Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary

History

An Anthropology of Religion and Magic, II

Author(s): Keith Thomas
Source: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Summer, 1975), pp. 91-109
Published by: The MIT Press
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Journal of Interdisciplinary History vI:I (Summer 1975), 9I-I09.

Keith Thomas

An Anthropology of Religion and Magic, II

Southey was a somewhat impatient listener to Coleridge's meta-

physical talk. When Southey was engaged on his History of Brazil,
Coleridge said to him, "My dear Southey, I wish to know how you
intend to treat of man in that important work. Do you mean, like
Herodotus, to treat of man as man in general ? Or do you mean, like
Thucydides, to treat of man as man political? Or do you mean,
like Polybius, to treat of man as man military? Or do you mean ..."
"Coleridge", cried Southey, "I mean to write the history of Brazil." I

Since most working historians tend to be impatient of anything which

looks like methodological discussion I must begin by saying that I am
genuinely grateful to Geertz, not only for so closely reading my text,
but also for formulating her criticisms of it in terms which pose wide
general issues of some profundity.2 It is a salutary experience to have
one's work subjected to probing analysis of this kind and I will readily
admit that, if I had had the advantage of reading Geertz at an earlier
stage, Religion and the Decline of Magic would have been a different
book, though perhaps not very different. Still, as the Red Queen said
to Alice, "When you've once said a thing, that fixes it, and you must
take the consequences." My aim in this brief note will not be so much
to "defend" my book as to reflect on the implications of some of the
important general issues which Geertz has raised.
She begins by objecting to the categories which I have used to
conduct my analysis. In particular, she questions whether there is such
a thing as "magic" at all. By adopting such a concept, and, even more,
by defining it in such a way as to distinguish it from "religion," I have,
she suggests, fallen victim to language which reflects the official pre-
judices of my own society; for today both scientists and theologians
agree in using the term "magic" negatively and pejoratively, to group
together and disparage such practices as they currently regard as irra-
tional or useless. Worse still, these official prejudices have led me into
Keith Thomas is Fellow and Tutor in Modem History at St. John's College, Oxford.

I Richard J. Schrader (ed.), The Reminiscences of Alexander Dyce (Columbus, 1972),

178.
2 I am also deeply grateful to the program committee of the American Historical
Association for devoting a session at its annual convention (1972) to the discussion of
my book and for making it possible for me to be present.

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92 KEITH THOMAS

making the historian's greatest error-asking the wrong question. For

she says, "It is not the decline of the practice of magic that cries out for
explanation, but the emergence and rise of the label 'magic."'
Is this criticism justified? Have I been studying a non-existent
problem? Should I be compared to a pre-Namierite historian who
assumes that the essence of mid-eighteenth-century British politics was
a conflict between "Whigs" and "Tories," or a pre-Freudian doctor
trying to find the causes of "hysteria" ? Is "magic" a concept which
totally dissolves on closer inspection ?
Let me say first that I am fully aware that anthropologists today,
when discussing the beliefs of other societies, are chary about using
the Western concept of "magic" tout court. Acutely sensitive to the
danger of ethnocentricity, they emphasize that an ethnographer's first
task is to arrive at the basic categories or systems of classification
employed by the people whom he is studying. To do this he has to
begin by discarding his own categories. "Typically he may have to
abandon the distinction between the natural and the supernatural, re-
locate the line between life and death, accept a common nature in
mankind and animals."3 It is partly this awareness of the difficulty of
apprehending unfamiliar systems of classification which has led to the
immense current interest among anthropologists in linguistics, sym-
bolism, and communications theory, and to a major change of direction
in social anthropology as a whole.4 The interests of the new generation
of anthropologists tend to be not so much sociological, as linguistic,
even philosophical. Their primary concern is the way in which lan-
guage and symbolism determine human understanding and behavior.
Their object is to reconstruct the various methods by which men
impose conceptual order on the external world. They wish to identify
the "programs," the "grammars," the "paradigms," the "cognitive
structures," on which social behavior, as they see it, is founded. Above
all, they seek to reconstruct individual cultural systems in their entirety,
and to understand particular notions by identifying their place in the
system to which they belong. They therefore reject the work of those
earlier ethnographers who thought it possible to study a society by
simple observation without mastering the language of its people, who
classified beliefs by their functions rather than by their inner structure,

3 Rodney Needham, introduction to his translation of Emile Durkheim and Marcel

Mauss, Primitive Classification (London, 1963), viii.
4 For this change and its implications see Edwin Ardener, "The New Anthropology
and Its Critics", Man, VI (I97I), 449-467.

