The underlying reason is undoubtedly the explicit biblical prohibition against the practice of magic (repeatedly dwelt upon in medieval Hebrew literature) and the Bible's abhorrence of magicians and soothsayers. There is, therefore, no favorable allusion to magic practices in medieval literature, and they are rarely dealt with in a purely informative manner, although the numerous texts of the Genizah dealing with this topic allow us to understand in how many ways magic was present in Jewish life during the Middle Ages. Such terms as kishuf, mekhashef, and mekhashefah were descriptive of the wicked, sinners, and non-Jews. Magic was discussed in medieval Hebrew literature, but surreptitiously, under the guise of different names, such as segullot ("remedies" or "charms"), kame'ot ("amulets"), refu'ot ("cures"), goralot ("destinies" or "fortunes"), simanim ("signs" or "omens"), and refafot ("bodily itches as a portent"). The medieval writer thus was able to circumvent the term "magic" and eschew a direct confrontation with the biblical prohibition. In fact, the practice of magic was very popular and widespread among medieval Jews, and the number of texts including magical elements is very striking.

sources and dissemination

Literature on magic is universal in its character, its methods, and its structure. Each society, each language, and every period contributed toward magic literature, enriching it or modifying it in the light of the particular characteristics of the society, the culture, and the times. The main themes and methods in magic were, however, transmitted from country to country, from language to language throughout the ages without any basic changes being wrought. In the Middle Ages, Jewish magic literature differs very little from the magic literature of other nations. Magical practices were very widespread during the Middle Ages not only in Jewish communities but also among Muslims and Christians. Textbooks of magic circulated in the three cultures, although theoretical considerations were less frequent. Hebrew works on magic quote extensively from non-Jewish magic literature, citing especially sources that medieval scholarship attributed to ancient Greek authors. The basic terminology and methods found in Hebrew works are similar to those dominant in non-Jewish works. In some Hebrew works a term may be used which was originally Hebrew but is applied in such a way as to show that it was copied from a non-Hebrew work; its Hebrew origin had apparently been unknown to the Hebrew writer, for example, the term Elo'i Sabaot derived from the Hebrew Elohei Zeva'ot. Angelology and magic formulas in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin of the Hellenistic period were basic to the development of medieval magic literature. Since this period led to the fusion of Hebrew and non-Hebrew formulas, the process continued throughout the Middle Ages when terms and formulas from Arabic, German, French, Slavic, and other languages were added to medieval Hebrew magic literature. To date there is no serious study on the sources on which medieval Hebrew magic works drew. The various influences have neither been defined nor classified and no clear distinction can therefore be made between the following sources: the Assyrian and Babylonian (which apparently also influenced the Talmud), the Hellenistic (Jewish-Hellenistic and Greek), the ancient Egyptian and their later adaptations during the syncretistic periods of the Roman Empire, the original Arabic and their fusion with the Persian and Indian, and the European which were intermingled with Arabic and other sources. Principally, however, there is as yet no way to distinguish in every case between traditional Hebrew magic, derived from the biblical and talmudic periods, and the magic elements which reached Jewish writers from foreign sources. An example is a Greek and Arabic traditional connection between Saturn and magic; in Jewish medieval thought both magic and Saturn, who is in charge of the Jewish people, are also connected with the Sabbath day (Idel). We know today that Jewish magic in the Middle Ages was strongly influenced by two Arabic treatises, al-Kindi's De radiis and al-Majariti's Picatrix, which were translated into Latin and Hebrew, but their actual degree of influence has not been sufficiently studied. Until such studies are made, only impressions and generalizations can serve as basis for any assumption as to the nature of medieval Hebrew magic works.

Though there are no detailed studies on hand, there is no doubt that Jewish medieval magic drew on all the abovementioned sources. Some medieval Hebrew works correspond very closely to non-Jewish magic writings. Others, for example a number of 18^th-century collections of Hebrew magic formulas, differ little from magic formulas which survived from the geonic period. Collections which originated in North Africa are very similar to works on magic by Jews in Germany. There is thus no essential difference in the basic magic formulas and the attitude toward magic between the various nations, countries, and periods. The same fusion of ancient and medieval sources is to be found in each of these works, all of which contain Arab, European, and authentic Jewish elements.

the character of hebrew magic literature

The character of Hebrew magic literature was influenced not only by the biblical prohibition on witchcraft but by the nature of this literature. Works on magic neither use nor are identified by terms denoting magic, but were written under the guise of concepts which neither reveal their special character nor their contents. There are hundreds of collections on magic, in print and in manuscripts, appearing under such names as simanim, refafot, refu'ot, goralot, and segullot. These works are usually not devoted only to one branch of magic or popular superstition, but to a variety of practices such as dream interpretation, popular medicine, and amulets. Unfortunately, the complete typology of magic literature has not yet been seriously studied.

Many of these works are anonymous; in others the name of the editor or compiler appears in the introduction. (The term "author" is not applicable to such works, which are nothing but collections drawn from various sources.) Rarely is there anything known of them from other sources; most of them were obscure writers who did not engage in scholarly activities. This may be the underlying reason for the low level of the language and literary merit of most of these works. Some of the writings on magic are attributed to ancient sages and scholars; thus, for example, works which are partly devoted to the interpretation of dreams are often ascribed to the biblical figures Daniel or Joseph; works on goralot ("destinies" or "fortunes") are attributed to the wise *Ahithophel the Gilonite, etc. Babylonian geonim and early scholars, from Saadiah b. Joseph Gaon to Nahmanides, have had works on magic ascribed to them. Though widely disseminated, works on magic were mostly not written within the framework of medieval and early modern scholarly Hebrew literature. In any case, the corpus of Jewish magic, including complete books and fragments, is very large. Some of the better known works that discuss magic are Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed and Mishneh Torah, including sorcery and magic among the forbidden practices; the commentaries on the Pentateuch by Nahmanides (13^th century); the responsa of Solomon ben *Adret and the sermons of Nissim *Gerondi in the 14^th century; Nishmat Hayyim by *Manasseh Ben Israel, in which the author devotes a long chapter to the description of magical practices; Derekh ha-Shem by Moses Hayyim *Luzzatto, has a section on magic; and Shalshelet ha-Kabbalah, an important historical work in which the author, Gedaliah b. Joseph *Ibn Yahya, a Renaissance scholar, also discusses magic.

The literature of the *Hasidei Ashkenaz, probably more than any other medieval corpus of Hebrew scholarly writings, is a source on medieval magic (12^th and 13 centuries), especiallySefer Hasidim and the esoteric works of *Judah b. Samuel ha-Hasid of Regensburg and of his disciples, of which Hokhmat ha-Nefesh, a work on psychology by *Eleazar b. Judah of Worms, is a prime example. The concern of the Ashkenazi Hasidim with magic practices and phenomena has its roots in some of their theological ideas.

magic and medieval disciplines

Medieval man, as reflected in the literature on magic, did not clearly differentiate between magic and other branches of knowledge, especially between medicine, astrology, and magic. There were very different kinds of magic, some of them of a high cultural level, and other more popular types. Cultural magic was considered a branch of medieval science, at the same level as medicine or astrology. Many times, this magic was a kind of alternative medicine. Most of the collections dealing mainly with magic do not distinguish between the treatment of an ailment according to the accepted norms of popular medicine, such as the application of heat, herbs, and certain foods, and magic means, calling for the help of angels and demons to heal the patient. This failure of distinction was not only due to the lack of a scientific framework but to the desire to lend authority and legitimacy to magic formulas when combined with medical practice. These works also do not clearly distinguish between astrology and magic. Works on goralot ("destinies" or "fortunes") include astrological calculations which portend the fate of a man according to the constellations at his birth, and determine his character traits and religious, economic, and social status. The same works also contain magic instructions on how to use the auguries of the constellations for other purposes and how to change a man's fate through incantations and amulets, etc.

Most of the magic in the extant collections is devoted to simanim which derives from the fact that the Talmud, contrary to its injunction against the practice of magic, allows the practice of "signs." This literature describes various events, feelings, or even the itching of various parts of the human body (refafot), which are indicative of an oncoming event. Incantations are often chanted and charms used in an attempt either to nullify an ominous portent or to enhance a benign prophecy. To this category also belongs the literature of "dream interpretation" which describes in detail various occurrences within dreams thought to reveal the future to the dreamer. Sometimes advice is tendered in the use of magical means to prevent the bad dreams from being realized. Compilations of popular medical literature, such as The Book of Women's Love (perhaps 13^th century), contained many magic (mainly love magic) elements and formulas; most of these practices, reflected in the written materials or transmitted in oral form, were current during the Middle Ages. Their main goal was to manipulate sexuality, intervening in human relationships. Some of these formulas are taken from the tradition of the "practical Kabbalah."

The segullah is basic to all magic formulas and is the main magic means used by the person himself. Knowledge of many charms is the professional distinction of the expert magician. The central element in the segullah is a name or a series of names which is considered holy. The common appellation of a magician in Eastern Europe in the 17^th and 18^th centuries as Ba'al Shem or Ba'al Shem Tov ("owner of the Holy Name" or "owner of the Holy Good Name") is rooted in this practice. The name used is most frequently that of an angel, or, sometimes, one of the many names of God. Sometimes even the name of a demon is resorted to which would seem tomake this form of magic "black magic." The demon invoked in such charms is, however, thought to be a "bad angel" (malakh habbalah) who should be addressed when the magician intends to harm someone, kill an enemy, cause damage, find the whereabouts of a thief and make him return his loot, etc. Some of the names in the segullah are common biblical or talmudic-midrashic names, mostly polysyllabic so as to awe the hearer and to seem as strange as possible. Many of the names were culled from Heikhalot and Merkabah writings, the Hebrew mystical literature of the talmudic and geonic period from which the major part of Hebrew medieval angelology is derived; sometimes even from non-Hebrew sources; others were created anagrammatically according to a definite system, either from other known names or from biblical verses.

