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
Category: History
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
.
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.
The Bible as a colonial grimoire
As Christianity spread across the European colonies natives wondered whether the Bible was the occult source of power of the white colonizers. Amongst the peoples of parts of Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific, anthropologists have found a widespread notion that the white man deliberately withheld the full power of Christianity in order to keep them in a state of subjugation. This was not necessarily achieved by restricting literacy, but by deliberately withholding some of the true Bible and therefore the complete key to wisdom, knowledge, and consequently power. In the Caribbean today, for instance, the Bible is considered by some as an African divine text appropriated and controlled by Europeans. When asked why he accepted the Bible but not Catholicism, a worshipper of the Trinidadian spirit religion of Orisha explained, ‘The Bible came from Egypt; it was stolen by the Catholics who added and removed parts for their own purposes.’