Definitions

It is strangely gratifying when looking at the history of Western scholarly attempts to define magic to realise that marketing is not alone in the uncomfortable suffering of definitional purgatory. As Stark (2001) memorably puts it, “the term magic has been a conceptual mess” (p. 102). For example, there are longstanding disagreements over whether magic is to be differentiated from religion or seen as a part of it, or indeed if both categories have any meaning whatsoever outside of scholarly analysis (for interesting overviews, see Bremmer, 1999; Wax and Wax, 1963; Hammond, 1970; Geertz, 1975). Even the exact origins of the word ‘magic’ are clouded in some confusion and dispute (Bremmer, 1999). If we are going to talk about the relationship between rhetoric and magic, however, we certainly need to have some idea of what it is we are referring to when we use the term. Firstly, it is unavoidable that use of the word ‘magic’ (along with its close cognates such as ‘sorcery’, ‘goetia’, and ‘witchcraft’) has tended to have a rhetorical component. It has often been used to indicate spiritual practices which are felt to involve trickery, foreign influence, or which are outside the established way of doing things in a particular location, social/cultural/ethnic grouping, or spiritual doctrine. So, the term ‘magic’ comes from Greek usage (magos and mageia) designating the practices of wandering Persian priests (perhaps more familiar to Western European audiences as ‘Magi’) or those who had adopted (and adapted) such practices. In this sense, magos and mageia usually had a derogatory connotation and were used to describe charlatans, beggars, quacks, or “people of an inferior theology and an inferior cosmology” (Bremmer, 1999, p. 4). At the same time, while the Greek culture that used these terms clearly did so in a pejorative manner, we should not forget that it also treated many aspects of Persian culture with fascination and intrigue and “in many spheres of life busily copied them” (ibid., p. 6). As Bremmer (1999) notes, “in tragedy, rhetorics and earlier philosophy, magos is a term of abuse, whereas historians and Aristotelian philosophers tend to take the Magi seriously” (ibid.). So, our word ‘magic’ already comes to us with a complex of rhetorical associations even before it finds itself transferred into a Judeo-Christian context and the languages of Western Europe. It refers to something decidedly Other, at times deceitful and vulgar, at times mysterious and powerful. The associations of alluring exoticism, however, seem to have won out at the end of the day—the reputation of the Persian Magi as possessors of powerful spiritual knowledge in Roman and then European Medieval cultures meant that, while there might be equivalent words in their indigenous languages (as well as in Greek), “later magicians called themselves […] magos/magus” (Bremmer, 1999, p. 9).

