Magic

Magic is the cultural real mythological application and are the supernatural powers of beliefs, rituals or actions employed in the looked that they can subdue or most wonderful natural or best original legendary beings and forces. It is a category into which have been placed various beliefs and practices sometimes considered separate from both religion, arts and science. understood as an occult art or science, is the belief and practices that seek to produce the supernatural powers and the very fine results through rituals, spells and invocations.

Magic and spells are really the recurring elements that can usually be subject to the most curious superstitions because it always really has supernatural powers and mythological systems.

In modern age, classic age and Neopagan religions, many self-described magicians and sorcerer/sorceress regularly practice the magic; defining magic as a technique for bringing about change in the physical world through the force of one's will. This definition was popularised by Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), an influential British occultist, and since that time other religions (e.g. Wicca) and magical systems (e.g. chaos magic) have adopted it.

Magical thinking or magical knowledge consists of a way of reaching conclusions, based on informal, erroneous or unjustified and often supernatural assumptions, which generates opinions or ideas lacking robust empirical foundation. It basically consists of attributing an effect to a specific event, without a verifiable cause-effect relationship between them. This is, for example, what happens with superstition, religion and various popular beliefs.

In a more technical sense, it can be described as a form of reasoning that consists of using the logic of mental operations on external reality to explain the operation of the latter. In this way, magical thinking projects the properties of psychological experience (purpose or intention, for example) onto biological or inert reality. Magical thinking can also be considered the transfer of concepts derived from biological observation to the way inanimate nature operates.1

The consequence is that the subject (or the social group) attributes causal relationships between actions and events not connected to each other, and that the scientific consensus does not accept as valid. In religion, popular religiosity and superstition, correlation is a presupposition that relates religious rituals, prayers, sacrifices or observances of a taboo with certain expectations of benefit and reward. In clinical psychology it can cause a patient to experience fear of performing certain acts or harboring certain thoughts because he assumes a correlation between that and terrible calamities. Magical thinking can lead to believe that personal thoughts per se can cause effects in reality or that thinking about something is equivalent to doing it.2 It is therefore a type of causal reasoning of fallacy of questionable cause that looks for insignificant relationships of phenomena (coincidences ) between acts and events. Magical thinking generates the mistaken belief that one's thoughts, words, or actions will cause or prevent a particular event in a way that defies commonly accepted laws of cause and effect.

It is part of the normal development of the child, 3 and for centuries the most advanced science of its time showed traits of magical thinking, such as Aristotelian teleologism.

On the other hand, quasi-magical thinking describes "cases in which subjects act as if they mistakenly believe that theiRider waite tarots the very wonderful magic. fortune teller magical form divinaton original.jpg r aRider waite tarots the very wonderful magic. fortune teller magical form divinaton original.jpg ctions influence the results, even when they do not really believe it."

Within Western culture, magic has been linked to ideas of the Other, foreignness, and primitivism; indicating that it is "a powerful marker of cultural difference" and likewise, a non-modern phenomenon. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Western intellectuals perceived that the only original practice of magic to be a sign of a primitive mentality and also commonly attributed it to marginalised groups of people.

all the magicians 's medicinal practices and supernatural powers in the Middle Ages were often regarded as forms of “natural magic” and high magic, One in particular was referred to as a “leechbook”, or a doctor-book that included masses to be said over the healing herbs. For example, a procedure for curing skin disease first involves an ordinary herbal medicine followed by strict instructions to draw blood from the neck of the ill, pour it into running water, spit three times and recite a sort of spell to complete the cure. In addition to the leechbook, the Lacnunga included many prescriptions derived from the European folk culture that more intensely involved magic[original research?]. The Lacnunga prescribed a set of Christian prayers to be said over the ingredients used to make the medicine, and such ingredients were to be mixed by straws with the names “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John” inscribed on them. In order for the cure to work, several charms had to be sung in Latin over the medicine. Historians and anthropologists have distinguished between practitioners who engage in high magic, and those who engage in low magic. High magic, also known as ceremonial magic or ritual magic, is more complex, involving lengthy and detailed rituals as well as sophisticated, sometimes expensive, paraphernalia. Low magic, also called natural magic, is associated with peasants and folklore and with simpler rituals such as brief, spoken spells. Low magic is also closely associated with witchcraft. Anthropologist Susan Greenwood writes that "Since the Renaissance, high magic has been concerned with drawing down forces and energies from heaven" and achieving unity with divinity. High magic is usually performed indoors while witchcraft is often performed outdoors.