The name, which is the essence of the segullah, is supplemented with various elements which differ from book to book and even from page to page in the same work. The segullah, or the petition for magical intercession (of a supernatural power), must be written in a clear form or enunciated clearly and loudly. Sometimes the time at which the deed should occur (a certain hour of the day or night or a certain day of the month) is also given; an astrological element was thus added to the magical charm. Certain substantive elements are also added, such as bits of flesh, bone, or skin from various animals (or even the human body), or certain herbs or plants. In the classic cases of sympathetic magic sometimes the performer of the act of magic, when he directs an incantation against a certain person, draws a picture of the latter or writes his name, or even molds his likeness in clay. These means were especially resorted to in the case of a thief. The suffering inflicted by sympathetic magic on the thief caused him to reveal the cache of the stolen goods and give them back. Through these means demons could also be compelled to serve man, when an incantation with the name of the culprit proved ineffective.

The segullah is used both as a direct magic act to attain a certain aim and as an auxiliary to medical aid, to reveal a man's fate, to appease or prompt the auguries of a "sign," or to interpret a dream. An amulet, for instance, is usually nothing more than a segullah written in a certain form, so that a person could carry it with him always. Such a charm is usually protective, invoking the heavenly powers to safeguard the wearer against any harm.

The contents of works on segullot are arranged according to their purposes. A title states the function of the charm after which there is a description of the charm including the holy names and the other necessary elements. Another type of segullot literature, sometimes called shimmushim ("uses"), is arranged according to the holy names indicating the purpose and uses to which each name can be put. Thus, for instance, Sefer ha-Heshek lists 70 names of the archangel *Metatron, after each of which the author gives the use that it can be put to and what magical purpose can best be served by using one particular appellation of this angel. The holy divine names, composed either of 42 letters or 72 letters, which are comprised of units of three or six letters, serve many magic purposes; each name can be the means of achieving a specific magic goal. Treatises on the magic use of the Psalms (Sefer Shimmush Tehillim) and on the properties of the members of animals were very common in Jewish houses. Some form of magic was even practiced by rabbis who did not see them as opposed to Judaism (Barkai). "Shimmushei Tehillim" ("The Uses of the Psalms"), a body of magic writings, describes the magic power inherent in certain verses and chapters in the Psalms and in some other Scriptures. The Bible was also used for the purpose of "sign" magic, i.e., prophecies. A person practicing this magic would open the Bible, put his finger at random on a certain verse and the content of this verse would reveal the attitude of the Divine Powers to the question or request of the person inquiring.

relationship between mystic and magic literatures

Scholars believe that the extent of the influence of magic on Jewish mysticism has not yet been sufficiently studied. Historical circumstances rather than literary or conceptual affinities have created an impression, especially in modern times, that there is a similarity or even identity between mystic literature and magic in Jewish life and thought. One expression of this view is the term "kabbalah ma'asit" ("practical tradition"), which is magic, and "kabbalah iyyunit" ("theoretical tradition"), which is mysticism. "Kabbalah" in this context means nothing more than tradition and does not denote any special mystical system. Nineteenth-century scholars of Jewish studies who were fiercely opposed to *Hasidism, which is one derivation of the Kabbalah proper (the mystical ideology), saw Hasidism and Kabbalah as representing medieval superstition, and did not try to differentiate between mystical thought and magic practice, which to them seemed to derive from the same source. Their ideas were accepted even bysome 20^th-century scholars.

Still, there is some connection between the development of magic literature and mystical literature. In talmudic times there undoubtedly existed a unique magic literature to which such works as Sefer ha-Razim, published in a scholarly edition (by M. Margalioth, 1966; there is an English translation by M.A. Morgan, 1983), clearly testify. The book is an example of early Jewish magic which did not have any mystic tendency, and which is influenced mainly by non-Hebrew sources.

If the magic elements are not very dominant in this kind of rabbinic literature, the writings of the Heikhalot and the Merkabah have a strong magical component. Included are works of a clear magical character, e.g., Hakkarat Panim ve-Sidrei Sirtutim, a work on chiromancy. Even major works of this literature, such as Sefer Heikhalot Rabbati, include some material concerning prophecies, signs, and even incantations. According to the conceptual view of Heikhalot and Merkabah literature, when the angels revealed heavenly mysteries (revelations which constitute the body of this literature) to the talmudic sages they also made esoteric magic disclosures in which they described the divine worlds and eschatological secrets. These texts of early Jewish mysticism include many adjurations of magical character asking the angels to come down and reveal to man the mysteries of heaven and earth, including the complete knowledge of the Torah, and sometimes alluding to the necessary rituals for the heavenly journey of the mystic. The means of achieving the goals of this mysticism is magic; the authors of this literature "attempted to integrate magic into Judaism" (Schaefer). The magical view of the Hebrew language, combining letters for forming divine names, is one of the bases of this form of Jewish mysticism. Medieval scholars, the Hasidei Ashkenaz, and the kabbalists who resorted to Heikhalot and Merkabah literature in their esoteric and mystical speculations also accepted the magic tradition that it embraced and sometimes even practiced it.

Magic is relatively little treated in theoretical Kabbalah writings, especially in works which concentrated on matters concerning the structure of the divine worlds, the Sefirot, and the developments within the divine realm (themes central to kabbalistic literature). Many kabbalists, from those in the Gerona circle (13^th century) on, did not practice magic at all. The doctrines of medicine and astrology are undoubtedly nearer to that of magic than the doctrines of Jewish mysticism. A detailed examination of magic literature clearly shows that most of those who practiced magic, or the authors of works on magic, did not know anything about mysticism in general, or Kabbalah in particular. It is therefore very unlikely that kabbalistic symbolism of the holy Sefirot, or the kabbalistic concept of evil, would appear in magic charms. When the Zohar became part of the holy literature and widely known, it was used for magic purposes, but no more than the Book of Psalms. The use that both works were put to does not reflect their original content. Supernatural knowledge and powers were, however, attributed to many kabbalists. Even Isaac the Blind, one of the earliest kabbalists who lived in Provence, was described as having the power to distinguish between a new soul, which appeared for the first time in the world, and an old soul, which had been reincarnated. This tradition of magic and supernatural hagiography of prominent kabbalists developed continually up to the times of Isaac *Luria and *Israel Ba'al Shem Tov. The writings of Moshe *Cordovero (16^th century), the kabbalist of Safed, are also full of magical views, since he adopted a type of Kabbalah very close to astral magic.

Based on a tradition preserved in a talmudic text on the creation of an artificial man, unable to speak, and using techniques found in the Sefer Yezirah (combination of letters), medieval kabbalists and hasidic circles developed the idea of the golem, which was from the very beginning replete with magic content. There were different modalities of this idea in Franco-Ashkenazi and Sephardic centers, going from the purely material being to the fully spiritual one. Zoharic and Lurianic kabbalists were not interested in the topic, while ecstatic kabbalists and Cordovero paid attention to it. In particular, the Ashkenazi texts dealing with the golem were basically magical, as shown by Idel.

Magic in Kabbalah literature is touched upon in discussion of earthly or demonological matters, but even in this literature it was cautiously treated and circumscribed. Few magic elements are found in the Zohar, and in the writings of other early kabbalists there are even less. The case of the ecstatic Kabbalah, the school of Abraham *Abulafia, is very different: for him, magical techniques like the combination of letters can be a help in attaining the personal mystical experience that endows the mystic with magical powers.

Later magic literature and kabbalistic doctrine were also seldom fused. Hayyim *Vital describes some magic practices in his autobiographical work Sefer ha-Hezyonot ("Book of Visions"), which, however, he does not relate to the special kabbalistic doctrine of his teacher, Isaac Luria. In his theological works, magic is a marginal theme. Though he accepted magic, it did not impinge on his innermost spiritual beliefs expressed in the kabbalistic myth which he set down in many books. The same applies to the writings of many other kabbalists.

The Hasidei Ashkenaz discussed magic in their works at length and also had some magic works attributed to them. The relationship they established between esoteric theology and magic speculation was rooted in a peculiar theological development. The Ashkenazi hasidic theology is based on the concept that God, far away from the natural world and the laws that govern it, is revealed, according to these laws, within the world of man in specific, well-defined phenomena which confirm to man His existence. Such phenomena, miraculous in character, including magic, witchcraft, and demonology, defy the laws of nature and reveal the power of the hidden Godhead. The Hasidei Ashkenaz consequently tried to collect in their writings as many descriptions of such phenomena as possible which they analyzed and on which they commented in the light of their own esoteric doctrine. The inference, however, cannot be drawn that they dealt in practical magic more or less than other scholars of that period. Theimplication is merely that they were theologically interested in such matters more than others, and therefore included them in their literature.

The Hasidei Ashkenaz thus became famous as scholars possessed of magic knowledge, and many legends revolved around them, such as the story about a competition in magic between *Samuel b. Kalonymus he-Hasid, and three non-Jewish magicians; the story about the ability of Eleazar b. Judah of Worms to get very quickly from place to place (kefizat haderekh) by the power of a magical formula; the tale of Judah b. Samuel he-Hasid who overpowered an evil magician; and many others. How far the legends woven about scholars were removed from the actual lives of these scholars may be seen by the fact that Abraham *Ibn Ezra, the Spanish Jewish philosopher and commentator, became the hero of many magic stories (probably because of his astrological works).

Some 19^th-century scholars described modern Hasidism, founded by Israel Ba'al Shem Tov, as a prime example of magic and superstition. While many leaders of the hasidic movement believed in magic and practiced it, especially in giving amulets (the Ba'al Shem Tov himself dealt in magic and probably made his living as a popular healer and magician), hasidic theoretical literature, the vast homiletic literature which describes its ideology, is devoid of all magic elements. Hasidic tales might contain elements of the use of magic or of overcoming magic deeds performed by evil non-Jews, but hasidic doctrines eschewed magic elements even more than the kabbalistic literature which the Hasidim had inherited and developed. The difference between the "practical tradition" of Hasidism, which practiced magic, and the "ideological (theoretical) tradition" of the movement is probably more pronounced in modern Hasidism than in any other mystic movement.

medieval jewish magicians

The terms mekhashef ("magician") and mekhashefah ("witch") in medieval literature designate two very different categories. A mekhashef is a person possessed of secret knowledge in magic which he uses for his own profit or to help others. He is considered a professional and is paid for his services. While in medieval Hebrew literature there are few records of a Jew being described as a mekhashef, in the early modern period the usage is much more frequent but under the name *Ba'al Shem (i.e., "owner of the Holy Name").

