Ritual Magic Research Articles

Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural

Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural

От мистерии к карнавалу: китайские новогодние праздники в повести М.А. Булгакова «Роковые яйца»

Chinese allusions of New Year and the Lantern Festival used by M.A. Bulgakov in the 6th chapter of the novella “The Fatal Eggs” are studied. White and black ritual magic, mythological images of Chinese agricultural calendar are considered from the perspective of Chinese festive culture and its carnivalization: Peach tree, “Fire judge”, “White inconstancy” and “Black inconstancy”, “Purple girl”. The mythopoetic analysis of the novella involves a “fantastic and satirical” novel by a medieval Chinese writer Wu Cheng’en “Journey to the West” (1590). It is shown how M.A. Bulgakov inscribes this unusual, exotic, religious work that captures the basics of Chinese culture in his text. In addition to the mythological content, the allusions analysis sphere on the Chinese text involves the image of a medieval Chinese official, Chinese etiquette, a celebratory feast, street and areal decorations of the spectacle and jollification. The miracle-play character of the novella is researched. Not only the rituals of summoning the gods, demons, and spirits of the dead are described, but also the traditional for all the miracle-plays initiation of the “neophyte”, one of the main stages of which is the catabasis (descent into hell), called by C.G. Jung as the archetype of “the knight's departure into the dark”. The main character’s path to the Chinese tartarus of the novella by Professor V.I. Persikov turns out to be such a catabasis, shown in a parody key. Close attention is paid to such a modernist method of depicting Russian reality as the method of collision/interference of times. Chinese carnival “madness” is becoming a real Russian madness associated with the reforms of the national economy. Therefore, a special place in the study is giv-en to the satirical means analysis of influencing the viewer: elements of eccentricity, comedy play, parody and grotesque. In this field of Bulgakov’s caustic satire lies, we think, the image of the “the world’s first socialist state” founder V.I. Lenin and the internal policy of the leaders who replaced him, announced the beginning of the Russian peasantry destruction era and the beginning of the collectivization and agriculture mechanization era. The phantasmagoria genre, manifested in the mass hysteria of Muscovites and blazing fires from burning mountains of dead chickens, also strengthens the satirical character of the story.

Imaginal architectural devices and the ritual space of medieval necromancy

The material and spatial dimensions documented in the manuscripts of ritual magic that circulated in the medieval and early modern periods have long eluded researchers. Studying where those rituals take place is important to understand the history of the practice of ritual magic. Few attempts have been done to interpret the reasons behind the construction of magic circles and the use of domestic locations. The author introduces a new interpretative category of such ritual spaces: imaginal architectural devices (IADs). IADs pick out a specific kind of portable, spatially unfixed ritual space, where “magical” ones are a key example. They are temporary architectural artefacts, attested across a swath of sources of ritual magic, that work as strategic tools for orienting cognition, behavior, and belief. Drawing on spatial theory and cognitive studies, the author constructs IADs as a typological category for comparative analysis. It describes architectural operations that work at the interplay between mental projections and material culture, and that modify the perception of space. In the second part of the article, IADs will be applied to study the circles described in the second section of the Liber Iuratus Honorii, a thirteenth-century handbook containing instructions on how to conjure different ranks of spirits. In the end, the author suggests future directions of research on the transmission of IADs into contemporary ritual magic.

Making Magic in Elizabethan England. Two Early Modern Vernacular Books of Magic ed. by Frank Klaassen

