By Zenko Takayama^[1]

Phenomena that religious scholars of the past could unreservedly describe as “magical” are still occurring all the time, even now. For example, under the influence of COVID-19, some people destroyed the 5G antennas by believing that this would curb its infection. They have also begun to sell amulets or stones that supposedly prevent COVID-19. These would have been pointed out in the past as being based on “magical thinking” without a doubt. But the problem with the conceptualization of magic must be dealt with first before we consider “magical thinking”. The main focus of this article is this magical thinking rather than the concept of magic itself, but let’s first briefly look at the the concept “magic”.

It is well known that the concept of magic, little late to the debate about the concept of religion, has also been considered as problematic since about 1990. Some have suggested replacing it with “ritual” or “healing, divining, execrative” in order to avoid pejorative connotations. However, nearly three decades after 1990 the word “magic” still remains in the public discourse. More recently, there have been cases of describing what would be seen as unscientific reactions to COVID-19 as “magical,” which seems to have strongly imprinted society with the impression that “magic” is indeed unscientific, something researchers have been trying to avoid. For example, The Magical Thinking of the White House’s New Covid-19 Plan (WIRED: America), COVID-19 isn’t through with us: Our summer of magical thinking comes to its inevitable end (NationalPost: Canada) use the phrase “magical thinking” to give the impression that this was an unscientific measure.

One might argue that we should use a different word for our daily lives than for our research. We could also do a historical and cultural study, arguing that “magic” should be considered as an object rather than as an analytical concept. However, before I go deeper into this issue, I would like to suggest that the concept of “magic” must be considered differently from the concept of “religion”. This is because scholars have argued that “magic” is a concept, characterized by a logical aspect, that is different from “religion”.

Logic of magic?

From the perspective of scholars of religion and anthropologists of religion, “magic” is still a field that is placed under the umbrella of “religious studies”. From the perspective of the historians of science, however, it is a part of the “history of science”. This swing in perspective can be seen in the time of Edward Burnett Tylor and James George Frazer. According to Frazer’s theory, which continues to be influential today, magic, unlike “religion”,  is “pre-scientific” due to the   “elementary processes of reasoning”(Frazer 1900, p. 70). This logic can be simply called “analogy” (it can be understood as a form of resemblance or similarity, but I will use the word analogy as a representative of these here).Although the use of the words logic and reasoning here may seem strange, since we are usually aware of them as explicit thought activities that we explicitly perform. However, they are used here not only in the explicit realm, but also to include the flow of thought and connections that we implicitly and unconsciously think about.In this sense, the logic of this post is close to the meaning of cognition.

Now, as mentioned above, we are left with the problem of how to deal with this analogy even if we were to stop using the concept of “magic”. What is the nature of this logic and why has this been thought to be a form of “magical thinking” are the problems  we now face. Even if we say that “magic is an ideological term,” insofar as it involves a logical problem, it also involves the question of what part of this logic is ideological because it is impossible to separate magic from this logic.

It is for this reason that I am going to consider the logic of magic next, but there is a new issue lurking here. It is the issue called cognitive science. This is because cognitive science has led to a general understanding that analogy is not limited to “magic,” but a universal human cognitive function that is also used by scientists especially when they create a new idea of research and teaching theories (to begin with, there are a lot of words analogically constructed in science such as “cell”or “wave”― they are originally to mean small room or billow). We can no longer simply look to analogy for the logical features of magic.

Here “magic” has seemingly been trapped in an impasse. First of all, this problem of logic gets in the way of studying the concept of magic, and also the achievements in the field of cognitive science has problematized this logic of analogy, or traditonally put, of “imitation.” But here, I am proposing a newer perspective.  I do hope that they will somehow serve as a starting point for our understanding of the logic of magic. The perspective that I proposed is that magic is characterized not by analogy, which is also used by scientists, but by a cognitive function that takes the analogy as real, for example, not only thinking that the flow of blood is similar to the flow of a river, but also thinking the blood and the river are one and the same, and believing that we are the earth itself. When we become aware of this cognitive function, we name it magic.

My research has showed that ancient Indian philosophers believed the individual and the universe were analogous because the individual and the universe were similar (i.e. they saw the analogy as a real linkage); therefore, they believed that immortality, i.e. the state that one escapes death, was possible for humans.  Thus, I argue that examples of magic such as attacking a puppet that resembles a particular person with the belief that person would suffer in reality (found in Japanese magical practices, Haitian Voodoo, and other practices around the world) are examples of how analogy is thought to have a connection with the real. We can also understand that there is an analogy between the puppet and human body (puppets are made to mimic a person in the first place), however, there is a wide gap between whether the analogy is seen as a real connection or not. Moreover, if we believe that in cells of our body little humans live (so that we need to eat foods to full their stomachs) or drinking liquid made from the wave of sunlight makes our body healthy, we may want to call it magical thinking. The keywords for understanding these thinkings are not analogy itself, but actualization of analogy and its cognitive function. So, I put forward that we should focus on a cognitive function that takes the analogy as real rather than analogy itself to think “magic.”

