Quotes

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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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

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

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.’

— Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books