Reviewed by: Making Magic in Elizabethan England. Two Early Modern Vernacular Books of Magic ed. by Frank Klaassen Judith Bonzol Klaassen, Frank, ed., Making Magic in Elizabethan England. Two Early Modern Vernacular Books of Magic, University Park, PA, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019; hardback; pp. 160; 66 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$89.95; ISBN 9780271083681. Frank Klaasen’s Making Magic in Elizabethan England consists of transcripts of two anonymous Elizabethan manuscripts of magic: the Antiphoner Notebook (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Additional B. 1) and the Boxgrove Manual (London, British Library, MS Harley 2267). In addition to making two obscure and difficult manuscripts accessible to scholars and students of medieval and early modern magic, Klaasen’s insightful introductions and notes explain how magic developed and changed during the early modern period. He particularly focuses on how the scribes of the manuscripts altered and adapted the original texts in response to the changing religious and cultural environment of early modern England. The Protestant parish priest of Boxgrove commissioned a scribe to copy the Boxgrove Manual in the late sixteenth century. The original manuscript is not extant. Written in English, it is a work of learned, ritual magic that draws heavily on the 1578 edition of Agrippa’s influential De occulta philosophia, as well as other medieval Latin texts of conjuring and necromancy, thus making them accessible to a vernacular audience. It contains lamens and pentacles for the summoning of spirits, many of which have bled through the paper, obscuring the text on the other side. Consequently, Klaasen’s consummate transcription has made the text more accessible to modern scholars by overcoming many of the impediments created by the incompetent scribe. The Antiphoner Notebook was created in the second half of the sixteenth century, probably by a cunning man, on fragments from a fourteenth-century English liturgical manuscript and copied towards the end of the sixteenth century by two scribes. It is a collection of spells, charms, and cures, written both in English and Latin, dealing primarily with the practices with which cunning folk were most concerned: finding thieves, locating treasure, and countering witchcraft. Some of the Latin is untranslatable and Klaasen has done an excellent job of adding suggestions for what the Latin might have meant. For the scribe of the Antiphoner Notebook, the Latin was part of the numinous power of the magic and therefore needed to be retained, despite the problems it presented. To overcome some of these problems the scribes relied on Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, first published in 1584. Although this was a sceptical, anti-Catholic work written to expose the practices of cunning folk as fraudulent, it nevertheless provided a useful collection of simplified and vernacularized magical spells, amulets, and remedies that were widely used by cunning folk in the early modern period. [End Page 220] In Making Magic in Elizabethan England Klaasen interprets and explains how the scribes who created the manuscripts altered and modified their original sources in response to scientific, religious, and cultural changes in post-Reformation England. In the Boxgrove Manual, for example, the Protestant author removed all the overtly Catholic aspects from his sources. The removal and translation of the Latin from the earlier sources was part of a process in which learned magic was popularized for a much wider English-speaking audience. The Antiphoner Notebook, on the other hand, is ‘a book of magic that preserves older elements, adopts features of the new religion, and despite itself, creates entirely new ones’ (p. 24). Furthermore, the scribe, particularly in his engagement with Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, contemplated the differences between religion and magic, thus creating what Klaasen describes as a ‘peculiarly early modern intellectual artefact’ (p. 26). Earlier studies have tended to depict cunning folk as clinging to the old religion for comfort and support in a rapidly transforming world where superstitious, magical practices were being eradicated. Klaasen’s study of the Antiphoner Notebook supports the work of historians such as Owen Davies, by showing how the practice of cunning folk was dynamic and versatile, meeting the changing needs of the communities they served. Much of the earlier research into English magical traditions has portrayed...

Making Magic in Elizabethan England: Two Early Modern Vernacular Books of Magic ed. by Frank Klaassen

