Download or read book A General Theory of Magic written by Marcel Mauss and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-07-05 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First written by Marcel Mauss and Henri Humbert in 1902, A General Theory of Magic gained a wide new readership when republished by Mauss in 1950. As a study of magic in 'primitive' societies and its survival today in our thoughts and social actions, it represents what Claude Lévi-Strauss called, in an introduction to that edition, the astonishing modernity of the mind of one of the century's greatest thinkers. The book offers a fascinating snapshot of magic throughout various cultures as well as deep sociological and religious insights still very much relevant today. At a period when art, magic and science appear to be crossing paths once again, A General Theory of Magic presents itself as a classic for our times.
Download or read book A General Theory of Magic written by Marcel Mauss and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-07-05 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First written by Marcel Mauss and Henri Humbert in 1902, A General Theory of Magic gained a wide new readership when republished by Mauss in 1950. As a study of magic in 'primitive' societies and its survival today in our thoughts and social actions, it represents what Claude Lévi-Strauss called, in an introduction to that edition, the astonishing modernity of the mind of one of the century's greatest thinkers. The book offers a fascinating snapshot of magic throughout various cultures as well as deep sociological and religious insights still very much relevant today. At a period when art, magic and science appear to be crossing paths once again, A General Theory of Magic presents itself as a classic for our times.
Download or read book A Cognitive Theory of Magic written by Jesper Sørensen and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2007 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magic is a universal phenomenon. Everywhere we look people perform ritual actions in which desirable qualities are transferred by means of physical contact and objects or persons are manipulated by things of their likeness. In this book S rensen embraces a cognitive perspective in order to investigate this long-established but controversial topic. Following a critique of the traditional approaches to magic, and basing his claims on classical ethnographic cases, the author explains magic's universality by examining a number of recurrent cognitive processes underlying its different manifestations. He focuses on how power is infused into the ritual practice; how representations of contagion and similarity can be used to connect otherwise distinct objects in order to manipulate one by the other; and how the performance of ritual prompts representations of magical actions as effective. Bringing these features together, the author proposes a cognitive theory of how people can represent magical rituals as purposeful actions and how ritual actions are integrated into more complex representations of events. This explanation, in turn, yields new insights into the constitutive role of magic in the formation of institutionalised religious ritual.
Download or read book Magic in Theory written by Peter Lamont and published by Univ of Hertfordshire Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A useful manual for any magician or curious spectator who wonders why the tricks seem so real, this guide examines the psychological aspects of a magician’s work. Exploring the ways in which human psychology plays into the methods of conjuring rather than focusing on the individual tricks alone, this explanation of the general principles of magic includes chapters on the use of misdirection, sleight of hand, and reconstruction, provides a better understanding of this ancient art, and offers a section on psychics that warns of their deceptive magic skills.
Download or read book The Magic of the State written by Michael Taussig and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the enchanted mountain of a spirit-queen presiding over an unnamed, postcolonial country, this ethnographic work of ficto-criticism recreates in written form the shrines by which the dead--notably the fetishized forms of Europe's Others, Indians and Blacks--generate the magical powers of the modern state.
Download or read book Defining Magic written by Bernd-Christian Otto and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-11 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Magic has been an important term in Western history and continues to be an essential topic in the modern academic study of religion, anthropology, sociology, and cultural history. Defining Magic is the first volume to assemble key texts that aim at determining the nature of magic, establish its boundaries and key features, and explain its working. The reader brings together seminal writings from antiquity to today. The texts have been selected on the strength of their success in defining magic as a category, their impact on future scholarship, and their originality. The writings are divided into chronological sections and each essay is separately introduced for student readers. Together, these texts - from Philosophy, Theology, Religious Studies, and Anthropology - reveal the breadth of critical approaches and responses to defining what is magic. CONTRIBUTORS: Aquinas, Augustine, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Dennis Diderot, Emile Durkheim, Edward Evans-Pritchard, James Frazer, Susan Greenwood, Robin Horton, Edmund Leach, Gerardus van der Leeuw, Christopher Lehrich, Bronislaw Malinowski, Marcel Mauss, Agrippa von Nettesheim, Plato, Pliny, Plotin, Isidore of Sevilla, Jesper Sorensen, Kimberley Stratton, Randall Styers, Edward Tylor
Download or read book Stolen Lightning written by Daniel Lawrence O'Keefe and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1983 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An interdisciplinary investigation of the role of magic in human societies, past and present, asserts that magic remains an important element in contemporary civilizations
Download or read book Magic written by Ernesto De Martino and published by Hau. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though his work was little known outside Italian intellectual circles for most of the twentieth century, anthropologist and historian of religions Ernesto de Martino is now recognized as one of the most original thinkers in the field. This book is testament to de Martino's innovation and engagement with Hegelian historicism and phenomenology--a work of ethnographic theory way ahead of its time. This new translation of Sud e Magia, his 1959 study of ceremonial magic and witchcraft in southern Italy, shows how De Martino is not interested in the question of whether magic is rational or irrational but rather in why it came to be perceived as a problem of knowledge in the first place. Setting his exploration within his wider, pathbreaking theorization of ritual, as well as in the context of his politically sensitive analysis of the global south's historical encounters with Western science, he presents the development of magic and ritual in Enlightenment Naples as a paradigmatic example of the complex dynamics between dominant and subaltern cultures. Far ahead of its time, Magic is still relevant as anthropologists continue to wrestle with modernity's relationship with magical thinking.