There can be economic incentives that encouraged individuals to identify as magicians. In the cases of various forms of traditional healer, as well as the later stage magicians or illusionists, the label of magician could become a job description. Others claim such an identity out of a genuinely held belief that they have specific unusual powers or talents. Different societies have different social regulations regarding who can take on such a role; for instance, it may be a question of familial heredity, or there may be gender restrictions on who is allowed to engage in such practices. A variety of personal traits may be credited with giving magical power, and frequently they are associated with an unusual birth into the world. For instance, in Hungary it was believe that a táltos would be born with teeth or an additional finger. In various parts of Europe, it was believed that being born with a caul would associate the child with supernatural abilities. In some cases, a ritual initiation is required before taking on a role as a specialist in such practices, and in others it is expected that an individual will receive a mentorship from another specialist. Anthropological and sociological theories of magic generally serve to sharply demarcate certain practices from other, otherwise similar practices in a given society. According to Bailey: "In many cultures and across various historical periods, categories of magic often define and maintain the limits of socially and culturally acceptable actions in respect to numinous or occult entities or forces. Even more, basically, they serve to delineate arenas of appropriate belief." In this, he noted that "drawing these distinctions is an exercise in power". This tendency has had repercussions for the study of magic, with academics self-censoring their research because of the effects on their careers.

Randall Styers noted that attempting to define magic represents "an act of demarcation" by which it is juxtaposed against "other social practices and modes of knowledge" such as religion and science. The historian Karen Louise Jolly described magic as "a category of exclusion, used to define an unacceptable way of thinking as either the opposite of religion or of science".

Modern scholarship has produced various definitions and theories of magic. According to Bailey, "these have typically framed magic in relation to, or more frequently in distinction from, religion and science." Since the emergence of the study of religion and the social sciences, magic has been a "central theme in the theoretical literature" produced by scholars operating in these academic disciplines. Magic is one of the most heavily theorized concepts in the study of religion, and also played a key role in early theorising within anthropology. Styers believed that it held such a strong appeal for social theorists because it provides "such a rich site for articulating and contesting the nature and boundaries of modernity". Scholars have commonly used it as a foil for the concept of religion, regarding magic as the "illegitimate (and effeminized) sibling" of religion. Alternately, others have used it as a middle-ground category located between religion and science.

The context in which scholars framed their discussions of magic was informed by the spread of European colonial power across the world in the modern period. These repeated attempts to define magic resonated with broader social concerns, and the pliability of the concept has allowed it to be "readily adaptable as a polemical and ideological tool". The links that intellectuals made between magic and those they characterized as primitives helped to legitimise European and Euro-American imperialism and colonialism, as these Western colonialists expressed the view that those who believed in and practiced magic were unfit to govern themselves and should be governed by those who, rather than believing in magic, believed in science and/or (Christian) religion. In Bailey's words, "the association of certain peoples [whether non-Europeans or poor, rural Europeans] with magic served to distance and differentiate them from those who ruled over them, and in large part to justify that rule."

Many different definitions of magic have been offered by scholars, although—according to Hanegraaff—these can be understood as variations of a small number of heavily influential theories. The intellectualist approach to defining magic is associated with two prominent British anthropologists, Edward Tylor and James G. Frazer. This approach viewed magic as the theoretical opposite of science, and came to preoccupy much anthropological thought on the subject. This approach was situated within the evolutionary models which underpinned thinking in the social sciences during the early 19th century. The first social scientist to present magic as something that predated religion in an evolutionary development was Herbert Spencer; in his A System of Synthetic Philosophy, he used the term magic in reference to sympathetic magic. Spencer regarded both magic and religion as being rooted in false speculation about the nature of objects and their relationship to other things.

