1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Magic/Definition of Magic

Definition of Magic.—To arrive at a definition of magic we may either follow the a priori road mapped out by Frazer and decline to recognize the distinction actually drawn by various societies between magical and religious practices; or we may ask what magic and corresponding terms actually connote. Frazer’s method ignores the fact that magic, like religion, is an institution, i.e. a product of society, not of any single individual; there is no more reason to suppose that a child reared in isolation would develop any kind of magical practices than that it would invent for itself a religion; but if this is the case, the associationist account of magic cannot be true. It is therefore by an analysis of actually existing practices that we must define and limit the term magic. There is, however, a serious difficulty in the way of determining the attitude of non-European peoples towards religio-magical practices; general terms are things of slow growth; it is therefore prima facie improbable that peoples in the lower stages of culture will have anything corresponding to our terms “religion” and “magic”; moreover, if we are right in assuming the fundamental unity of the two, it is by no means certain that they have even the consciousness of any distinction. Even when this consciousness is present, it by no means follows that the whole of the field is mapped out according to our categories; there will be a large indeterminate area which is neither magical nor religious. This suggests that the consciousness of the educated Occidental, for which the spheres of magic and religion in civilized society are sharply defined and contrasted, should be the ultimate arbiter; but here again we are confronted by a difficulty, for, to the educated man, the characteristic of magic is its unreality, and this does not help us to distinguish primitive magic and religion.

We must, it appears, determine the relation of magic to religion by an analysis of the conceptions of those who believe in both; but in so doing we must consider that, like all other institutions, magic has a history. Even if we go back to the 16th century and take the view of magic then held by the average European, it is still a complex idea. When we ask what the most primitive races now on the earth regard as magic, we are applying to their ideas a touchstone made for a very different age and culture; as well might we ask what their theory of knowledge is. If, however, we reverse the process and ask what elements of primitive institutions correspond most nearly to later conceptions of magic, we can at once say that the forbidden and private arts are the prototypes of the magic of later times. Magic is therefore the practice of maleficent arts which involve the use of religio-magical power, with perhaps a secondary idea of the use of private arts, which are to benefit, not the community as a whole, but a single individual. Religion in the lower stages of culture is essentially the tribal creed which all practise and in which all believe; if therefore an individual has a cult of his own, even if otherwise indistinguishable from a public cult, it is for this very reason on a lower plane, and probably corresponds in a degree to what is later regarded as magic. But our information as to the attitude of the uncivilized towards magico-religious rites in general is seldom sufficiently clear; our terminology is influenced by the prepossession of alien observers whose accounts cannot be assumed to correspond to the native view of the case.