Magic

Foreword
Magical Thinking/Thinking the Magical

The shadow of developmental thought hangs heavy over the field (or fields?) of magic. Magical thinking was something to eliminate, a survival of an earlier, primitive mode of thought to Edward Tylor, Oxford University’s first anthropologist, in his Primitive Culture (1871). In nineteenth-century developmental thought ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny; that is, the individual restages the passage of the species from earliest to latest, from simple to complex and so from primitive magical to modern rational thought. This idea underpins everything from J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890–1902), that vast synthesis of the place of magic in primitive culture, to Sigmund Freud’s new-fangled psychoanalysis, where the child’s fantasy of omnipotence and control over the world is a form of magical thinking to which the rational adult might fall back at any moment. In ‘The Uncanny’ Freud wrote: ‘All supposedly educated people have ceased to believe that the dead can become visible as spirits’, yet it took only one uncanny moment to slide back aeons and find ‘almost all of us think as savages do on this topic’.¹

The developmental disparagement of magic continues long into the twentieth century. It haunts Weber’s disenchantment thesis in ‘Science as a Vocation’. It is critical to Jean Piaget’s model in The Child’s Conception of the World (1929), which sees magical misconceptions of cause and effect universally ironed out by the age of 9 or 10, leaving belief in magic as intrinsically childish. Some of Theodor Adorno’s funniest explosions of bad-temper are about ‘the metaphysic of dunces’ he ascribes for all modes of occult theory and practice.² The logic ←ix | x→of ideological demystification in this mode of Marxian critique shares much with the spirit of Weber’s Entzauberung der Welt, which Thibaut Rioult early on in this books suggests is best translated as ‘the demagification of the world’. Modernity is meant to steadily erase magical thinking, and academia has long aligned with this project.

One of the pleasures of this collection is the ambition to reassess the compacted negative associations of magical thinking, and instead reanimate different ways of apprehending magic: to rethink the magical. This is done with gloriously eclectic verve in chapters that move fast from Byzantine amulets to Indian rope tricks, the Harry Potter franchise, Thai cinema, or the memoirs of Robert-Houdin. Katharina Rein’s collection is thus part of a wider project to interrogate the limits of the disenchantment thesis to explore instead a more complex rhythm in modernity where disenchantment is always accompanied by a symbiotic counter-effect of re-enchantment. Sources here might range from Charles Taylor’s interrogation of secularization in his magnum opus, A Secular Age to Alex Owen’s resituating of occult thought not as a retreat or evasion of modernity, but as thoroughly entangled with it in her Place of Enchantment.³ This has been central to cultural and literary scholars such as Marina Warner, from her Inner Eye catalogue to her recent works, Stranger Magic and Forms of Enchantment, or the work of Gauri Viswanathan or Joshua Landy and Michael Saler.⁴ And an equivalent body of work has come out of the academic network The European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism, which emerges from the study of the occult and hermetic traditions, syncretic theology and New Religious Movements.⁵ The attempt to rethink the revival ←x | xi→of the supernatural and the occult in the nineteenth century has long abandoned the urge to decode or demystify spiritualism or psychical research as the result of mistake, illusion or self-delusion and instead to explore them in more sympathetic frameworks derived from the history of science, whether as ‘fringe sciences’, or (in Michel Foucault’s term) ‘subjugated knowledges’ that have been edged out of orthodoxy but still have historical value in evidencing the modalities by which institutional discourses police legitimacy. The work of Pamela Thurschwell or Christine Ferguson or Richard Noakes are exemplary here.⁶

In the same vein, the history of technology or media archaeology has taken its steer from Arthur C. Clarke’s famous ‘Third Law’ that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’.⁷ In the early years of the Second Industrial Revolution, the electronic one, nineteenth-century men of science and engineers produced a stream of seemingly magical devices that collapsed space and time. They were intrinsically intertwined with magical thinking, not just in popular wonderment, but by the engineers themselves. One of the earliest spiritualist newspapers was called the Spiritual Telegraph; Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant Thomas Watson, who received the first telephone call, was also a psychic medium, who listened to the crackles on the line for messages from the dead; the gramophone was built to capture and preserve the voice after death; the eminent physicist Oliver Lodge detected invisible ‘ethereal’ waves (soon after named for Heinrich Hertz) in the midst of experiments to determine the physics underpinning telepathy, making radio waves intrinsically uncanny. A host of studies over the last twenty years have examined ‘haunted media’, and both Simon During and Simone Natale have ←xi | xii→sought to explicate the media technologies intertwined with the golden age of performance magic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.⁸

There is also a lot of recent work on the pan-European modernist movement and its entanglements with the occult. Christopher Partridge’s two-volume study, The Re-Enchantment of the West has brought this almost up to date.⁹ Partridge introduced the expansive concept of ‘occulture’ to attest to the blurring of many cultural arenas in this hybrid and multi-disciplinary field.

It’s also important to acknowledge that psychologists have explicitly tackled the negative conceptualization of magical thinking as a mode solely of cognitive error. In several studies at the turn of the millennium, magical thinking was reconceived more sympathetically as a potentially highly adaptive mode, a useful cognitive frame that can order the world meaningfully in times of change or stress. Freud and Piaget’s developmental models were displaced here for much more complex and nuanced conceptions.¹⁰←xii | xiii→

However, being on the scuffed edge of a magic circle, as any apprentice magus or mere consumer of modern horror films could tell you, is not always the safest place to be. Demonic forces swirl there. I think it is quite right to insist that the blurred space of magic in modernity falls into the curious realm of disavowal – that conflicted position that both knows magic is trick or illusion yet harbours that hesitancy in which a little voice whispers … but what if, all the same, it was true? Disavowal explains how we can believe and disbelieve simultaneously, that ‘half-belief’ invoked by the sociologist Colin Campbell.¹¹ This allows a form of enchantment to survive within a routinized and disenchanted world; indeed, it allows us to explain how a fervent desire of dogged materialists to stamp on superstition or religious belief as ‘false’ actively produces whole cultures of belief in a symbiotic counter-reaction and imbues them with the glamour of refusal or resistance.

In the recent Wellcome Trust exhibition in London, The Spectacle of Illusion, the thrust was to expose the psychological conditions that create ‘magical’ (mis)perceptions, but there was also a sympathetic understanding of the power of illusion that holds us enchanted nevertheless.¹² To navigate these tricky tides requires sophisticated models for rethinking the magical that neither debunk with a cruel materialist pleasure nor effectively erase the distinction between true and false in the rush to gloss subjugated knowledge as inherently subversive. Both tactics seem important to avoid in the twenty-first century, where magical thinking is at its most intense in political conspiracy theories fostered by new digital technologies that see occulted forces everywhere, ←xiii | xiv→conjure up Satanic enemies, render all systems of thought equivalent and do their damnedest to undercut rational democratic discourse. Re-thinking the magical does not have to contribute to this collapse. Instead, as the contributions to this collection display across a bewildering array of cultural locations suggest, there are many productive ways to unpick the knot that continues to bind modernity and magic together.