Reviewed by: Making Magic in Elizabethan England: Two Early Modern Vernacular Books of Magic ed. by Frank Klaassen László Sándor Chardonnens Elizabethan England, Early Modern England, books of magic, sixteenth century, seventeenth century, primary sources, Antiphoner Notebook, Boxgrove Manual, Cornelius Agrippa, Protestantism, Reginald Scot frank klaassen, ed. Making Magic in Elizabethan England: Two Early Modern Vernacular Books of Magic. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 147. Modern practitioners of magic who are interested in older sources can turn to a range of editions by occult presses that cater to their needs. Scholars and students of magic studies, on the other hand, are less well served by these same publications; with some positive exceptions, that is, such as the work of Joseph Peterson. Yet since Peterson cannot be expected to edit all surviving medieval and early modern source texts, it is fortunate that one of the leading scholars in the field of early modern ritual magic, Frank Klaassen, has now turned his attention from merely studying to also editing books of magic from early modern England, starting with the publication of two concise manuals in an effort to expand "our understanding of sixteenth-century magic" (2). Having studied Making Magic in Elizabethan England in detail alongside facsimiles of the two books of magic in question, it is my firm conviction that Klaassen has succeeded in this aim. Making Magic has a general introduction followed by separate introductions to, and editions of, both books of magic; it also includes a set of appendices, a bibliography, and an index. The general introduction outlines the conditions under which magic transitioned from the Middle Ages into Early Modernity, with a focus on ritual magic and charms—two quite distinct forms of magic that were increasingly found side by side in early modern books of magic. The central argument of the general introduction is that early modern magical practices are rooted in medieval customs, but that they evolved under the influence of cultural, religious, and legislative changes in sixteenth-century England. The social backgrounds of the practitioners were, furthermore, more varied than the medieval clerical underworld as a result of social and religious turmoil in the early modern period. Part III of Klaassen's 2013 study The Transformations of Magic devotes attention to the same period, but I find that Making Magic presents the social and cultural dynamics of early modern ritual magic more effectively. [End Page 277] The first book of magic introduced and edited in Making Magic is Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Add. B. 1. Introduced as the Antiphoner Notebook, this text was copied in the late sixteenth century onto cuttings from the wide margins of a large fourteenth-century liturgical manuscript. The Antiphoner Notebook innovatively combines charms with conjurations and experiments. Perhaps the work of a cunning man, the Antiphoner Notebook focuses "on the three common areas of activity in this group: healing, thief identification, and treasure hunting" (19). A notable feature of the Antiphoner Notebook is its frequent use of materials from Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), a study of "the irrationality of belief in magic and witchcraft" and Catholicism (24). Scot presented many examples of magical and Catholic practices, which were subsequently reused without the anti-magical and anti-Catholic rhetoric by practicing magicians, such as the scribe of the Antiphoner Notebook, in "a self-conscious process of re-enchantment" (25, emphasis Klaassen's). Another noteworthy component of the Antiphoner Notebook is an experiment with a wax puppet to punish a thief (item 1 in the edition). Klaassen opines that "the use of wax images for harm in necromantic (i.e., demon conjuring) collections is curiously uncommon" (23), in contrast to its frequent appearance in legal contexts and astral magic. Yet the use of wax puppets is anything but uncommon in early modern necromancy. Cursory reading of the surviving sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English necromantic manuscripts yields about twenty texts on the construction of wax puppets for compelling thieves, harming people, and even constraining rebellious spirits. Half of these are analogues to the experiment in the Antiphoner Notebook (London, British Library, Add. MS 36674, fols. 88r, 88v, and 164r–165r (three separate texts), Sloane...

Personating the Ripper: Civilian Performance and the Melodramatic Mode

This article illuminates how the Ripper murders and their 1888 coverage re-theatricalised not only London, but many provincial towns. It looks beyond canonical theatrical contexts for, and responses to the Ripper, exploring extra-theatrical, popular performance ‘scenarios’ by civilian men, outside professional sites of theatricalised or medicalised spectatorship. It examines how civilian men personated key figures in the Ripper ‘scenario’: the plain-clothes detective, the Ripper's female victims, and the Ripper himself. These civilian performances illuminate our understandings of fin-de-siècle masculinity and its intersections with the melodramatic mode in theatre and culture. Simultaneously interrogating these performances through the lenses of fin-de-siècle theatre culture, the periodical press, and the anthropology of ritual magic reveals the cultural complexities of the ‘personations’ happening in streets and homes across the United Kingdom.

Documentary Film and Magic in Communist Romania

Abstract The current paper is concerned with the ways that delegitimized forms of spirituality in communist Romania found unexpected ways of circulating their knowledge. Because of state control, especially during the repressive cultural revolution of the 1970s, magic practiced by Romanian Orthodox believers (as opposed to magic done by practitioners in other faiths) was practiced underground and was not a desirable topic of engagement for public figures and scholars. Conducting research on the topic of ritual magic was difficult for social scientists working in state institutes, and could only be done in secret. The current article explores one aspect of the politics of the communist regime against magic. In the late 1960s to early 1970s, a Romanian ethnographer shot and produced a documentary on ritual magic using the state’s technical and social tools. I investigate how the methodological problems faced by Romanian social researchers illuminate their research on ritual magic as a space of resistance.