Tylor's understanding of magic was linked to his concept of animism. In his 1871 book Primitive Culture, Tylor characterized magic as beliefs based on "the error of mistaking ideal analogy for real analogy". In Tylor's view, "primitive man, having come to associate in thought those things which he found by experience to be connected in fact, proceeded erroneously to invert this action, and to conclude that association in thought must involve similar connection in reality. He thus attempted to discover, to foretell, and to cause events by means of processes which we can now see to have only an ideal significance". Tylor was dismissive of magic, describing it as "one of the most pernicious delusions that ever vexed mankind". Tylor's views proved highly influential, and helped to establish magic as a major topic of anthropological research. Marett viewed magic as a response to stress. In a 1904 article, he argued that magic was a cathartic or stimulating practice designed to relieve feelings of tension. As his thought developed, he increasingly rejected the idea of a division between magic and religion and began to use the term "magico-religious" to describe the early development of both. Malinowski similarly understood magic to Marett, tackling the issue in a 1925 article. He rejected Frazer's evolutionary hypothesis that magic was followed by religion and then science as a series of distinct stages in societal development, arguing that all three were present in each society. In his view, both magic and religion "arise and function in situations of emotional stress" although whereas religion is primarily expressive, magical is primarily practical. He therefore defined magic as "a practical art consisting of acts which are only means to a definite end expected to follow later on". For Malinowski, magical acts were to be carried out for a specific end, whereas religious ones were ends in themselves. He for instance believed that fertility rituals were magical because they were carried out with the intention of meeting a specific need. As part of his functionalist approach, Malinowski saw magic not as irrational but as something that served a useful function, being sensible within the given social and environmental context.

In the first century CE, early Christian authors absorbed the Greco-Roman concept of magic and incorporated it into their developing Christian theology. These Christians retained the already implied Greco-Roman negative stereotypes of the term and extented them by incorporating conceptual patterns borrowed from Jewish thought, in particular the opposition of magic and miracle. Some early Christian authors followed the Greek-Roman thinking by ascribing the origin of magic to the human realm, mainly to Zoroaster and Osthanes. The Judaeo-Christian view was that magic was a product of the Babylonians, Persians, or Egyptians. The Christians shared with earlier classical culture the idea that magic was something distinct from proper religion, although drew their distinction between the two in different ways.

Nowadays, in the modern world, it is very common to believe that magic exists. The idea of ​​magic is commonly used in many places, mainly books, stories, stories, animation or others, in which magic appears as an extraordinary power to modify or not manipulate nature at will. Likewise, since the nineteenth century, magicians and illusionists shows are a constant in the performing arts, where a tacit pact is established between spectators and artists through which it "acts as if" it has supernatural powers with which it impresses, through tricks, to an allegedly credulous audience. The greatest difficulty in knowledge of magic is that in order to make the first evocation where the magician or aspiring magician can evoke the desired entity and get their favors, it is precisely that it requires knowing its name, stroke and evocation ritual as well as knowing In depth, the dangers he faces and how to protect himself against them, by virtue of the oath, implies that without a teacher any aspirant could dedicate a large part of his life to solving these enigmas on his own, without a guide to solve them. first doubts.

Natural magic: "Natural magic" was defined as all observable natural magical phenomena in which matter was involved or present, even though they were inexplicable. This is how astrology was considered and developed by the Persians, whose architects were called "magicians or sorcorer", it became astronomy. Still in the seventeenth century, the famous German pedagogue and physicist Gaspar Schott (Jesuit) titled his physics texts (which he himself produced and later imparted to his students) "acoustic magic and optical magic" (written in Latin), in clear allusion to the memory of the archaic etymological meaning of "natural magic", a phrase reserved in Latin to allude to physical phenomenology still scientifically inexplicable in its time, such as light and sound. [citation needed]