Magic and the Scholars

For most of its history magic has been described by its opponents. In the last half-century it has also become the subject of patient and sympathetic scholarship. The Guild welcomes that scholarship, has learned a good deal from it, and on certain conditions assists it.

Defined from outside

In the Western world the word magic has served for centuries as an umbrella for a great variety of beliefs and rites that seek to influence events by hidden means. Until quite recently nearly every definition of it was written by people who were against it. Religious authorities defined it as dealing with demons, lawyers as a crime, and the philosophers of the Enlightenment as a primitive error that the progress of knowledge would sweep away. Each of these definitions tells us more about the definer than about the practice, and none of them was much interested in what practitioners actually did or why they did it.

The Guild's founders were familiar with this problem from the other side. Imogen Castellane spent much of her scholarly life on texts that survived only because they had been copied by people who wished to condemn them.

A young field

The serious academic study of what scholars now call Western esotericism, the family of currents that includes ritual magic, astrology, alchemy, the Qabalah of the Christian scholars and the occult movements of the modern age, is only a few decades old as a recognized discipline. Universities began to create posts in it in the last years of the twentieth century, and its terms are still being settled. One reviewer of a recent study observed that even the word ritual had hardly been examined in this context before.

Some of the most useful work for practitioners has been on initiation. Historians have traced how the degree rituals of the fraternal orders that grew from the stonemasons' guilds became the blueprint for nearly every later rite of initiation in the West, from the higher degrees of the eighteenth century to the magical orders of the nineteenth and the witchcraft movements of the twentieth. They have noticed, too, that each family of initiatory rites teaches a different part of the tradition: one conveys alchemy, another the Qabalah, another a doctrine of polarity. What this means for the Guild's own admissions is discussed under Initiation.

Many disciplines

No single department can study magic alone. The best programs bring together scholars from a dozen fields, and a student of the Art who reads their work will meet all of these:

Classics

Greek and Roman magic, the curse tablets, the mystery cults, and the Greek handbooks of Roman Egypt

Near Eastern studies

The omen literature and incantations of Mesopotamia and the magic of the Egyptian temples

The religions of the book

Occult texts in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the long conversation among them

Arabic and Islamic studies

The treatises on the stars and on talismans through which much ancient learning reached Europe

History

The witch trials, the learned magic of the Renaissance, and the modern revival

History of science and medicine

Astrology, alchemy, natural magic, and the remedy books

Literature and folklore

The sorcerer in story, and the charms and customs of the countryside

Anthropology

Fieldwork among living practitioners, at home and abroad

Philosophy

The nature of ritual experience and of the body in ritual

Theater and film

Stage conjuring, illusion, the magic lantern and the seance room

Scholars of the medieval Middle East have done particular service in reminding the rest of the field that the Arabic-speaking world was not a channel through which ancient magic passed unchanged, but the place where much of it was joined together, developed and made new. The account given under The Western Tradition owes a great deal to their work.

Insiders and outsiders

The older scholarship of magic studied texts. The newer also studies people. Anthropologists and scholars of religion have joined groups of practitioners as participant observers, taking part in their rites and recording what they saw, and asking practitioners to describe their work in their own words rather than in the words of their critics.

One such study, of five groups of modern practitioners, concluded that becoming a magician is less a matter of adopting beliefs than of acquiring, through ritual, a distinctive way of inhabiting the body and directing the attention, which carries the practitioner from an ordinary to a magical way of meeting the world. Members of the Guild who have read it recognize themselves in it, and the page on The Body in Ritual was written partly in its light.

Insiders and outsiders see different things, and each should remember the limits of their view. A scholar is not a judge of whether a working works, and does not usually claim to be. A practitioner is not, by virtue of practice, a historian, and the practitioners' histories of the Art have proved on the whole much less reliable than the scholars'.

What the historians have tested

The most important correction the scholars have made concerns the age and unity of the tradition. The claim, repeated in a hundred books, that Western ceremonial magic was handed down unbroken and in secret from ancient Egypt has now been tested by historians surveying the whole span of the evidence. They find a real continuity of techniques and of texts, much of it running through Roman Egypt as the occultists said, but no continuity of secret societies, and no hidden line of masters. Several theories that once seemed to supply such a line, among them the theory of a surviving pagan witch-cult, have been abandoned. A member's account of this work is printed in the Journal as Was There Ever a Secret Tradition?

The founders would have approved. It is the same test the Thursday Workroom applied to its own sources in 1971: discard whatever cannot be confirmed, and keep what remains.

The Guild and researchers

The Guild has assisted serious research since the archive of Records was first opened to scholars in 1996. It does so on the following conditions, which protect its members and which no researcher has yet found unreasonable.

• The archive. Researchers may apply to the Warden of the Book. Access is given to extracts only, with every name removed. Records still under seal are not opened for any purpose.
• The library. Scholars may read in the library at Lantern House by appointment, on the same terms as members.
• Interviews. A member may speak to a researcher about his or her own work as freely as he or she pleases. Under the fifth Charge no member may identify another, or describe what another said or did in the Hall.
• Observation. No researcher attends a working in any Hall without the consent of every member present, given beforehand. The open evenings are open to researchers as to anyone else.
• The admissions. The wording of the rites of admission is not disclosed, for the reasons given under Initiation.
• Publication. The Guild asks for a copy of anything published with its assistance, for the library. It asks for nothing else, and it does not ask to approve what is written.

Applications should be sent to the Warden of the Book at book@sorcererguild.com, with a short account of the project and of the institution, if any, under which it is conducted.

What the Guild has learned

The Guild owes more to scholarship than its size would suggest. Its second Guildmaster was a classicist, and the editorial habits she brought to the Thursday Workroom, the comparison of sources and the striking out of what was corrupt, are the habits of a scholar. The Record itself is kept in the manner of a field notebook: dated, plain, and written before interpretation. The Reform of 2003 was argued from the archive as a study would be argued. And members have repeatedly found that the historians' account of where a method came from has made the method easier to use well.

I would rather be measured by a stranger than flattered by a friend. Let them come and count.

Margit Anselm, at the General Convocation of 1996