Occult Mind , livre ebook

The Occult Mind
MAGIC IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
CHRISTOPHER I. LEHRICH

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
ITHACA AND LONDON
For Sarah, who puts magic in my life
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Preface
1 Ægypt
2 The Ley of the Land
3 The Theater of Hieroglyphs
4 The Magic Museum
5 Tarocco and Fugue
6 De(mon)construction
Notes
Bibliography
ILLUSTRATIONS
1 The main hall of the museum at the Collegio Romano
2 Hieroglyphs and their alphabetic derivations
3 Egyptian hieroglyphics translated by Athanasius Kircher
4 Fanciful origins of Chinese characters
5 Occult chains linking the sciences
6 Classification from the musical ennead scale
7 Kircher’s music-making ark
8 The Egyptian labyrinth
9 Tarot card of the Hermit, c. 1690
10 Tarot card of the Hermit, c. 1910
PREFACE
Modern academe does not recognize a discipline devoted to the analytical study of occult, magical, or esoteric traditions. Work in these areas, though on the increase, remains hampered by various methodological and political blinders. The primary difficulty is simply explained: work on magic is tightly constrained by the conventions of the disciplines in which it is locally formulated. Early modern magic, a preoccupation of the present work, receives treatment within the narrow limits of intellectual history and the history of science. Most books advert to normative modes of evidence, analysis, and interpretation in those historical fields. Sociological and anthropological studies similarly present themselves in traditional disciplinary styles. And some important potential contributors, notably philosophers, have not as yet seen a reason to join the conversation.
Academic scholars working on magic have often been strikingly anxious to situate themselves indisputably within a conventional disciplinary framework, as though thereby to ward off the lingering taint of an object of study still thought disreputable if not outright mad. Many have encountered hostility, or amused disdain, from colleagues in more accepted fields. Thus it is no surprise that scholars of magic bend over backward to demonstrate just how “straight” they are.
But it should no longer be necessary to defend studies of magic, given the long line of distinguished predecessors in several disciplines. In the history of ideas, Eugenio Garin, Carlo Ginzburg, Paolo Rossi, D. P. Walker, and Frances Yates laid an eminently reputable foundation on which others have built. In the history of science, Brian Copenhaver, Allen Debus, Walter Pagel, David Pingree, and many others have legitimated previously disdained materials as essential to understanding the foundations of science. In anthropology, surely the name of Claude Lévi-Strauss by itself grants sufficient legitimacy, whatever one thinks of his conclusions, to say nothing of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Stanley Tambiah, and Robin Horton. In the history of religions, Jonathan Z. Smith has continually grappled with magic, as have in different ways and areas Hans Dieter Betz, Christopher Faraone, Fritz Graf, Moshe Idel, and Joseph Needleman. One could continue such lists endlessly. Why then the desire—or need—to apologize?
The peculiar insecurity of scholars of magic has further prompted a failure to read across disciplines, or at least to do so overtly. Classicists do not cite anthropology, historians of science do not cite comparative religious studies, and vice versa. The exceptions are few and far enough between to prove the rule, and rarely developed on a broad basis; Tambiah’s interesting look at Yates’s work in Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality serves more as a prolegomenon to a wider-framed anthropology than as an independent interrogation of magic.
One explanation lies in the difficulty of writing on an interdisciplinary basis. However fashionable the notion of interdisciplinarity, scholarship normally rests on narrow foundations and reaches outward for occasional inspiration. A work by and for historians must satisfy their criteria of evidence and argumentation, and if it draws on anthropology it need not by this token take entirely on board the disciplinary context of the ideas borrowed. Thus in the last few decades we have seen the rise of self-consciously theoretical history, which as a rule borrows notions from theorists of one sort or another and deploys them as tools to extend fairly traditional historical scholarship.