From this, I think it may be possible to explain the normative understanding of the relationship between  “religion – magic – science”. Depending on which point of magic we focus on, it may be called religion or science (e.g., focussing on its aspect of logic get us call it rather science and on its aspect of actualization of logic get us want to say rather religion). However, as we know, “religion” has conceptual problems. While I can also understand the opinion that “religion” should not be an analytical concept, but an ontological one… my current argument is that the study of the concept of religion and recent cognitive science of religion/cognitive science may be closer than one might think. It seems to me that these two major fields that have been influencing the study of religion in recent years are actually internally related.. And if the concepts of magic and religion are deeply related to the (universal) cognitive functions of human beings, then the phenomena we like to call magic and religion will not disappear as long as we exist, and the theory that these concepts themselves are strongly responsible for the prejudicial values of certain regions/traditions will be open to reconsideration. I now imagine that by addressing this problem of logic, we may be able to provide new insights into the study of the concept of religion, perhaps in the future.

^[1] The new idea put above is mainly argued in my paper written in Japanese 呪術とは何か—近代呪術概念の定義と宗教的認識 (Trans: What Is Magic?:The Definition of the Modern Concept of Magic and Religious Cognition), Japanese journal of cultural anthropology, 83(3), 358-376, 2018. However, the base of idea is also written in English here https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2018.1466002, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogsys.2016.10.001.

Frazer, James George, 1990, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Second edition. Vol. 1 of 3. London: Macmillan.

Biography:

Takayama Zenko was born in Fukushima, Japan and currently based in Tokyo, is the president of an academic venture company Nihon Kenkyusya Publishing. His research focuses on the conceptualization of religion, and human cognitive functions that enables the constructions of believe systems around the concepts such as God, soul, and spirit. Some of his publications are “How are religious concepts created? A form of cognition and its effects,” Cognitive Systems Research 41, 2017, “How does knowledge bring one to the state of immortality in early Upaniṣadic philosophy?” Religion, 48, 2018. He has also written articles in Japanese publications. 呪術とは何か—近代呪術概念の定義と宗教的認識 (Trans: What Is Magic?:The Definition of the Modern Concept of Magic and Religious Cognition), Japanese journal of cultural anthropology 83(3), 2018, 宗教的な宗教現象と世俗的な宗教現象のあいだ (Trans: ‘Between “Religious” Religious Phenomena and “Secular” Religious Phenomena: What Sort of Element Can Be the Norm of Religion?’), Shukyo Kenkyu 92(1), 2018.

[Japanese]

かつての宗教学者なら「呪術的」だと気兼ねなしに評することができた現象は、今も常に生じています。たとえば新型コロナの影響下では、次世代モバイル通信の５Gのアンテナを破壊することで、感染を抑制することができると一部の人間が信じて行動するという出来事がありました。また、コロナを防止するとされる不思議なアイテムも売られ始めています。これらは間違いなく「呪術的思考」に基づいたものであると、従来なら指摘されてきたものです。しかし現代のわれわれには、まず最初に呪術概念の問題がこの思考の問題の前に立ちはだかっています。今回の記事の主役は、呪術概念そのものではなく、この呪術的思考ですが、まずは概念の問題から見てみましょう。

宗教概念への疑義にやや遅れて、呪術概念も1990年頃から問題にされてきたのは、もはや周知の事実です。差別的な意味合いを避けるために、「ritual」や「healing、diviningやexecrative」に置き換えようという発言をする者もいました。しかし、その後約30年たった今でも、「呪術」という語は残っています。むしろ最近では、新型コロナ下で非科学的な対応を「呪術」と形容する事例が出てきており、「呪術」は非科学的なものだという、研究者が避けるべきだとしてきた一面的な印象を強く社会に植え付けているようです。The Magical Thinking of the White House’s New Covid-19 Plan（WIRED：America）やCOVID-19 isn’t through with us: Our summer of magical thinking comes to its inevitable end（NationalPost：Canada）などの記事では、非科学的な方策だったことを印象づけるために「magical thinking」という言葉が用いられています。

われわれは日常的な生活の場と、研究の場とで、用いる単語を分けるべきだ、と主張することも可能かもしれません。また、「呪術」を分析的な概念としてではなく、あくまで研究対象として研究すべきと考えて歴史・文化的な研究をすることもできます。しかし、私はこの問題に深入りする前に、「呪術」に対する考察は「宗教」に対する考察とは違った配慮をしなければならない、という提案をしたいと思います。なぜなら、「呪術」には論理性という、「宗教」とは異なる要素に関する考察がされてきたからです。

