The Place of Magic in the Intellectual History of Europe

by Торндайк Линн

To men of the past — how long ago does not at present matter — magic meant far more than the performance for their amusement of clever tricks, which however puzzling they knew well enough were based upon illusion and deception. There was a real magic for them.

This faith in the reality of magic was not, moreover, merely the outcome of men’s belief in the existence of evil spirits, in the power of those spirits to work changes in matter or to predict the future, and in man’s power to gain their services. We sometimes speak of magic and necromancy as if they were identical, and mediaeval writers often did the same thing, but such is not the case. If we but consider the meaning of the word “magic” when used as an adjective, we perceive that thus to restrict its scope as a noun is incorrect. What is a magic cloak, for instance? It is simply a cloak possessing properties which cloaks in general do not possess and which we are surprised to find in cloaks. Most cloaks keep us warm or improve our personal appearance; this cloak makes us invulnerable and invisible. A demon or a fairy may have endowed the cloak with these extraordinary qualities, but that is a secondary consideration. What makes the garment a magic cloak is the fact that it has such properties, no matter where or how it got them. Or what is a magic change? Is it merely a change wrought by spirits good or evil? By no means.

It is any change with characteristics and results which we do not expect nor usually see in changes. In short, magic is preternatural rather than supernatural.

Thus we find the existence of magic in the earliest period of human thought generally assumed by anthropologists, but some writers deny that man always has believed in supernatural beings. He first, they tell us, had a vague notion that by propitiating or by coercing nature he might secure for himself happiness; and that if anything external was to have power over the workings of the natural structure, it must be man, for both gods and God were yet unknown. Only gradually, they hold, through his belief in tree-spirits, through his devotion to plants or fetishes made sacred by their supposed efficacy in serving human wishes, perhaps, too, through his attitude toward human beings whose reputation for skill in magic finally led to deification, did man come to a belief in more or less divine beings and turn to them for the power and the happiness which in his savage and untutored impotency he had been unable to win by his own efforts.^[51] Then only would the performance of magic by the aid of supernatural beings commence.

There is another misleading idea which we should avoid. Fairy tales and romances picture magicians to us as few in number, adepts in a secret art. Instinctively, moreover, looking as we do upon magic as a mere delusion, we are prone to regard it as the creation of the popular imagination, and to believe that what magicians there were outside of the ordinary man’s imagination were a few imposters who took advantage of his fancies, or a few self-deceived dreamers whose minds such fancies had led astray. This is a superficial view. It does not explain how the ordinary man came to imagine the existence of magic. Magicians in the true sense were no mere imaginary order existent only in the minds of men, nor a profession of dreamers and imposters. Magic was not the outright invention of imagination; it was primitive man’s philosophy, it was his attitude toward nature. It was originally not the exercise of supposed innate, marvelous powers by a favored few nor a group of secret doctrines or practices known to but a few; it was a body of ideas held by men universally and which, during their savage state at least, they were forever trying to put into practice. Everybody was a magician.

To understand magic, then, we should consider this attitude of primitive man — I use the word primitive in no narrow sense — and should try to picture to ourselves what his attitude would be. It is a safe assumption that he would interpret the world about him according to his own sensations, feelings and motives. Whether he looked upon nature at large or in detail, he would in all probability regard it not as an inexorable machine run in accordance with universal and immutable laws, but as a being or world of beings much like himself — fickle, changing, capable of being influenced by inducements or deterred by threats, beneficent or hostile according as satisfied or offended by treatment received. To make life go as he wished, he must be able to please and propitiate or to coerce these forces outside himself.^[52] In this endeavor his faculty of association probably led him to conclude that things resembling each other or having any seeming connection must be related by strong bonds of sympathy and have power over each other. Since he had already attributed human characteristics to matter, he naturally now observed no distinction between the animate and the inanimate, the material and the spiritual. A wooden image might be used to affect the fate of a human being, or the utterance of alluring and terrifying sounds to produce change in unfeeling and unresponsive matter.

Moreover, as man observed the world about him, he would note many a phenomenon in nature which he could explain only by assuming strange and subtle influences. There was, for instance, the magnet, so different from other stones; the hot spring, so different from other waters; the action of electricity — still a mystery. Such things, too, as a calf with five legs, a dream, a sneeze, appealed to him as peculiar and striking, and perplexed him. He thought that they must have some important significance. His attempt to explain all such phenomena generally led him into magic.

Man often had to decide between two or more courses of action, apparently equally pleasing and advantageous or displeasing and disadvantageous. Should he turn to the right or to the left; should he begin his journey to-day or to-morrow? The thought probably came to him that one of these directions, one of these days, would in the end prove more advantageous than the other, though at present he could see no difference between them. One must be lucky, the other unlucky. This belief in lucky times, places and actions was magic. For such times, places and actions were magical as truly as the cloak that is unlike other cloaks or the change that differs from other changes.

Akin to man’s desire to discover what course of action would bring him good luck was the longing he doubtless had to know the future; a knowledge which would be as interesting as those tales of his ancestor’s doings in which he delighted, and of more practical use. As he had no difficulty in granting to matter spiritual qualities or in subjecting to trivial material influences mind and soul without power of resistance, so now he sought in the present sure signs of his own future. Such indications seemed to him to be found not only in dreams, which indeed had some connection with his personality, but also in such things as the flight of birds or the movements of the stars. He often did more than assign magic powers to the heavenly bodies; often he worshiped them as gods. His effort thus to learn the future from inadequate and irrelevant present phenomena was divination or magic.

These notions of primitive man do not exhaust the field of magic. As he became educated, he would extend the attribution of magic properties to such things as numbers and written characters or formulae. His original ideas might be elaborated.or refined. But already he accepted the principles upon which a belief in magic founds itself. These principles were evidently common property. Of course some men would come to surpass others in their knowledge of the supposed bonds of sympathy between different things, or of lucky objects, seasons and methods, of ways to coax and control natural forces, of the meaning of portents and of means to predict the future. In the progress of time the finer mysteries of the art might become the monopoly of a priesthood. But everybody believed in magic; everybody understood something about it.