Mekhashef designates a certain psycho-pathological state, often connected with cannibalism. The term alludes to women and men who wander in forests, singly or in groups, or sometimes live in a community and kidnap babies or even grownups in order to eat them or suck their blood. While the term mekhashefah frequently recurs in medieval Hebrew literature, the actual phenomenon it represents seems to have been rare. In the 12^th and 13^th centuries in Central Europe these vampires were called "shtria" for the female (from the Latin strix, striga) and werewolf for the male. Such vampires do not necessarily possess any supernatural powers or secret knowledge. In Sefer *Hasidim, a 13^th-century ethical work, there is a description of a baby born with teeth and a tail. The rabbi of the community advised that these be cut, so that when he grew up he would not eat people. This seems to testify to a case where a child was considered to have been born a werewolf, and could be cured naturally. No supernatural elements seem to be involved either in the birth of the werewolf or the proposed cure. A community where women ate children is also described in Sefer Hasidim. When threatened that if they continued their practice their teeth would be ground on the stones of the well, they stopped. The story is told as a clinical fact (which it probably was) and there seems to be neither any supernatural nor religious connotation or implication. On the other hand, in other stories from 13^th-century Central Europe such creatures are immortal. They never die naturally but are killed in a prescribed manner. In one case, a witch was offered divine forgiveness if she were to reveal the secret of how she might be killed. Thus the person who committed the sin of cannibalism could religiously be saved. The phenomenon, apparently pathological in nature, was, in some cases, explained supernaturally – as if such cases were already dead, and therefore could not be killed. The mekhashefah does not belong to magic in the strict sense but designates a species of abominable creatures who form a category in themselves to which should be added the beliefs associated with them such as the belief in the "mare," a woman who strangles men in their sleep (hence the word "nightmare"). Other unnatural creatures who do not fit into either of the above categories should be classed somewhere between demons and magicians, or demons and witches. The term mekhashefah and the literature that evolved around it had relatively little influence on the development of medieval Jewish culture; the term mekhashef, however, is much more prominent.

In the 17^th and 18^th centuries in Eastern Europe the position of magicians ("ba'alei Shem") began to emerge on the Jewish social scene. The ba'alei Shem practiced magic and popular medicine, used amulets, drove away demons, and prophesied. Owing to the power inherent in the names they knew to use, they could discover thieves, retrieve lost articles, purify houses from evil spirits, etc. From the historical point of view, however, these magicians were of special significance in that many of them disseminated Shabbatean ideas throughout Eastern Europe; magicians were also instrumental in the development of the hasidic movement.

magic in medieval jewish society

In the opinion of some scholars, a negative attitude in respect to magic has relegated the study of magic, and its role in medieval Jewish society, to the margins of Jewish studies. The existing materials, in particular the fragments of the Genizah, have not yet been adequately studied, and we still lack today good monographs on medieval Jewish magic and divination. For that reason, it is not easy to attain an accurate picture of the social role of magic during these centuries. Jewish intellectuals did not consider magic either as an ideological or social challenge which had to be dealt with. But the texts of the Genizah show that magic was familiar at both the elite and popular levels of culture (Wasserstrom). The belief in the power of magic was apparently universal in Jewish society, both in the East and in the West, from the beginning of the Middle Ages up to early modern times. Opposition to magic was voiced by but a few which, when expressed in writing, formed a minor element within their work. While Maimonides, like some other Jewish philosophers, rejected magic and the use of amulets, he was not deeply concerned with it and only devoted a few passages to the problem in Guide of the Perplexed, much less, for instance, than to his argument with astrology on which he wrote a special treatise. Among others who repudiated magic were Saadiah Gaon (who rejected it in the same way as astrology) and Hai Gaon; they too, however, did not stress the question in their writings. As a consequence belief in magic hardly ever called forth any defenders in Hebrew literature. In the great 13^th-century controversy the rabbis of France in their criticism also denounced Maimonides for his opposition to magic; it was, however, a very minor point. Menahem Ziyyoni's short treatise on the defense of magic and the belief in demons, Zefunei Ziyyoni (in Ms.), is written from a kabbalistic point of view as were similar treatises by other kabbalists.

The practice of magic (which is quite different from a belief in magic) was also not a major problem in Judaism, though magic as such was condemned outright because of the biblical prohibition and it therefore was practiced under the guise of different names. The practice of "signs," "charms," amulets, astrology, and popular medicine was never a subject of serious scholarly discussion. Magic was employed without deep discussion in many areas of life: for influencing people's feelings and opinions, for healing all kinds of illness, for incantations, for mystical trance-inducement, for apotropaic charms, and even for finding hidden treasures. Some halakhists tried to accept the situation, distinguishing between magical practices that were directly forbidden and other practices that could be seen as not properly magic and were allowed. It was not strange that some magical practices, connected first of all with popular medicine or with human relations, or even with mystical traditions, were explained as something natural, and as such were not forbidden. Other kinds of magical practices, performed with the intention of influencing astral forces, or related to black magic, were usually prohibited. Owing to the biblical prohibition on magic the most vulgar and "black" forms of magic did not become common in Judaism and such practices as necromancy were very rare. While some books on magic contain formulas for killing an enemy by magic means, for love potions, etc., there is no evidence that these were practiced. These formulas were probably copied from non-Jewish sources. Sorcery was many times identified with black magic, and while some jurists did not see in it any real danger, others saw it in the context of demons or destructive angels and considered it forbidden as contrary to God's will.

As a result the practice of some kinds of magic was not a legitimate and commonly accepted profession in medieval Jewish society and the religious convictions of a man who practiced magic were suspect. Formulas were thus written down since there was no oral transmission within a special class of practitioners of magic. Many Jews, especially in the East, usually consulted non-Jewish magicians rather than Jewish magicians.

The Christian injunctions against magic and witchcraft and the fierce persecutions against those who practiced magic, which started around the end of the 15^th century, affected in a particular way many *Conversos, but also old Christian families that had to face similar charges. Jews and Conversos were accused of ritual crimes and were persecuted by the Inquisition, as in the case of "the holy child of La Guardia" at the end of the 15^th century which was considered a case of black magic. This kind of attitude does not have parallel in Judaism. There are few examples in Judaism of Jews persecuting Jews because of magic practices. In those rare cases where there is evidence of such persecutions, the accusation served as a camouflage for more fundamental reasons. Thus the accusations of the rabbis of Venice against Moses Hayyim Luzzatto for dealing in magic were a guise for their suspicion that he had Shabbatean tendencies. In those Jewish communities where Christian anti-witchcraft persecutions had an influence, such as Italy, the relationship between Jews and non-Jews was closer than elsewhere.

The only social sphere of Jewish life in which magic practice attained legitimacy was in the formulas of the herem ("excommunication"). Many herem texts have incantations with a clear magic undertone.

The untranscendental purposes of most magical practices were probably one of the reasons why magic played such a minor role in cultivated medieval Jewish literature. There are few records of major significance in which magic featured, such as *Joseph della Reina's attempt to hasten the redemption through magic means. Magic literature centers around such minor matters as toothaches and lost articles, and some attempt at prophecy of private persons' destiny. It thus did not always relate to the major historical and ideological problems of medieval Jewish society. The private character of the practice rendered it unimportant in the eyes of both its supporters and opponents so that it never became a major issue of dispute.

In spite of the relatively small influence that magic had on medieval Jewish thought, some scholars consider that the widespread use of magical practices among Jews made the members of other communities see magic as a Jewish specialization. This can in no way justify the fact that Jewish magic became a cause for antisemitism and hatred toward the Jews in the Middle Ages. The belief that every Jew was an evil magician, possessed of supernatural evil powers, was very widespread among certain popular groups of Christians in the Middle Ages and early modern times. In some uncultivated ambiances Jews were believed to be the people of Satan and they thus possessed supernatural secrets. This concept was one of the major sources of persecutions and blood libels throughout that period. Jewish reality in the Middle Ages hardly gave any substance to such accusations or to such an impression of the Jewish people. The basis for it was Christian theology, which in ecclesiastical circles described the Jews as deicides, therefore Satanic, and therefore possessors of magic.

[Joseph Dan /

Angel Saenz-Badillos (2^nd ed.)]

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MAGIC

MAGIC. Modern historians have reclaimed the term magic from anthropologists and social scientists who question its utility as a category and its existence as a phenomenon. Although an admittedly ambiguous and elastic term, magic was used by early modern Europeans to describe a complex of thought and practice involving the apparently disparate fields of religion, science, and language. Many of the most sophisticated intellectuals and theologians of the early modern period include magic in their discussions about the nature of physical reality, the causes of suffering and misfortune, the rationale of history, the foundations of political authority, the institutions of the church, and the basis of morality and ethics. Consequently, magic is a legitimate and important field of study, and understanding such pivotal events as the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism will remain incomplete until historians investigate the complex and varied attitudes toward magic that emerged between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.

CHARACTERISTICS OF MAGIC

Magic is best defined as a form of esotericism based on a view of the world as an integral whole composed of interacting spiritual and material forces that human beings can understand and manipulate for good or evil purposes. It encompassed a wide range of activities, such as astrology, alchemy, medicine, divination, necromancy, and conjuring. While this definition holds true for magic over the millennia, only during the early modern period was "black" magic equated with demonic witchcraft and made into a serious criminal offense. At the same time there was a growing interest in and respect for "natural," or "spiritual," magic that began in the twelfth century, reaching its apogee during the Renaissance and early modern period. Scholars agree that this type of elite magic contributed to developments in science, although they disagree about the nature and extent of these contributions. The traditional idea that magic disappeared with the triumph of science overlooks the fact that the decline in witchcraft prosecutions occurred in the mid-to-late seventeenth century, before Enlightenment thinkers embraced the new science and while a magical worldview was still valid for most people. Magistrates and judges, not philosophers and scientists, were the first to doubt the reality of demonic magic and to put a stop to witch prosecutions. While it is true that demonic magic lost its credibility among most European intellectuals and professionals, ordinary Europeans continued to explain misfortune in terms of the evil acts (maleficia) of evil individuals. Furthermore, alchemy and astrology appealed to many intellectuals throughout the eighteenth century, and new forms of occult and esoteric thought (mesmerism, phrenology, physiognomy) emerged to answer questions mechanical and atomic scientific theories could not.