呪術の論理性？

宗教学者・宗教人類学者の視点から見れば、「呪術」は現在も「宗教学」の傘下に位置づけられる一分野です。しかし、科学史研究者の視点から見れば、「科学史」の一部分です。このような視点の揺れは、Edward Burnett TylorやJames George Frazerの時代にすでに見ることができますが、今なお影響を与え続けているFrazerの理論によれば、呪術はその論理性によって宗教的というよりも、前科学的な性質をもっています。この論理性について、フレーザーは「elementary processes of reasoning」と形容していますが、これはあるものがあるものに似ているという感覚にもとづく論理的思考、つまり「類似」のことを意味しています。

もしかしたら、ここで用いられている「論理」という言葉に、少し違和感を感じられる方がいるかもしれません。これはおそらく、通常この論理という言葉が、明示的に示された思考の道筋に対して一般に用いられているためです。しかしここではもう少し意味を拡大して、暗黙的に、つまりあまり意識しない状態にも働いている思考の流れを含めて論理という言葉を用いていきたいと思います。

さて、われわれには前記のように、たとえ「呪術」という概念の使用をやめたとしても、この「論理」についてどう扱うかという問題が残ってしまいます。この「論理」の正体はなんなのか、これが「呪術的思考」の様式だと考えられてきたのはなぜなのか、そういう問題です。「呪術はイデオロギー的な語だ」というにしても、それが論理的な問題を含んでいる以上、この論理のどこがイデオロギー的なのかという問題も同時に含んでしまうのです(これは「呪術」とこの論理性を切り離すのは不可能だという私の理解に基づいています)。

そんな理由で、次に呪術の論理性について考えてみようと思うのですが、ここには新たな刺客が潜んでいます。認知科学という刺客です。認知科学の発展によって、「類似」はすでに呪術のものではなく、科学者も用いている人間の普遍的な認知機能だという理解が一般的になっているからです。もはやわれわれは、呪術の論理的な特徴を単純に類似に求めることはできなくなっているのです。

ここで「呪術」は、一見袋小路に追い詰められてしまったように思われます。まず呪術概念を研究しようにも、この論理の問題が邪魔をしてしまう上に、この論理の問題も、認知科学の成果によってよくわからない状態に置かれてしまったからです。しかし、ここでこの状況を打開する理論が新しく提出されました。いや、正確にいうと私がその本人なので、私が提出した、ですね。

もちろん、私はここで、私の考えが決定版だというつもりはありませんが、何らかの形でみなさんの思考のたたき台になってくれればと思っています。どういう打開策を提案したのかというと、呪術の特徴は、科学者も用いている類似ではなく、なんと類似を現実的なものだと捉える認知機能にある、という打開策です（呪術の名づけに関しては、この認知機能が発見されたときに行われるとしています）。

これは実は、古代インドの哲学者が、人間にとって不死が可能だと考えたのは、個人と宇宙が類似しているという考えを、個人と宇宙が一体であると考えている（つまり、類似を現実的な連関だと捉えている）ためだ、という私の研究の成果から得られました。そしてそこから、特定の人に似せた人形を攻撃すると、その人が本当に苦しむという「呪術」の例などを、類似が現実的なつながりをもっていると考えられている例だとして論じました。どうですかね？ある程度信憑性をもっている提案かもしれません。

ここから私は、従来よく指摘されてきた「宗教―呪術―科学」の関係性も説明できるかもしれないと考えています。呪術のどのポイントに注目するかによって、宗教と呼ばれるか、科学と呼ばれるかが変わるのです。しかし、ご存じのように「宗教」には概念上の問題があり、これを分析概念としてではなく対象として…という意見もよくわかります。この「分析概念としてではなく対象として…」意見に基づき、歴史の新たな側面が明らかになるものだと期待しています。

しかし、宗教概念の研究と近年の宗教認知科学・認知学とは、案外近いところにあるのかもしれない、というのが、現在の私の個人的な所感です。最近の宗教学を彩るこの二大潮流が、実は内部で関連しあっているという可能性が、ここにはあるように思います。そしてもしそうだとしたら、つまりもし、宗教概念や呪術の問題が人間の認知機能とかかわりのある問題だとしたら、宗教や呪術とわれわれが呼びたくなる現象は、我々が生きている限りおそらく消えることはないという気がします。これまで少なくない学者が指摘してきたような、呪術や宗教概念には特定の地域/伝統がもつ価値観に由来する偏見が含まれている、という説にも再考の余地が出てくるでしょう。私は、このように、この呪術や宗教の論理性の問題を扱うことで、今後宗教概念研究にも、そしてそのほかの研究に対しても将来的に新たな知見を与えることができるかもしれないと、今は想像しています。

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