Week 1 Lecture Notes

Modern Magic and Witchcraft

Strong cultural biases must be taken into account in any discussion of magic and witchcraft in a modern setting. Such biases derive from many sources, but overall the general understanding of religious ‘magic’ in our culture is negative, and far removed conceptually from any practice within liturgical or institutional culture among Jews and Christians. Yet actual religious practices and community functions are similar among monotheists and pagans, and in many instances actually derive from the same historical sources. Though in former years the Church was a primary influence on our ‘surface concepts’ of witchcraft and magic, today it is popular culture (and specifically film and television) that shape many of our opinions, echoing traditional ideas and adding to them.

On a deep level, because witchcraft now involves ‘self-conceptions’ as much as projections upon individuals and groups from the outside, we can apply anthropological methods to try to identify and define communities, cultural beliefs, and practices. This means that there are actually many definitions of witchcraft and magic, so no one viewpoint may be held as accurate in all situations. One premise we may take into such study is that all religions share some attributes. Where many people in our culture resist is in calling modern witchcraft and other forms of paganism “religion”.

We may broadly define religion as a system of ethical or moral belief and action based on some ‘god concept’ (including, incidentally, but not usually, even an atheistic philosophy). Following John B. Cobb’s notion of ‘deep religious pluralism’, we may note that not all religions need possess the same concepts of deity, the same general ethics, or even the same idea of ‘the ultimate.’ Cobb himself has left open, in addition to the personal God of Western theologies and the impersonal deity of Eastern religions, a general ‘earth-based’ orientation of many traditional cultures around the world. Some paganisms fit well within the general framework of Western theology and concepts of personal deity, while many paganisms do not. In this respect, in order to assess forms of modern witchcraft as religion, we need to be open to some fairly radical ideas about religious constructs and their implications for underlying beliefs.

Modern Magic and Witchcraft. When I speak of ‘modern’ magic and witchcraft, my reference is to ‘philosophically modern’ constructions of the concepts. These date initially from the formation of modern Western cultural consciousness with the emergence of science in the 16^th century. In particular, the notion of magic began to transform within modern philosophy and common culture as our ideas of science evolved. Additionally, the practice of science has often influenced human views of all religious constructs and communities. Scientific understandings, especially in constructions of biological process and evolution, have tended to undermine ‘received’ religious views of origins and nature, placing the core Western religious myths in the same category as folklore and myth offered in other related and completely independent cultural traditions (the work of Joseph Campbell was focused upon this essential understanding of modernity). Yet at the transition from medieval to modern philosophy, many extant notions of magic derived from much earlier sources, and some of these ideas persisted as an undercurrent of early empirical studies in science. Let us not forget that alchemy (originally understood as ‘the art of transmutation’, derived into Latin through Arabic from a Greek root meaning ‘black’) shares connection with our modern discipline of chemistry. In its early modern forms, empirical studies of matter shared much background in texts relating to what were regarded as high magical processes—the ‘mage’ was the forerunner of the ‘physical scientist.’

And the knowledge of old ‘magic’ goes back to the eastern Mediterranean region, before the Greek dominance of that region, and especially to the esoteric practices of the Egyptians. Morton Smith offered a popular and informative work, Jesus the Magician (1978), reviewing concepts of magic in the centuries around the beginning of the Christian era. Regardless of how one regards Jesus’ use of magic as attested in the Christian gospels, Smith’s work differentiates formal esoteric knowledge systems of the ‘magi’ from the practices of ‘street magicians’, and discusses the important topic of ‘necromancy’ within these early magical systems as a means of understanding some of the magical allegations (and claims) made about Jesus in the gospels. Even in the ancient systems of magic understood formally in Roman law, sorcery carried a very negative connotation because it was presumed to involve the acquisition of magical powers through the control of spirits of dead people. Thus, the differentiation between ‘magic’ as a negative practice and apparently magical effects derived from deity is very old. As Christian law developed in the first millennium CE ‘magic’ came to be disassociated with religious action and closely connected with negative manipulations of God’s intended order. In this way, most forms of magic (excluding sleight-of-hand and illusion) came to be seen as signs of work through demonic forces. Even so, magic as entertainment retains many trappings of ‘occult’ connection as part of the context for illusion.

