Esoterica, Religion, Philosophy, and Literature Shelfies

CFP - Material Culture of Magic

Call for Chapters - The Material Culture of Magic

Book project, ed. by Dr Antje Bosselmann-Ruickbie and Dr Leo Ruickbie

Magic is a wide field of research comprising what we might call the occult, paranormal events, anomalous experience, spirituality and other phenomena throughout human history. However, research has often been focused more narrowly on the historical analysis of written sources, or the anthropology and occasionally sociology of practitioners and their communities, for example. What is often overlooked are the physical artefacts of magic themselves.

In all areas of research, ‘material culture’ is becoming increasingly important – the ‘material turn’ as it has been labelled. This is particularly the case for disciplines that traditionally have not focused on object studies but on theory such as historical or social sciences. However, it is self-evident that the objects emerging from a culture provide valuable information on societies and their history. This is also and particularly the case for magic and related phenomena. Magic, especially, became divorced from its concrete expressions as academic study focused on problems of rationality and functionalist explanation.

When studying magic it is crucial to look at the objects that have been produced and what purpose they had, who made them and in what period, whether they represent only a certain historical period or are a long-lasting phenomenon, etc. This volume hence aims to ‘re-materialise’ magic, to re-anchor it in the physical things that constitute ‘magic’ and recover the social lives, even biographies, of these things.

The envisaged academic book aims to cover a wide range of subjects, periods, geographical areas, as well as methods: firstly, because an interdisciplinary approach is essential to adequately encompass the subject; secondly, to investigate whether similar objects were used in different cultures in parallel or over a long period; and thirdly, to serve as a starting point for future research. This will be the first book on the material culture of magic and consequently has the potential to become a foundational text.

Therefore, we invite contributors from different disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, art history, ethnology, folklore, parapsychology, religious studies, sociology and others. Subjects could be, for example, case studies focusing on particular objects, museum collections, or mass market items labelled as magical; analysis of classes of embodied magical functions, such as charms, amulets, talismans, magical jewellery, icons, relics, poppets (Voodoo dolls), etc.; consideration of classes of materials, such as bone, wood, metal, precious and semi-precious stones, etc. In addition, it is important to understand people-object relations, spatial-temporal aspects of magical objects, the dialectics of transference (projection and introjection), the role of narratives and social performance, cultural trajectories, and the processes of commodification and fetishisation (reification). These can be addressed in a variety of contexts from traditional religion to popular culture, and historically situated anywhere from prehistory to the present day.

Any physical representation of magical ideation or anything imbued with supernatural meanings by its creator, such as found objects, animal/human parts, and man-made artefacts, can be considered in this context. What matters is a central focus on the physicality of the magical object; its material existence.

The volume will present an overview of current research in this field. It will comprise approximately 20 of the best and most relevant contributions on this subject. Contributors will be asked to submit a finished chapter of around 6,000 words (inc. references) with publication planned for 2015.

In the first instance, an abstract of no more than 300 words should be sent, together with a brief biography, to the editors before 1 August 2014 at Bosselmann-Ruickbie@uni-mainz.de. We are also happy to answer any questions.

In order to get the best possible response, we would appreciate your help in re-distributing this call for chapters. Email it to colleagues, other relevant mailing lists, or print it out and stick it up on the department noticeboard!

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Dr Antje Bosselmann-Ruickbie is a lecturer in the Department for Christian Archaeology and Byzantine Art History, Institute for Art History and Musicology, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany.

Dr Leo Ruickbie is the published author of several books, as well as the editor of the Paranormal Review, the magazine of the Society for Psychical Research, and a Committee Member of the Gesellschaft für Anomalistik (Society for Anomalistics).

