Download Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern by Randall Styers PDF
By Randall Styers
Because the emergence of spiritual reviews and the social sciences as educational disciplines, the concept that of "magic" has performed a tremendous position in defining faith and in mediating the relation of faith to technological know-how. throughout those disciplines, magic has usually been configured as a definitively non-modern phenomenon, juxtaposed to rather sleek types of faith and technological know-how. but this proposal of magic has remained stubbornly amorphous. In Making Magic, Randall Styers seeks to account for the intense power of scholarly discourse purporting to outline and clarify magic regardless of its failure to do exactly that. He argues that this endurance can top be defined in mild of the Western force to set up and safe specified norms for contemporary identification, norms in line with slim varieties of instrumental rationality, industrious hard work, rigidly outlined sexual roles, and the containment of wayward kinds of wish. Magic has served to designate a kind of alterity or deviance opposed to which dominant Western notions of acceptable non secular piety, valid clinical rationality, and orderly social family are introduced into aid. students have stumbled on magic a useful software of their efforts to outline definitely the right obstacles of faith and technological know-how. On a broader point, says Styers, magical considering has served as an immense foil for modernity itself. Debates over the character of magic have provided a very wealthy web site at which students have labored to outline and to contest the character of modernity and norms for all times within the sleek international.
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Additional resources for Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (Aar Reflection and Theory in the Study of Religion Series)
Sample text
Citing particularly the position of Augustine on these issues, theologians and church officials taught that witchcraft was illusion or fantasy, a form of pagan superstition. 7 While medieval secular and ecclesiastical authorities viewed a broad array of folk practices as manifestations of residual paganism, these practices were regularly ignored. When they came into conflict with church teaching, the common penalty was merely a stiff penance. Various forms of folk healing appear to have been widespread, particularly in a culture in which effective alternatives were practically nonexistent and in which the predominant philosophical and medical systems taught that analogies and sympathetic correspondences existed among various parts of the created order.
Witches were often portrayed as seeking to obtain economic gain through impious machination rather than through appropriate forms of labor. A number of historians have underscored the economic tensions underlying the witchcraft persecutions, particularly in the context of the spread of capitalist economic systems through Europe. In a period of economic transition, witches were often construed as impediments to—or polluters of—proper economic relations. For example, the famous demonologist Nicolas Re´my accused witches of perverting commerce.
H. C. Erik Midelfort points out that by the end of the sixteenth century Protestants and Catholics had come to formulate different perspectives on witchcraft. Protestants emphasized divine providence and moralized against witchcraft, while Catholics continued to stress the power of the diabolical (particularly the demonic nature of the Ref- 38 making magic ormation itself ). Protestant notions of predestination and election also placed constraints on human freedom that would conform with emerging mechanistic notions of nature.