Download or read book Experiencing the Impossible written by Gustav Kuhn and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the scientific study of magic reveals intriguing—and often unsettling—insights into the mysteries of the human mind. What do we see when we watch a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat or read a person's mind? We are captivated by an illusion; we applaud the fact that we have been fooled. Why do we enjoy experiencing what seems clearly impossible, or at least beyond our powers of explanation? In Experiencing the Impossible, Gustav Kuhn examines the psychological processes that underpin our experience of magic. Kuhn, a psychologist and a magician, reveals the intriguing—and often unsettling—insights into the human mind that the scientific study of magic provides.Magic, Kuhn explains, creates a cognitive conflict between what we believe to be true (for example, a rabbit could not be in that hat) and what we experience (a rabbit has just come out of that hat!). Drawing on the latest psychological, neurological, and philosophical research, he suggests that misdirection is at the heart of all magic tricks, and he offers a scientific theory of misdirection. He explores, among other topics, our propensity for magical thinking, the malleability of our perceptual experiences, forgetting and misremembering, free will and mind control, and how magic is applied outside entertaiment—the use of illusion in human-computer interaction, politics, warfare, and elsewhere. We may be surprised to learn how little of the world we actually perceive, how little we can trust what we see and remember, and how little we are in charge of our thoughts and actions. Exploring magic, Kuhn illuminates the complex—and almost magical—mechanisms underlying our daily activities.
Download or read book A General Theory of Love written by Thomas Lewis and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This original and lucid account of the complexities of love and its essential role in human well-being draws on the latest scientific research. Three eminent psychiatrists tackle the difficult task of reconciling what artists and thinkers have known for thousands of years about the human heart with what has only recently been learned about the primitive functions of the human brain. A General Theory of Love demonstrates that our nervous systems are not self-contained: from earliest childhood, our brains actually link with those of the people close to us, in a silent rhythm that alters the very structure of our brains, establishes life-long emotional patterns, and makes us, in large part, who we are. Explaining how relationships function, how parents shape their child’s developing self, how psychotherapy really works, and how our society dangerously flouts essential emotional laws, this is a work of rare passion and eloquence that will forever change the way you think about human intimacy.
Download or read book The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money written by John Maynard Keynes and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-20 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book was originally published by Macmillan in 1936. It was voted the top Academic Book that Shaped Modern Britain by Academic Book Week (UK) in 2017, and in 2011 was placed on Time Magazine's top 100 non-fiction books written in English since 1923. Reissued with a fresh Introduction by the Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman and a new Afterword by Keynes’ biographer Robert Skidelsky, this important work is made available to a new generation. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money transformed economics and changed the face of modern macroeconomics. Keynes’ argument is based on the idea that the level of employment is not determined by the price of labour, but by the spending of money. It gave way to an entirely new approach where employment, inflation and the market economy are concerned. Highly provocative at its time of publication, this book and Keynes’ theories continue to remain the subject of much support and praise, criticism and debate. Economists at any stage in their career will enjoy revisiting this treatise and observing the relevance of Keynes’ work in today’s contemporary climate.
Download or read book Magic A Very Short Introduction written by Owen Davies and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-01-26 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defining 'magic' is a maddening task. Over the last century numerous philosophers, anthropologists, historians, and theologians have attempted to pin down its essential meaning, sometimes analysing it in such complex and abstruse depth that it all but loses its sense altogether. For this reason, many people often shy away from providing a detailed definition, assuming it is generally understood as the human control of supernatural forces. 'Magic' continues to pervade the popular imagination and idiom. People feel comfortable with its contemporary multiple meanings, unaware of the controversy, conflict, and debate its definition has caused over two and a half millennia. In common usage today 'magic' is uttered in reference to the supernatural, superstition, illusion, trickery, religious miracles, fantasies, and as a simple superlative. The literary confection known as 'magical realism' has considerable appeal and many modern scientists have ironically incorporated the word into their vocabulary, with their 'magic acid', 'magic bullets' and 'magic angles'. Since the so-called European Enlightenment magic has often been seen as a marker of primitivism, of a benighted earlier stage of human development. Yet across the modern globalized world hundreds of millions continue to resort to magic - and also to fear it. Magic provides explanations and remedies for those living in extreme poverty and without access to alternatives. In the industrial West, with its state welfare systems, religious fundamentalists decry the continued moral threat posed by magic. Under the guise of neo-Paganism, its practice has become a religion in itself. Magic continues to be a truly global issue. This Very Short Introduction does not attempt to provide a concluding definition of magic: it is beyond simple definition. Instead it explores the many ways in which magic, as an idea and a practice, has been understood and employed over the millennia. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book The History and Practice of Magic written by Paul Christian and published by Literary Licensing, LLC. This book was released on 2014-03 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Is A New Release Of The Original 1870 Edition.