An important element of ‘magical practice’ shared between Indo-European and Semitic cultures is the association, in early conceptions of language, of words with the things they represented. In Hebrew traditions that ultimately led to ‘high magical practices’ in the late-Medieval world, the perfect language of God would be effective in calling forth conditions in the world: “And God said….and there was…” offered a formula, if one only knew the correct form, for making things happen. This general idea exists in many cultures, and among Indo-Europeans we get the strongest examples of it in derived Germanic and Celtic beliefs about words, and about written symbols for sounds. Thus the runes among Germanic cultures, ogham among the Celts, and alphabetic forms for many eastern Mediterranean Semitic cultures all sometimes involved the idea that the ‘physical sign’ (sound or letter) was imbued with some qualities of things to which they referred or other symbolic associations. Runes could be used to produce magical effects on weapons, or as wards against magical effects from others. Within Kabbalah, which is only the most explicit written version of such an elaborated symbolic system, words and individual letters were incorporated into magical processes with the idea that they conferred actual physical results, rather than simply ‘representing’ abstract concepts.

Thus, words in general have been thought to possess power, and as culture words do create significant effects in the world. We may think of magic, then, as any behavior that causes us to change the way we think about or encounter the world around us. Such a linking of magic to ‘meaning’ in linguistic and behavioral contexts ties the concept to other evocative behaviors, such as political rhetoric, poetry, ritual speech, and prayer, and helps us remove some of the longstanding bias against magic as religious behavior by Western monotheism.

In English context, we learn much from the historical usage of the term ‘witch.’ For example in Wulfstan’s address to the English (1014) ‘wicce and waelcyrian’ (witches and choosers of the dead) appear in a long list of bad influences and defilements from Danish incursions. The term is quite distinct from ‘wita’ (wise man, sage), ‘witan’ (know), a form that at least one popular writer has adopted for a variant form of modern Wicca. In fact, there is no evidence of any traditional pagan continuity from the Old English period into the present, especially inasmuch as witchcraft itself under early Christian influences was taken as sinister and improper.

The modern history of witchcraft, then, involves communities and concepts that are not completely or accurately represented in popular constructions, core religious community reactions, film, television, or written fictions. Even positive treatments sometimes involve strong ideological elements that cannot accurately represent historical connections or current practices. The two texts for this class very effectively present a more accurate picture, Ronald Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon providing a superb cultural analysis of the roots and dissemination of British Witchcraft, including its literary/folkloric roots and phallocentric biases. Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon shows the somewhat ecologically-minded and feminist associations of American witchcraft in the late 20^th century. Both also cover the diversity of the English-speaking witchcraft communities, complete with the connections among traditions provided by several strong personalities within the witchcraft movement. To these influences, we will add consideration of more purely animistic religious orientation that has emerged within ‘eclectic witchcraft’ drawing from many world cultural sources.

As we approach our reading, then, keep in mind the connections of ‘the god’, ‘the goddess’, and community as they have developed over the past 100 years. Much of the impetus for current witchcraft practices is deeply steeped in common British and American experience. I should recommend several literary and critical works that have guided actual practice or affirmed engagement with worlds of magic for many people. Minimally, they would include The White Goddess by Robert Graves, a quasi-folkloric and poetic homage to the goddess tradition, The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley, the children’s series The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis, His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy and surrounding writings of J. R. R. Tolkien. To these we might also add several children’s novels (especially the ‘time quartet’ that includes A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and Many Waters) by Madeleine L’Engle and the children’s novellas Juniper and Wise Child by religious biographer Monica Furlong. What these many diverse works share is a deep exploration of the idea of ‘magic’ in connection to both monotheism and the broader Western mythos.