Defining Magic: A Reader (Critical Categories in the Study of Religion)

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As people from Latin America, to central Africa, to Mongolia, to the US and Europe become engulfed in urbanization, capitalist markets, and dreams of social mobility, ideas about the occult gain currency. Bearing in mind that distinguishing between ‘negative’- and ‘craft’-oriented approaches to the study of magic is to some extent an analytical artifice, this section will foreground examples of the creative and positive dimension of magic. In a watershed study conducted in the 1930s, Edward Evans Evans-Pritchard investigated witchcraft and anti-witch vengeance magic among members of the Azande ethnic group of current day South Sudan. The case of ceremonial magic and especially Western esotericism is particularly helpful to appreciate magic’s ‘craft’.

Although co-opted and condemned by Christian leaders of this period, magic survived in a complex relationship with the dominant religion. His interest in religion first resulted in an essay “On the definition of religious phenomena” (1899). Similar acculturation processes occurred in later conversions in Latin America and Africa, where indigenous beliefs in spiritual forces and magical practices coexist, sometimes uneasily, with Christian theology. The high praise was contained in a feature in the Architects' Journal (AJ) which showcased the students’ work.

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The useful lesson that this historical case can offer us is that enchantment and disenchantment are often intertwined in unpredictable ways.Far from being seen as problematic, eclecticism in ritual is often proudly declared, an emphasis on creativity and bricolage understood as empowering (Magliocco 1996: 99; 2006). GB" , "support_discard" : "0" , "vendor" : null , "virtual" : 1 } }, "ansible_distribution" : "CentOS" , "ansible_distribution_file_parsed" : true , "ansible_distribution_file_path" : "/etc/redhat-release" , "ansible_distribution_file_variety" : "RedHat" , "ansible_distribution_major_version" : "7" , "ansible_distribution_release" : "Core" , "ansible_distri People who throw accusations of appropriation around on an erroneous or false basis only serve to assist those who wish to dismiss the concept. However, magic offered a framework to explain why something happened to a particular person and not someone else. magic was strongly identified with paganism, the label Christian missionaries used to demonize the religious beliefs of Celtic, Germanic, and Scandinavian peoples.

Witchcraft is a highly problematic term because of the different uses of the word today versus its historical uses. Owing to its ability to generate desirable affective states, William Mazzarella (2017) surmises, magic makes reality more enjoyable and pleasureful – even the mundane encounter with a packet of leaflets is experienced with delight – and this has positive repercussions on a sorcerer’s self. Others appreciate it for complementing scientific knowledge without being incompatible with a rational picture of the world (Matthews 2016, 2017).Stanley Tambiah (1990: 8-11) has argued that, given the prestige of Hellenic traditions in Western academia, a separation between magic and religion ended up influencing Victorian anthropologists such as James Frazer. These figures, at once proto-scientists, theologians, and explorers of the occult, played an important role in defining the field of ‘erudite’ Western magic, drawing on repertoires as different as astrology, Christian theology and ethics, Greek mystery religion and philosophy, and Jewish mysticism (Yates 1964, 2001; Culianu 1984; Jütte 2015). Caldwell embraced hip hop as much as hip hop embraced him – What You Won’t Do for Love became Do for Love by Tupac.

His self-titled debut album was a triumph of a soul record, but the problem was that he sounded like a member of the Temptations at Motown or the Stylistics (remember Betcha by Golly, Wow), but looked as if he belonged in the lily-white Osmond family. Ambivalence toward magic carried into the early Christian era of the Roman Empire and its subsequent heirs in Europe and Byzantium. Where did the assumption underpinning nineteenth century academic conceptualizations of magic come from? There are, however, a lot of practices that different people disagree with, such as divination, justified harm, love magic and so forth.Though scholars agree that late modernity has witnessed a resurgence of organised religions as well, magic, with its experimental, do-it-yourself character, appears particularly well-aligned with the post-secular spirituality of the twenty-first century. Understanding magic, then, requires that we be prepared to shed or at least bracket ingrained prejudices. Despite the mainstream’s uneasiness with occult crafts such as ceremonial magic and divination, their stubborn refusal to simply vanish into thin air points not only to the inherent contradictions of modernity, but also to the value that practitioners attach to such crafts. Ceremonial magic is a type of magic that depends heavily on book learning; precise, complicated ritual; and intricate sets of correspondences. GB" , "start" : "2048" , "uuid" : null } }, "removable" : "0" , "rotational" : "0" , "sas_address" : null , "sas_device_handle" : null , "scheduler_mode" : "deadline" , "sectors" : "167772160" , "sectorsize" : "512" , "size" : "80.