So much for the origins of the word that I will be using here. But to what exactly does it refer? How can we think of magical practice in fifth-century Athens as equivalent in some way to magical practice in seventeenth-century England, let alone the Trobrian Islanders studied by Malinowski (1935)? And how does that magical practice relate to persuasion and rhetoric? In the same way that a fifth-century Athenian would be using the term to refer to a quite constructed sense of what Others might have been doing, so are all descriptions of ‘magic’ necessarily constructed. Malinowski’s (1935) understanding of what the Trobrianders did when they did magic is necessarily influenced by his own intellectual paradigm, as Wax and Wax (1963) argue. Malinowski was concerned to establish the “Trobrian—and the savage in general—as a practical man, pragmatic and utilitarian if unreflective” (p. 498). The way Malinowski defines magic is therefore intimately bound up with seeing it as part of an attempt to control nature for practical benefit. Similarly, James Frazer’s (1894) influential view of magic as a form of early pseudoscience inspired by a clumsy appreciation of the order that exists in the universe is a reflection of Frazer’s own intellectual paradigm that sought to categorize religion and magic as fundamentally different and marking separate developmental stages of humanity. For Frazer, sympathetic magic, “which plays a large part in most systems of superstition” (p. 9), represents a “germ of the modern notion of natural law or the view of nature as a series of events occurring in an invariable order without the intervention of personal agency” (p. 9). Magic seeks to “bend nature” to human wishes (p. 12). Instead of seeking to change the course of nature by religious supplication to a god (praying for that god to intervene in a drought, for example), the magician seeks to use an understanding of sympathetic correspondences that they have discerned in the natural order in order to cause a change in that order. So, sympathetic magic assumes that “any effect may be produced by imitating it” (p. 9)—a hunter can take on the slipperiness of a frog by using a charm and ritual which imitate aspects of the frog. Frazer argued that, although it was “misapplied”, such practices displayed “the modern conception of physical causation” (p. 12). In this, of course, he betrays a very Victorian, mechanistic understanding of the natural sciences, a rather paternalistic view of “primitive man”, as well as a determination to neatly (bluntly) compartmentalise the spiritual practices and traditions of humanity into simple categories and dichotomies. As Tambiah (1968) points out, spiritual rituals usually display a rich mixture of forms and registers, some of which might be described as ‘magical’ and others as ‘religious’, in Frazer’s terms. To keep arguing that “magic was thoroughly opposed to religion” (p. 176) was a position that made increasingly little sense especially when faced with the realities of ritual around the world. However, it did make sense for someone like Frazer who was generally sceptical of what religion had brought to the world and who wished to see science as the force that progressed humanity. By framing magic as a mistaken but conceptually sophisticated attempt to engage with the order of nature, he could cast it as an early evolutionary stage that later blossomed into science itself. The assertive, masculine derring-do of magic and science is ranged against Frazer’s framing of religion as “feminine and sycophantic” (Wax and Wax, 1963, p. 496) in ways that are perhaps all too familiar to readers of ‘marketing science’.

Even when historians of religion and anthropologists have been more reflective regarding the pitfalls of categorisation, the exact nature of magic remains quite unclear. As Smith (2004) notes, in “academic discourse ‘magic’ has almost always been treated as a contrast term, a shadow reality known only by looking at the reflection of its opposite (‘religion’, ‘science’) in a distorting funhouse mirror” (p. 216). Additionally, magical practice is so variegated that defining it in opposition to something invariably leaves that definition open to being undermined by a few well-chosen counter-examples. Collins (2003), for example, points out how “public, state-sponsored curses […] seem to defy a simple ‘public/private’ or ‘social/antisocial’ contrast for magic” as do “formularies that employ for their efficacy propitiation, slander, and compulsion of divine forces” which therefore “blur perhaps the most conventional and misleading contrast, that between religion as propitiatory and magic as coercive in their respective attitudes toward divinity” (p. 18). Arriving at a coherent, stable definition of what magic is seems highly problematic, then. What is defined as magic depends on who is talking, when they are talking, and to what audience they are talking. This, perhaps explains why “an amazing number of scholars have been content to write about magic at length while leaving it undefined” (Stark, 2001, p. 102). Certainly, a clear context is vital when discussing what magic might consist of or mean at any one time and trying to draw out fundamental similarities across different centuries (if not millennia) and cultures is fraught with traps and pratfalls. I will look in more detail at the ways in which magic has been used as a “contrast term” for marketing in the next chapter, but what I am at pains to determine at this point is the nature of the connection between magic and rhetoric. In order to achieve this, there must be some points of description that can be generally agreed upon. So, given that rhetoric is about language, I will focus on those aspects of magical practice that can be seen to deal with language and representation, while trying to avoid falling into too much reliance upon general theoretical pronouncements of what magic is.

A good point to start, perhaps, is with Lehrich’s (2007) suggestion that “comparison is indeed typically magical”, which he glosses as meaning “usually magical, typical of magic, of a type with magic” (p. 83). Two of the most characteristically magical approaches to the world, according to Frazer (1894), were based upon the principles of sympathy and contagion. Now, while we have seen that Frazer goes on to explain how the magical approach to causation that sympathy and contagion epitomise is fundamentally “misapplied”, it is worthwhile detaching it from its Frazerian evolutionary framework and examining the way in which the operation of comparison underlies both sympathy and contagion. This will then go some way towards demonstrating the magical aspects of language and linguistic persuasion.