Much of early modern magic represented a continuation of traditions and practices that developed in the medieval period from a synthesis of classical, Jewish, Islamic, and Christian concepts of magic with indigenous Celtic, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Slavic traditions as these groups were converted to Christianity. It is difficult—though in some cases possible—to separate these various strands because they were so thoroughly mixed with Christian elements. Although some scholars continue to distinguish magic from religion on the grounds that magic attempts to manipulate supernatural forces, while religion is directed at divine entities who can be supplicated but not controlled, this distinction is untenable. Saints' prayers often have coercive force, while magical charms and rituals have a supplicatory element. Furthermore, Christianity shared many assumptions that were basic to a magical worldview. Foremost among these was that of a vitalistic universe divided into three levels, the super-celestial, celestial, and terrestrial, each of which was intimately linked to the others through a series of correspondences, sympathies, and antipathies that might be hidden (occult) but that were regular, rational, and discoverable. Christianity and magic also agreed on the existence of invisible, spiritual entities (angels, demons, devils), who interacted with humans in many ways, including sexually. Christianity and magic both emphasized the power and efficacy of words, a belief that was intensified by the Christian reliance on the spoken and written word and by the notion of Christ as the incarnate word of God. Many magical prayers and formulas were simply adaptations of Christian formulations. A further link between Christianity and magic was the belief that hidden powers and virtues existed in natural objects (amulets, talismans, relics, holy water, the sign of the cross, the Eucharist, church bells), which could be tapped for human use. Given these similarities, one can conclude that "[a]cross Europe, throughout the centuries . . . magic often seems indistinguishable from religion" (Clark, p. 110).

VARIETIES OF MAGIC

On a popular level, magic was practiced extensively to deal with problematic events or situations from childbirth and childcare to animal husbandry, sickness, misfortune, lost or stolen objects, divination, business affairs, traveling, falling in or out of love, counteracting witchcraft, and even such mundane activities as shutting windows at night. Magical remedies, rituals, and formulas can be found in necromancer manuals, medical textbooks, scientific texts, the lives of saints, and courtly romances. Since magical practices were so varied, one way of categorizing them is by their intended results: healing, protection, divination, obtaining a desired object, the acquisition of occult knowledge, or simply entertainment. While astrology was a recognized part of academic medicine, magical healing was reserved primarily for diseases that were considered "unnatural" (madness, possession, nightmares) or whose causes were unknown (sudden strokes, heart attacks, seizures) and consequently attributed to the evil machinations of sorcerers, witches, demons, elves, or dwarfs. In these cases, magicians and healers patterned their actions after those of Jesus and the saints and conjured spiritual forces by ritual actions, prayers, blessings, exorcisms, and the use of amulets, talismans, relics, the sign of the cross, holy water, and nostrums made variously from herbs, animal parts, stones, or gems. Next to healing, the most popular form of magic was divination, a practice emphatically rejected by Christian authorities. Charts and manuals existed for reading signs about the future in the sky or in animals, plants, parts of the human body, and dreams. Love magic was used both to seduce and to cause impotency, a common theme in both courtly romances and inquisitor's manuals.

Like popular magic, "spiritual" and "natural" magic were concerned with issues of healing, protection, and divination, but there was a greater emphasis on the acquisition of occult knowledge as a prerequisite to successful magical practices. Broadly, one can say that "spiritual" magic was a form of religiosity whose goal was to attract beneficial divine and spiritual forces into the soul of the operator. Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) was the most famous Renaissance practitioner of this kind of magic. Language was an important element in Ficino's magic because he believed words had intrinsic powers. A similar emphasis on the power of words appears in the work of Jewish Cabbalists like Abraham Abulafia (1240–after 1291) and Joseph Gikatilla (1248–after 1305) and their Christian counterparts, Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) and Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522), who believed that Hebrew was a repository of secret wisdom. In his De Verbo Mirifico (1494), Reuchlin claimed that Jesus' name in Hebrew had the power to revive the dead, cure the sick, exorcise demons, turn rivers into wine, feed the hungry, repulse pirates, and tame camels. A similar kind of magical power was attributed to Egyptian hieroglyphs by Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680). It is not always easy to distinguish between "spiritual" and "natural" magic, nor between "spiritual" and "demonic" magic, for all three were concerned with the spiritual state of the practitioner and were thought to have transitive effects. Necromancy and black magic were an established part of medieval magic and continued throughout the early modern period. The Picatrix, derived from an Arabic source, mixed spiritual and demonic magic with astrology and was widely influential. This kind of synthesis comes out clearly in the work of Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), whose De Occulta Philosophia (enlarged edition 1533) discusses astrology, mathematics, mechanical marvels, numerology, universal harmony, the power of music and incantations, images for talismans, and the occult virtues in natural things. Agrippa claims that whoever wishes to be proficient in magic must study natural philosophy, mathematics, astrology, and theology. Only when he has mastered these disciplines will he attain the highest level of understanding through an act of mystical illumination and become a true magus. A characteristic feature of this kind of magic is its "intense religiosity and sense of piety" (Clark, p. 150). Giambattista Della Porta's Magia Naturalis (1588) was another popular work on natural magic that described procedures for such diverse things as transmuting metals; producing exotic plants and animals through grafting and cross-breeding; cutting, conserving, and cooking meat; staving off baldness; eliminating wrinkles; and engendering beautiful children.

CHANGING ATTITUDES

Around 1400 there was a radical change in attitudes toward magic on the part of religious and secular authorities. No longer seen as a body of superstitious and largely illusory practices that could be eradicated through a combination of missionary activity and the counter-use of Christian ritual—a view characteristic of the Middle Ages—magic and magicians came to be viewed as a demonic fifth column threatening the very existence of Christian civilization. This negative view of magic was reinforced by the Protestant attack on Catholic sacraments, rituals, and miracles as demonic. For the most part, however, Catholic and Protestant authorities distinguished between "popular" magic, whose practitioners were prosecuted as witches and sorcerers in league with the devil, and "learned" or "spiritual" magic, which was generally tolerated and widely practiced at European courts because of its promise of wealth and prestige and its sheer entertainment value. But even when tolerated, magicians inspired ambivalent attitudes, for beneficent "white" magic might easily be perverted into "black" magic. For this reason, two of the foremost demonologists of the sixteenth century, Jean Bodin (1530–1596) and Martin Del Rio (1551–1608), condemned all magic as demonic.

The increased concern with demonology and witchcraft in the early modern period has been attributed to the religious conflicts stirred up by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Recent research has shown, however, that it was not religious conflict per se that encouraged witch hunts but the new age of "confessionalism" that accompanied reform movements, heightening religious fervor and the concern with eradicating religious deviance. In more general terms, the increased fear of magic and sorcery was a response to increasing political and religious insecurity and social unrest. The Black Death, the Great Schism, the proliferation of heretical movements in the high Middle Ages, the discovery and dissemination of new texts, printing, trade, travel, and the discovery of the New World all undermined established truths and called into question the idea of divine providence and God's omniscience and benevolence. Misfortune, uncertainty, and insecurity called for a new theodicy, and this was supplied by demonologists and witch theorists. Neither irrational nor unscientific, they deployed all the resources available from natural philosophy and theology to vindicate the goodness of God and the truth of the Bible. Witchcraft theory was a kind of "theological damage control" (Stephens, p. 366) that let God off the hook for seeming injustice by attributing evil and misfortune to the activities of men and women in league with the devil.

The fact that the fear of sorcerers and witches was most intense during the period of the so-called scientific revolution (1570 to 1680) undermines the idea proposed by Enlightenment thinkers (Comte, Condorcet) and nineteenth- and twentieth-century social anthropologists (Edward Tylor, James Frazer, Bronislaw Malinowski) that magic represented an early stage of human development superceded first by religion and finally by science. Modern scholars reject this progressive view in favor of a conceptual history of magic that emphasizes it as an inextricable element in the religious, political, and scientific discourse of various time periods. In the early modern period, attitudes toward magic and witchcraft have been shown to correlate with political and religious views. For example, those committed to the divine right of kings and Tridentine Catholicism had a greater tendency to support the persecution of magicians and witches than humanists, libertines, and skeptics, who took the Machiavellian position that the magic and witchcraft were delusions manipulated for the benefit of those in power.

SKEPTICISM ABOUT MAGIC

There was also a correlation between magic and science. The argument that magic was a substitute for real science and technology is simply wrong. The widespread practice of magic suggests that it was considered effective, and the lively debate about the efficacy of magic is now recognized as a contributing factor to the development of science. Lynn Thorndike described magicians as the first experimental scientists. Frances Yates emphasized the role played by "occult" philosophy in stimulating science. Although her claims have been modified, it is clear that the natural magic tradition influenced important scientific figures such as Paracelsus (1493–1541), Daniel Sennert, Jean Baptiste van Helmont (1579–1644), Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), John Dee (1527–1608), and members of England's Royal Society. The paradox was that as demonologists debated with their critics about whether the effects of witchcraft, sorcery, and magic were natural or diabolical, they promoted the very skepticism they were at pains to allay. Among the skeptics were Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525), who offered naturalistic explanations for the power of incantations; Johann Weyer (1515–1588), who turned to medicine, arguing that witches were simply insane old women; and Reginald Scot (1538–1599), who denied that incorporeal spirits could have contact with humans. Even more damaging were those like John Wagstaffe (1633–1677), who concluded that witchcraft was simply a politically useful tool, an idea that led Francis Hutchinson to conclude in 1718 that beliefs about witches and sorcerers were products of their historical contexts. Witch-hunting was therefore not an anomaly in the age of the socalled scientific revolution but a constituent part of it. Underlying the debate over magic and witchcraft were fundamental issues concerning the authority and credibility of the Christian revelation; the physical constitution of the created world; the nature of causality; and the basis of politics, ethics, and morality. Every one of these involved the more general problem of what constitutes valid evidence and how knowledge may be obtained. But however beneficial this kind of scientific questioning and skepticism was in the long term, it was not immediately responsible for the decline of witch-hunting. That fell to the judicial skepticism—created largely by the excesses of witch-hunting—which led those in charge of witch trials to demand more restraint in the use of torture and stricter standards of evidence. As a result of changes in judicial procedures, mass panics ended, more of the accused were acquitted, and courts became increasingly reluctant to initiate prosecutions. This did not happen because judges, magistrates, and inquisitors denied the reality or possibility of witchcraft but because they increasingly came to believe that witchcraft was not a crime that could be proven by law.