Shamanic Vision Quest: Native American Ritual, Depth Psychology, and Renaissance Natural Magic

This paper portrays the shamanic vision quest through dreamtime cosmologies, common to the disciplines of Native American ritual, depth psychology, and Renaissance natural magic. The subject matter of Native American ritual is my practice, of depth psychology is C.G. Jung’s The Red Book, and of Renaissance natural magic is Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples’ De magia naturali. Whether through Native American medicine wheel or medieval geocentric cosmology, these disciplines are grounded in the physics of gravity: the most mundane law governing life on earth, yet perhaps also the most obscure law at play in quantum physics. Physics has recently observed what may be a graviton, a particle that incriminates the weak and lowly law of gravity as the kingpin of all the laws of physics. Gravitational waves also have been measured during the writing of this paper. Graviton: the immovable mover; the non-localized singularity or center of everywhere, but whose circumference is nowhere. Shamanic archetypes, like these medicine wheels or black hole ouroboros, may be experienced via neurologic spindle cells. Images of original nature photography and paintings embody ideas intended to draw the reader into their own shamanic vision of the dreamtime medicine wheel, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. The shaman’s solitary journey, back into the dreamtime of the dark mother, anima mundi or world soul—whether under the hypnagogic spell of an animal spirit guide, Philemon, or Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus—leads from the fiery event horizon of a black hole, to its central graviton singularity, to the dark matter that creates and consumes them. That is the paradox of human existence: only when we become conscious of the unconscious abyss can we live rooted to our singular nature, and from that individuation begin to experience divine love for our shared cosmos. This paper elicits that existential Unity.

Magic and Masculinity: Ritual Magic and Gender in the Early Modern Era by Frances Timbers

Reviewed by: Magic and Masculinity: Ritual Magic and Gender in the Early Modern Era by Frances Timbers Samaya Borom Timbers, Frances, Magic and Masculinity: Ritual Magic and Gender in the Early Modern Era, London, I. B. Tauris, 2014; hardback; pp. 304; 10 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £56.00;; ISBN 9781780765594. Early modern England witnessed the intersection of religion, philosophy, and science, at the same time that conceptions of gender ideologies and worldviews were also shifting, all of which contributed to new interpretations of magic. Frances Timbers here expertly documents the interaction of conceptions of manhood and masculinity with the practice of ritual magic and in so doing presents a new perspective on a frequently overlooked aspect of contemporary magic and magical practice. [End Page 249] Chapter 1 addresses the distinction between ceremonial magic and witchcraft: magic was the artful manipulation by learned men of the natural world though alchemic means, the study of classical manuscripts and texts, and complex rituals; witchcraft was seen to be confined largely to illiterate women caught up in a social/psychological phenomenon. Timbers’s exploration covers the elaborate ritual preparations found in the Clavicula Salomonis (Key of Solomon), through to drawing the reader’s attention to the difference between superstitious behaviour then, and now in the modern world. Chapter 2 further explains the role of masculinity and magic. The practice of magic was often viewed as an alternative path to manhood. It could also serve as a clever way of making a living, as in the example of William Hills (c. 1651) who would be visited by the local constabulary for insights into cases (p. 42). In Chapter 3, ‘Fraternity and Freemasons’, Timbers describes how processes of ritual and magic came to be incorporated into certain social practices further cementing the connection between magic and masculinity. Chapters 4 and 5 provide insights into John Dee, Edward Kelley, and John Pordage. Religious philosophy is seen to have influenced magical ritual and thought through the invocation of angels and spirits, which, Timbers argues, allowed masculine identities to be reworked into acceptable masculine traits (p. 104). The theme of masculine representation and sexuality in ritual objects and philosophy continues into Chapter 6, ‘Swords, Satan and Sex’, while Chapter 7, ‘Fairies and Female Magicians’, illustrates the relationship between women and the spirit world. Timbers observes that ‘Magic, as practiced by women, became a foil for the intellectual, scientific and religious associations that male magicians tended to foster’ (p. 120). Self identity and belief in demons, angels, and spirits are further explored in Chapter 8, aptly titled ‘Magical Metaphors’. According to Timbers, it was often the perception of the fantastical within the realm of reality that drove personal narratives surrounding magic and involvement in it. With Magic and Masculinity, Timbers has expertly mapped out the evolution of the construction of masculinity as it was embodied in ritual items, spaces, and philosophy. She has also provided an interesting comparison to gendered social attitudes to magic and ritual, one that was also involved in shaping contemporary understandings of magic and witchcraft. [End Page 250] Samaya Borom Charles Sturt University Copyright © 2016 Samaya Borom

Un proiect etnoarheologic de un sfert de veac

The author makes a summary of the 24 National Seminars of Ethnoarchaeology in which the following topics were discussed: „Fortification. Type and function” (1991); „Home - symbol and language: foundation, building techniques, sanctification” (2006-2007); „Magic farm: house, yard and outbuildings” (2010-2011); „Funerary rite and ritual” (1992); „Rite and ritual burial. Funerary offerings in the tombs” (1994); „Fire, clay, gesture and sound” (1995-2000); „Fire, Water, Clay, gesture and sound” (2001-2002, 2005); „From Wheat to Bread” (2003); „Rite and ritual magic. Who, what, how and why” (2008-2009); „Revelation of metallurgy" (2012-2013) and „The clothes - between practical utility and message"(2014-2015).

