Bernd-Christian Otto gives a working paper on 'The Illuminates of Thanateros and the Institutionalization of Religious Individualization'

The ‚Illuminates of Thanateros‘ (IOT) is a modern new religious movement founded in 1976 (re-founded in 1986) and an initiatory order dedicated to the study and practice of ‚Chaos Magick‘, which is one of the most advanced and individualistic currents in the history of ‚Western learned magic‘. In the article, which I have written for the final proceedings of the Kollegforschergruppe, I interpret the foundation of the IOT as an attempt to institutionalize religious individualization, and henceforth its major schism – the so-called ‘Ice Magick War’ in the early 1990s – as an indicator that institutionalizing religious individualization is inevitably ambivalent and eventually determined to backlash into de- or non-individualization. But, as ever, the finding is ambiguous.

Bernd-Christian Otto is going to present a working paper on '„Magie im Islam“ aus diskurstheoretischer Perspektive'

The present paper functions as an „afterword“ to a German anthology on „Magie im Islam“, edited by Sebastian Günther and Dorothee Lauer (Göttingen University), to be submitted to Brill later this year. A TOC to this volume is attached, and parts of my contribution discusses papers of said volume, which I have read before writing the piece. The core of the argument, however, is devoted to demonstrating that the discursive approach towards “magic” (or “Western learned magic”) which I have pursued in several other publications, can also be applied to the study of „magic in Islam“. The article is thus divided into three chapters: the first attempts to demonstrate that a discursive approach towards Islamic material deemed “magic” is not only possible but yields various analytical advantages, such as overcoming Eurocentric stereotypes on the matter, or re-reading some Islamic sources that deal with “magic” (arab. siḥr). The second chapter aims at embedding Islamic material within the much wider history of “Western learned magic”, thereby de-contextualizing said material, which leads to asking different questions that inevitably arise from a diachronic, comparative, and necessarily interdisciplinary perspective. The focus here lies on ritual dynamics from a longue-durée perspective, that is, on continuities and discontinuities as well as transformations and innovations. The third chapter devotes some final considerations to the question of whether – and to what degree – Islamic “learned magic”, particularly in the medieval Era, was actually “deviant”, or whether there were considerable social spaces of liberal attitudes, legalized practice or even “institutionalization” (e.g. in schools).

Richard Gordon is presenting a workshop paper on 'Debating ancient magic'

The paper I offer for discussion here is to form part of the introduction to a collective volume incorporating the results of a research-programme at the University of Zaragoza, directed by Francisco Marco Simón, whose primary aim was to map the archaeology of magical practice in the western (Latin-speaking) Roman Empire. We aimed to collect all relevant archaeological data onto a data-base, part of whose purpose was to construct digitalised distribution-maps of different types of material. These data have also provided much of the empirical evidence required for the volume, which is devoted to the contexts of magical practice in the western Empire, temporal, topographic, physical, social. A subsidiary topic is the techniques used to enhance the authority of specifically literate magical texts. An earlier volume resulting from a conference held in Rome in November 2010, entitled Contesti magici/Contextos Mágicos, was a first, relatively informal, attempt at tackling some of the issues involved.[1]

Such an aim immediately raises a series of questions, of definition, scope and representativity, that we discuss in the introduction. What do we mean by magical activity (or, as the Spanish title has it, ‘magico-religious’ activity)? Can we define it coherently? In view of the debates of the 1960s and 70s on understanding alien belief-systems, can historians properly use the term ‘magic’ at all? What it is the price paid for such use? Can it be minimised and thereby made acceptable? Is it merely sleight of hand to concentrate on archaeological evidence, even if ‘archaeological’ here is used in a wide sense to include epigraphic, iconographic and even papyrological evidence? Can such material be meaningfully interpreted if literary evidence is largely excluded? What is the nature of that literary evidence? Its agendas? Does it matter, how much does it matter, if the archaeological evidence, by its very nature, can tell us nothing about many familiar types of magical practice, especially the practice of the very numerous, low-level specialists such as rhizotomoi/ herbarii, low-level manteis/harioli and their skills in divination, and those specialists, such as astrologers, that fell into the Roman category of ‘magicians’ but not ours?

---

[1] Piranomonte and Marco Simón (eds.) 2012.

Bernd-Christian Otto presented a working paper on '"Perfectioning" in learned discourses on magic of the 20th century'

The present paper is devoted to the phenomenon of changeability in the history of ‚Western learned magic‘ and focuses on a particular – conceptual as well as ritual – shift which took place, so the paper argues, at the turn of the 20th century. The paper is derived from a lecture I gave during a Ringvorlesung on the topic of ‚Perfektionierung des Menschen‘ earlier this year. It will appear in a volume that assembles selected lectures of said Ringvorlesung, and thus stands next to papers on genetics, embryo screening, or transhumanism.

The paper first sketches out my current understanding of ‚Western learned magic‘ (ch. 1), and therafter (ch. 2) attempts at outlining the relationship between ‚Optimierung‘ and ‚Perfektionierung‘ in the pre-modern ‚learned magic‘ discourse (I mainly operationalize these two concepts on the level of ritual goals: inner-wordly Kontingenzbewältigung vs. self-deification or apotheosis). Chapter 3 provides the main part of the analysis: the three discussed examples – the Hermetic Order oft he Golden Dawn; Aleister Crowley; and the so-called ‚moonchild experiments‘ by Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard – are intended to illustrate the presumed shift from ‚Optimierung‘ to ‚Perfektionierung‘ in the 20th century ‚learned magic‘ discourse. The final chapter (ch. 4) attempts to provide a range of explanations for this seemingly crucial shift in the history of ‚Western learned magic‘.

Bernd-Christian Otto presents a workshop paper on "Magical manuscripts in the German Book Trade (c. 1700)"

On 26 April 2016 Bernd-Christian Otto is presenting his paper in the MWK, Erfurt.

This is not a finalized article, but rather a ‘Werkstattbericht’, or even a ‘Steinbruch’ of a project I am currently working on together with a colleague (Daniel Bellingradt, Jun. Prof. for book history at the university of Erlangen-Nuremburg). It is an attempt to provide a historical contextualization as well as an in-depth content analysis of a collection of 142 manuscripts of ‘learned magic’ that have been copied/translated/compiled some time between the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The collection is today hosted at the university library of Leipzig (Cod. mag. 1-142), and has so far avoided scholarly attention (only one of the 142 manuscripts has recently been edited). We believe that this is likely the largest corpus of manuscripts of ‘learned magic’ in eighteenth century German speaking Europe, and moreover the earliest collection of German translations of such texts (113 codices of the collection comprise German texts, the remaining texts are written in Latin or Italian). The article will be submitted to the Journal Book History later this year (deadline is 31 August), together with two appendices: an edition of a selling catalogue that dates to the year 1710 (Appendix A: at that time, the collection included 140 manuscripts; there is a minor discrepancy of 9 manuscripts between the 1710 and the contemporary collection), and a content analysis of the surviving manuscripts hosted in the university library of Leipzig (Appendix B). These two appendices are provided for the colloquium, but note that the edition of the selling catalogue (Appendix A) is currently in German (it remains to be translated into English), and that the content analysis (Appendix B) only covers some 25 manuscripts (of 142) so far. Apologies, also, for inconsistent or incomplete citations and footnotes – these will be re-worked before submission. For the colloquium I would be most interested in remarks concerning the general structure of the article. We struggled with assembling the different angles and narrative sections in a logical, coherent, or at least systematic order. The current analytical framework of three sections entitled ‘uniqueness’, ‘scarcity’, and ‘illegality’ is disputed. Do other possibilities of arranging the material come to your mind?