What Is Magic?
Contested category of non-ordinary practice
Definition. Magic is a scholarly label for practices and beliefs that claim to affect persons, events, or spiritual agents through means that are not recognized as ordinary technology or officially sanctioned religion. Modern historians emphasize that it is not a fixed essence but a historically variable category whose content depends on how particular cultures draw boundaries between magic, religion, and science (Bailey, 2006; Kieckhefer, 1989; Thomas, 1971).
Historical Frame
Historical work on Europe shows that ideas of magic have been repeatedly redefined as religious, legal, and intellectual authorities renegotiated what counted as legitimate access to supernatural or hidden forces (Bailey, 2006; Bailey, 2014). Thomas’s study of early modern England depicts a landscape in which church rituals, popular charms, astrology, and learned conjuration all coexisted, with “magic” gradually narrowed and problematized as beliefs and institutions changed (Thomas, 1971; Thomas, 2023).
Kieckhefer argues that medieval thought distinguished between natural magic—seen as an extension of natural philosophy drawing on occult properties—and demonic magic—understood as illicit dealings with spiritual beings, especially demons (Kieckhefer, 1989; Kieckhefer, 1990). These distinctions were themselves fluid, and debates over them shaped how theologians, jurists, and practitioners conceptualized magic’s place between religion and emerging scientific explanation (Bailey, 2014; Kieckhefer, 1989).
Theoretical Approaches
Classical social theorists such as Frazer and Durkheim tried to define magic in contrast to religion, portraying magic as instrumental, individual, and mechanically oriented toward results, while religion appeared as communal, supplicatory, and morally framed (Bailey, 2006; Bailey, 2018). Later scholarship has criticized these sharp dichotomies, noting that many historical practices mix features of both, and that the same rite may be called magic or religion depending on who is judging it (Bailey, 2006; Thomas, 1971).
Contemporary historians and scholars of religion therefore tend to treat magic as a heuristic category: a tool for analyzing how societies classify and regulate certain rituals, experts, and claims about invisible forces, rather than as a universal system with a single inner definition (Bailey, 2014; Kieckhefer, 1989). This perspective highlights how accusations of magic, learned taxonomies, and self-descriptions all participate in constructing what “magic” is taken to be at a given time (Bailey, 2006; Thomas, 2023).
Practices and Contexts
Historical surveys identify a wide range of practices that have been called magic, including healing charms, divination, astrological elections, protective rites, conjuration of spirits, and techniques for influencing love, luck, or weather (Bailey, 2007; Kieckhefer, 1989). Many of these draw on broader religious symbols, texts, and institutions; church prayers, sacramentals, and saints’ cults, for example, could be used in ways that contemporaries variously saw as pious devotion or as illicit magical manipulation (Thomas, 1971; Thomas, 2023).
Recent work on periodization stresses that the visibility and configuration of magic change across what Bailey calls “ages of magicians,” as different actors—clerics, physicians, cunning-folk, occultists—claim expertise in managing hidden forces (Bailey, 2014). Rather than a separate sphere, magic appears as a shifting intersection of popular practice, learned speculation, and institutional control (Bailey, 2006; Kieckhefer, 1989).
Modern Scholarship and Usage
Modern introductory studies present magic as a family of practices and discourses whose common feature is the claim that specific, often symbolically ordered actions can produce effects through non-empirical or extra-ordinary connections (Bailey, 2018). At the same time, they emphasize that what counts as “non-ordinary” is itself historically contingent, depending on prevailing views of nature, causality, and divine action (Bailey, 2006; Thomas, 1971).
Scholars also attend to the politics of the term, noting that “magic” has frequently been used to mark the beliefs of marginalized groups, competitors, or predecessors as irrational, dangerous, or illegitimate (Bailey, 2006; Kieckhefer, 1989). Analyses of this labeling process show how defining magic is intertwined with constructing religious orthodoxy, scientific authority, and social order (Bailey, 2014; Thomas, 2023).
Common Misconceptions
- “Magic is a single, timeless system.” Historical research shows that magic encompasses diverse practices and ideas that have been grouped and regrouped under changing definitions, rather than forming a stable, unified tradition (Bailey, 2006; Kieckhefer, 1989).
- “Magic is simply failed science or false religion.” While some older theories framed magic as a primitive precursor to science or a deviation from religion, current scholarship treats it as a meaningful way people have organized experience and power in specific contexts (Bailey, 2018; Thomas, 1971).
- “There is one correct scholarly definition of magic.” Contemporary authors emphasize that definitions are tools tailored to particular questions; debates over definition are part of how the field reflects on its own assumptions (Bailey, 2006; Bailey, 2014).
Summary
Magic in current academic use names a historically changing category applied to practices that claim to act on the world through non-ordinary means. Its content and evaluation depend on how specific societies draw and contest the lines between magic, religion, and science, making it as much a window onto those boundaries as a description of any one kind of practice (Bailey, 2006; Bailey, 2014; Kieckhefer, 1989; Thomas, 1971).
References
Bailey, M. D. (2006). The meanings of magic. Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, 1(1), 1–23.
Bailey, M. D. (2007). Magic and superstition in Europe: A concise history from antiquity to the present. Rowman & Littlefield.
Bailey, M. D. (2014). The age of magicians: Periodization in the history of European magic. Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, 9(2), 158–179.
Bailey, M. D. (2018). Magic: The basics. Routledge.
Kieckhefer, R. (1989). Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press.
Kieckhefer, R. (1990). Forbidden rites: A necromancer’s manual of the fifteenth century. Pennsylvania State University Press.
Thomas, K. (1971). Religion and the decline of magic: Studies in popular beliefs in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Scribner.
Thomas, K. (2023). Work out of time: Religion and the decline of magic at fifty. Past & Present, 261(1), 259–287.