Magic and Masculinity: Ritual Magic and Gender in the Early Modern Era (Frances Timbers)

<i>Magic and Masculinity: Ritual Magic and Gender in the Early Modern Era</i> (Frances Timbers)

Magic and Masculinity: Ritual Magic and Gender in the Early Modern Era by Frances Timbers (review)

Magic and Masculinity: Ritual Magic and Gender in the Early Modern Era by Frances Timbers (review)

Wicca and the Christian Heritage: Ritual Sex and Magic. By Joanne Pearson

Wicca and the Christian Heritage: Ritual Sex and Magic. By Joanne Pearson

Christian Ritual Magic in the Middle Ages

AbstractThis article gives a brief introduction to the area of medieval ritual magic, outlining the main kinds of texts likely to be understood as belonging to the category – image magic, necromancy, and theurgy or angel magic. Before moving to an overview of the current state of scholarship, it makes note of some watershed works that helped to open up the area of intellectual magic for study. A number of interesting new discoveries, both textual and historical, have been made since the 1990s, and these discoveries have in turn instigated a push toward further exploration and editing of medieval texts and manuscripts of ritual magic, which is turning out to be a more interesting and diverse category than might once have been assumed.

Subjective Experience and the Practice of Medieval Ritual Magic

Following the suggested lead of Robert Mathiesen, and relying conceptually on the ethnographic work by Tanya Luhrmann, this article looks at what we know about the practice of modern magic and various forms of psychological or cognitive conditioning, seeking to apply it to an analysis of medieval ritual magic and reports about its operation. Beginning with a classroom experiment on dream divination, the author proceeds to examine the primary known works of medieval ritual magic to illuminate what kind of effects they probably had on practitioners. The author argues that understanding the nature of these experiences provides a greater level of sympathy with medieval copyists and practitioners of magic and also provides more subtle insights into the organization and orientation of these texts.

The Occult Roots of Scientology?

The Church of Scientology remains one of the most controversial and poorly understood new religious movements to emerge in the last century. And among the most controversial questions in the early history of the Church is L. Ron Hubbard's involvement in the ritual magic of Aleister Crowley and the possible role of occultism in the development of Scientology. While some critics argue that Crowley's magic lies at the very heart of Scientology, most scholars have dismissed any connection between the Church and occultism. This article examines all of the available historical material, ranging from Hubbard's personal writings, to correspondence between Crowley and his American students, to the first Scientology lectures of the 1950s. Crowley's occult ideas, I argue, do in fact represent one—but only one—element in the rich, eclectic bricolage that became the early Church of Scientology; but these occult elements are also mixed together with themes drawn from Eastern religions, science fiction, pop psychology, and Hubbard's own fertile imagination.

