It's Magic

Andy Cullison has an interesting blog post that sketches an analysis of the concept of magic. He offers various reasons why the exercise might be worthwhile, not least that the notion of magic shows up in some discussions of causation and influence. I spent some time a few years back (don't ask...) looking through the some of the literature, primary and secondary, on magic as understood by people who believe(d) in it. I also think it's interesting to look at the notion of magic, though for somewhat different reasons than Andy offers. And so a few thoughts.

Andy suggests thinking of magic as a property of events. That probably works for the recent philosophy literature that he has in mind; there the idea of "magic" is used in a schematic, casual sort of way there. It works less well for "real" magic -- that is, for what people who took magic seriously had in mind.

One reason is that "magic" applied to many things -- spells, potions, rituals, substances, symbols... and at least for folk magic, what links the various cases is as much a matter of family resemblances as anything else. Whether "the folk" would have thought that a love potion and a curse brought about their results by way of a common property is unlikely, I would guess. The efficacy of a curse might have something to do with demonic involvement. Whether that would be so for a wart charm or a "magical" cure is more doubtful.

That said, we can point to recurring themes in magic. Perhaps most important, things that worked straightforwardly, reliably and without any sense of the obscure or mysterious wouldn't have counted as magic. Though they don't just mean the same thing, there's a reason why "magic" and "occult" are associated. "Occult" properties are hidden and inaccessible. Whatever made magical things work was often thought of as "occult" in that way and for the theoreticians of magic, "occult" served as a technical term.

We can add to the list: magic often depended on sympathies and antipathies. Harming someone by harming their image is an example of (particularly unsympathetic) sympathetic magic. A good deal of magic had an element of action-at-a-distance about it. Magic was suspect because at least some of it was thought to be demonic, but some theoreticians of magic would protest that this wasn't always so. Some important forms of magic were closely tied to astrological ideas. Spell-casting embodies the idea that the will as such can influence the world.

I mentioned "theoreticians" of magic because such there were. And to get a feel for how complex the notion of magic really is, we might ask: is magic, supposing there is any, supernatural?

It may come as a surprise that the answer isn't simply yes. Consider, for example, Giambattista della Porta's 1558 tome Natural Magic. Even a casual look makes clear that there was no simple distinction between what we might think of as magic and what we might think of as science. Another example: William Gilbert's famous treatise on magnetism. Some parts seem like observational science. But Gilbert understood what we would think of as the earth's magnetic field as a manifestation of the Soul of the World. Supernatural? If your view of the world is broadly Neo-Platonic, then the "natural/supernatural" distinction gets blurry.

Platonic and Neo-Platonic ideas had an unmistakable influence on Renaissance magical thinkers such as Ficino and Agrippa, and this reminds us of something: the rich notion of magic that these thinkers worked with gets its sense within a cosmological picture that most of us have abandoned. We simply don't think of "nature" the way they did. Here's a lovely quote from Plotinus:

This One-All, therefore, is a sympathetic total and stands as one living being; the far is near; it happens as in one animal with its separate parts: talon, horn, finger, and any other member are not continuous and yet are effectively near; intermediate parts feel nothing, but at a distant point the local experience is known. Correspondent things not side by side but separated by others placed between, the sharing of experience by dint of like condition- this is enough to ensure that the action of any distant member be transmitted to its distant fellow. Where all is a living thing summing to a unity there is nothing so remote in point of place as not to be near by virtue of a nature which makes of the one living being a sympathetic organism.

The Cosmos is a sympathetic totality; Ficino and Agrippa would have enthusiastically agreed. If you think about nature that way, the idea of magic itself will seem much more "natural."

There's another part of the magical world-view that's in the same neighborhood: the world isn't just a place with mechanical links; it's a place knit together with links of meaning. Renaissance magical thinkers -- hardly the first to do so -- made a good deal of the idea of "correspondences" -- links among parts of the world that we might think of as bad metaphors, but that they saw as magical resources. Ficino's Three Books of Life are chock-a-block with charming and benign examples of ordinary substances -- honey and gold, for example, that are filled with the astral virtues of the Solar temperament. The magic of sigils and signs was a more threatening case of similar connections.

There's volumes more that could be said, and I'm no scholar. What intrigues me about the concept of magic (as I hope even this brief discussion suggests) is partly how rich and complex it is. But perhaps even more interesting is how elusive and all but inaccessible the idea is if we think of the world as we've grown accustomed to thinking.

Needless to say, this is no complaint against science. It's just a reminder that when non-magical thinking moderns invoke the term "magic," what they have in mind is the dried husk of a notion that's mostly lost but still enchanting.