If someone asks:
When Jesus walked on water, how exactly did it work? Did he increase the surface tension or solidify the water around his feet, or was he really just levitating at water level?
Then they deserve whatever responses they get.
My understanding of what Panurge said is that magical formulae often get their power from or through the cosmology of the culture in which they operate. Myths are often set before or outside of time, and often describe enormous changes in the universe (no fire > fire; big egg > universe; clumsy giant > rock formation, etc.). So if the incantation or charm references that period, it obtains some of that transformative power by sympathetic magic.
For example, if I have a disease and want to charm it away, I might refer to a myth about the way the gods subdued the demons, or a particular instance of a healing in my mythology.
As to whether that works, in the abstract sense, for believers: I would say “no” (or more generously, “unproven”). Believing in magic doesn’t make it real anymore than believing you can fly obviates the need for airplanes. But that is because I believe reality exists independent of our perception of it. That belief isn’t universal, either, and I’m sure someone will be along to call me irrational and illogical for clinging to it!
To go back to your earlier post, I have in fact a large shelf of books on magic, amulets, the occult, and similar beliefs from throughout history. And that’s in addition to a 23-volume encyclopedia called Man, Myths, and Magic. I even write (and, yes, publish professionally) fantasy fiction about magic and magical beings. I’ll match my historic, cultural, and anthropological understanding of magic against yours any day.
And that’s why I say that the how of magic is almost entirely neglected in historical records. The few possibilities that one can dig out are recourse to larger voices than humans. Sometimes magic calls upon gods (or demons or other supernatural creatures) to do work for humans. Occasionally, magicians can call upon natural forces (personifications of wind, fire, water) to work. Some sympathetic magic works by calling on similarities to work in similar ways.
However, except for saying that somebody else does the work, there is never a how in any body of work on magic. That is because magic comes out of a pre-rational state in which the “how” of ordinary processes is not known. If wind and fire are not understood than no theory of how to work magic with wind or fire can possibly exist. If no theory of medicine exists then sympathetic magic to make people ill or cure them cannot have an equivalent how.
It simply cannot be stressed enough that historical magic depended on a lack of understanding of how the world worked. It seemed perfected obvious to them that larger forces than humanity buffeted them invisibly. Disease, weather, aging, the sun and moon, everything in their world beat down upon people inexorably and without explanation other than recourse to god figures. Magicians were originally those who claimed to be able to call upon or manipulate or supplicate the god figures. All magic stems from this. In the west, with Christianity, the supplication of the Christian God became an official heresy, so other god figures were substituted, or, more safely, the manipulatation of natural forces in some arcane way. Non western cultures had similar developmental paths, but the details vary in a thousand ways.
All magic is similar in its underlying aspect, however. There is no “how.” The supernatural did things that humans could not, by means that no human could comprehend. That is why the rise of science, the age of reason, the enlightenment hit magic such fierce body blows. The substitution of workable - and reliable - theories of how the world operated obviated the need for supernatural intercession to a greater and greater extent.
Asking “how” magic was thought to work is looking at the question in the wrong way. It is an artifact of our current scientific age, in which how is not only a legitimate question, but the expected and necessary question. This did not used to be true. Nobody asked “how” magic worked. One might ask “why” magic worked. Today “why” and “how” are inextricably linked, but in a pre-rational society those were separate questions.
People thought magic worked because it harnessed the powers of magical beings. It’s as circular as that.
No. I know that there are plenty of those on the SDMB. What surprises me is that even though the OP’s question is answerable or at least debatable within a humanistic scientific framework (if the question is rephrased, as I did) it is immediately shot down by numerous posters saying that “there is no such thing as magic”. Well - my point is that magic and religious rituals do exist and do have both meaning and efficacity for the people who perform them. We, as outsiders who do not believe that sacrificing a goat really brings rain or that the world was born from a great golden egg or that demons from hell can be called upon to act in this world, still have the opportunity to try to conceptualize what is going on in these rituals. If we do so consistently and succeed in developing a vocabulary and a methodology that can be applied in the study of ritual at a general level, we might be able to do some comparative analysis and in the end learn a bit about how and why humans act and think as they do. Then again: I am aware that the humanistic disciplines rarely - if ever - produce absolute, authoritative answers to anything, but this doesn’t mean that all the humanistic disciplines should be banned from GQ and moved to CS in stead.
