We have also repeatedly seen magic itself becoming more scientific or pseudo-scientific in method and appearance. This is well illustrated by the fact that in our authors of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries astrology is the most widespread, as it is the most pseudo-scientific of any variety of the magic arts. Indeed, it has ceased to be merely one method of divination and claims to study and disclose the universal law of nature in the rule of the stars, by which every fact in nature and every occult influence in magic may be explained. If this doctrine were true, all other sciences and magic arts would be reduced to branches of the supreme science and art of astronomy or astrology. But it is not true, and hence I prefer to classify astrology as a magic art along with other arts of divination. And this brings us back to the question of the definition of magic.
Definition of magic.
The results of this investigation seem to me to have justified the selection of the word, “magic,” as a generic term to include all superstitious arts and occult sciences, and to designate a great primary division or phase of human thought and activity. Magic is subordinate to no other superstition or occult art; they are more often regarded as subdivisions of it. The attempts of some of our authors to distinguish between magic and astrology, or magic and divination, or good and bad magic, or natural magic and sorcery, or witchcraft and counter-magic, have all been exceedingly illogical and unconvincing. Magic appears, in our period at least, as a way of looking at the world which is reflected in a human art or group of arts employing varied materials in varied rites, often fantastic, to work a great variety of marvelous results, which offer man a release from his physical, social, and intellectual limitations, not by the imaginative and sentimental methods of music, melodrama, fiction, and romance, or by religious experience or asceticism, but by operations supposed to be efficacious here in the world of external reality. Some writers, chiefly theologians, lay great stress on resort to spirits in magic, some upon the influence of the heavens, some on both these forces, which yet others almost identify; but, except as theological dogma insists upon the demoniacal character of magic, or as astrological doctrine insists on the rule of the stars, it cannot be said that spirits or stars are thought of as always necessary in magic. The sine qua non seems to be a human operator, materials, rites, and an aim that borders on the impossible, either in itself, such as predicting the future or curing incurable diseases or becoming invisible, or in relation to the apparently inadequate means employed.
Difficulty of reducing magic to one principle.
In our authors it has been difficult to account for the particular occult properties attributed to things and acts, or to detect any one underlying principle, such as sympathy, symbolism, imitation, contagion, resemblance, or association, guiding the selection of materials and rites for magic. This is either because there never was such a principle, and magic from the start was empirical and complex, or because we deal with a late stage in its development, when the superstitions of different peoples have coalesced, when the peculiar customs of folk-lore have become confused with those of science and religion, after the primitive methods of magic have been artificially over-elaborated, and after many usages have become gradually corrupted and their original meaning has been forgotten. Whether magic is good or evil, true or false, is with our authors a matter of opinion, in which the majority hold it to be true but evil. Every shade of opinion is represented, however; but furthermore few can avoid a wholesome feeling that there is something false about magic somewhere. This sounds the signal, as it were, for magic’s doom.
Human fondness for the fallacious.
However, I suspect that it is not so much that magic has been shown to be false, as it is that men have come to set a greater value upon truth, that accounts for magic’s decline. As I survey the practice and “beliefs” of primitive and savage tribes or the columns of modern newspapers and much of modern literature, I become convinced that men have a natural tendency to assert, and craving to hear the sensational, exaggerated, and impossible, and to fly in the face both of reason and experience. People take pleasure in affirming the extravagant and in believing the incredible, in saying that they have seen or done what no one else has seen or done. Cows, for instance, seldom or never burst, as everyone knows perfectly well, primitive man probably better than civilized; that is what makes it interesting to mention circumstances under which they will burst. “Lord, I believe, help Thou my unbelief,” is a good picture of the mental attitude supporting much of magic, which may be not so much a matter of belief as of make-believe.
Utility is not magic’s strongest appeal.
To turn from “belief” to practice, I suspect that much magic is done from want of anything better or else to do, rather than from complete conviction of its efficacy. When Pamphile in the pages of Apuleius anointed herself from top to toe in order to turn into an owl, it was because this was the best way of which she could think to enable herself to fly far, far away. But had an airplane been at hand, I fancy she would have had more confidence in it for purposes of flight. Inventions in artificial lighting have probably done more than sermons, arguments, and laws to dispel the works of darkness with which magicians whiled away the night-time. Had electric light been invented in Pamphile’s age, she would probably have spent her evenings in jazz or at a movie. It was probably not during the hunting season that cave-men drew their magic pictures of wild boars and bulls. The telepathy practiced by savages in war and hunting[3012] is perhaps less from firm faith in its potency than because the women left at home want to do something and to share somehow in the crucial operations, and furthermore are expected “to do their bit” by the men in the field. Perhaps such telepathic magic had almost as great actual efficacy toward its end as some of the desperate expedients, prompted more by patriotic emotion than discreet calculation, which were adopted to help “win the war” or to “maintain morale” by those who stayed at home during the recent great conflict. I should doubt if most men ever believed that rain falls only as a result of magic. It seems more likely that they are aware that the rain will come some time, and hence are ready to do almost anything which may hurry it up or relieve their own feelings and inaction in the meantime. As no modern scientist has brought to their attention any more efficacious method of altering the weather, they continue their time-honored rite regardless of our jeers. It does as well as any. But where some prehistoric genius introduced artificial irrigation, rainmaking magic probably promptly declined in popularity.
The spirit of magic is not the scientific spirit.