See also Astrology ; Catholicism ; Occult Philosophy ; Reformation, Protestant ; Ritual, Religious ; Scientific Revolution ; Witchcraft .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ankarloo, Bengt, and Stuart Clark, eds. Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Middle Ages. Philadelphia, 2002.

——. Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Period of the Witch Trials. Philadelphia, 2002.

Geertz, H. "An Anthropology of Religion and Magic." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6 (1975): 71–89.

Idel, Moshe. "On Judaism, Jewish Mysticism and Magic." In Envisioning Magic, edited by Peter Schafter and Hans G. Kippenberg, pp. 195–214. Leiden, 1997.

Malinowski, B. Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays. New York, 1954.

Moran, Bruce T. Patronage and Institutions: Science, Technology, and Medicine at the European Courts, 1500–1750. Woodbridge, U.K., 1991.

Rossi, Paolo. Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science. Translated by S. Rabinovitch. London, 1968.

Stephens, Walter. Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief. Chicago, 2002.

Thomas, Keith. "An Anthropology of Religion and Magic, II." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6 (1975): 91–109.

——. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England. London, 1975.

Thorndike, Lynn. A History of Magic and Experimental Science. 8 vols. New York, 1923–1958.

Trevor-Roper, H. R. The European Witchcraze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Other Essays. New York, 1969.

Walker, D. P. Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella. London, 1958.

Wilson, Stephen. The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-Modern Europe. London and New York, 2000.

Allison P. Coudert, John Sewell

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.

Labouvie, Eva. Verbotene Kunste: Volksmagie und landlicher Aberglaube in den Dorfgemeinden des Saarraumes (16.–19. Jahrhundert). St. Ingbert, Germany, 1992.

La Fontaine, Jean. "Satanism and Satanic Abuse Mythology." 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.

La Fontaine, Jean. Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1998.

Luhrmann, Tanya M. Persuasions of the Witch's Craft: Ritual Magic and Witchcraft in Present-Day England. Oxford, 1989.

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.

Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. London and New York, 1971. A magisterial study of the changing relationship between religion and magic that transformed the social history of popular beliefs.

Traimond, Bernard. Le pouvoir de la maladie: Magie et politique dans les Landes deGascogne, 1750–1826. Bordeaux, France, 1988.

Magic

Sorcery and witchcraft

Cultural and structural approaches

Magic and social change

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The article under this heading discusses witchcraft and sorcery as well as magic. Related material will be found under Pollution; Ritual; and in the articles mentioned in the guide to Religion. The biographies of Durkheim; Frazer; Kluckhohn; Malinowski; Mauss; and NADEL should also be consulted.

The relation of magic to religion and to science provided fuel for early anthropological speculation. All students of primitive religion have had to face the question in some form or other. It has proved difficult to circumscribe the subject of magic with any degree of precision. If, as is often the case, the subjects of mana, taboo, totemism, and ritual are included, the discussion of magic easily dissolves into comparative religion.

In recent years, apart from a notable work on taboo (Steiner 1956), there has been a lack of interest in magic, although the work of Levi-Strauss on primitive thought (1962; 1964) promises to revive discussion. In the past 30 years anthropologists have concentrated on describing and analyzing the moral and religious ideas and institutions of particular peoples in great detail. In these studies the great philosophical issues of magic, science, and religion, which exercised thinkers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have receded into the background. There has been great interest in specific institutions, such as sorcery and witchcraft, which may be regarded as the social dimensions of magic. Although theoretical formulations in these fields have not kept pace with the greatly increased area of knowledge, such contributions as those of Evans-Pritchard (1937), Kluckhohn (1944), and Nadel (1952) have had important repercussions.

In historical terms, there can be seen a development from attempts to single out isolated and exotic instances of belief or practice in order to but-tress a highly abstract philosophical position (such as Frazer’s work) to an effort to place all magical acts in their proper context within the totality of moral and religious ideas, institutions, and practices of a culture.

For nineteenth-century thinkers like Tylor (1871), McLennan (1865–1876), Spencer (1876–1896), and Lang (1901), the question of greatest interest was the origins of magic as related to the origins of religion. Their works were attempts to understand how early man was led in the direction of superstition by faulty observation and reasoning. This line of inquiry led to Levy-Bruhl’s famous work on primitive mentality (1910). Frazer (1890) was also working on evolutionary premises. Theories regarding the evolution of religion or science from magic are no longer in vogue, but Frazer’s work will remain one of the most sustained efforts to penetrate the difficulties of the subject. Frazer regarded magic as an earlier, primitive form of both religion and science. He observed rightly that primitive practice is often based on excellent observation of natural phenomena and involves a theory of causality. He therefore felt that there was a basic similarity between magic and science. The only difference was that for a variety of reasons the mistaken assumptions and erroneous conclusions of magic were veiled from the observer and did not shake his beliefs.

The basic principles of magic, according to Frazer, were two: the law of similarity and the law of contagion. According to the first principle, like produces like, so that sticking pins into a doll is like sticking arrows into the enemy; and according to the law of contagion, prolonged or intimate contact produces identity, so that the enemy’s nail parings and hair can be treated as if they represented him.

Evans-Pritchard (1933) has remarked that if Frazer had observed what the natives did rather than what they thought, he would have been less inclined to draw similarities between scientists and witch doctors. He would also have seen the difference between scientific methods and traditional arts.

While anthropologists were skeptical about the attempt to reduce the exuberant complexity of primitive ritual and magic to two principles of thought, the initial impact of Frazer’s ideas was considerable, especially beyond the circles of academic anthropology. In retrospect, Frazer’s work is generally regarded as having one crippling difficulty: similar customs and practices from all cultures of the world were collected and examined under common labels. Since the labels and their relations exemplified Frazer’s own thinking on the subject, the data merely filled the preconceived receptacles and did not add to the analysis of the phenomena in any one culture (Leach 1961).

Since Frazer, every major writer on primitive religion has struggled with “magic” and every major monograph has provided more material on this elusive subject. Durkheim (1912), for instance, distinguished magic and religion on the assumption that religion presupposed a church or a congregation, while the magician worked alone and merely had a clientele.

Malinowski wrote in a different vein. In his article “Magic, Science and Religion” (1925), he argued, in Frazerian terms, for the necessity of distinguishing among these fields, but on a non-evolutionary basis. Magic, he suggested, is related to anxiety. In ordinary, everyday economic pursuits there is no magic. But when the outcome of the enterprise is uncertain and there is danger involved, the native has recourse to magic. Moreover, magic is directed to specific ends and differs from religion in not being concerned with the worship of spiritual beings.

As Malinowski pointed out, the natives of the Trobriand Islands are perfectly able to distinguish the sphere of magic from that of technology. Thus, although every step of the cultivation process is marked by magical rites, there is no question of giving up one’s own efforts to cultivate gardens and attempting to grow the food by magic alone. On the contrary, they know that even after having spent their best efforts on cultivation, some unpredictable act of nature may destroy their crops. Thus, argued Malinowski, the native has his “scientific technology” clearly distinguished from the sphere of magic. It is against the unpredictable that magic is utilized. Natives would consider it laughable to do otherwise.

This pragmatic point of view expressed by Malinowski has had many supporters. (We may observe also that the relation which he posits between anxiety and ritual harks back to psychoanalytic theory.) But the utilitarian basis of these theories has recently been severely questioned. It has become clear that the facts of ethnography do not fall into place as neatly as Malinowski had thought. Some features of magic, of Australian increase ceremonies, or of totemism don’t make sense in simple utilitarian terms. Malinowski wrote, for instance, that “.. . food is the primary link between the primitive and providence.. .. The road from the wilderness to the savage’s belly and consequently to his mind is very short” ([1925] 1948, pp. 26-27). But in the magical repertoire of aboriginal Australians there are “increase ceremonies” for all kinds of nonutilitarian categories—for instance, mosquitoes—and simple pragmatic explanations for such complicated facts would be naive.

Malinowski had specifically dismissed the views of Mauss, who had argued (see Levi-Strauss 1950) that magic is a special application of the forces of sacred powers, like mana, some conception of which is found in every society. For Mauss, mana was, in fact, a connection between religion and magic. Magic comes from religion into the realm of everyday life, where its end is action.

Malinowski, in denying the role of mana, attempted to place the emphasis again on pragmatic functions. He asked, “.. . what is mana, this im-personal force of magic supposed to dominate all forms of early belief? Is it a fundamental idea, an innate category of the primitive mind, or can it be explained by still simpler and more fundamental elements of human psychology. .. ?” These fundamental elements turn out to be merely “a blend of utilitarian anxiety about the most necessary objects of his surroundings.. .. With our knowledge of what could be called the totemic attitude of mind, primitive religion is seen to be nearer to reality and to the immediate practical life interests of the savage” ([1925] 1948, pp. 4-5).

Lévi-Strauss (1950) upholds Mauss and is concerned to redress the balance in favor of an argument that the inner logic of religious ideas is not utilitarian and that their logic has to be understood in their own terms. Features of primitive beHef must be examined not by imputing our materialist viewpoint to the idealized native but in terms of the position of such ideas and symbols in the total tapestry of customary belief and practice. Thus, Levi-Strauss agrees with Mauss and notes that the concept of mana is truly like a common denominator for concepts of the “sacred” and is, indeed, intimately related to magic. The conclusion here is that to understand magic, we must understand the refractions of the concept of the sacred in the culture.

Magic, then, is not a uniform class of practices and beliefs which can be immediately discerned in every society. On the contrary, it is best regarded as an aspect of religious belief and practice that takes its special force from the antecedent and deeply rooted recognition in many societies of supernatural or divine power. The place given to the practical use of such powers for everyday purposes such as healing or assuring luck and fertility —which in very general terms we may refer to as magic—differs from society to society.

