Practical Magic

Voltaire

Up until the early 20th century, pretty much everybody thought of superstition as "other people's religion." For instance, Voltaire famously pointed out that the difference between superstition and religion is just a matter of perspective. One sect's religion is another sect's superstition, he wrote in his Philosophical Dictionary (1764).

But a Polish anthropologist named Bronislaw Malinowski changed all that. In the 19-teens, he became one of the first cultural scholars to actually live among the people whom he studied; up until then, most ivory tower folks worked secondhand, relying on accounts from adventurers, explorers, traders, and such. For that reason alone, you've got to love the guy. But there's more. He was also one of the first to think seriously and scientifically about the difference between superstition and religion.

The Bron

Living and working among the tribes of the Trobriand Islands -- an archipelago off the east coast of New Guinea -- Malinowski made a distinction between the ceremonies performed to mark births, deaths, marriages, and other milestone events for the community and the rituals practiced on more mundane occasions. The former he thought of as "religion"; the latter, "magic." For Malinowski, magic differed from religion in several important respects: 

• Idiosyncrasy. "Religion is the concern of the community," wrote The Bron. By contrast, superstition or magic is practiced and performed by individuals in ways often peculiar to themselves. In other words, superstition is religion by the individual, for the individual.
• Practicality. "Magic is a practical art consisting of acts which are only means to a definite end expected to follow later on," he wrote in the essay "Magic, Science, and Religion" (1954). Uncertainty plays an important role in superstition; whenever the success of an activity depended largely on chance or accident, the islanders turned to magic. Religion, on the other hand, "is a body of self-contained acts being themselves the fulfillment of their purpose" -- their purpose being the continuation of tradition or the goal of transcendence. (I know, that makes the title of this post a redundancy. So what?)

• Danger. "We find magic wherever the element of danger is conspicuous," Malinowski concluded. For example, when the Trobriand Islanders fished in the familiar confines of their lagoon, they went about their business casually. But when they ventured out into the open sea, far from home, they practiced a variety of rituals before their trip to ensure safe passage.

Malinowski found real value in magic. "It enables man to carry out with confidence his most vital tasks and to maintain his poise and mental integrity under circumstances which would ... demoralize him by despair and anxiety, by fear and hatred." In other words, it gives people the illusion of control -- an idea that psychologists would explore in depth and detail some 50 years later.