Do you believe in magic?
‘Who does not know Turner’s picture of the Golden Bough?’ begins one of the hoariest old explanations of the origins and progressive development of magic, religion and science – in that order, traced through 12 volumes of evidence from anthropology and history collected into a great scheme of things. Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough is the type of meta-narrative no longer approved of in these postmodern times. It is speculative and, in its own way, magical but it offers a simple and coherent explanation of magic – or, rather, magical thinking. What would baffle Sir James is the return of so much magic today. To do that needs resort to another hoary old Victorian denizen of London – Karl Marx and his concept of ‘commodity fetishism’ which he advanced in his grand and historical scheme.
According to Frazer, magic works on the principle of homology: if one thing resembles another, they are thought by people who do not know better to have some connection and influence on each other. The winter mistletoe on the Druid oak is sacred because evergreen like summer. If your liver troubles you, the remedy lies in the liverwort which looks like a liver, rather than perhaps stopping drinking so much alcohol. Indeed, ancient and indigenous medical systems typically present parallels between parts of the body and the natural world. This is the way homeopathy supposedly affects its magic – you take more of the same that is causing your allergy or illness in order, magically, to cure it.
Magical re-enactments of uncontrollable events can also seemingly bring them under control. So sports players often perform personal rituals – touch left foot with right hand, right foot with left hand – before beginning play. Students carry the same ‘lucky mascots’ into exams, hoping their presence on the desk or in their pockets will bring them the luck that got them through the last exam. Or they go through irrational actions – cramming all night before the exam, for instance, even though this reduces their chances of even staying awake the next day!
While such rituals may have psychological benefits – putting you ‘in the zone’ so you can concentrate – they are plainly not the basis for a coherent explanation of events. To find this, Frazer thought that as evidence accumulated humanity moved from magic to religion, typically reducing the many influences, spirits and gods of – for example – the oldest surviving religion, Hinduism, to concentrate on placating a reduced number of deities in ‘more advanced’ religions, such as the pantheons of Egyptian or Greek gods, usually families ruled over by a guiding king or sun-god, like Ra or Zeus. In monotheisms, this presiding deity became the sole remaining God – even if Christianity complicated things by giving him a son! Islam is therefore simpler and more advanced/ progressive than Christianity in Frazer’s view but, of course, simplest of all would be to have no gods at all and move on to science which ‘has no need of that hypothesis’ for its predictions, as the French scientist Laplace supposedly told Napoleon.
Despite the pragmatic scientific world view supporting so much of our lives and thought today, in situations of uncertainty people tend to revert to religious or even magical thinking; like the Irish playwright Brendan Behan who said that he was ‘a daylight atheist’ but when it got dark he fell down on his knees! ‘Do you believe in magic/ In a young girl’s heart?’ as the Loving Spoonful asked, relating to the apparent uncertainties of pair-bonding – though most people in fact find their partners within their own social class, however defined. The song also illustrates how commercial popular culture keeps such beliefs alive so that Marx argued that human relations under capitalism were ‘fetishized’. Like the example that Frazer gives of West African fetish kings, the masked ruler or his (occasionally her – as in the UK today!) effigy/ totem is credited with ‘control of the weather and so forth’ (not in the UK!).
So, in the ‘immense accumulation of commodities’ that Marx says makes up the wealth of capitalist societies and which the economy must go on producing and selling to maintain itself, ‘the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life’ and, invertedly, ‘relations between people assume the fantastic form of relations between things’. The use of the commodity produced for sale becomes less important that its price, so that ‘priceless’ and really incomparable art works, for example, are fetishized in an imaginary hierarchy of quantity over quality. As indeed, everything and everyone has their price which can be rated on a monetary scale. Money, the symbol of value and exchange, thus becomes more real than the things it buys.
This has a psychological underpinning in Freud’s notion of fetishists replacing the real object of their desires with a substitute – like women’s shoes, notoriously (though the Chinese did the same by binding feet)! The fetish is endowed with magical powers that we can see in advertisements where the commodity assumes a life of its own, like cars that speak and are presented as somehow ‘sexy’ or ‘powerful’. This tendency towards fetishism is heightened in the postmodern simulacrum that presents itself as more real (‘hyper-real’) than reality because, although depending upon science for their production, the inner workings of the fetishized commodities that fill our world become more arcane and unknown to most people. And so as we work them and they work themselves by so-called ‘artificial intelligence’, they assume magical properties and the world spirals out of human control or even understanding.
We cannot therefore be so confident that, as Frazer concluded his voluminous study, the ‘clouds and thick darkness’ of magic that envelop ‘the backward portion of the web… which the Fates are now weaving on the humming loom of time’ will be irradiated by the rationality of science. Especially as the productions of science are fetishized as the commodities of an unsustainable hyper-reality, our species must disenchant the world we have created in order to survive.
By Patrick Ainley
The Philosophy Takeaway 'Magic' Issue 25