As Greenwood (2000) has argued, Frazer’s concept of sympathetic magic can usefully “still be taken as a basic definition today” of magic and has been adopted into most of the major theorisations of magic and religion that have followed him, including those of Malinowski, Mauss, and Evans-Pritchard. Indeed, Greenwood also states that sympathetic magic is the “underlying theme behind communicating with the otherworld in the diversity of contemporary magical practices” (p. 38). What exactly does it mean, then? Frazer (1894) writes that “one of the principles of sympathetic magic is that any effect may be produced by imitating it” (p. 9). He illustrates this principle by recounting the use of what we would now popularly refer to as ‘voodoo dolls’, but which can be found in various forms across many cultures. So, “if it is wished to kill a person an image if him is made and then destroyed”—through “a certain physical sympathy between the person and his image” it is thought that when harm is done to the image so that harm will be inflicted upon the intended victim. This is a tremendously powerful and common way of thinking across time and cultures. Even if one is nervous of reproducing ‘Frazerian categories’, it is clear that “the basic notion that objects made to resemble certain people or things, or symbolically linked to them, might convey power to their possessor is evident in many widely separate contexts” (Bailey, 2006, p. 18). We all have probably caught ourselves indulging in such notions—it is, surely, the root of the whole ‘signature series’ marketing trope, and intimately informs the trade in celebrity and historical memorabilia, amongst many other things. As a guitarist, for example, I am all too aware of the almost irresistible draw of instruments and equipment which have been imbued with some form of “physical sympathy” with a revered artist, whether that be through a simple silk-screened signature on a headstock, the completely faithful replication of a well-worn guitar, or even an entirely new model designed by the artist specifically for the brand. While we (and the marketing communication department) can make half-hearted attempts to rationalise such purchases in terms of the ‘search for authentic tone’ (itself, of course, embedded in a broader sympathetic magic of imitation) such product lines are operating at a far deeper, simpler level—if I play something that has some connection to a favoured artist, then I will take on something of their ability, their spirit, their musicality.

In actuality, such magical thinking demonstrates a mixture of two magical perspectives—the imitative one we have already met and Frazer’s other category (introduced in the second edition and formally named in the vastly expanded third edition of The Golden Bough), contagious magic. In a move that has led to a degree of confusion that still occasionally haunts discussion of the subject, Frazer finally decided to describe both the imitative and contagious branches of magic as being grounded in the overarching originating category of “sympathetic magic”. So, the two subcategories are formally distinguished by observing that imitative magic (also referred to by Frazer as “homeopathic magic”) revolves around the conviction that “like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause”, while contagious magic depends upon the idea that “things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed” (Frazer, 1920, p. 52). The distinctions between the two are somewhat artificial, and even Frazer acknowledges that “in practice the two branches are often combined” (p. 54). We can, then, adopt Frazer’s subsuming title of “sympathetic magic” to describe the patterns of thinking around the powers of imitation and contagion that tend to occur in magical practice but which we also see in many other walks of life.

