Magic (paranormal)

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Magic, sometimes known as sorcery, is a conceptual system that asserts human ability to control the natural world (including events, objects, people, and physical phenomena) through mystical, paranormal or supernatural means. The term can also refer to the practices employed by a person asserting this influence, and to beliefs that explain various events and phenomena in such terms. In many cultures the concept of magic is under pressure from, and in competition with, scientific and religious conceptual systems. This is particularly the case in the Christian West and the Muslim Middle East where the practice of magic is generally regarded as blasphemous or forbidden by orthodox leadership.

History

Further information: History of astrology and History of religion

Classical antiquity

Main article: Magic in the Greco-Roman world

Hecate, the ancient Greek goddess of magic.

The prototypical "magicians" were a class of priests, the Magi of Zoroastrianism, and their reputation together with that of Ancient Egypt shaped the hermeticism of Hellenistic religion.^{[citation needed]} The Greek mystery religions had strongly magical components, and in Egypt, a large number of magical papyri, in Greek, Coptic, and Demotic, have been recovered. These sources contain early instances of much of the magical lore that later became part of Western cultural expectations about the practice of magic, especially ceremonial magic.^{[citation needed]} They contain early instances of:

• the use of "magic words" said to have the power to command spirits;
• the use of wands and other ritual tools;
• the use of a magic circle to defend the magician against the spirits he is invoking or evoking; and
• the use of mysterious symbols or sigils thought useful to invoke or evoke spirits.^[1]

The use of spirit mediums is also documented in these texts; many of the spells call for a child to be brought to the magic circle to act as a conduit for messages from the spirits.^{[citation needed]} The time of the Emperor Julian of Rome, marked by a reaction against the influence of Christianity, saw a revival of magical practices associated with neo-Platonism under the guise of theurgy.

Theories of magic

Anthropological and psychological origins

Further information: Myth and ritual

The belief that one can influence supernatural powers, by prayer, sacrifice or invocation goes back to prehistoric religion, and is consequently present from the earliest records of a cultic nature, including the Egyptian pyramid texts and the Indian Vedas, among which the Atharvaveda in particular addresses magic in the classical sense, and the position of the Vedic Brahmins, like that of any ancient priesthood, can be compared to that of magicians.^[8]

James George Frazer believed that magic was a fallacious system and asserted that magical observations are the result of an internal dysfunction: "Men mistook the order of their ideas for the order of nature, and hence imagined that the control which they have, or seem to have, over their thoughts, permitted them to exercise a corresponding control over things."^[9]

Others, such as N. W. Thomas^[10] and Sigmund Freud have rejected this explanation. Freud explains that "the associated theory of magic merely explains the paths along which magic proceeds; it does not explain its true essence, namely the misunderstanding which leads it to replace the laws of nature by psychological ones".^[11] Freud emphasizes that what led primitive men to come up with magic is the power of wishes: "His wishes are accompanied by a motor impulse, the will, which is later destined to alter the whole face of the earth in order to satisfy his wishes. This motor impulse is at first employed to give a representation of the satisfying situation in such a way that it becomes possible to experience the satisfaction by means of what might be described as motor hallucinations. This kind of representation of a satisfied wish is quite comparable to children's play, which succeeds their earlier purely sensory technique of satisfaction. [...] As time goes on, the psychological accent shifts from the motives for the magical act on to the measures by which it is carried out—that is, on to the act itself. [...] It thus comes to appear as though it is the magical act itself which, owing to its similarity with the desired result, alone determines the occurrence of that result."^[1