Witchcraft and sorcery also involve the belief in supernatural powers, and sorcery in particular may be regarded as a specialized branch of offensive magic. What is said about magic and religion holds true for witchcraft and sorcery as well: it is imperative to place these beliefs and practices within the context of the total supernatural belief system of the culture in question. It Will then be feasible to raise the question of whether there is logic in this madness and to what extent the different parts of the supernatural system show structure, division of labor, and specialization of function.

Sorcery and witchcraft

The terms “sorcery” and “witchcraft” refer to practices and supernatural beings which are part and parcel of the European Christian tradition. Their use in anthropology involves an essential widening of their meaning to cover a great many beliefs and practices from other cultures which have proved difficult to classify. The conceptual categories involved in such supernatural beings and practices are sometimes so unique to particular peoples that the translation of concepts from one cultural idiom into another becomes a difficulty of the first magnitude. Is “witchcraft” similar to the “evil eye”? Is a European witch the “same” as an Islamic djinn or a Hindu yaksa? These questions about the similarities and differences between belief systems of different cultures remain largely unresolved.

With the above general reservations, it may be noted that in the area of witchcraft and sorcery, the empirical and theoretical distinctions made by Evans-Pritchard (1937) in his analysis of the ideas of the Azande have won general acceptance. The conceptual distinction made by the Azande has been observed in numerous other African cultures. The distinction turns on the nature of witches. According to Azande theories, “witches “are ordinary members of society who have inherited special supernatural powers to harm others and who may be completely unconscious of their evil potentialities. The Azande have consistent and developed physiological theories to explain just where in the human body such powers lie. They also have their special ways of consulting oracles to discover who among them carries the power, the reason for the attack, and how the danger is to be averted. Among the Azande these witches who are singled out by their fellow men are sharply distinguished from “sorcerers.” Sorcerers are men who have learned the particular techniques of handling special substances and charms whereby they can affect others. While the witches’ supernatural powers are innate and unconscious, sorcery is an acquired technique and is conscious. In one case a person fully unconscious of his guilt may be publicly accused as a “witch” and by the use of oracles may be confirmed as such, whereas in the other case, at least in theory, there is a conscious agent responsible for certain incidents who may or may not be accused of evil intentions.

These distinctions have thrown light upon anthropological field information beyond the Azande material from which they were developed. Sorcery theory and practice are evidently very widespread on all continents; but witchcraft, with its direct accusations of certain individuals who may be totally unaware of what they are accused of, is a more remarkable and less widespread phenomenon. Apart from the celebrated medieval European and New England examples, cases of witchcraft accusation from parts of Middle America (Nash 1960) and central and east Africa also have been described. On the whole, the term “witchcraft,” in the narrow sense, has not been used to describe related phenomena in the Near East and south Asia.

The above definitions make it possible to distinguish a gradation of witchcraft belief ranging from the fully developed dogmas that certain people become witches in some form (which may be embellished with detailed stories of their secret meetings and activities) to vague feelings that certain people might possess occult powers (such as the evil eye) to cause some harm, even though they may not be directly accused. The latter fear, in various degrees, is very widespread in the Mediterranean region as well as the Near East and south Asia, even though these powers are not usually described as “witchcraft.”.

It should be underlined that this distinction between sorcery and witchcraft lies entirely within the region of ideas and that there may be no “objective “basis to either set of beliefs. In other words, although it should be theoretically possible to ob-serve the sorcerer at his work, and although external evidence could be produced in the form of magical substances, special bundles, and the like, it is also quite possible that while there may be wide-spread fear of sorcery, it may in fact never be practiced by anybody. In this sense, in the study of both sorcery and witchcraft we are almost entirely concerned with the analysis of supernatural beliefs.

Cultural and structural approaches

Although descriptive works of high quality are now numerous, little progress has been made by anthropologists into the systematic analysis of customary belief systems. The dilemma has remained: how far are belief systems to be related to and analyzed in terms of the economic and social structures of the groups in question? Or if such systems are not directly related to economic and social structures, are there internal logical and categorical features which produce consistency and form in belief systems? The differences between these approaches have made themselves felt in the emphasis placed on the cultural or structural aspects of these phenomena.

Internal features of belief systems

The cultural approach to witchcraft and sorcery has underlined the consistency or logical closure of such systems: thus witchcraft and sorcery ideas are theories of causation concerning good and evil in human society. When a misfortune takes place, it can be explained by witchcraft or sorcery. This explanation in turn involves the necessity of discovering the agents of causation, i.e., those witches and sorcerers responsible. Thus, beginning with a theory of causation, one is led to techniques of divination. These, in turn, necessitate the development of the arts of healing and defense. Hence, ideas regarding witchcraft and sorcery become part of a coherent and consistent set of ideas regarding the nature of events in the world. Since these ideas have very wide ramifications and are inextricably related to the thought, language, and customary behavior of the societies in question, convictions regarding witches, sorcerers, and magic cannot be contradicted on simple rational or empirical grounds. They are rooted deep in the nature of social life.

There has been little analysis of the total “design” of supernatural belief systems, even though witnesses in the field have generally taken their coherence for granted. The “design” means here the characteristics, roles, rights and obligations of supernatural beings, their organization and relations with each other and with human society at large. It also includes the methods whereby they may be approached, communicated with, appeased, angered, or utilized. It seems clear that all societies have a design of this nature whereby a division of labor between different sections of the supernatural is effected.

An example of the operation of such a system is to be seen among the Sinhalese villagers of Ceylon. In these communities the world of supernatural beings has both Buddhist and Hindu features. The Buddha and his monks, who are held in high esteem, are seen to help man’s prospects in the next existence or in eternity, whereas the Hindu-influenced pantheon of supernatural beings is seen to hold sway over the present life and worldly prospects of men. Within this general framework, However, the supernatural beings who deal with this world are divided into gods and goddesses who are thought to ensure long life, well-being, and fertility, on the one hand, and demons and demonesses who are thought to wreak havoc and to bring infertility, suffering, and death, on the other. Oversimplifying, their relations can be seen as the forces of light and darkness, or those of good and evil.

The place of magic in this picture becomes clear when we observe the elaborate precautions which are taken on the threshing floors at harvest time. The threshing floor is treated as the temple—residence of the gods and goddesses who try to increase the yield. The small circle becomes the battleground for the gods and demons over the fertility of the lands and the yield of the harvest. The demons and demonesses are feared to be hovering outside its borders, aiming to attack the grain on the threshing floor and to steal it. Special magical pre-cautions are taken to please the gods and repulse the demons. Indeed, until recently Sinhalese peasants in the interior spoke a special language, which the demons could not comprehend, when they entered the sacred precincts of their threshing floors.

It is in this context that the role of sorcery is also seen most clearly. Just as there are elaborately developed techniques of communicating with the supernatural in the threshing floor to appease the gods and hold the demons at bay, there are also techniques, said to be very dangerous, to achieve the opposite. Logically, if the achievement of the good is within the bounds of human influence, so is the working of evil. Hence, Sinhalese villagers fully believe that some people can activate the demons against them by special offerings and incantations. Thus, sorcery is part of the very foundations of the total belief system of the villagers. And further, if there is sorcery, and if there are demons who are active, then men must seek magical protection. Indeed, the great theatrical art of ritual healing—directed specifically against sorcery —is one of the most noteworthy and developed aspects of folk culture among the Sinhalese (Wirz 1954; Yalman 1964).

Such precise linking of supernatural cause and effect, white magic and sorcery, sorcery and ritual healing is not always clearly visible in the detailed description of supernatural designs, but it appears likely that further analysis will reveal similar logical interlinkages in most primitive religions. As Evans-Pritchard observes for the Azande, “witchcraft, oracles and magic are like three sides of a triangle” (1937, p. 387).

The attempt to understand fully the inner workings of the mind of even the most primitive peoples is an obvious prerequisite to the analysis of their supernatural beliefs, behavior, and rituals. Without such penetration into what appear to be irrational and alien mentalities, all observations are bound to be superficial, rash, or wrong. The process of understanding the minds of others is partly a matter of insight and freedom from prejudice, and although the discipline of anthropology has gone far in this direction, there is much room for improvement. In any case, the objective and respectful attempt to understand the inner logic in what superficially appears meaningless or illogical cannot be taken for granted. But the further question must also be raised of whether the linked and orderly system of ideas presented to us is really that of the native, or whether the order is artificially imposed on the phenomena by the mind of the anthropological observer. This issue is a difficult one, resting near the precipice of metaphysics, but its difficulty does not prevent the observation that the heuristic assumption of “system” in primitive ideologies has proved to be very fruitful. The claim regarding the systematic nature of primitive ideas is always open to further verification, but as yet no anthropologist has been able to sustain an argument based on the senselessness or illogicality of primitive beliefs.

In the meantime, further developments toward the understanding of belief systems have derived from structural linguistics. These are based on the desire not only to understand belief systems in a general way but also to go beyond the generalities and analyze the detailed features of belief systems on the model of communication systems (Levi-Strauss 1964). Proponents of this approach maintain that belief and ritual systems have elements of order and internal structure because they form the framework for human communication. Levi-Strauss (1955) has recommended examining the most minute details of primitive myths, as if they were literary texts. Other anthropologists have suggested that the sequences of ritual may be susceptible to the type of analysis that is applied to sequences of sounds in modern linguistics (Yalman 1964). These developments in the fields of mythology and ritual have an important bearing on magic, witchcraft, and sorcery; but as yet they remain promising methods rather than well-rounded and well-supported theoretical and analytic positions (Leach 1964). Their aim is the clarification of the structure of the language of mythology and ritual. Thus, they are formal analyses divorced both from Marxist opinions regarding the primacy of the social structure over systems of ideas and from the Freudian assumptions concerning the effects of the unconscious. Whether this line of inquiry will prove effective remains to be seen (Levi-Strauss 1963).

Structural aspects

We turn now to the effect of the beliefs in sorcery and witchcraft on social relations. The direct or veiled accusation of a person or a group is a critical element in the sorcery and witchcraft complex. Wherever these beliefs occur, we may expect a great elaboration of super-natural weapons of offense and defense against sorcerers and witches and these accusations.