The Gnostic Imprint on Parsifal, An Illumination of Ruins

Kunstwerke sind asketisch und schamlos. (1) --Theodor W. Adorno I begin by addressing the presence of Gnosticism in Parsifal in order to confront a more general theoretical problem about how the past is staged, both its impossibility and necessity. Richard Wagner's extraordinary originality in the creation of the character of his final drama and the combination of the typical with an extraordinary originality, make this work an appropriate ground from which to analyze an essentially theoretical position through the phantasmagoric evocation of Gnosticism in the Middle Ages: the representation of, obsession with, and recurrence of history in works of art. In Parsifal, a great work that belongs to the of history, Wagner's evocation of the Middle Ages establishes a very particular relationship with the past, one worth exploring from the theoretical stance that I have chosen. Furthermore, the work exemplifies another phenomenon of great interest: Gnosticism's recurrence in European culture as a marginal trend that is suppressed time and time again, but that always resurfaces, in many cases, as the important leaven in crucial works of the Western Tradition. The underlying hints of Gnosticism within Parsifal provide yet another example of the nineteenth century's obsession with medieval society, although our interest in its presence is not simply attributed to a widespread fad. Rather, it is motivated by a deeper commentary. Parsifal is one of the key works of a century that casts a hallucinated glance back to the past at the very moment when Europe begins its hallucinating voyage into the future. Parsifal precisely exemplifies some fundamental tendencies evolving within European culture at the time: it touches on the sacralization of art and the celebration of an imaginary past, conceived of as a model for the future. At the same time, it exemplifies the key to identity in the present, the transfiguration of eroticism, the fascination with the Orient, and the desire to regress from capitalism's all-measuring linear time to the circular time of myth. Within the Buhnenweihfestspiel there are also tendencies that reveal trends of the future: a rejection of theater as mere bourgeois entertainment alongside an attempt to revive its sacred character, an artistic asceticism that renounces brilliance in its search for authenticity, and a new language that will dominate the twentieth century's most remarkable music. My exploration is not limited to an analysis of the correspondences that can be found between Parsifal and the diffuse image of medieval heresy present in the drama. Instead, I turn my focus to a second constellation that tends to be forgotten. Wagner's work does not constitute a stable and fixed moment in July 1882. On the contrary, over time, the Buhnenweihfestspiel has been distorted because of its multiple interpretations and analysis. Both those who have been fascinated by Parsifal as well as those who have felt the horror within its music have irrevocably attached themselves in distinct ways to the work. Thus we can trace a second constellation to our present: Parsifal has become a ruin. It is an object that can be analyzed as Walter Benjamin analyzed decadent landscapes in his decisive work on ruins, a work itself in ruins, The Arcades Project. A Fascination with Gnosticism Gnosticism (2) has been associated with Christianity from the beginning, like an intermittent shadow deforming its image, but also, as if involved in a game of mirrors, like a sign revealing that perhaps the deformity occurs within the Christian Church itself. Gnosticism has been defeated time and time again and persecuted nearly to extinction, yet it has unyieldingly reappeared, in various incarnations. (3) First, during the Middle Ages, it appeared as heresy; later, when the church had lost much of its power to transform any departure from orthodoxy into heresy, it emerged in its inspiration of other movements such as Rosicrucianism, freemasonry, theosophy, and ritual magic. …

La magie divinatoire à la fin du Moyen Âge

Magic and divination are strictly connected during the medieval period, in the theological censorship, but also in the practices which deliver us some rare manuscripts of the end of the Middle Ages. The ritual magic, in particular, appropriates gladly a divinatory function, which it realizes by resorting to a big variety of means. This article proposes a synthesis on this question, based mostly on experimenta of the ms. Amsterdam, Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, 114 (end of XVth c.), edited as documentary evidence.

Charles Williams and the Companions of the Co-inherence

This article assesses the legacy of Charles Williams as an esoteric Christian teacher. Best known as a friend of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, Williams was also a prolific writer, a practicing Rosicrucian, and a lay spiritual director. Focusing on his central doctrine of co-inherence and corresponding prayer technique known as “substituted love,” the essay examines his novels, poetry, and theological writings as well as his practice of spiritual direction, asking how his ideas were influenced by his familiarity with ritual magic. It also explores the informal religious order he founded, the Companions of the Co-inherence.

A Theory of Adjudication: Law as Magic

This article takes a new approach to the problem of legal rationality. In the 1920s and 1930s the Legal Realists criticized judicial decisions as "magic solving words" and "word ritual." Though the Realist critique continues to shape American jurisprudence, the legal magic they observed has never been seriously explored. Here, drawing on anthropological studies of magic and ritual, I reconsider the irrational legal techniques the Realists exposed. My thesis is that the Realists were right that law works like magic, but wrong about how magic works. That is, they were right that adjudication makes use of a particular combination of techniques - enacting performances, heightened formality, transformative analogy, performativity, temporal play - that is also found in ritual magic. But they were wrong that those techniques necessarily preclude rational decisionmaking. Drawing on the insights of field anthropology, I theorize legal magic as an authentic mode of legal practice. After considering the different aspects of legal magic and the Realists' critique, I propose three potential roles for legal magic: as a way to imbue official legal decisions with the affective moral force of lived experience, as an institutional practice that may enhance judicial impartiality, and as a method for symbolically reversing otherwise irreparable injuries. I hope that my reanalysis of legal magic can provide a new perspective on the relationship of law and reason, illuminate undertheorized aspects of law and contribute to a more concrete and nuanced understanding of adjudication's social role.