That is what I meant. This is not the only way that magic or rituals work, but one that is often easy to see. The cosmological references can be very subtle, often reduced by time passed to ethymological connections and such, but a lot of the time it can be found. On a more general level, what I tried to say is that the ritual creates a special, authoritative, transformative kind of rhetorical situation (in the minds of the believers, that is) where the utterances take upon itself a different meaning than it would in everyday use and thus attain world-altering power.
I think your reply is spot-on; there really isn’t a “theory of magic”, because magic itself is based on a false understanding of how the world worked.
However, is it possible the practice of magic may have revealed certain cultural or psychological notions? I guess I’m wondering if a “comparative religions” approach would reveal anything interesting, but I’ll bet this is already covered under studies of such magic/religious activity as shamanism.
I see. You’re making a semantic point that I did not pick up on. I’m glad you clarified that.
We still have points of disagreement (e.g. the definition of “rational”; I don’t understand how a human society could be characterized as “pre-rational”), but I don’t think they’re relevant to the thread.
So “Make your own reality”?
All of it is perception and thought influence. By using the right words, cultivating the right emotional/ecstatic states, possibly with some psychoactive plants thrown in, there is no limit to what you can get people to swear actually happened. In their mind it’s as real as a rock. Once you’ve achieved the ability to manipulate perceptions in that manner, you can then influence actions in order to create self-fulfilling prophecies. That’s what magic is. To the outsider it looks like simple deception, to the participants it looks like magical reality. Thought it may seem like an obvious ruse, do not make the mistake of trying to point this out to the witnesses, because to them it is as real and unquestionable as anything in the world. It is most easily perceived by those who are already convinced that it exists, the rest need strong drugs (which fortunately nature provides to wizards in great abundance).
I would recommend looking at Marcel Mauss’s 1902 General Theory of Magic. Link to google books.
Why can’t there be a theory if the phenomenon isn’t real? Does anyone remember phlogiston? That wasn’t real, and was based on a false understanding of how the world worked. And yet there was a theory. And people interested in the history of ideas and the scientific process still discuss it, even without belief.
That promised to be a fascinating book. But after reading all the reproduced pages, I am at a loss to describe the author’s premise or conclusion. Does magic work? Is it a delusion, real or it only works if you believe?
You have to use the right words.
These words are keystructures that make reference calls to forces that underly the structure of the cosmos. Think of the words as built in functions to the universe. Each of the words do some miniscule thing, though they do it well, the greater magic is stringing the words together in a usefull mannner (called piping by some) which create little gateways that connect all the forces to accomplish the intended goal.
Unfortunately there was a mistake in the cosmos, some of the key functions that underly the cosmos got corrupted by unintended usage, and the function library of the universe was lost. Magic has not existed since then.
I recommend a format and clean install.
That’s not quite the same as magic, a deity, after all *'Doth as he likes, or wherefore Lord? * The difference is in the idea of petitioning and compelling. People who are religious may or may not believe that God intervenes in events on Earth, but they always understand that any intervention is essentially up to God. People who engage in magic(k)al thinking believe they (or others) have a supernatural ability to manipulate reality.
In essence, he tries to systematize the practices of magic across many cultures and see what, exactly, practitioners of magic are doing and why. Since he wrote this in 1902, a lot of his own theoretical perspectives are long obsolete, but he attempts to define the phenomenon, classify it, and analyze it. He really doesn’t even attempt to answer the question of whether it works if you believe in it. How would you test for that? He looks at how it functions in society, as a traditional craft.
