Fashioning Magic, Fashioning History: The Past and Present of Modern Witchcraft

1. MAGICAL HISTORIES AND HISTORICAL MAGIC

Definitions of magic are often circular and limited to rationalist parameters. They tend to embrace a set of beliefs about the irrational possibilities of control over unseen and supernatural sources, succinctly described by Keith Thomas as "the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxieties."¹ For more than a century, foundational anthropological theories mapped magic against religion and science to explain the "prevalence and persistence of occult beliefs and practices"² as a functional social or psychological category in which "no action is inherently magical."³ But magic remains complicated and often ambiguous. It is used to classify anything that cannot be explained by supposedly testable scientific principles, from sorcery and witchcraft to illusion. Yet this also points to the circularity of these definitions. As Peter Pels noted, magic as the unscientific other makes no sense outside of the "complex discursive field that makes up magic, science and religion in the nineteenth century," which continues to shape our current understanding of magic.⁴ My starting point is Pels's observation that definitions of magic are thus always historical and contextual—the product of the "whims of history."⁵

Scholarly histories of magic have been shaped by principles of rational modernity. Borrowing from Trouillot's advice in Silencing the Past, I argue that we should consider how magic "works" rather than what it "is."⁶ This is not an invitation to test its practical efficacy but to consider how it "works" as a more experiential and less logical set of processes and conditions. Such an approach may help dislodge magic from the rationalist restraints in which claims of a disenchanted modernity appear self-evident, an inevitable decline of magic in the face of secular reality.⁷ Scholarly histories of magic have been shaped by the principles of rational modernity. However, ethnographies of modern Western witchcraft⁸ offer opportunities to investigate how magic might "work," situated in ritual practice, dreaming, and engagements with an inspirited world that is shaped and produced over time.

In particular, I draw attention to alternative perspectives that researchers have been able to find among contemporary Western magical-religious witches. For example, Margot Adler states that "magic is a convenient word for a whole collection of techniques, all of which involve the mind . . . including the mobilization of confidence, will, and emotion brought about by the recognition of necessity; the use of imaginative facilities, particularly the ability to visualize."⁹ Susan Greenwood offers "magical consciousness" as a "type of imaginative associative thinking" that differs from "more abstract analytical modes of thought." Typically marginalized in Western cultural history, she reframes the imaginal as a "legitimate source of knowledge" and challenges empirically informed anthropological theories of magic.¹⁰

Within this context, the use of history by modern practitioners of magic is particularly worthy of consideration, especially given history's role in the construction of rationalist definitions of magic. Far from being an obstacle, such rationalist histories have provided a further spur for the construction of magical histories. Modern witchcraft falls under the broad umbrella of contemporary eclectic Pagan Nature Religions.¹¹ It is made up out of diverse spiritual, religious, and magical thriving and growing traditions that have undergone significant changes in ideas and emphases since first emerging into the Western occult and esoteric scene in the 1930s as "Wicca." Gerald Gardner, a retired civil servant, claimed that he had stumbled on surviving fragments of the "old religion," an ancient pagan fertility witch-cult.¹² Gardner proposed that witches worked in closed initiatory covens, although, as the movement has gained momentum, many practice in more solitary and informal ways.¹³ Central polytheistic principles revere nature as sacred, and for many practitioners the world is perceived as fundamentally inspirited, animated, and alive.¹⁴

Since the latter years of the twentieth century, many self-identified British witches have been re-evaluating the historiography of the modern movement. They face contradictions posed by the recognition that it has a relatively shallow history...