How magic works

Abstract

Daniel Lawrence O'[Keefe] defines magic as ''the expropriation of religious collective representations for individual or subgroup purposes - to enable the individual ego to resist psychic extinction or the subgroup to resist cognitive collapse.'' To say that his definition presents sociological, anthropological and psychological problems of differentiation would be an understatement, and those are not the only problems in it. The term ''collective representations'' is problematic in contemporary social theory, and it is superfluous when the term ''culture'' can be used with greater convenience and theoretical productivity. Another problem lies in the identification of magic as an expropriation of religious collective representations, suggesting that religion comes first and magic is extracted from it. Mr. O'Keefe argues in favor of this theory in ''Stolen Lightning.'' Mr. O'Keefe views magic as ''a total social fact.'' Medical, ceremonial, paranormal, occult, sectarian and religious magic, as well as black magic, constitute the realm of magic ''in the strict sense.'' But he also identifies vast areas of life where magic continues to function in a ''weak sense.'' Between the weak and the strict senses, just about any phenomenon may be magical in this view, from experimental psychology to religion. In social theory, however, ''Stolen Lightning'' may have a major impact on our understanding of magic. The major contribution Mr. O'Keefe makes in this book is his argument that magic is a part of the system of symbols commonly understood and shared in a culture; in any social context magic works through symbol and agreement. As Mr. O'Keefe puts it, ''Magic combats the uncertainties and dangers of the symbolic universe by giving man control over some of the most potent of the symbols.'' It works because it uses a special language that has a rigid script. The combination of this special script and a symbolic universe makes magic a reality for those who believe in it. Based on ''preexisting or prefigured agreement,'' magic ''works because people agree it works.'' Those points should be viewed as Mr. O'Keefe's basic contribution to a social theory of magic. His understanding of contemporary anthropological theory is especially inadequate. ''Stolen Lightning'' offers, among many other theoretical views, a theory of the evolution of magic that comes out of the 19th century. In this view magic is supposed to have evolved from religion in the neolithic age. We know, however, that many prehistoric archeologists agree that paleolithic cave art represents a type of magic. This would put the beginning of magic thousands of years earlier than the neolithic. Mr. O'Keefe's confusion about social evolution is also aggravated by his misuse of the terms ''tribe'' and ''chiefdom'' and by his tendency to assign cultures to wrong categories.