For a variety of reasons, scholars of religions no longer find it useful to compare religion and magic. According to the worst misconception, magic compels natural or supernatural forces to obey human will, whereas religion acts by supplication to a god who may or may not respond. With the rise of symbolical interpretations of magic, this distinction has stopped making sense. If the magical act is a form of expressive speech, which is not compelling but meaningful, then magic and religion become two types of one phenomenon: a symbolic rationality in relation to the sacred. Due to the fact that the magical experience can exist anywhere—a dentist's office as much as a hunting expedition—it is the subjective aspect of magic that should interest us most. Magical “empathy” can become the new subject of inquiry, the extension of the magical experience into daily life. The study of magic must combine the history of embodied experience—the ground of interrelatedness—and its articulation in concrete cultural forms.

In a previous article published in this journal, I discussed the relation between the neurological system and some culturally prescribed forms of self-inflicted pain. I showed that the way humans experience and communicate pain depends on the cybernetic features of the peripheral and central nervous system. The body-self, our sense of coherent and embodied agency, was also discussed in its relation to neural function—Ronald Melzack's “neurosignature.” These topics traced a basic epistemology of self-inflicted pain. I showed that an intentional manipulation of systemic neural features could result in states of “self-transcendence,” or effacement, to which many mystics have aspired. These dynamics take place beneath the level of consciousness. They constitute a neuropsychology. But what happens at the conscious level, in the awareness of the self-mutilator? How do the neurological processes translate into decisions to hurt oneself, and what are the consequences of such pain? These questions are the subject of the present work. The discussion now moves to the psychological level of the experience of pain, but it builds carefully on the neurocybernetics of the previous article. There will be no deus ex machina Self who becomes magically reborn through the ordeals of pain. For reasons that will become explicit shortly, I will adhere to the strict rules of phenomenology that regulated the first article. The subject who undergoes pain will only be discussed as an expansion of the body-self.

No abstract

This book offers a new approach towards the definition and understanding of magic. Basing the analysis in the Indian city of Banaras, where magic is a familiar part of everyday life, it reviews the major theories that have explained (or explained away) magic over the last century. It argues that all of these theories leave out something critical, namely what it calls “magical consciousness”—a special state of awareness of magicians and their clients which, though extraordinary, is also perfectly natural.

Sociological and symbolical interpreters of magic singlemindedly ignore the occult questions that magic raises. The social sciences simply have no methods for inspecting extraordinary causal claims, which they regard as superfluous to the real purpose of magic. Any effort to verify or falsify occult claims would simply sidetrack the researcher from the proper manner of understanding magical phenomena. Hard scientists, who like to tinker with ideas, are more likely to take the boasts of magicians literally, if only for the sake of exposing their fakery. Recently, a new trend in medical and physical research has begun to regard magic both literally and sympathetically as an area worthy of serious study. This chapter looks at a few representative ideas and asks whether such new science projects explain magic, or explain it away. It examines the relatively new field of medical anthropology, and more specifically medical ecology, magical healing and folk healing, and psychoneuroimmunology.