"Magicians, who were also alchemists, astrologers and doctors in Greece, India and elsewhere, were the founders and exponents of astronomy, physics and natural history ... Mathematicians certainly owed a lot to researches carried out concerning magic squares and the magical properties of numbers and figures. This treasury of ideas, amassed by magic, was a capital store which science for a long time exploited. Magic served science and magicians served scholars." [177]
"Magic is essentially the art of doing things, and magicians have always taken advantage of their know-how, their dexterity, their manual skill. Magic is the domain of pure production, ex nihilo. With words and gestures it does what techniques achieve by labour." [175]
"When the people gather round a magician and then he withdraws into his private world, it may seem at this moment that their participation is also withdrawn, but in fact it is more real than ever at this point because it is society's presence which gives him the confidence to become possessed and permits him to come out of this state in order that he may perform his magic." [165]
"... magic is not an easily opened door ... Magic, like sacrifice, requires and produces an alteration, a modification in one's state of mind. This is expressed by the gravity of the actions, the changed nature of the voice and even by the use of a special language, the language of spirits and gods." [157]
"The same applies to women. It is because they have a special social status that they are thought to play important magical roles, considered to be sorceresses, attributed with special powers. Female attributes are qualitatively different from men's and give them specific powers." [147]
"And indeed, the idea may well exist without having been expressed: people have no more need to express ideas like these than they need to formulate the rules of their grammar. In magic, as in religion and linguistics, unconscious ideas are at work." [143]
"The single word [mana] embraces a whole series of notions which we have seen, are inter-related, but which we have always represented as separate concepts. It reveals to us what has seemed to be a fundamental feature of magic -- the confusion between action, rite and object." [134]
"There are two types of special functions in society which we have already mentioned in relation to magic. They are science and technology on the one hand, and religion on the other. Is magic a kind of universal art or possibly a class of phenomena analogous to religion? In art or science the principles and methods of action are elaborate collectively and transmitted by tradition. It is for these reasons that science and the arts can be called collective phenomena. Moreover, both art and science satisfy common needs. But, given these facts, each individual is able to act on his own. Using his own common, sense, he goes from one element to the next and thence to their application. He is free: he may even start again at the beginning, adapting or rectifying, according to his technique or kill, at any stage, all at his own risk. Nothing can take away his control. Now, if magic were of the same order as science or technology, the difficulties we previously observed would no longer exist, since science and technology are not collective in every single essential aspect, and, while they may have social functions and society is their beneficiary and their vehicle, their sole promoters are individuals. But it is difficult to assimilate to magic the sciences or arts, since its manifestations can be described without once encountering similar creative or critical faculties among its individual practitioners." [110 - 11]
"The normal condition of magic is one involving an almost total fusion of powers and roles. As a result, one of its constituent features may disappear without the nature of the whole changing. There are magical rites which fail to correspond to any conscious idea." [108 - 9]
"Magic has little poetry. We do not find many stories about its demons. Demons are like soldiers in an army, they are troops, ganas, bands of hunters or cavalcades; they lack any real individuality. This applies even more to the gods which have become involved in magic ... they may be transformed to suit a magician's purpose, and are often reduced to mere names." [105]
"Owing to the fact that magicians came to concern themselves with contagion, harmonies, oppositions, they stumbled across the idea of causality, which is no longer mystical even when it involves properties which are in no way experimental. From this line of thinking they ended up deriving, in authentic fashion, special properties from words and symbols." [95]
"... while it is clear that objects are vested with particular powers, by virtue of their names (reseda morbos reseda), we claim that things are more as incantations than as objects with properties, since they are really kinds of materialized words." [95]
"Sorcerers were the first poisoners, the first surgeons -- we are aware that primitive surgery can be highly developed. Magicians made real discoveries in the field of metallurgy." [94]
"Magic involves a terrific confusion of images, without which, to our way of thinking, the rite itself would be inconceivable. In the same way that the central person in the sacrifice, the animal victim, god and the sacrifice itself become merged into one, the magician, the magical rite and its effects give rise to a motley of indissociable images. Moreover, this very confusion may be the object of the representation. However separate the different moments in the representation of a magical rite may be, they also form part of a total representation whereby cause and effect become confused." [77 - 8]
"It is all the more confusing when the traditional character of magic is found to be bound up with the arts and crafts. The successive gestures of an artisan may be as uniformly regulated as those of a magician. Nevertheless, the arts and crafts have been universally distinguished from magic; there has always been an intangible difference in method between the the two activities." [24 - 5]
A General Theory of Magic (1902)
Marcel Mauss (1872 - 1950)