While Mauss’ book is very interesting, it is also very far removed from the way comparative religion discusses magic and ritual today. Instead I would recommend some of the books on ritual by Catherine Bell or, if you are in the vicinity of a good university library, Jesper Sørensen’s 2001 thesis Essence, Schema, and Ritual Action: Towards a Cognitive Theory of Magic. The notion of pre-rational, for instance, that was much in vogue in Mauss’ time has been completely abandoned today. Every culture presents a (relatively) coherent system within which most cultural utterances make perfect sense. An Andamanese fisherman is not pre-rational or “primitive” when he moves about in the world, everything he does makes sense within the system that is his culture.
Yes - sort of. Happens all the time - ever known someone who joined a cult? 
I agree, but it does propose a “theory of magic”, one of many which CJJ* and Exapno Mapcase seem to think don’t exist. They do exist. Theories abound. Whether or not they’re proven (they’re not), or whether or not any particular person accepts them as valid, they do exist. I already gave contemporary cites for two of them, in the very first serious reply to this thread.
In short, DMK talks a lot about string and chaos theory and literal vibrations of air by which one can move an atom in front of you and cause effects on an atom across the globe - if you know which atom to move and how to do it. Is this a legitimate interpretation of string and/or chaos theory? I have no idea. But it is certainly one theory of how magick works.
Avatars, egregores, familiars, Goetic daemons, Ruach, Tantra, Qabala, the Law of Similars, psychology - shit, modern magick is more theory than actual practice, in my experience with magickians.
Crap. It’s exactly the kind of handwaving with words that writers of fantasy and science fiction do every day to make their kind of magic work. It is not a theory of anything, any more than claims of vibrating extra-oxygenated water molecules are a real theory for selling bottled water at $90 each. It’s a scam along with quack health care products, quack stereo enhancers, and quack everything. It’s an insult to the word theory to label this nonsense with the word.
This is exactly what I mean by the difference between pre-rational and post-rational societies. That a society is pre-rational does not mean that it doesn’t work. It means simply that it has not developed a scientific methodology for explaining how the world works. Today’s western world demands invocation of string and chaos theories for its magic. (Read James Randi’s column or the feedback page of New Scientist for dozens of examples of handwaving misuse of scientific terms to justify quackery for sale to the gullible masses.) Similarly, the pre-rational world demanded invocation of gods and demons for its magic. Without an actual methodological structure, however, neither are rational or scientific.
And as soon as the terms used in popular change, I can guarantee you that the terms used to justify DMK’s claptrap will also change. They mean nothing beyond “watch the shiny object.”
I think Exapno is making a very important point.
The people at the Salem witch trials didn’t have a theory about how magic worked more complex than that witches either asked Satan to do magic for them, or Satan granted them the power to do magic.
Those Puritan magistrates wouldn’t have even thought to ask the question, “Well, if Tituba has the power to curse someone and make them sick, how does that work? What is the physical cause of the sickness?”
And this is why magic in modern fantasy so often works nothing like magic in fairy tales or the Icelandic sagas or Hellenic mythology. Modern fantasy magic involves all sorts of energy lines and tapping into power sources and magical ego attacks and shields and such, that work logically by alternate laws of physics. It often works like Luke’s Jedi powers. Modern fantasy settings have a theory of magic, otherwise it’s a deus ex machina each time magic powers are used, because the reader will have no way to predict what a character will be able to do.
But in a fairy tale, a witch might turn a prince into a bear. How does she do it? No explanation is given, she’s a witch, and she can turn a prince into a bear, and she does. She might have a magic stick, or a magic apron, or give him a magic potion to drink, or use a magic word. But our modern notions of cause and effect and conservation of energy don’t apply. That fairy tale witch doesn’t use magic like a Mercedes Lackey mage. She hits the prince with a stick and he turns into a bear, and the only way he can be turned back into a human is if a princess agrees to marry him on new year’s eve under a full moon. How does the spell work? Wrong question.
Once a society starts asking itself, “Hey, how DOES magic work, I mean, really work,” then pretty soon the answer becomes obvious, it doesn’t work. But our modern sensibilities demand that magic works for a reason, and so modern fantasy includes that explanation, and modern believers in magic have some pseudo-scientific half-logical explanation for how magic works. But a medieval peasant telling a story about a witch turning a prince into a bear wouldn’t think to ask the question of how that transformation works.