Religion And Magic In Western Culture

In this book, Daniel Dubuisson analyses the long history of the dichotomy between religion and magic, as well as the great stakes of power which it has concealed over the centuries.

The story of the beliefs and practices called 'magic' starts in ancient Iran, Greece, and Rome, before entering its crucial Christian phase in the Middle Ages. Centering on the Renaissance and Marsilio Ficino, this richly illustrated and groundbreaking book treats magic as a classical tradition with foundations that were distinctly philosophical.

Witchcraft, astrology, divination and every kind of popular magic flourished in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the belief that a blessed amulet could prevent the assaults of the Devil to the use of the same charms to recover stolen goods. At the same time the Protestant Reformation attempted to take the magic out of religion, and scientists were developing new explanations of the universe. Keith Thomas's classic analysis of beliefs held on every level of English society begins with the collapse of the medieval Church and ends with the changing intellectual atmosphere around 1700, when science and rationalism began to challenge the older systems of belief.

Since the emergence of religious studies and the social sciences as academic disciplines, the concept of "magic" has played a major role in defining religion and in mediating the relation of religion to science. Across these disciplines, magic has regularly been configured as a definitively non-modern phenomenon, juxtaposed to distinctly modern models of religion and science. Yet this notion of magic has remained stubbornly amorphous. In Making Magic, Randall Styers seeks to account for the extraordinary vitality of scholarly discourse purporting to define and explain magic despite its failure to do just that. He argues that this persistence can best be explained in light of the Western drive to establish and secure distinctive norms for modern identity, norms based on narrow forms of instrumental rationality, industrious labor, rigidly defined sexual roles, and the containment of wayward forms of desire. Magic has served to designate a form of alterity or deviance against which dominant Western notions of appropriate religious piety, legitimate scientific rationality, and orderly social relations are brought into relief. Scholars have found magic an invaluable tool in their efforts to define the appropriate boundaries of religion and science. On a broader level, says Styers, magical thinking has served as an important foil for modernity itself. Debates over the nature of magic have offered a particularly rich site at which scholars have worked to define and to contest the nature of modernity and norms for life in the modern world.

"[P.D. Ouspensky's] yearning for a transcendent, timeless reality—one that cancels out physical disintegration and death—figures into science at some fundamental level. Einstein found solace in his theory of relativity, which suggested to him that events are ever-present in the space-time continuum. When his friend Michele Besso passed on shortly before his own death, he wrote: 'For us believing physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.'" —from Magic, Mystery, and Science The triumph of science would appear to have routed all other explanations of reality. No longer does astrology or alchemy or magic have the power to explain the world to us. Yet at one time each of these systems of belief, like religion, helped shed light on what was dark to our understanding. Nor have the occult arts disappeared. We humans have a need for mystery and a sense of the infinite. Magic, Mystery, and Science presents the occult as a "third stream" of belief, as important to the shaping of Western civilization as Greek rationalism or Judeo-Christianity. The occult seeks explanations in a world that is living and intelligent—quite unlike the one supposed by science. By taking these beliefs seriously, while keeping an eye on science, this book aims to capture some of the power of the occult. Readers will discover that the occult has a long history that reaches back to Babylonia and ancient Egypt. It proceeds alongside, and frequently mingles with, religion and science. From the Egyptian Book of the Dead to New Age beliefs, from Plato to Adolf Hitler, occult ways of knowing have been used—and hideously abused—to explain a world that still tempts us with the knowledge of its dark secrets.

Recent years have seen a spectacular rise of the New Age movement and an ever-increasing interest in its beliefs and manifestations. This fascinating work presents the first-ever comprehensive analysis of New Age Religion and its historical backgrounds, thus providing the reader with a means of orientation in the bewildering variety of the movement. Making extensive use of primary sources, the author thematically analyses New Age beliefs from the perspective of the study of religions. While looking at the historical backgrounds of the movement, he convincingly argues that its foundations were laid by so-called western esoteric traditions during the Renaissance. Hanegraaff finally shows how the modern New Age movement emerged from the increasing secularization of those esoteric traditions during the 19th century. This ground-breaking publication is compulsive reading for all those involved or interested in the New Age movement.

In Personal Religion and Magic in Mamasa, West Sulawesi, Kees Buijs describes the traditional culture of the Toraja’s. The focus is upon the personal religion as it has its centre in a special way in the kitchen of each house.

Western popular culture is saturated with ideas drawn from religious institutions and a variety of other forms of awareness. In an age that many view as secular, news accounts are replete with sensationalist stories about inexplicable supernatural events. The Occult, mythology, vampires, zombies, ghosts and apparitions, and paranormal activity are but a few of the supernatural or cosmological themes and images that are felt in everyday life. Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion in the Media, represents a unique effort to capture a cross-section of these events in media reportage and analyze them through the lens of anthropology. The essays selected for this text, which are drawn from a variety of news media and online sources, are clustered around important themes and discussed in terms of their impact on society. They illustrate how classic observations and theory made by social and cultural anthropologists have real world application in everyday American life. This is an ideal supplemental text for introductory and general education courses on "the anthropology of religion," yet it is accessible to an educated public. Liam D. Murphy is a professor of anthropology at California State University, Sacramento. He is the author of many articles and research papers on religion, politics, and identity, published in such peer-reviewed journals as the Journal of Ritual Studies, the Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, Anthropology in Action, and the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures. He is also co-author (with Paul A. Erickson) of A History of Anthropological Theory (UTP Higher Education, 2013) and co-editor (with Paul A. Erickson) of Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory (UTP Higher Education, 2013). A specialist on religion in Northern Ireland, Murphy is also the author of Believing in Belfast: Charismatic Christianity after the Troubles (Carolina Academic Press, 2010). His current ethnographic research focuses on heavy metal and cultural identity in Western France.