Ronald Hutton on historical periods of European magic

European learned magic has passed through a number of distinct phases of development. It is suggested here that there were five of these. The first was the ancient, which provided most of the materials for those coming later: the consecrated circle within which some magicians worked, the importance attached to cardinal points of the compass, the concepts of elements (fire, water, air, and earth) and of elemental spirits, a belief in the existence of angels and demons, and use of ritual tools, amulets, spells, and invocations, the notion of spiritual correspondences within the natural world, the use of sacred geometry such as pentagrams and triangles, and the drawing of spirits or deities into human bodies, to fuse temporarily with the owners’ spirit or to occupy their forms.

The second was the medieval phase, which really began as an aspect of the twelfth-century Renaissance. It placed a new emphasis upon the importance of complex set rituals to gain power over spirits, collected in handbooks (‘grimoires’) which inspired something of the awe of sacred texts, and usually involving a combination of the circle, the quarters, tools, signs, and invocations. The detail of actions was all-important, with little concern shown for the quality of the practitioner… The third phase was the early modern one, which retained this medieval magic but drew upon the ancient hermetic texts to put new emphasis upon the figure of the person who worked it, the magus. He was seen as an individual who needed to be both spiritually mature and unusually learned, and thus the mental preparation of the operator of magic was now held to be as important as the operation itself…

The fourth phase was the Enlightenment one, in which the magi and grimoires were eclipsed by the proliferation of secret societies… Finally, there is the modern phase.

— Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

Trippy bagpipe music as a critical magical response

Once upon a time, Letcher was like many other neo-pagan folk musicians: a practicing druid who believed the mythos that his faith and music were authentic recoveries from an idyllic pagan era. He got involved in direct democracy protests and wrote songs about the green man of the woods—pagan songs for pagan people—about identifying as something outside the mainstream, tied to the past. But in the mid-1990s, he encountered Ronald Hutton, a professor of pre-Christian British religion and neo-paganism, at a druid camp in Wiltshire. Over the course of 40 minutes, Hutton demolished all the mythos Letcher believed in and pushed him back into academia. In grappling with his shattered beliefs in a new university environment, Letcher decided to hold onto the mythology, magic, and music of his druid folk protestor days as images, tools, and vessels, set to a different purpose and speaking to a much wider audience than just fellow neo-pagans.

This Guy Wants to Trip You Into a Parallel Reality Via Bagpipes | VICE | United States

Bureaucracy as a system of curses

For some indigenous Indians in southwest Colombia magia, which they define as deriving from books of conjurations that allow one to pact with the Devil, are considered to be an instrument of social control. The whites had brought magia with them, and as one Indian complained, ‘They use it to take our land.’ These perceptions were not only born of suspicions regarding Christian magic but were also an aspect of wider concerns about how books were being used as a means of enslavement. We see this expressed in a magic tradition found amongst the largely indigenous Quichua population of the town of Salasca, Ecuador. In the provincial capital of Ambato lies the seat of a ‘witch-saint’, Saint Gonzalo… who is believed to kill people through a book in which victims’ names are written…. The blancas (whites)… are the guardians of a large ‘witch book’. People pay them to include the names of their enemies, who the saint will then curse, or conversely to have their names removed. This is no legend, but a real money-making activity for the guardians, who have on at least one occasion been charged with adding names to the book to extort money.

… The witch book is no mock grimoire with occult signs and pictures of the Devil; it is a functional large notebook consisting of lined paper, not unlike those used for Civil Registry and Church record keeping. In other words, the archival function of books, which serve as a means of social control in an administrative sense, can also be used to subjugate through magical means.

— Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books

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The Kindly Brontosaurus: a spell for customer service

Jessica Winter at Slate describes a technique for dealing with customer service agents that has “hypnotic, even occult powers”: The Kindly Brontosaurus.

A practitioner, nay, an artist, of the Kindly Brontosaurus method would approach the [airline] gate agent as follows. You state your name and request. You make a clear and concise case. And then, after the gate agent informs you that your chances of making it onto this flight are on par with the possibility that a dinosaur will spontaneously reanimate and teach himself to fly an airplane, you nod empathically, say something like “Well, I’m sure we can find a way to work this out,” and step just to the side of the agent’s kiosk.

Here is where the Kindly Brontosaurus rears amiably into the frame. You must stand quietly and lean forward slightly, hands loosely clasped in a faintly prayerful arrangement. You will be in the gate agent’s peripheral vision—close enough that he can’t escape your presence, not so close that you’re crowding him—but you must keep your eyes fixed placidly on the agent’s face at all times. Assemble your features in an understanding, even beatific expression. Do not speak unless asked a question. Whenever the gate agent says anything, whether to you or other would-be passengers, you must nod empathically.

