Magic (paranormal)

Magic is a category into which have been placed various beliefs and practices considered separate from both religion and science. Emerging within Western culture, the term has historically often had pejorative connotations, with things labelled magical perceived as being socially unacceptable, primitive, or foreign. The concept has been adopted by scholars in the humanities and social sciences, who have proposed various different—and often mutually exclusive—definitions of the term. Many contemporary scholars regard the concept to be so problematic that they reject it altogether.– Historian of religion Henrik BogdanFor the storm lasted for three days; and at last the Magians, by using victims and wizards' spells on the wind, and by sacrificing also to Thetis and the Nereids, did make it to cease on the fourth day. Magic is a category into which have been placed various beliefs and practices considered separate from both religion and science. Emerging within Western culture, the term has historically often had pejorative connotations, with things labelled magical perceived as being socially unacceptable, primitive, or foreign. The concept has been adopted by scholars in the humanities and social sciences, who have proposed various different—and often mutually exclusive—definitions of the term. Many contemporary scholars regard the concept to be so problematic that they reject it altogether. The term magic derives from the Old Persian magu, a word that applied to a form of religious functionary about which little is known. During the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE, this term was adopted into Ancient Greek, where it was used with negative connotations to apply to rites that were regarded as fraudulent, unconventional, and dangerous. This meaning of the term was then adopted by Latin in the first century BCE. Via Latin, the concept was incorporated into Christian theology during the first century CE, where magic was associated with demons and thus defined against (Christian) religion. This concept was pervasive throughout the Middle Ages, when Christian authors categorised a diverse range of practices—such as enchantment, witchcraft, incantations, divination, necromancy, and astrology—under the label magic. In early modern Europe, Protestants often claimed that Roman Catholicism was magic rather than religion, and as Christian Europeans began colonising other parts of the world in the sixteenth century they labelled the non-Christian beliefs they encountered magical. In that same period, Italian humanists reinterpreted the term in a positive sense to create the idea of natural magic. Both negative and positive understandings of the term recurred in Western culture over the following centuries. Since the nineteenth century, academics in various disciplines have employed the term magic but have defined it in different ways and used it in reference to different things. One approach, associated with the anthropologists Edward Tylor and James G. Frazer, uses the term to describe beliefs in hidden sympathies between objects that allow one to influence the other. Defined in this way, magic is portrayed as the opposite to science. An alternative approach, associated with the sociologists Marcel Mauss and Émile Durkheim, employs the term to describe private rites and ceremonies and contrasts it with religion, which it defines as a communal and organised activity. By the 1990s, many scholars were rejecting the term's utility for scholarship. They argued that it drew arbitrary lines between similar beliefs and practices that were instead considered religious and that, being rooted in Western and Christian history, it was ethnocentric to apply it to other cultures. Throughout Western history, there have been individuals who engaged in practices that their societies called magic and who sometimes referred to themselves as magicians. Within modern occultism, which developed in nineteenth-century Europe, there are many self-described magicians and people who practice ritual activities that they call magic. In this environment, the concept of magic has again changed, usually being defined as a technique for bringing about changes in the physical world through the force of one's will. This definition was pioneered largely by the influential British occultist Aleister Crowley and is used in occultist movements such as Wicca, LaVeyan Satanism, and chaos magic. The historian Owen Davies stated that the word magic was 'beyond simple definition'. Similarly, the historian Michael D. Bailey characterised magic as 'a deeply contested category and a very fraught label'; as a category, he noted, it was 'profoundly unstable' given that definitions of the term have 'varied dramatically across time and between cultures'. Scholars have engaged in extensive debates as to how to define magic, with such debates resulting in intense dispute. Throughout such debates, the scholarly community has failed to agree on a definition of magic, in a similar manner to how they have failed to agree on a definition of religion. Even among those throughout history who have described themselves as magicians, there has been no common understanding of what magic is. Concepts of magic generally serve to sharply demarcate certain practices from other, otherwise similar practices in a given society. According to Bailey: 'In many cultures and across various historical periods, categories of magic often define and maintain the limits of socially and culturally acceptable actions in respect to numinous or occult entities or forces. Even more basically they serve to delineate arenas of appropriate belief.' In this, he noted that 'drawing these distinctions is an exercise in power'. Similarly, the scholar of religion Randall Styers noted that attempting to define magic represents 'an act of demarcation' by which it is juxtaposed against 'other social practices and modes of knowledge' such as 'religion' and 'science'. The historian Karen Louise Jolly described magic as 'a category of exclusion, used to define an unacceptable way of thinking as either the opposite of religion or of science'. Within Western culture, the term 'magic' has been linked to ideas of the Other, foreignness, and primitivism. In Styers' words, it has become 'a powerful marker of cultural difference'. It has also been repeatedly presented as the archetypally non-modern phenomenon. Among Western intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, magic was seen as a defining feature of 'primitive' mentalities and was commonly attributed to marginal groups, locations, and periods. The concept and term 'magic' developed in European society and thus using it when discussing non-Western cultures or pre-modern forms of Western society raises problems, as it may impose Western categories that are alien to them. While 'magic' remains an emic (insider) term in the history of Western societies, it remains an etic (outsider) term when applied to non-Western societies. During the twentieth century, many scholars focusing on Asian and African societies rejected the term 'magic', as well as related concepts like 'witchcraft', in favour of the more precise terms and concepts that existed within these specific societies. A similar approach has been taken by many scholars studying pre-modern societies in Europe, such as Classical antiquity, who find the modern concept of 'magic' inappropriate and favour more specific terms originating within the framework of the ancient cultures which they are studying. Alternately, this term implies that all categories of magic are ethnocentric and that such Western preconceptions are an unavoidable component of scholarly research. Many scholars have argued that the use of the term as an analytical tool within academic scholarship should be rejected altogether. The scholar of religion Jonathan Z. Smith for example argued that it had no utility as an etic term that scholars should use. The historian of religion Wouter Hanegraaff agreed, stating that 'the term magic is an important object of historical research, but not intended for doing research.' Bailey noted that, as of the early 21st century, few scholars sought grand definitions of magic but instead focused their attentions on 'careful attention to particular contexts', examining what a term like magic meant to a given society; this approach, he noted, 'call into question the legitimacy of magic as a universal category'. The scholars of religion Berndt-Christian Otto and Michael Stausberg suggested that it would be perfectly possible for scholars to talk about amulets, curses, healing procedures, and other cultural practices often regarded as magical in Western culture without any recourse to the concept of magic itself. The idea that 'magic' should be rejected as an analytic term developed in anthropology, before moving into Classical studies and Biblical studies in the 1980s. Since the 1990s, the term's usage among scholars of religion has declined.