We see similar patterns of sympathetic relationship working across sports, cuisine, and arts marketing. We even have a whole raft of fallacies to identify the irrational, illogical thinking involved (arguments of composition, division, association, post hoc ergo propter hoc, etc.). Yet it seems that it is difficult to break the hold such thinking has upon us no matter how much our cultures might ostensibly valorise rational and logical thought and decision making. Take, for example, an excellent study by Albas and Albas (1989) of the ways in which university students “participate in magic at exam time” (p. 603). Exams are, of course, events where students “no matter how well prepared, encounter a number of uncertainties” (ibid.) and might therefore wish to use any (legal) tool at their disposal to reduce those uncertainties and associated anxieties. The researchers found that many of the practices that students used to control their luck (and therefore their anxiety) operated on the simple associations of sympathetic magic. So, one respondent “always wore a three-piece suit that he had found particularly efficacious when he wore it on one occasion to a job interview” (p. 607)—a good example of the mixing of the contagious and imitative (the student wears the suit to imitate the same set of circumstances that had previously produced success and also sees the suit as imparting success to him through contact). A number of other students wore specific pieces of jewellery that belonged to their parents but “in all of these cases, the students mentioned that the parent was particularly bright and successful, thus implying a faith in magic by contagion” (ibid.). Examples of pure imitative magic used by respondents are practices that involve the creation of an artefact or pattern that mimics the desired examination result. So, on every exam day one student would cook a breakfast consisting of “one sausage placed vertically on the left of the plate and beside it two eggs sunny side up to make the configuration ‘100’ (percent)”. Another would stir his coffee exactly twenty times before his examinations, as “he was taking 5 courses and aspired to an A in each (which is the equivalent of 4 grade points), and 5 times 4 equals 20” (p. 608). While we may joke as much as we want about the febrile imaginations and illogic of undergraduate students, the simple reality is that Albas and Albas’ (1989) respondents represented a broad sample of those engaged in higher education across a broad range of subjects (including the sciences) in a large, provincial university in the United States. Not somewhere where we would immediately expect to discover the rampant practice of sympathetic magic. Albas and Albas (1989) make the final point that the modern sympathetic magic of students is clearly expressed in ways that can differ from more traditional magical practices. The student magic that they uncovered was generally individually performed for individual purposes rather than related to public or community concerns, often quite “spontaneously generated” rather than culturally dictated, and “highly variable and even contradictory” (p. 612) in its rituals. Yet, despite these ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’ variations, the basic assumptions of sympathetic magic are clearly present and link the actions (and the thinking) of these undergraduates with the magical practices of the Ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Trobriand Islanders, Cornelius Agrippa and the Renaissance occult philosophers, the practitioners of Santeria, etc. Indeed, let us not forget that we are not linking magic with anything laughingly called ‘primitive’ society. Their practices do not make Albas and Albas’ (1989) students ‘primitive’ (whatever that might possibly mean). Rather, their spontaneous recourse to sympathetic magic illustrates the way that the law of similarity and the law of contact seem ‘natural’, ‘right’, ‘correct’ at some level to humans in need of control over their lives wherever and whenever they might be.

The basic assumptions of sympathetic magic can be used to build up truly impressive feats of intellectual creativity. In Renaissance Europe, for example, the assumptions of homeopathic and contagious magic were expanded into highly complex systems of correspondences that uncovered the hidden (occult) relationships within the variety of the natural world. “Natural magic”, as it was called, sought to investigate, catalogue, and then exploit these “occult sympathies” (Yates, 2003, p. 53), aiming to control natural forces (and a person’s place within them) to the magician’s advantage. Cornelius Agrippa, indeed, in his treatise on natural magic first published in 1531, provides us with exactly the same division between magics of similarity and contact that Frazer was to propose some many centuries later. What Agrippa calls the “occult virtues” of things can be discovered through the magician’s attention to the similarities between things and to the way that things come into contact with each other. While God has infused everything with these “occult virtues” nevertheless He has hidden them from the eyes of humanity. Yet we are also created by God and have been given the tools to uncover these properties, using our “experience and conjecture” to inquire into the nature of the world and discover its secrets (which is, of course, the root of the scientific method mainstream marketing prizes so highly). For Agrippa, when we inquire into the world, we should first consider that “everything moves and turns itself into its like”; “so fire moves to fire, water moves to water, and he that is bold moves to boldness” (Agrippa, [1651] 1898, p. 71). It therefore follows that if

So, if we wish to “promote love” we should, seek out the animal that is “most loving” (for example a pigeon or a turtle), and then “take the members or parts” which display this property most vigorously (say, its heart or its breast) at the time when its love is the most intense (in Spring, perhaps). Agrippa then moves on to talk of ways in which the magician can also manipulate occult virtues by contact. He explains that “so great is the power of natural things that they not only work upon all things that are near them, by their virtue, but also besides this, they infuse into them a like power, through which, by the same virtue, they also work upon other things” (p. 74). He uses the commonplace example of the lodestone to demonstrate how true this is, for when iron rings are drawn near to the lode-stone they also become infused with the same qualities as the lodestone and are themselves able to draw further iron pieces. From this material example of infection through contact, Agrippa then moves on to one based in human personality—“after this manner it is, as they say, that a wanton, grounded in boldness and impudence, is like to infect all that are near her, by this property, whereby they are made like herself”. It is then but a very small step for Agrippa to argue that “if any one shall put on the inward garment of a wanton, or shall have about him that looking-glass which she daily looks into, he shall thereby become bold, confident, impudent and wanton” (ibid.). In this way, the principles of similarity and contact are seen to provide the explanatory mechanisms for all of Agrippa’s natural magic.

