💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › david-graeber-the-politics-of-magic.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 09:08:29. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: The Politics of Magic
Author: David Graeber
Date: March 1998
Language: en
Topics: magic, book review
Source: Retrieved on 28th November 2021 from https://davidgraeber.org/articles/the-politics-of-magic/
Notes: Published in The Nation.

David Graeber

The Politics of Magic

Thessalian witches, it was said, would regularly make threats against

the cosmos: if the gods didn’t do their bidding they would blot out the

sun and pluck the moon from the sky like an eye out of its socket. Under

the Roman Empire, magicians claimed to have gods frequently over for

dinner, and a popular rumor had it that Christ himself was just a

magician—who, after many years of study in the secret chambers beneath

Egyptian temples, had learned the true names of several important

angels. They thereby became his slaves and enabled him to perform

miracles.

It is, perhaps, not surprising that serious scholars have had a hard

time deciding what to say about this sort of thing.

It’s especially hard for Classicists, most of whom ignore ancient magic

entirely. Classicists, after all, are likely to be drawn to their field

by an admiration for ancient philosophy, or art, or simply an attraction

to what used to be called the classical temper, with its rationality,

balance, and hatred of excess. Not surprising then they tend to shun

those areas of ancient life which are most obviously irrational,

unbalanced and excessive. This is probably the reason why the last

serious attempt at an overall history of magic in the ancient world was

written by Pliny the Elder, sometime around 77 AD.

Magic in the Ancient World, by Fritz Graf, a Swiss classicist, would

then seem to be filling a very definite gap. And it is, indeed, a very

good book, full of insights. It’s also a rather frustrating

one—especially for a non-Classicist. The author seems to presume a

reader who not only already knows what, say, the hermetic tradition or

theurgy is, but one who already has opinions about them. The story he

has to tell has to be teased out from a series of often technical

arguments. Still, it can be. And it’s a fascinating story.

It begins in the 5^(th) century BC, a time which saw the arrival in

Greece of a slew of “beggar priests” (as Plato called them) from the

Middle East, wandering curers who also carried with them hitherto

unknown Assyrian and Babylonian techniques for “binding” one’s enemies.

They were particularly well received in Periclean Athens, which—during

the time of Socrates, Euripides, and the rest—witnessed a veritable boom

of sorcery, with thousands of citizens sneaking to cemeteries at night

armed with lead tablets and wax figurines in order to send ghosts to tie

the tongues of those likely to testify against them in law suits.

Athenian philosophers and doctors were quick to seize on such beggar

priests as the epitome of all they were against. The theologically

inclined attacked them for believing the gods would ever allow mere

mortals to tell them what to do; materialists, for believing gods had

anything to do with natural processes to begin with. They labeled them

“magi”, after the official priestly caste of the Persian Empire—which a

few probably were, or at least claimed to be. It was the perfect slur,

since Persians were for the Greeks the quintessential bad guys, and

worse, the quintessential losers (if their spells were so powerful, why

had they failed so miserably when they tried to conquer Greece? In

ancient Israel, by contrast, the Persians were the good guys, having

freed the Jews from exile in Babylon. Hence the three kindly magi of the

New Testament.)

In Roman times, “magus” remained largely a term of abuse. For most

intellectuals, it meant charlatans who used their tricks to wow the

ignorant country folk and gull them of their money. But as time went on,

the term was picked up by a sort of counterculture of self-proclaimed

magicians—which might include anyone from teenage philosophy students in

search of kicks to wandering hucksters and fairground showmen, purveying

claims to miraculous knowledge from the East. A literature developed.

Secret books of purportedly Egyptian, Jewish, and Assyrian lore were

copied and passed on. It was the beginning of a tradition—with its

demons and pentagrams—which would continue through the Middle Ages, all

the way to the likes of Aleister Crawley and the Golden Dawn, not to

mention providing endless material for low-grade horror fantasies in the

junk culture of just about every subsequent period of European history.

Graf keeps the focus mainly on this secret literature: on the actual

texts of the lead tablets deposited in tombs, or of spells recorded on

Egyptian papyri. One chapter is concerned with showing how little

literary representations of magic had to do with the real thing. But in

a way this is also the book’s greatest weakness. After all, if one wants

to understand the social significance of magic (which presumably is,

ultimately, the point) what magicians actually do is not nearly so

important as what people think they do. Graf does acknowledge

this—magicians, he notes, are created by public opinion—but even here he

is so determined not to sensationalize his topic that he ends up robbing

it of much of its substance. After all, magic is pretty much inherently

sensationalistic. If it can’t amaze and titillate, what power does it

have?

It’s not really Graf’s fault. Really it’s the fault of social theory.

There just isn’t any worthwhile theory of magic out there to apply. Like

most historians, he dutifully turns to anthropology for insights; but

anthropological theories of magic—I am myself an anthropologist, so I

can say this—hit a dead end years ago, and they do not serve him well.

