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
Tag: books
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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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.
Placebos as “meaning responses”
We define the meaning response as the physiologic or psychological effects of meaning in the origins or treatment of illness; meaning responses elicited after the use of inert or sham treatment can be called the “placebo effect” when they are desirable and the “nocebo effect” when they are undesirable…
Insofar as medicine is meaningful, it can affect patients, and it can affect the outcome of treatment. Most elements of medicine are meaningful, even if practitioners do not intend them to be so. The physician’s costume (the white coat with stethoscope hanging out of the pocket), manner (enthusiastic or not), style (therapeutic or experimental), and language are all meaningful and can be shown to affect the outcome; indeed, we argue that both diagnosis and prognosis can be important forms of treatment.
— Daniel E. Moerman and Wayne B. Jonas, Deconstructing the Placebo Effect and Finding the Meaning Response, The Placebo: A Reader
Ted Kaptchuk on “legitimate healing”
Besides clinical and scientific value, the question of enhanced placebo effects raises complex ethical questions concerning what is “legitimate” healing. What should determine appropriate healing, a patient’s improvement from his or her own baseline (clinical significance) or relative improvement compared with a placebo (fastidious efficacy)? As one philosopher of medicine has asked, are results less important than method? Both performative and fastidious efficacy can be measured. Which measurement represents universal science? Which measurement embodies cultural judgment on what is “correct” healing? Are the concerns of the physician identical to those of the patient? Is denying patients with nonspecific back pain treatment with a sham machine an ethical judgment or a scientific judgment? Should a patient with chronic neck pain who cannot take diazepam because of unacceptable side effects be denied acupuncture that may have an “enhanced placebo effect” because such an effect is “bogus”? Who should decide?
— Ted Kaptchuk, The Placebo Effect in Alternative Medicine: Can the Performance of a Healing Ritual Have Clinical Significance?, The Placebo: A Reader
A ritual template from sex magic
Perhaps strangely, the rituals I have found most accessible and least scary are sex rituals. Partly because I’ve only done them with people I’m very close with, and partly because sex rituals have a big advantage if you want to find rituals that don’t feel like going through superstitious motions. Your body will let you know whether your ritual for creating sexual connection and ecstasy is powerful or not.
Longtime sex activist Barbara Carrellas, in her book Urban Tantra (byoa, as always), gives a series of steps and associated intentions for sex rituals that I have been applying to sex for almost ten years:
- Set the stage (to prepare the space)
- Chill out (to relax and get present)
- Warm up (to engage your body)
- Come together (to get connected)
- Rock and roll (to enjoy some ecstatic activities)
- Afterglow (to cool down and bask)
I really appreciate the order of stages 1-4: space, mind, body, connections. They build on each other in practical as well as symbolic ways.
Divination as strategic observation
Auguries and sacrifice: crude tools of toothless practitioners. Or so her mother said, even as she’d rehearsed Hild in every variation. But she said, over and over, there was no power like a sharp and subtle mind weaving others’ hopes and fears and hungers into a dream they wanted to hear. Always know what they want to hear– not just what everyone knew they wanted to hear but what they didn’t even dare name to themselves. Show them the pattern. Give them permission to do what they wanted all along.
Hild is Nicola Griffith’s historical novel about the childhood of St. Hilda of Whitby, and it goes deep into how Hild(a) could have become what she was: an advisor to kings. In the 600s, advising a king mostly looked like fortunetelling and making wishes come true, so this is in a lot of ways a non-supernatural story about a very successful witch.
The book presents divination as a material skill. Rather than contacting the spirit world, Hild learns to read things that other people can’t. Why the birds are nesting low in the trees, what makes someone stand straighter, how wealth is going to shift, or, more literally, gossip in foreign languages, and what it all reveals about opportunities, motives, and risks. It reminded me of Dune or Sherlock Holmes, from the perspective of a girl. Obviously I love this– forest whispering and social intuition are the kind of witch skills I want to have.
Personification of the unconscious
Perhaps the subconscious of the Roman soldiers [, who had seen a vision of the god Pan showing them a safe place to cross a river,] was perfectly capable of making lightning calculations as to the river’s depth and the speed of its current, but was unable to pass it to their conscious minds in the direct manner that modern brains employ. Could it be that the visions of gods or supernatural figures that populate our histories are projections, messages from an unconscious that was at the time unable to communicate in any other way?
— Alan Moore, From Hell (back matter)
I like to think about Alan Moore’s projection idea when I work with visualizations and self-guided meditations. Could it be that apparitions are a pretty good way to talk to your own subconscious?
The first visualization I learned, and still the main thing I do, is to ask to meet a particular character (a dream teacher, a life coach, a friend) and then ask that character questions. At first, all I could do was act out the scenes with my usual conscious mind, but with practice I am much more able to wait quietly until these figures take their own forms, and give me sometimes surprising answers. It feels more and more like asking my unconscious mind to meet up for a chat, and more and more like a mindfulness exercise where my task is to let my conscious mind get still.
The deepest insight I can currently get from these dream figures is on the level of “what should I ask you?” or “why am I anxious?”. In the beginning the answers were often things I knew consciously but didn’t want to admit. These days the answers are more opaque and strange, more like a dream. I am curious whether I could practice enough to get (correct) answers to questions like “where did I forget my keys?” or “is my body healthy?”– things I might know on some level, but can’t think of in my conscious mind. It occurs to me that when I ask to meet someone in a visualization, I should try asking for my unconscious mind itself.
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.’
Two spells for burning buildings
A good spell makes new things possible. Years ago I saved this quote from Stone Butch Blues. It is the genderqueer protagonist’s reaction to reading Women’s Studies books.
I felt as though I was rushing into a burning building to rescue the ideas I needed in my own life.
That line made it easy to explain that a book can be worthwhile and problematic at the same time, provided you have a mission. It made it possible to see reading terrible books with a critical eye as heroic instead of embarrassing. It’s a good spell for someone like me who borrows a lot of books from the 000-200 section of the library, and at the same time has enough science background to question using quantum physics to explain serendipity and enough political analysis to see random dreamcatcher cover art as racist.
If that is too metaphorical, here is a short and direct motto from a vanished blog I used to love. I use this as a disclaimer all the time. It’s a spell that can transform a sketchy text into a resource, that can invoke a bigger context and invite all of someone’s history and knowledge into an encounter. I predict this will be a good spell for most things I post here.
Bring your own analysis.