These occult sympathies did not just exist on the natural (or elemental) level, however, but were also mirrored (in far more complex fashion) in the celestial and supercelestial realms—knowledge of which would enable the magician to communicate with angels, demons and, at the most rarefied level, God Himself. In an instance of spiritual bootstrapping, once magic has provided you with the means by which to converse with such spirits, then they will be able to provide you with the “knowledge of the whole universe, and of the secrets of Nature contained therein” (Arbatel, [1655] 1978, p. 211). All of this will make you someone who is aware of their place in the universe, who is able to interpret correctly what is happening to them in their life. As the pseudonymous Arbatel (author of the famous Renaissance treatise Of Magick) writes, the magician becomes someone who

All of this is neatly contrasted with the fate of the non-magician, who “is carried to and fro, as it were in war with his affections; he knoweth not when they issue out of his own minde, or are impressed by the assisting essence; and he knoweth not how to overthrow the counsels of his enemies by the word of God, or to keep himself from the snares and deceits of the tempter” (ibid.). In other words, even the highly elaborate magical systems of Renaissance scholarship are seen as routes to the confidence and mental strength that will allow the magician to be decisive and clear in their thinking about the universe, and avoid being blown about by the vicissitudes of a mysterious and complex world. For Hammond (1970), this is the “central concept” of magic—“the power that makes magic effective is a projection of man’s capacity to act effectively by means of his knowledge and skill” (p. 1353). An understanding of the sympathetic relations in the universe reflects humanity’s active stance towards nature and the environment—it is about taking control through knowledge and active comparison. The practice of magic, Hammond argues, expresses “the belief in human powers as effective forces” (p. 1355). And perhaps here it is worth remembering Gorgias’ pride in the power of rhetoric. The way that it can effect ascendency in any realm of human endeavour provides a confidence to Gorgias that almost seems magical.

