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Sorcery or Science? examines how two Sufi Muslim theologians who rose to prominence in the western Sahara Desert in the late eighteenth century, Sīdi al-Mukhtār al-Kuntī (d. 1811) and his son and successor, Sīdi Muḥammad al-Kuntī (d. 1826), decisively influenced the development of Sufi Muslim thought in West Africa. Known as the Kunta scholars, Mukhtār al-Kuntī and Muḥammad al-Kuntī were influential teachers who developed a pedagogical network of students across the Sahara. In exploring their understanding of “the realm of the unseen”—a vast, invisible world that is both surrounded and interpenetrated by the visible world—Ariela Marcus-Sells reveals how these theologians developed a set of practices that depended on knowledge of this unseen world and that allowed practitioners to manipulate the visible and invisible realms. They called these practices “the sciences of the unseen.” While they acknowledged that some Muslims—particularly self-identified “white” Muslim elites—might consider these practices to be “sorcery,” the Kunta scholars argued that these were legitimate Islamic practices. Marcus-Sells situates their ideas and beliefs within the historical and cultural context of the Sahara Desert, surveying the cosmology and metaphysics of the realm of the unseen and the history of magical discourses within the Hellenistic and Arabo-Islamic worlds. Erudite and innovative, this volume connects the Islamic sciences of the unseen with the reception of Hellenistic discourses of magic and proposes a new methodology for reading written devotional aids in historical context. It will be welcomed by scholars of magic and specialists in Africana religious studies, Islamic occultism, and Islamic manuscript culture.
In this sensitive and personal investigation into Benin's occult world, Douglas J. Falen wrestles with the challenges of encountering a reality in which magic, science, and the Vodun religion converge into a single universal force. He takes seriously his Beninese interlocutors' insistence that the indigenous phenomenon known as àze ("witchcraft") is an African science, credited with fantastic and productive deeds, such as teleportation and supernatural healing. Although the Beninese understanding of àze reflects positive scientific properties in its use of specialized knowledge to harness nature's energy and realize economic success, its boundless power is inherently ambivalent because it can corrupt its users, who dispense death and destruction. Witches and healers are equivalent to supervillains and superheroes, locked in epic battles over malevolent and benevolent human desires. Beninese people's discourse about such mystical confrontations expresses a philosophy of moral duality and cosmic balance. Falen demonstrates how a deep engagement with another lived reality opens our minds and contributes to understanding across cultural difference.
Quantum Sorcery is a modern magical system through which an individual can learn to manifest desired effects in the physical world through the exertion of Will, assisted by appropriate symbols and tools. This paradigm incorporates elements from earlier magical systems as well as physics, psychology, mathematics and biology to propose a mechanism by which such an act might occur through means more natural than supernatural. Basic magical principles such as the laws of similarity and contagion are examined alongside the principles of entanglement and entrainment. The application of thermodynamic laws and communication theory to the transmission of magical intent is approached. Examples of ritual workings and the creation of magical constructs are included to display the flexibility of Quantum Sorcery as a stand-alone system, a larger framework in which other types of magic can be practiced, or as a robust set of techniques for those who prefer to assemble their own system of practical sorcery.
This book is an in-depth, comparative study of two of the most popular and influential intellectual and spiritual traditions of West Africa: Tijani Sufism and Ifa. Employing a unique methodological approach that thinks with and from—rather than merely about—these traditions, Oludamini Ogunnaike argues that they contain sophisticated epistemologies that provide practitioners with a comprehensive worldview and a way of crafting a meaningful life. Using theories belonging to the traditions themselves as well as contemporary oral and textual sources, Ogunnaike examines how both Sufism and Ifa answer the questions of what knowledge is, how it is acquired, and how it is verified. Or, more simply: What do you know? How did you come to know it? How do you know that you know? After analyzing Ifa and Sufism separately and on their own terms, the book compares them to each other and to certain features of academic theories of knowledge. By analyzing Sufism from the perspective of Ifa, Ifa from the perspective of Sufism, and the contemporary academy from the perspective of both, this book invites scholars to inhabit these seemingly “foreign” intellectual traditions as valid and viable perspectives on knowledge, metaphysics, psychology, and ritual practice. Unprecedented and innovative, Deep Knowledge makes a significant contribution to cross-cultural philosophy, African philosophy, religious studies, and Islamic studies. Its singular approach advances our understanding of the philosophical bases underlying these two African traditions and lays the groundwork for future study.
Five-hundred years ago, sorcery began to fade from the world. As technology prevailed, combustion engines and computers replaced enchanted plows and spell books. Real magicians were hunted almost to extinction. Science became the primary system of belief, and the secrets of spell-casting were forgotten. That is ... until now. Sorcery for Beginners is no fantasy or fairy tale. Written by arcane arts preservationist and elite mage Euphemia Whitmore (along with her ordinary civilian aide Matt Harry), this book is a how-to manual for returning magic to an uninspired world. It's also the story of Owen Macready, a seemingly average 13-year-old who finds himself drawn into a centuries-long war when he uses sorcery to take on a school bully. Owen's spell casting attracts the attention of a ruthless millionaire and a secret society of anti-magic mercenaries, all of whom wish to use Sorcery for Beginners to alter the course of world history forever.
Magic Science Religion explores surprising intersections among the three meaning-making and world-making practices named in the title. Through colorful examples, the book reveals circuitous ways that social, cultural and natural systems connect, enabling real kinds of magic to operate. Among the many case studies are accounts of how an eighteenth-century actor gave his audience goosebumps; how painters, poets, and pool sharks use nonlinearity in working their magics; how the first vertebrates gained consciousness; how plants fine-tuned human color vision; and the necessarily magical element of activism that builds on the conviction that "another future is possible" while working to push self-fulfilling prophecy into political action.
Most scholarship on sorcery and witchcraft has narrowly focused on specific times and places, particularly early modern Europe and twentieth-century Africa. And much of that research interprets sorcery as merely a remnant of premodern traditions. Boldly challenging these views, Sorcery in the Black Atlantic takes a longer historical and broader geographical perspective, contending that sorcery is best understood as an Atlantic phenomenon that has significant connections to modernity and globalization. A distinguished group of contributors here examine sorcery in Brazil, Cuba, South Africa, Cameroon, and Angola. Their insightful essays reveal the way practices and accusations of witchcraft spread throughout the Atlantic world from the age of discovery up to the present, creating an indelible link between sorcery and the rise of global capitalism. Shedding new light on a topic of perennial interest, Sorcery in the Black Atlantic will be provocative, compelling reading for historians and anthropologists working in this growing field.
A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.
This vintage book comprises three famous Malinowski essays on the subject of religion. Malinowski is one of the most important and influential anthropologists of all time. He is particularly renowned for his ability to combine the reality of human experience, with the cold calculations of science. An important collection of three of his most famous essays, "Magic, Science and Religion" provides its reader with a series of concepts concerning religion, magic, science, rite and myth. This is undertaken in an attempt to form a definite impression and understanding of the Trobrianders of New Guinea. The chapters of this book include: "Magic, Science and Religion", "Primitive Man and his Religion", "Rational Mastery by Man of his Surroundings", "Faith and Cult", "The Creative Acts of Religion", "Providence in Primitive Life", "Man's Selective Interest in Nature", etcetera. This book is being republished now in an affordable, modern edition - complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.