Continue as above until the gate agent gives you your seat number. The Kindly Brontosaurus always gets a seat number.

I am fascinated by what people use spells for, especially outside of spiritual traditions. One narrative about magick is that people used to use magick for all kinds of things, but now we have better tools and more power to control our lives without magickal means. We have medicine to heal injuries and diseases, we have technology to foretell the weather and communicate with distant people, and so on. I am suspicious that customer service and bureaucracy attract more than an average amount of magick spells in the contemporary world, because dealing with them is so disempowering and confusing and we have no superior technologies for battling them.

Astrology in science and business

In this episode of the Religious Studies Project podcast, Dr. Nick Campion discusses the history of western astrology. There is lots of fun and interesting stuff in there, but two bits stuck out to me.

Firstly, so many enlightenment scientists and modernist intellectuals were into astrology, theosophy, and the occult! The brief mentions of the shift from astrologies of fate and predestination to astrologies of spiritual development and personal evolution in enlightenment Europe make me want to read Campion’s history of astrology. I’m interested in what all kinds of people use divination for and how they understand it to work, and I am especially intrigued to know how it was conceived of by rationalist, materialist, reductionist natural philosophers.

Secondly, I was stunned by the direct lineage from Greek astrology, through Jung, into the personality type category systems that are so common in contemporary business culture. Recently at my hilarious yet rewarding corporate job (long story) I have been doing a bunch of Myers-Briggs and similar self-assessments and discussing them with other people as part of a training. The comparison we make most often is to astrology (i.e., you can find relevant descriptions of yourself in most of the categories, everyone has traits of various types in different ways), so I am both surprised and not to learn of this heritage.

Campion’s idea that astrology fills a need for personalized psychology and meaning in an increasingly impersonal world seems astute, and corporate workers are surely faced with depersonalizing forces. (I am regularly referred to as “a resource” instead of a person, to my face.) Perhaps the endless personality quizzes do some work to make people feel human and individual again; perhaps they are just compelling under the circumstances.

Tanya Luhrmann on prayer as emotional management

Tanya Luhrmann, a professor of anthropology at Stanford, presents her work on prayer as a set of meta-cognitive practices that have health benefits. This is the first time I can remember getting ideas for magick and mindfulness practices from contemporary American evangelical Christianity.

Dr. Luhrmann briefly discusses some ways of understanding common prayer activities as emotional management techniques:

  • The practice of offering gratitude during pain and suffering as a form of cognitive behavioural therapy
  • Confessing sins as a way of verbalizing experience to gain a sense of control, and setting small, manageable goals
  • Asking for help as “externalizing hope”, in a similar sense as many placebo medical treatments

She then goes into detail about another prayer practice, adoration of God and experience of God as a real presence. Parts of this seem similar to other ways of personifying spontaneous thoughts, and I enjoyed the descriptions of activities people use to learn to talk to God. Luhrmann emphasizes that feeling God as a personal presence requires learning (and even play) as well as constant work, which I found reassuring given how much effort I put into my own (admittedly very different) practices for meeting presences in my mind.

The panel responses at the end are solid as well, but as usual I skipped out after the first “this is more of a comment than a question” from the audience.

Meaning response syndromes

“Stendhal syndrome, hyperkulturemia, or Florence syndrome is a psychosomatic disorder that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to an experience of great personal significance, particularly viewing art.”

“Jerusalem syndrome is a group of mental phenomena involving the presence of either religiously themed obsessive ideas, delusions or other psychosis-like experiences that are triggered by a visit to the city of Jerusalem.”

“Paris syndrome is a transient psychological disorder exhibited by some individuals visiting or vacationing in Paris or elsewhere in Western Europe. It is characterized by a number of psychiatric symptoms such as acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution, derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, and also psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating, and others.”

Alan Moore gives a definition of magic

I suppose the thing with magic is that a lot of it is about writing anyway. “To cast a spell.” That’s a fancy way of saying spelling. Grimoire, the big book of magical secrets. That’s a French way of saying ‘grammar.’ It’s all about language and writing. It’s all about incantation. It’s all about all these things. And so magic, really, it turns out to just be a continuation of the stuff I’ve been doing anyway. Using certain arrangements of words or images to affect people’s consciousness.

— Alan Moore, interviewed by Stewart Lee