I do not dismiss the value of such works, in the study of magic or elsewhere, but one often finds problematic assumptions embedded therein, assumptions at odds with many of the theories employed. In particular, such work presumes a clear and distinct division between data and theory, primary and secondary source. One takes for granted that a Foucaultian study of sixteenth-century German witch trials uses Foucault as a lens through which to look at German data. But Foucault, like most poststructural theorists, insisted on the intrinsic invalidity of such a procedure: the methods and theories must be part and parcel of the analytical object, because the object is constituted by the scholar, not simply “there” to be studied.
To take seriously the theoretical developments of the last fifty years requires that such easy divisions be challenged, and furthermore that the challenge occur in the doing and not only in the abstract. Theoretically informed history must do theory as much as it does history, and it must at least consider the possibility that one might not always be able to tell the difference.
The truly interdisciplinary theoretical scholarship required for magic would, if formulated in the ordinary way, tend to make itself an artifact of no discipline—and furthermore unreadable. A genuine merger between history and anthropology, for example, would need to legitimate itself in the evidentiary and discursive modes of each discipline and would have to advance critically within both sets of questions and concerns. One book must do the work of two and also strive toward some further synthesis not normally requisite. If the number of disciplines at stake is large, as with the study of magic, even a single article soon expands to epic proportions.
The present book works somewhat differently. I have striven to include sufficient detail, from whatever discipline or area, to make the arguments comprehensible and allow purchase for critical engagement. To accomplish this, the chapters build on one another, both argumentatively and thematically: this is not a series of independent essays. In thus moving from start to finish, I try to provide enough data to elucidate my various forms of evidence. But the purely defensive gesture of disciplinary self-positioning is pared to the bone.
In a previous work, I attempted a first gesture toward the comparative theoretical methods employed here, focused on a close reading of a single major work in the history of magic; I also worked to constitute a dialogue between magical thought and modern theories. The present book, though it makes a similar gesture, has higher stakes and needs a larger array of materials, and as such the explicit documentation must be slimmer to prevent utter tedium. I have therefore provided extensive notes as a partial solution.
In composing this book as something of a preliminary to an interdisciplinary field as yet improperly constituted (or not at all), I have wished not to exclude those new to the field, or to early modern studies, or to various modes of theory. For this reason, I deliberately focus on works available in modern English editions. Where I draw on other languages, I downplay this in the text. I have tried, where possible, to suppress jargon and technical language—magical or theoretical—by simple avoidance or by defining terms where necessary and using them consistently.
Nevertheless, it must be said that this book makes some peculiar demands. Because I can have no knowledge of readers’ prior familiarity with any of the various areas examined, I must on the one hand summarize everything and on the other not do so at length. I hope the readership is composed significantly of those not specializing in the history of magic, and I have endeavored not to mystify them, but it must be allowed that the nature of evidence and argumentation here cannot fully satisfy the disciplinary expectations of every reader. Thus I ask the reader to imagine this book as a product of a discipline that could exist but does not. For that reason it is only to be expected that its analytical conventions will be somewhat unfamiliar.
On the other hand, I hope that this book will act as a preliminary to an interdisciplinary field of magic. A disciplinary formation is, I believe, impractical, but more to the point would foreclose a great deal of positive dialogical engagement among disciplines. Unfortunately, this is the direction currently taken by major voices in the study of magic (esotericism, occultism, etc.): though such is by no means their intent, these scholars move by constructing a narrowly delimited discipline to shut off collaboration and criticism from the “outside.”
I hope that scholars whose primary interest is not magic will be led to investigate some of its claims—and mine. I hope other scholars who do work on magic will be encouraged to look seriously at the thin ice upon which we skate. And I hope that those who have felt constrained by a need to validate themselves and their work before the eyes of hostile or simply incredulous colleagues will find here some rudiments of a position from which to laugh back.
I should like to acknowledge Aleister Crowley’s book Magick in Theory and Practice, which provided the subtitle for the present book. Although I have ultimately devoted minimal space to his thought, I have borrowed an epigraph for chapter 6 in token appreciation.
Although every work of scholarship incurs debts, of friendship, assistance, and intellectual stimulus, the wide-rangi