There have been attempts to relate overt accusations of witchcraft and sorcery to the morphology of kinship or social groups. It is suggested that such accusation of evil intent of one person by another must run along the lines of stress in the structure of social groups. There is undoubtedly much truth in this statement, and it is confirmed by the widespread feeling among people of many cultures that institutions such as the evil eye, witches, and sorcery spring directly from one of the most powerful human sentiments, jealousy. This is merely a different way of expressing the strained social relations between the accuser and the accused. This is why jealousy and envy are so often given as the reason for the supernatural attack (Wilson 1951a). Witchcraft accusations that reveal both secret and unconscious envy as well as overt suspicions may be regarded as particularly clear symptoms of strain in the social structure.

One of the most interesting studies of this problem is by Nadel (1952). For purposes of precise comparison he selects two pairs of societies: the Nupe and Gwari of Nigeria, and the Korongo and Mesakin of the Sudan. Each pair is similar in most cultural respects but differs in a few critical structural features. Thus, in the Nigerian pair Nupe women are often traders, and their economic interest and activities put a well-recognized strain on husband-wife relations. Among the Gwari, the economic problems do not exist, and the strains are absent. Accordingly, although both cultures firmly believe in witchcraft, among the Nupe witches are conceived of as women, and witch associations are said to resemble women’s trade associations. The Gwari, on the other hand, conceive of their witches as being both male and female.

In the second pair there is greater contrast. According to Nadel, the Korongo have no witchcraft beliefs at all, whereas the Mesakin are said to be totally obsessed by witchcraft. In general structural form the two groups are similar, except for some critical features which are singled out by Nadel. Both groups are matrilineal. Among the Korongo the age-class system permits easy mobility through the numerous classes for young men, whereas among the Mesakin there are fewer grades and they remain closed and rigid. Among the latter, mobility is curtailed and is replaced by competition and hostility between the generations. The Korongo have no witch problems, whereas among the Mesakin most witchcraft accusations occur among maternal kin—more specifically, between mother’s brother and sister’s son, who are placed in positions of the most intense competition in the age-grade system.

In such theories the ideology and practice of witchcraft are related with some precision to areas of anxiety and stress in the social fabric. All these theories are based on the incidence of witchcraft accusations between individuals in certain specific social roles. But, for obvious reasons, statistical evidence of sufficient depth and range in connection with such highly charged issues is difficult to collect and evaluate.

Middleton and Winter (1963) have raised some important questions regarding both the coherence of dogma and the structural aspects of witchcraft and sorcery. Accepting the notion that witchcraft and sorcery have coherent doctrines which explain events in social life, they argue that sorcery and witchcraft beliefs are exhaustive systems of super-natural explanation. When found in the same society, moreover, they are opposed explanations. Theoretically, then, one set should be redundant; but in fact most African societies, they argue, have both systems of dogma. If so, they suggest, witchcraft and sorcery must fit in with different aspects of the social structure, and this hypothesis is related to the different natures of witchcraft and sorcery.

Since sorcery is a voluntary matter and merely a technique which can be learned, anybody may be in a position to use it for offense or defense. Moreover, depending upon the motives of the sorcerer, it is not innately evil. On the other hand, witchcraft is by definition an innate matter, usually evil, in which the alleged witch has no choice. For this reason Middleton and Winter suggest that witchcraft accusations are more characteristically made against persons who are in ascribed roles, such as involuntary membership in unilineal descent groups where the individual acquires his position by virtue of his birth, whereas sorcery accusations tend to be made against persons in achieved statuses and are more characteristic of the nonunilineal aspects of societies.

Thus, among Lugbara lineages, the women who come in as wives are incorporated into their husbands’ patrilineages and become full members. Even if they leave the husband, their future children legally continue to belong to his patrilineage. In this context the elaborate ideology of witchcraft is linked to women, and witches are always said to be females. Among the Nyoro, on the other hand, people live in mixed nonunilineal neighborhoods, the women are not incorporated into patrilineages, most social positions are voluntary, and there is a developed technology of sorcery rather than witchcraft.

Even though the specific application of these ideas is illuminating, it is difficult to generalize from them to witchcraft beliefs at large. For there is always an ascribed aspect to social status, and it appears difficult to evaluate the witchcraft of complex communities in early New England, medieval Europe, or present-day Indian communities of Middle America and South America in these terms.

Apart from the question of tension in social relations, the psychological aspects of witchcraft beliefs are another dimension of the facts. If witchcraft beliefs are regarded as unrealistic fantasies—a weak theoretical position from the point of view of anthropology—then some similarity and connection may be seen between witchcraft, sorcery, and infantile fantasies. But since these ideas, however unrealistic, are collective fantasies, their explanation can be related in any meaningful fashion only to collective infantile experiences. The question remains interesting but open.

The dogmas of witchcraft, sorcery, and magic are also relevant to the social control and inheritance systems of certain societies. Among the Trobriand Islanders the power of sorcery was an important weapon which buttressed the position of the chief. Although commoners had access to sorcerers, the chief could call upon the services of many in different districts and thereby extend his authority. Frazer has reported similar instances of the use of supernatural means to secure extensive reinforcement of traditional political organizations. The divine kingship of the Shilluk is one of the well-known instances (Evans-Pritchard 1948).

In some societies where witchcraft is regarded as an innate quality in certain individuals, there are theories of its inheritance. In some cases when the main line of descent, for purposes of family organization, is in the male line, witchcraft is thought to run in the female line.

Magic and social change

Ideas about magic and supernatural creatures play a vital explanatory role as organized and institutionalized systems of public belief in traditional societies. They explain disease, injustice, misfortune, and death. Social reformers often feel that education may be used as the most potent weapon against such superstitions. It is true that modern education attacks these customary systems by providing alternative explanations for events and, probably more important, by undermining the authority of the spokesmen for the traditional system.

However, it is ironic that the fundamental changes in traditional society which permit the establishment of modern educational systems also bring about greater insecurity and increased tensions in social relations. Under such conditions, there is an even greater urge to turn to such super-natural weapons and beliefs as are available. It is notorious that modern governments in parts of Africa which have forbidden such practices as divination, the poison oracles, and similar traditional observances as being mere superstitions have naturally been seen as aligned with the forces of evil. For if the government prevents the use of appropriate traditional antiwitchcraft defensive weapons, they in effect frustrate the witch hunters and thereby materially contribute to the increase of witches. Hence, at least for parts of Africa, observers note that notwithstanding modernization, witches are felt to be more active and there is increased interest in modern movements of witch finders.

Magic, witchcraft, and sorcery are rooted in traditional customary ideas whereby cultures categorize and order the universe around them. As such, they not only are intertwined with every aspect of culture, thought, and language but also provide coherent and systematic means to influence the world in which man lives. For the anthropologist such belief systems provide essential material for the understanding of the metaphysics of non-Western cultures. They may also lead to a better understanding of the structured aspects of customary thought.

Ideas regarding witchcraft and sorcery appear strange in a rationalist period such as ours, but we should recall what immense sway such beliefs have held over very sophisticated and highly intelligent men. We must be guarded in our haste to dismiss these ideas of the supernatural. Rather, we must understand the very roots which provide the strength of conviction for such beliefs.

All knowledge rests on some degree of trust and respect. In modern societies the specialized task of developing knowledge and examining the basis of knowledge is given to thinkers and scientists in institutions of learning. Those not directly involved with a particular branch of investigation—if they understand its language at all—take their conclusions on trust. The respect in which the institution is held is an important aspect of this trust. Similarly, the knowledge of supernatural powers, of gods and goddesses, of demons and demonesses, of sorcerers and witches in all primitive societies derives from respected traditions and institutions and from men who have proved themselves worthy of trust. Commonly shared beliefs are at the basis of communal sentiments, and hence beliefs which appear primitive and totally illogical to the Western observer not only rest on dogma but also take added strength from the fact that they are part of the moral foundations of the society in which they are found.

Nur Yalman

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Durkheim, Émile (1912)1954 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. London: Allen & Unwin; New York: Macmillan. → A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Collier.

Evans-pritchard, E. E. 1933 The Intellectualist (English) Interpretation of Magic. Cairo, J̄mi’at al-Q̄hirah, Kullryat al-̄d̄b, Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts 1:282–311.

Evans-pritchard, E. E. (1937) 1965 Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon.

Evans-pritchard, E. E. 1948 The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan. Cambridge Univ. Press.

Fortune, Reo F. (1932) 1963 Sorcerers of Dobu: The Social Anthropology of the Dobu Islanders of the Western Pacific. Rev. ed. London: Routledge.

Frazer, James (1890) 1955 The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 3d ed., rev. & enl. 13 vols. New York: St. Martins; London: Macmillan. → An abridged edition was published in 1922 and reprinted in 1955.

Guiteras-holmes, Calixta 1961 Perils of the Soul: The World View of a Tzotzil Indian. New York: Free Press.

Hubert, Henri; and MAUSS, MARCEL (1904) 1960 Esquisse d’une theorie generate de la magie. Pages 1-141 in Marcel Mauss,Sociologie et anthropologie. 2d ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. → First published in Volume 7 of Annee sociologique. KLUCKHOHN, CLYDE 1944 Navaho Witchcraft. Harvard University, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Papers, Vol. 22, No. 2. Cambridge, Mass.: The Museum.

Kluckhohn, Clyde; and Leighton, Dorothea [CROSS] (1946) 1951 The Navaho. Oxford Univ. Press.

Lang, Andrew 1901 Magic and Religion. London: Longmans.

Leach, Edmund R. 1961 Golden Bough or Gilded Twig? Daedalus 90:371–387.

Leach, Edmund R. 1964 Telstar et les aborigenes, ou La pensee sauvage. Annales; economies, societes, civilisations 19:1100–1116.

Levi-strauss, Claude (1950) 1960 Introduction a 1’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss. Pages ix-lii in Marcel Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie. 2d ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Levi-strauss, Claude (1955) 1963 The Structural Study of Myth. Pages 206–231 in Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. → A revision of an article first published in English in Volume 68 of the Journal of American Folklore.

Levi-strauss, Claude (1962) 1966 The Savage Mind. Univ. of Chicago Press. → First published in French. LEVI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE 1963 Reponse a quelques questions.Esprit 31:628–653.