Download or read book Our Magic written by Nevil Maskelyne and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-08-05 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Books like this contain what may be called the raw material of the art, the processes which the magician can employ at will in building up his larger experiments in magic, each of which should be a complete play in itself. Then, when the student has found out how tricks can be done, he would do well to turn his attention to Our Magic, by Mr. Maskelyne and his associate, Mr. David Devant. And from this logical treatise he can learn how experiments in magic ought to be composed. It is from this admirable discussion of the basic principles of modern magic that more than one of the points made in this paper have been borrowed. Mr. Devant calls attention to the fact that new tricks are common, new manipulative devices, new examples of dexterity and new applications of science, whereas new plots, new ideas for effective presentation, are rare. He describes a series of experiments of his own, some of which utilize again but in a novel manner devices long familiar, while others are new both in idea and in many of the subsidiary methods of execution. One of the most hackneyed and yet one of the most effective illusions in the repertory of the conjurer is that known as the Rising Cards. The performer brings forward a pack of cards, several of which are drawn by members of the audience and returned to the pack, whereupon at the command of the magician they rise out of the pack one after the other in the order in which they were drawn. In the oldest form in which this illusion is described in the books on the art, the pack is placed in a case supported by a rod standing on a base, and the secret of the trick lies on this rod and its base. The rod is really a hollow tube and the base is really an empty box. The tube is filled with sand, on the top of which rests a leaden weight, to which is attached a thread so arranged over and under certain cards as to cause the chosen cards to rise when it descends down the tube; and in putting the cards into the case the conjurer released a valve at the bottom of the tube, so that the sand might escape into the box, whereby the weight was lowered, the thread then doing its allotted work, and the cards ascending into view, no matter how far distant the performer might then be standing. It seems likely that the invention of this primitive apparatus may have been due to the fact that some eighteenth century conjurer happened to observe the sand running out of an hour-glass and set about to find some means whereby this escape of sand could be utilized in his art. The hollow rod, the escaping sand, and the descending weight have long since been discarded; but the illusion of the Rising Cards survives and is now performed in an unending variety of ways. The pack may be held in the hand of the performer, without the use of any case, or it may be placed in a glass goblet, or it may be tied together with a ribbon and thus suspended from cords that swing to and from almost over the heads of the spectators; and however they may be isolated the chosen cards rise obediently when they are bidden. The original effect subsists, even though the devices differ.... The Bookman: A Review of Books and Life, Volume 40
Download or read book Magic written by Ernst Schertel and published by . This book was released on 2009-05 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In May of 2003, Timothy Ryback, the author of "Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life" had an article published in The Atlantic Monthly. In the article he detailed several of the books held in a portion of Hitler's library at Brown University. Mr. Ryback also mentioned some of the passages Hitler marked in these books. One particular passage was worthy of attention: "He who does not carry demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world." That passage appeared in the book "Magic: History / Theory / Practice," written by Dr. Ernst Schertel. Schertel was a researcher of alternative sexual practices, nudism, and the occult. After finishing his book Magic in 1923 he sent a dedicated copy to Adolf Hitler. Now, for the first time ever, "Magic: History/Theory/Practice" has been translated into English, with all sixty-six Hitler annotations intact.
Download or read book The Five Points in Magic written by Juan Tamariz and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Foundations of Magic written by J. F. O'Neill and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there a link between psychology and magic? Can the psyche have an impact on magical practice? Foundations of Magic is a unique, beginner's guide to spellcraft that synthesizes ceremonial magic and proven psychological techniques to work everyday spells. Without emphasizing any school of magic or belief system, this secular spell book is for people of all backgrounds. J. F. O'Neill introduces the basics of spellcraft and explains the psychological preparation needed to work magic. There are exercises for editing old memories and creating new ones, self-hypnosis, and reaching higher trance states. After becoming fully trained in the ways of magic, readers may begin working spells to find love, attract money, alleviate pain, achieve goals, eliminate depression, increase personal power, and more!
