Science Is Magic

[UltraBudgie]

Or, putting it another way, we can follow the argument of Sir James Frazier (third chapter of the Golden Bough) that magic is a kind of primitive science, trying to discover the workings of cause-and-effect in order to manipulate the world. Among their discoveries were the principles of imitation and contagion. "Imitation" being the principle that you can make things happen by doing something similar, e.g. pouring water onto the ground to encourage the rain to fall. "Contagion" being the principle that what you do to an item will affect something which it has touched; what you do to a hair might injure the person it came from, what you do to a knife might heal the person it injured. That is how, like the scientist, they were aiming to control the world around them.

This is different from reliigion. Reliigion makes requests from spiritual powers. Magic gives them orders.

I've heard the distinction made between "magic", "sorcery" and "witchcraft", too. I suppose it's a matter of labels, and intent, to a degree.

But you've got me thinking about imitation and contagion. The practice with tangible objects, okay. Tangible objects have persistence and objective observability. But can the same "magic" concepts be applied to non-tangible structures, such as words and ideas? Oh no, "meme magic"! Haha. It makes me wonder about advertising, which some have described as spellcraft. Manipulating contagion of mental association. Imitation of effect -- why did Joe Camel look the way he did? Contagion via the emotional voodoo doll of propaganda. And perhaps with science we're dealing with a more strict set of idea-structures, ones that require a certain consistency, a certain empirical uniformity. Does this "chase away" such magic? That is the devout hope of some. But perhaps, if that is something that can never quite be done, it merely "squeezes" the spellcraft to a higher level, wider and less determinable in effect. But not less powerful.

Something to think about, thank you.