Bengali black magic in kolkata (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Magic Art of Witchcraft and Black Magic
The belief in and the practise of magic has been present since the earliest human cultures and continues to have an important religious and medicinal role in many cultures today. The present study investigated about social representation regarding societal beliefs of witchcraft and black magic in North Eastern state of India.
Historicising 'Western Learned Magic': Preliminary Remarks
Aries, 2016
This programmatic paper conceptualises a research topic that has emerged in academic research over the past decades—'Western learned magic'—and provides a theoretical foundation for its historicisation to come. Even though a large amount of specialised findings on this topic have been brought forward in recent years, a diachronic and cross-cultural overview of the history of 'Western learned magic' that reconstructs possible red threads through the manifold material is still an urgent desideratum. Based on the observation that most classic definitions and theories of 'magic' are irrelevant to the history of 'Western learned magic'—as these have been deduced from anthropological sources and theorising—this article raises a range of theoretical issues that need to be taken into account in the course of its historicisation: continuity, changeability, hybridity, deviance, morality, complexity, efficacy, and multiplicity. By means of this novel theoretical setup, historians will be able to work towards a methodologically sound history of 'Western learned magic' that takes into account the recent criticism against a second-order category of 'magic' while, at the same time, revealing outdated stereotypes and master narratives on the topic.
Jewish magic is thriving in present-day Israel, in spite of the supposed disenchantment of the modern world. To see how it survived from Antiquity and the Middle Ages to our own days, this essay surveys the development of Jewish magic in the modern period. It begins with the Jews of Europe, where the printing of books of popular medicine and “practical Kabbalah,” and the Enlightenment’s war on magic, led to the transformation and marginalization of many Jewish magical texts and practices, but did not entirely eradicate them. It then turns to the Jews of the Islamicate world, who were much less exposed to the impact of printing or the ideology of Enlightenment, and whose mag- ical tradition therefor remained much more conservative than that of their European brethren. When the Jews of many Jewish communities finally met, before and espe- cially after the establishment of the Jewish State, the Jews of European origin tried to disenchant the world of their “Oriental” brothers, but were only partly successful in this endeavor. And with the rise of postmodern cultural sensitivities, and of New Age religiosities, even this attempt was mostly abandoned, and the Jewish magical tradi- tion is now more vigorous, and more visible, than the founders of Zionism would ever have imagined. Finally, while claiming that in the Jewish case modernity did not lead to the disenchantment of the world, this essay also claims that the same might be true of other magical traditions, whose history often was neglected by historians of Western esotericism.