Levi-strauss, Claude 1964 Le cru et le cuit. Paris: Plon.

Levy-bruhl, Lucien (1910) 1951 Les fonctions men-tales dans les societes inferieures. 9th ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Mclennan, John Ferguson (1865–1876)1886 Studies in Ancient History. New York: Macmillan. → Includes Primitive Marriage (1865).

Malinowski, Bronislaw (1925) 1948 Magic, Science and Religion. Pages 1-71 in Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion, and Other Essays. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press.

Marwick, M. G. 1950 Another Modern Anti-witchcraft Movement in East Central Africa.Africa 20:100–112. MARWICK, M. G. 1952 The Social Context of Cewa Witch Beliefs.Africa 22:120–135, 215-233.

Metraux, Alfred (1958) 1959 Voodoo in Haiti. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. → First published as Le voudou ha’itien.

Middleton, John; and Winter, Edward H. (editors) 1963 Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa. London: Routledge.

Nadel, S. F. 1952 Witchcraft in Four African Societies: An Essay in Comparison. American Anthropologist New Series 54:18-29.

Nash, Manning 1960 Witchcraft as Social Process in a Tzeltal Community. America indigena 20:121–126.

Smith, William Rbertson (1889)1956 The Religion of the Semites: The Fundamental Institutions. New York: Meridian. → First published as the first series of Lectures on the Religion of the Semites.

Spencer, Hrbert (1876–1896) 19251–1929 The Principles of Sociology. 3 vols. New York: Appleton.

Steiner, franz 1956 Taboo. New York: Philosophical Library.

Thomas, northcote W. 1926 Witchcraft. Volume 28, pages 755–758 in Encyclopaedia Britannica. 13th ed. Chicago: Benton.

Tylor, Edward B. (1871) 1958 Primitive Culture: Researches Into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom. 2 vols. Gloucester, Mass.: Smith. → Volume 1:Origins of Culture. Volume 2:Religion in Primitive Culture.

Wilson, Monica H. 1951a Good Company: A Study of Nyakyusa Age-villages. Published for the Internationa] African Institute. Oxford Univ. Press.

Wilson, Monica H. 1951k Witch Beliefs and Social Structure. American Journal of Sociology 56:307–313.

Wirz, Paul 1954 Exorcism and the Art of Healing in Ceylon. Leiden (Netherlands): Brill.

Yalman, Nur 1964 The Structure of Sinhalese Healing Rituals. Pages 115–150 in Conference on Religion in South Asia, University of California, Berkeley, 1961,Religion in South Asia. Edited by Edward B. Harper. Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press.

Magic

BIBLIOGRAPHY

In ancient times, the term magic referred to the doctrines and practices of the “magi,” a Zoroastrian caste of priests centered in Persia. The term meant “gift of God” in its original language, but as individuals claiming to be magi contacted Mediterranean cultures, it came to mean any itinerant specialist in fortune-telling or other forms of the occult. Europeans looked positively upon the magi because in the New Testament the magi were celebrated in Matthew’s account of the nativity of Jesus. But by 500 BCE the term magi also had a pejorative sense as many impostors made a living by pretending to possess supernatural powers gained in the mysterious East. The ars magica, or “the practices of would-be magi,” usually meant the tricks of showmen, a sense that followed the word “magic” when it entered English. For this reason, in the most popular usage, a “magic” trick performed by a “magician” typically means an illusion performed on stage as contrived entertainment.

In a more objective ethnographic sense, however, the concept of magic is useful in describing a common form of vernacular belief, as well as an important emphasis in a variety of new religions. The twentieth century occult revivalist Aleister Crowley (1874–1947) defined magic in a quasi-objective sense as “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will” (Adler 1986, p. 8). His practice, however, involved the use of rituals intended to “cause change” through the use of occult forces. Folklorists and anthropologists have likewise seen similar tendencies in a variety of cultures, and so magic could be defined more precisely as any traditional ritual that seeks to protect or benefit an individual through the private appropriation of supernatural forces.

During his research among Micronesian fishers (1914–1920), British anthropologist Bronislaw Mali-nowski found that magical practices were based on practical, utilitarian needs of those engaging in professions with high degrees of personal risk, particularly open-sea fishing. Malinowski argued that “where man can rely completely upon his knowledge and skill, magic does not exist,” while in activities “full of danger and uncertainty, there is extensive magical ritual to secure safety and good results” (Malinowski 1954, pp. 30–31). Subsequently, ethnographers found similar practices among other cultures with a high degree of personal risk (such as fishing, mining, or lumbering) or where success is largely due to unpredictable factors (gambling, sports competitions, or the law).

Most common forms of magic are simple, including watching for omens of a lucky or unlucky venture, preparing and carrying amulets intended to bring fortune, or engaging in simple rituals at the start of an activity. Folklorist Don Yoder saw many of these as forms of “folk religion” and argued that they included any religious or quasi-religious practice observed but not positively prescribed by the institutionalized sect to which one belonged. However, more elaborate, privately maintained magic-religious traditions have also survived in ethnic communities alongside these common omens and rituals. These traditions are often termed “ceremonial magic,” and involve complicated rituals and magical paraphernalia. The rituals are similar in structure to blessings and prayers carried out in religion, but as Malinowski noted, they are often pragmatic in intent, serving to ensure success in an individual’s economic or private matters.

Practitioners of such rituals normally define their art as “natural” or “white” magic because the forces that they use are the same as those honored in their dominant religion and their functions are supportive of their communities’ core ethics. In addition, as sociologist Hans Sebald found in a 1978 study of witchcraft traditions in Franconia (a region in southern Germany), magic often served as a convenient alternative in complex family disputes where calling in legal or religious officials would have caused a scandal. Nevertheless, such traditions are viewed with considerable suspicion by mainstream religious authorities.

The conventional distinction between “black” and “white” magic derives from this longstanding tension between vernacular practitioners and the law. In fact, scholars agree that few explicitly “satanic” or explicitly evil magicians ever existed. Prosecutors of the early modern (1500–1700) witch trials obtained confessions describing explicit devil worship and evil magic, but these descriptions were certainly obtained by coercion and torture. Sound ethnographic studies show that virtually all practicing “magicians” claimed to be “white” witches whose rituals supported the religious and ethical values of their communities.

Jealous religious authorities considered all private magic rituals, however, to be unnecessary (the literal meaning of “superstitious”), foolish, and at worst, a potentially dangerous form of “black” magic. “There is Mention of Creatures that they call White Witches, which do only Good-Turns for their Neighbours,” the Massachusetts Puritan minister Cotton Mather said shortly before the outbreak of the Salem Witch Trials (1692), adding, “I suspect that there are none of that sort; but … If they do good, it is only that they may do hurt ” (Mather 1689, p. 4). To be truly divine, that is, the exercise of supernatural powers needed to be limited strictly to institutionally approved specialists. Any use of allegedly “good” magic outside of orthodox religion was often defined as “black” magic for that reason alone. In addition, magical rituals that cast misfortune on an individual, or which explicitly call on demonic powers are the most strongly proscribed as “dark arts” by mainstream religions and, at times, by civil authorities as well.

The more elaborate traditions involve a belief that an unexplained illness or misfortune could be explained in terms of a curse cast by another person, deliberately or inadvertently. Hence the magic user’s first task was to diagnose the source of the inquirer’s problem, then to conduct a ritual intended to remove its influence and frequently, turn the curse back against the one who cast it. Such magical specialists also fabricate and sell fetishes intended to protect its purchaser. Often these traditions are complex enough that they need to be preserved in writing, either privately maintained manuscripts passed down in a family or circle of practitioners, or in print editions available from specialists. Among these “magic books,” the most notorious include the Germanic Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses and the Jewish qabbalist Key of Solomon.

A further development in magic occurred in England during the 1890s when a group of academics revived the medieval European traditions of ceremonial magic as a new religious movement. The Order of the Golden Dawn attracted many followers, chief among them the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), whose writings include frequent references to magical rituals that he performed. Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) was another influential faction in this movement. Predictably, Crowley was repeatedly denounced by religious authorities as a “black” magician who dabbled in Satanism. Although Crowley, a vocal critic of orthodox Christianity, at times encouraged this image, the rituals he practiced were in fact not diabolical in nature or intent. Nevertheless, the popular image of an evil “black” magician whose powers are countered by a benevolent “white” magician has become a cliché in popular fantasy and children’s literature.

More influentially, in 1954 Briton Gerald Gardner published a manuscript titled “Ye Bok of ye Art Magical,” supposedly the record of rituals preserved by a secret coven of English witches. In fact, the manuscript was based on publications of the Golden Dawn circles, but Gardner’s writings inspired the growth of a vigorous “Neo-Pagan” religious movement that has developed into a strong alternative religion in both Great Britain and North America. A number of ethnographic studies of contemporary witchcraft revival (particularly anthropologist Sabina Magliocco’s 2004 study) show that the use of magic has had profound impact on its followers. Magic, Magliocco argues, is not simple make-believe but a powerful means of inducing spiritually transformative experiences.

The common perception of “magic” in terms of illusion or ignorance is therefore simplistic. Magical beliefs need to be seen in the larger context of their practitioners’ social and religious worldviews. Only by seeing a magical tradition as an integral part of a culture’s definition of reality can we understand why it attracts and maintains followers

SEE ALSO Anthropology; Ethnography; Ethnology and Folklore; Luck; Malinowski, Bronislaw; Religion; Risk; Rituals; Taboos

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adler, Margot. 1986. Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers and Other Pagans in America Today. 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon.

Davies, Owen. 2003. Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History. London: Hambledon and London

Ellis, Bill. 2003. Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.

King, Francis. 1989. Modern Ritual Magic: The Rise of Western Occultism. Rev. ed. New York: Avery.

Magliocco, Sabina. 2004. Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. [1925] 1954. Magic, Science and Religion. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.

Mather, Cotton. [1689] 2002. Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions. The Internet Sacred Text Archive. http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/twp/twp03.htm.

Sebald, Hans. 1978. Witchcraft: The Heritage of a Heresy. New York: Elsevier.

Yoder, Don. 1974. Toward a Definition of Folk Religion. Western Folklore 33: 2–15.

Bill Ellis