At the dawn of the present era, a group of deities sacrificed themselves to create the sun, moon, and time. Nahua ("Aztec") devotees wrapped stick skeletons and greenstone hearts in the deities' clothing. They venerated the tlaquimilolli (sacred bundles) as the most precious form of deity embodiment. This article explores the magic in a bundle by considering how their making exceeds ordinary collection and binds them to human caretakers as kin.
Magic primarily resides in a participatory relationship with the world. Participation does not work with the sorts of divisions employed by Western thought, for instance, between economy and society, nature and culture, cosmology and practical action. According to non-Western thought, all the world is animate and sentient, sharing these qualities with humans. Forms of modern theory, such as 4E cognition, help us understand a participatory and less alienated stance toward the world. Such forms of thought and action are holistic, rather than analytical, emphasizing notions of care and morality in human relationships with the universe. I first lay out these general points, before looking at Indigenous Australian philosophy, focusing primarily on the notion of Country, as a prime example of participatory, magical action. Magic is a positive quality of engagement and something to be aspired to, rather than something to have any negative implications.
This essay reviews biases and confusions in applying the term "magic," then turns to magic as the efficacious quality of ritual speech and as the agencies conveyed by materials in assemblage, with two historical examples of artifacts.
This article presents knots, needles, and spindles as material archives of women's labor and magical knowledge through an examination of tibb al-rukka (the medicine of the distaff) in modern Egypt. It then traces the practice of knot magic in the Mediterranean and Islamicate world to consider the interwoven, transtemporal histories of domestic work, magic, and marginalization.
Anthropologists have long demonstrated how witchcraft and magic are engaged with the modern, in some cases suggesting that witchcraft's various manifestations are constitutive of modernity in its different forms. This scholarship pushes back against the inherited teleology of Protestant Enlightenment discourse, which in turn positioned itself against West African fetish practices, which were thought to evoke Europe's more superstitious past. Similarly, we can ask how English witchcraft accusations of the sixteenth to seventeenth century were also caught up with modernity. This paper takes up the problem of counter-witchcraft in the form of English "witch bottles" to explore their relation to the fetish and to modernity.
Witch-bottles were used in the seventeenth century to counteract suspected bewitchment. Filled with nails, pins, and urine and then buried, they were believed to harm the witch and lift the curse. Witch-bottles are still being made and used today-but no tradition survives unbroken or unaltered. Over the centuries, perceptions of witchcraft have changed greatly-and witch-bottles have adapted to these changes. This article examines the conception of the witch-bottle within the subculture of "WitchTok," an online community of self-identified Wiccans and witches. It is within this subculture that we most prominently find the twenty-first-century witch-bottle, and through this we can consider how the practice is conceived in contemporary society and what adaptations it has undergone.
One of the shibboleths of modern scholarship is that the origins of engraved medieval metal vessels known as Islamic magic-medicinal bowls lie in a series of inked ceramic incantation bowls from late-antique Iraq. Since the Islamic bowls differ in their materiality, iconographic context, and function, the assumption is problematic. Moreover, despite the insistence on continuity in the face of a significant chronological disjunction between both kinds of bowls, the existence of a class of late antique incantation bowls inked in Arabic (rather than in Aramaic, Mandaic, or Syriac) has been almost entirely overlooked. This neglect reveals significant biases in modern scholarship underwritten by collecting practices and the antiquities market. It has also obscured the existence of widespread and long-standing traditions of inking unglazed ceramic vessels with Arabic texts for "magical" purposes, paralleling the traditions represented by the better-known (and more traditionally collectible) metal Islamic bowls. Such unostentatious ceramics fall foul of a high-low division that has been pervasive in structuring the canon of Islamic art history. Rather than demonstrating continuities with a single localized tradition, their existence across a broad geographic and temporal span points to a more general relationship between rituals of domesticity and the materials of magic meriting closer examination than it has received to date.
Unlike modern depictions of magical books as inherently powerful objects, handbooks from Roman Egypt are practical guides that can be fruitfully explored by attention to their physical details. This study begins by contrasting this material dimension with iconic-sacred, semantic, and expressive-performative perspectives on manuscripts before exploring the production and circulation of handbooks, starting from their basic unit, the magical recipe, and discussing how these were built up into larger collections.
In the European Middle Ages, both alchemists and magicians sought to accomplish material change by manipulating the natural powers of matter. Modern historians of science attempt the same when reconstructing historical recipes in a laboratory setting. This article asks how "impossible" medieval practices can be visualized and replicated, focusing on the Natural Magic, one of a group of related treatises pseudonymously attributed to Ramon Llull. This treatise describes the generation of "shaped spirits": language that evokes both alchemical images of allegorical beasts and the suffumigations of ritual magic. Reconstruction suggests that this language also alludes to practice-the smoky vapors produced within the alchemical vessel.
Where does magic live? Starting with the premise that books are magical repositories of knowledge, this article traces the genealogy of medieval alchemical texts and their scientific underpinnings in order to argue for the links between magic and modernity. Unearthing links between the ancient Greek medico-moral texts of the physician Galen and their Arabic incarnations in the work of the polymath al-Kindi, I invite scrutiny of historical alchemical interventions and inventions at the House of Wisdom, a crucible of learning in medieval Baghdad. By examining surviving fragments of alchemical texts such as the Ripley Scroll, which details techniques for creating magical curatives, and tracing the alchemical history of the ever-popular gin and tonic cocktail, this article presents new ways of understanding magic in our mundane lives.
