by Joe Cosby

A Usenet essay posted to alt.magick in November 2003, arising from Joe Cosby's reading of Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic, a compendious survey of religious and magical practice in England through the Reformation. The essay grew from marginal notes into a sustained argument: that superstition and magic are not equivalent terms, and that the distinction between them turns on the concept of opus operandum — an act presumed effective in itself, independent of the operator's understanding or intent.

Cosby argues that Protestant charges against Catholic ritual — that the Mass is "magic" — reveal a real distinction, but mislocate it. The problem is not magic versus religion; it is informed practice versus rote repetition without comprehension. Mystery traditions, he concludes, are structurally immune from superstition: initiatic secrecy functions not to hide knowledge but to prevent its confused, mechanical misapplication.

This all came out of a book I'm reading. Basically it is a compendious survey of religious and magical practices in England through the Reformation, paying special attention to the relation between the transition from Catholic to Protestant practice and contemporary magical practice.

Originally I just started writing up a set of notes, things I was thinking while I read the book, but then I found myself thinking that this was very similar to things I was talking about on Usenet at the time. As that line of thought continued, this evolved more into a Usenet article.

Thomas's idea of magic is in many ways a typical one. His examples of Protestant objections to various Catholic rituals and practices as "magic" illustrate a basic difference between magic as it is understood by those who practice it and magic as perceived by those who don't.

The idea of opus operandum defines the difference nicely. This is the idea that a magical or religious act has efficacy in and of itself — regardless of who performs the act, outside influences, the mindset of those involved, or anything beyond the mechanical details which constitute the act. A purely opus operandum act could, theoretically, be performed by a sufficiently life-like robot as effectively as by a live practitioner.

Many of the Protestant objections cited came down to this one principle: that the clergy, in asking us to believe that the act (such as consecrating the host) has an efficacy opus operandum (such as causing the host to be miraculously transformed), were making themselves magicians — because they believed the act was effective rather than the will of God.

As far as the particular debate between Protestants and Catholics I can have little to say — I'm not really a student of religion — but I think it reveals a poor understanding of what magic is, as understood by those who practice it.

In fact Thomas touches on this indirectly himself when he mentions Frazer's Golden Bough, in which Frazer defines the difference between a prayer and a magical charm as that the latter is assumed to work opus operandum. The problem, as Thomas points out, is that in much practice of magic, this simply isn't the case — the magician's incantation is intended to address supposed spirits, and any effect is supposed to come from these spirits. I would go beyond saying this is the case in a lot of magical practice, and say that where the act is performed by a "magician" in any true sense, it would nearly always be the case that something beyond opus operandum is supposed to be at work.

On the other hand, I don't doubt that much "magical" practice is done which is much like the examples Thomas enumerates — charms and hexes which people who we would not consider magicians themselves have learned by rote and believe to be "magic" with no real idea how or why that would be the case. This comes close to the idea of opus operandum, although it doesn't necessarily always imply such a belief. (I may not understand what, exactly, happens when I turn my car's key in the ignition switch, but that doesn't mean that I necessarily think that it is the act of turning the key, in and of itself, opus operandum, which makes the car start.)

It seems then that we need some way of differentiating between the two classes of acts. The simplest and seemingly most obvious would be to define any symbolic or ritual act believed to be effective opus operandum as superstitious, rather than magical. This seems to fit the sense of "superstitious" well.

To some extent though, it leaves the idea of magic, per se, undefined. A lot of our culture would consider magic and superstition more or less interchangeable. I don't think this is realistic — probably anybody reading this group is aware of considerable precedent for magical practice which doesn't fit my definition of superstition. In fact for the majority of us, most of our study of magic has been nothing to do with superstition. Crowley, the GD, Qabbalism, practical Voodoo, Taoist alchemy, Goetia, Platonism and neo-Platonism — in all of these the practice of "magic" is an expression of an underlying belief system.

But at the same time, all of these systems have associated with them some amount of superstition, to various degrees. The initiatory and mystery systems probably least of all. Just as a medieval Catholic might feed a communion wafer to his cow to protect it from disease with little thought of the overall logic of what he's doing, so might someone living today in a Voodoo-dominated society ask the loa for a little rain with only a vague idea of the pantheon and no real personal experience with them. In this case really, the line between magic and superstition is at least a little blurry. Both Catholicism and Voodoo are, intentionally, "public" systems, intended among other things to provide a form of religious expression for the laity. As such, even the relatively confused use of the religious idiom among the laity must be seen as an organic aspect of the system. Furthermore, in both cases above, it's questionable whether the particular magical practice is "wrong" within the logic of the system or not.

There is though a clear separation between laity and the initiated, and in general superstitious practice is more associated with the former.

Mystery traditions then are somewhat inherently immune from superstition, at least by this working definition. Withholding the details of the organization and its practices and their meaning from the uninitiated prevents the confused, superstitious misapplication of them.

In brief then, a definition of magic as opposed to superstition would be: the practice of the initiated. This isn't a definition of magic in general, as it says nothing at all about actual practice or what the "initiated" actually do — neither does it differentiate between magic and religion in any way. It's simply a useful yardstick in differentiating magic from superstition.

Colophon

Written by Joe Cosby, posted to the Usenet newsgroup alt.magick on November 29, 2003. The essay arose from Cosby's reading of Keith Thomas's Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), a standard academic work on magical practice in England. Cosby was a regular contributor to alt.magick in 2003, writing on questions of magical theory and definition.

The essay generated a substantive reply from catherine yronwode, who disputed Cosby's conclusion on the grounds that it implicitly elevated initiatic European traditions over folk traditions such as Voodoo — which, she argued, have their own sophisticated frameworks rather than being merely "laity" practice.

Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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