Which brings us to an important question. If sympathetic relations of similarity and contact are to be placed at the centre of a general description (if not a definition) of magic, where does that leave language? For language is most definitely something that seems to have an important part to play in magical practice. Words accompany the making of magical artefacts, they are inscribed upon such artefacts, they direct spirits, they banish them, and they even cajole and persuade them. For quite some time, mainstream anthropological approaches to magic “devalued the role of words in ritual which was seen as stereotyped behaviour consisting of a sequence of non-verbal acts and manipulation of objects” (Tambiah, 1968, p. 175). However, although the “ratio of words to actions may vary between rituals” (ibid.), Tambiah (1968) argues that “in most cases it would appear that ritual words are at least as important as other kinds of ritual act” (p. 176). Furthermore, he notes that even when words might seem to play a secondary role in a particular magical practice, if the performer is questioned as to what makes the ritual work it is often the case that “the reply takes the form of a formally expressed belief that the power is in the ‘words’ even though the words become effective only if uttered in a very special context of other action” (ibid.). Words become magically powerful when uttered in the right way in the right place at the right time, then—a perspective that is fundamentally rhetorical. Indeed, many words uttered in magical rituals can seem, when examined in isolation, to have almost no meaning—they seem to be jumbled syllables or babble. They might originate in a language unknown to the magician or the client, they might be amalgams of words from different languages, they might be almost unrecognisable mutations of snatches of older liturgies, they might be onomatopoeic creations, or entirely synthetic exoticisms. But they have a nascent power that is brought out within a particular ritual context. They are given a perlocutionary force, in the terminology of Austin’s (1962) speech act theory. If a sentence’s locutionary force is its function to describe something, its illocutionary force is the speaker’s motivation in uttering it, its performative power. If I shout “Cthulhu’s behind you!”, my words have a descriptive function but they also are working as a warning (my motivation to scream these words is to warn you)—the illocutionary act is “performance of an act in saying something as opposed to performance of an act of saying something” (Austin, 1962, p. 99). The words’ perlocutionary force, however, is the power they have to get you to do something (in this case, start running, gibbering, voiding your bowels, etc.). The perlocutionary force of words refers to the effects that those words can have, their consequences. Chlup (2007) makes the point that just because the words of magical ritual may not have any apparent locutionary force (or may have lost it over time and cultural/linguistic shifts) does not mean that they have no illocutionary or perlocutionary power. Speaking of the language of the Hermetica (the second century CE collection of Egyptian-Greek magical spells and invocations), Chlup (2007) argues that although it “stands beyond logic and seems incoherent”, “that is not to say, though, that it becomes meaningless—only that locutionary meaning is replaced by a performative one” (p. 144). Of course, a vast amount of magical language does have locutionary as well as performative meaning and it is the play between the two that can itself produce what we might think of as the magical moment. Through the sorts of patterning, sequencing, and redundancy that Tambiah (1979) contends is typical of magical language, a “sense of heightened and intensified and fused communication” is produced (p. 140). This has a perlocutionary force, altering mental states, inducing euphoria or even “subordination to a collective representation” (p. 141). Tambiah (1979) further argues that the formal elements of magical language must be considered to work in tandem with the symbolic elements that it contains. An interesting consequence of this is that in his description of the spells of the Trobriand Islanders, Tambiah depicts a discourse which has striking similarities with rabble-rousing political rhetoric (or advertising copy, come to that):

I find this a remarkably powerful description not only of magical ritual but also of rhetorical force, the sort of force that Tonks (2002) claims allows marketing to energize exchange.

So, magic can broadly be seen as a way of trying to effect change in the world, change that is advantageous for the magician, his client, or his community. In order to effect this change magic tends to rely not upon simple appeals to divinity but instead on the performance of ritual that feature the logic of sympathy and the performative power of language. There are, of course, many other aspects to magical practice—the use of music, for example, or the construction of material artefacts. And, as Evans-Pritchard (1929) famously demonstrated, what one community’s magic looks like can be quite different from another’s just a few hundred miles away. Furthermore, the things that we point to and call magic change significantly over time. Smith (2004) notes, for example, that shamanism (denoting the complex of ritual practices described by ethnographers in circumpolar regions) was treated as “the very type of ‘magic’” (p. 218) in most late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works, and yet in the second half of the twentieth century it “has been transferred to the ‘religious’” category. So, different communities make different judgements over time regarding what is magic and what is not. One person’s religion can be another person’s magic—after all, there are clear aspects of sympathetic magic in operation in traditional Christian practices, and religious ritual makes much use of illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts. As we have seen Smith (2004) pointing out, magic is often used as a contrast term in academic discourse and this will inevitably mean that its boundaries and definition will change as the concepts and practices against which it is contrasted change with academic understanding, emphases, and fashion. These are problems that constantly accompany the use of the word “magic” in what Smith (2004) calls “second-order, theoretical, academic discourse” (p. 218). However, although he would wish for its simple abandonment in such discourse due to its constantly fluctuating nature, it is at the same time undeniable that “magic” also has “cross-culturally, a native, first-order category occurring in ordinary usage which has deeply influenced the evaluative language of the scholar” (p. 219). Magic is a word that is not just used by historians of religion, ethnographers, and anthropologists. All societies seem to label some sort of ritual practice as deviant, evil, discomforting, harmful, or dangerous, no matter what they might call it. This word, or collection of terms, is then used often to literally (or perhaps metaphorically) describe practices or arte-facts or people that are somehow possessed of supernormal, extraordinary power or significance. In other words, the shifting, oppositional understandings of magic that are reflected in Western scholarship must always be set beside the first-order ways in which societies use the concept. It is to two of those first-order uses of the term that I will now turn.