Hegel on Plotinus

It is very difficult to give a systematic account of his philosophy. For it is not the aim of Plotinus, as it was of Aristotle, to comprehend objects in their special determinations, but rather to emphasize the truth of the substantial in them as against the phenomenal. The point of greatest importance and the leading characteristic in Plotinus is his high, pure enthusiasm for the elevation of mind to what is good and true, to the absolute. He lays hold of knowledge, the simply ideal, and of intellectual thought, which implicitly life, but not silent nor sealed. His whole philosophy is on the one hand metaphysics, but the tendency which is therein dominant is not so much an anxiety to explain and interpret and comprehend what forces itself on our attention as reality, or to demonstrate the position and the origin of these individual objects, and perhaps, for instance, to offer a deduction of matter, of evil; but rather to separate the mind from these externals, and give it its central place in the simple, clear Idea. The whole tenor of his philosophy thus leads up to virtue and to the intellectual contemplation of the eternal, as source of the same; so that the soul is brought to happiness of life therein. Plotinus then enters to some extent on special considerations of virtue, with the view of cleansing the soul from passions, from false and impure conceptions of evil and destiny, and also from incredulity and superstition, from astrology and magic and all their train. This gives some idea of the general drift of his teaching.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hpalexandrian.htm

from a review of Klaassen's new book Transformations of Magic

"His attentiveness to the volumes ultimately sheds light on the
intellectual frames of reference that result in the transformations he
documents. Regarding image magic the framing question was whether an
image worked because of occult natural powers or demonic intervention.
In the former case, use of the image would be lawful; in the latter,
unlawful. The urge to make image magic lawful then situated it
alongside or even in the field of natural philosophy. The alignment
shaped the debate and can be seen in the placement of the texts of
image magic, which in collected volumes and on library shelves were
found among the <i>naturalia</i>. Prof. Klaassen determines that this
trend was shaped by certain authoritative works, most famously the
</i>Speculum astronomiae</i>, that became increasingly used as a guide
for scribes in their immediate discernment of the philosophical and
moral lawfulness of particular magical texts. Their use had a
constraining effect, and the number of texts of image magic
correspondingly decreased."

Klaassen, Frank F. <i>Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic
in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance</i>. Series: Magic in History.
 University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Pp. x,
280. $69.95. ISBN-13: 9780271056265.

  Reviewed by David J. Collins, S.J.
       Georgetown University

The Medieval Review
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3631

Renaissance Magic as the root of 19th century Magic

At first glance, it might seem that Renaissance magicians such as Ficino and Agrippa had embraced the image magic tradition through their own astrological magic systems and shunned the ritual magic. What Renaissance magic represented, however, was the subsuming of image magic into a broader system that shared the goals of ritual magic. This new breed of magus seems to have accepted the basic tenets and procedures of the ritual magic genre while dissociating themselves from the particular texts that came before. It was this particular mixture that powered the ceremonial magic traditions that came to prominence in the nineteenth century, and that are perpetuated even today.
From a review of Frank Klaassen's dissertation

Kiekhefer on the rationality of magic

"We cannot begin with the assumption that magic is irrational; we must ask ourselves why it was that for people whose rationality was otherwise unimpeachable it seemed to fit into a rational view of the universe, and the first step toward answering this question is listening carefully to their formulations, their definitions."
from Magic in the Middle Ages

decline of magic -- fragmentation?

"I suggest that there was a fragmentation of the occult arts and sciences during the Renaissance and early modern periods, as some aspects of the magic tradition became appropriated into the new philosophy, or new science. To a large extent it was the input from magic that made the new philosophies what they were, not only with regard to the experimental method and the new ethos that natural knowledge should be pragmatically useful, but also with regard to the substantive content of those new philosophies. At the same time,however, other aspects of the magical tradition were firmly rejected. These historical changes are perhaps best understood in terms of what sociologists of science have called ‘boundary work’, the process of demarcating supposed legitimate and valid procedures and presuppositions in establishing natural knowledge from those that are deemed invalid and illegitimate. From the Renaissance through the period known as the Scientific Revolution there was a complete rearrangement of the boundaries of what was magic or occult and what was not, which in turn involved a redrawing of the boundaries which determined what was natural philosophy and what was not.Furthermore, it is my contention that this led to a decline in the fortunes (among orthodox thinkers at least) of what was left behind in the realms of magic."

from The Fragmentation of Renaissance Occultism