19^(th) century anthropologists had an attitude almost identical to that

of most ancient intellectuals: magic was simply a collection of

impostures and mistakes. Most twentieth century anthropological

literature on the subject then has consisted in trying to find some way

to avoid this conclusion.

It isn’t easy. After all, presented with a person who claims to be able

to cast lightning, it is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that

this is not true; and that therefore, the person in question is either

deluded, or a liar. The usual solution is to focus on the word ‘true’.

Magical statements are not meant to be taken literally. When a witch

threatens to pluck out the moon, this is a poetic statement, a

‘performative speech act’, a form of expressive communication, a kind of

trope. Magical acts are really intended to have effects not on the

physical world, but on a human audience. Surely this approach can be

useful, but there are obvious objections. The most obvious: what if

there isn’t any audience? With most magic, and almost all ancient magic,

the actual ritual is done in secret. By accepting anthropological

theory, Graf is ultimately forced to the conclusion that most ancient

magic wasn’t social at all: it was about the magician’s personal

relationship with the gods.

The problem is that for most of ancient history, this was obviously

untrue. In Greece, under the early Empire, magic was a major instrument

of politics—public figures were always having their houses searched for

hidden dolls and tablets. So the author is forced to reformulate:

actually, it was only under the late Empire, when the state became

increasingly bureaucratic and authoritarian, and politics restricted to

a tiny elite, that magic became, as it were, New Age-ified, until in the

end it simply became a matter of concern for the magician’s “spiritual

welfare”.

But what about when magic was political? It’s here that theory fails us.

So allow me to offer a suggestion. What’s missing from most accounts is

a serious consideration of two factors which always seem surround magic,

in the popular imagination: scepticism, and fear. I doubt many

Thessalian peasants believed that witches could really pluck out the

moon; but probably most suspected anyone who made such claims might be

capable of something fairly terrible. They might have been sceptical

about the witches, but they were equally sceptical about philosophers

who would assure them such people had no powers whatsoever. Why take

chances?

It’s this factor of intimidation which I suspect explains the relation

with state politics. In ancient Rome, when the state clamped down, magic

effectively disappeared. I witnessed almost the exact opposite phenomena

in rural Madagascar. Madagascar had, for most of this century, been

under the grip of a typical colonial police state. Over the course of

the ‘70s and ‘80s, the state abandoned the countryside entirely. The

police disappeared completely. By 1990, just about everyone had become a

magician of some sort or another—or more accurately, perhaps, was

willing to insinuate they might be. The result was a society where it

was considered elementary common sense that one should be very polite to

strangers because you never know who might know how to blast you with

lightning, wither your crops or render your children insane. This

general uncertainty produced a remarkable degree of social peace.

There were professional magicianss, too: astrologers, mediums, curers.

Everyone assumed that most were frauds; that most of their amazing

effects (eating glass, sucking out objects from under peoples’ skins..)

were mere stage illusions; most of those who claimed to be able to cast

lightning, simply liars. (Even so, one would hardly be wise to go about

provoking such a person.) This is what anthropologists have discovered

just about everywhere. Traditionally, anthropologists have not found all

this scepticism particularly interesting: the point, they always say, is

that few deny that the genuine item does, somewhere, exist. I think it’s

very interesting. After all, consider what one is saying when one says a

magician is a fraud. One is saying that there are some people who

clearly are powerful and influential, but whose power is really based on

nothing other than their ability to convince others that they have it.

Is this not a profound insight into the nature of social power? In fact,

I suspect this is the real reason social theorists feel uncomfortable

acknowledging this political aspect of magic—or perhaps, in talking

about magic at all. Magic captures something of the essence of political

power: the fact that there is always something paradoxical, circular,

and just a little bit stupid about the whole thing.

The power of magicians, I am suggesting, is simply a slightly more

outrageous, smalltime carnival version of the kind held by kings and

consuls: a power which strives to both seduce and terrify, wielded by

figures who try to entertain their audience with preposterous lies at

the same time as constantly, tacitly trying to insinuate that, if

challenged,. they could also annhilate them—and probably wouldn’t

scruple much to do so. A power which many suspect (rightly) comes down

to little more than an ability to convince others it exists, but just

possibly, might be something more than that. No wonder real politicians

the world over tend to have the same reaction to such people: either,

like the Persian emperors, they adopt them as assistants, or if not, the

urge is always to do as so many Roman ones: to have them expelled from

the city, clapped in irons, or put to death. The only emperor who

dabbled in magic himself, as far as we know, was Nero (a great lover of

theatrical effects). He was sufficiently curious to have himself

initiated by a genuine Persian magus. After a while, though, he grew

bored of it: apparently, because he realized there was no power magic

could give him that he didn’t already have.