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RELIGION AND MAGIC, II 93

and who, by wrenching particular aspects of a system out of their

cultural context and arbitrarily grouping them together with super-
ficially similar aspects of other systems, ended up by studying non-
existent entities, brought into being by the ill-considered application
of a single label to social phenomena which in fact differed radically
from society to society.
Adherents of this older style of anthropology are now marooned
on a barren shore, cut off by a fast receding intellectual tide. Away on
the horizon sails a trim new craft, bearing the post-structuralists, the
semiologists, and the cognitive anthropologists. Theirs is a ship which
no longer flies the flag of comparative sociology, but is dedicated
instead to the discovery of the enduring features of the human mind.
To achieve its new speed this vessel has had to cast off a great deal of
ballast, among it many general categories which anthropologists once
used and which historians still use without a blush. They include not
just such anthropological exotica as "totemism," which everyone
regards as a useless item of vocabulary, but other more familiar terms,
which most historians probably do not realize are now regarded as
contentious; for example, "ritual," "belief," "witchcraft," "kinship,"
and "religion."5 All of these have been rejected, at least by some
writers, because they are culture-bound categories which are alien to
the thinking of many societies and which, if used on a universal scale,
turn out to lack any constant or intrinsic content. ("Primitive," of
course went much earlier because of its condescending evolutionary
overtones; it has been replaced by such debatable substitutes as "tribal,"
"traditional," "undifferentiated," "preliterate" or "having a low level
of material culture.") 6 And with this rejected ballast has gone "magic."
For, as one writer remarks, "If categorical distinctions of the Western

5 See Claude Levi-Strauss (trans. Rodney Needham), Totemism (Harmondsworth,

I969); Malcolm Crick, reviewing J. S. La Fontaine (ed.), The Interpretation of Ritual
(I972), inJournal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, III (I972), 5I; Rodney Needham,
Belief, Language, and Experience (Oxford, 1972); T. O. Beidelman, "Towards More
Open Theoretical Interpretations," in Mary Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and
Accusations (London, 1970), 35I; Malcolm Crick, "Two Styles in the Study of Witch-
craft,"Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, IV (I973), I8; Rodney Needham
(ed.), Rethinking Kinship and Marriage (London, 1971), cviii; David M. Schneider, "What
is Kinship all about?" in Priscilla Reining (ed.), Kinship Studies in the Morgan Centennial
Year (Washington, D.C., I972), 51; Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of
Religion (New York, I964). The term "religion" is retained by Thomas Luckmann, The
Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society (New York, 1967), but
widened to embrace any matter which an individual regards as of "ultimate" significance.
6 For an isolated defence of the term see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London,
I966), Ch. 5.

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94 | KEITH THOMAS

mind are found upon examination to impose distinctions upon (and so

falsify) the intellectual universes of other cultures then they must be
discarded... I believe 'magic' to be one such category."7
The wider perspective of the present-day anthropologist, however,
inevitably distinguishes his methods from those of the historian. For
the anthropologist is rightly suspicious of any terminology which
looks unsuitable for use in cross-cultural comparison, whereas the
historian, whose preoccupations are usually less global, is more ob-
viously culture-bound. He is content to speak of "religion" or "kin-
ship" without worrying whether these terms are helpful in some more
exotic context. Of course he would find it easy to agree with E. R.
Leach that "English-language patterns of thought are not a necessary
model for the whole of human society".8 But though unsuitable for
export they may well be good enough for home. In Religion and the
Decline of Magic (London, 1971), I was attempting to write English
history, not to engage in cross-cultural analysis and I must plead guilty
to having used language which contemporaries themselves, or most of
them, would have understood. Of course, there is no single definition
of "magic" elastic enough to embrace all of the different usages which
contemporaries gave the term. Even so, at the end of the period with
which I was concerned, the expression "magic" had come to have a
tolerably clear connotation. It meant the deliberate production (or
attempted production) of physical effects or the gaining of knowledge
by means which were regarded as occult or supernatural. There is
nothing hard and fast about this definition. For contemporaries differed
among themselves as to what was or was not "natural" (255-256), and
many refrained from applying the term "magical" to supernatural
operations which were authorized by the Church (Chs. 2, 4) or the
state (Ch. 7[ii]). Moreover, the word "magic" was relatively slow to
emerge as a single label for a number of different activities. In the
Middle Ages it was more common to speak separately of "enchant-
ment," "necromancy," "conjuration" or "sorcery" than to refer
simply to "magic." The word existed both in Latin and in English,but
commentators and clerics tended to list the magic arts separately; only
in the sixteenth century did it become common to group them

7 D. F. Pocock, foreword to Marcel Mauss (trans. Robert Brain), A General Theory of

MVagic (London, 1972), 2. As yet, however, few anthropologists seem to have managed
to keep the word out of their pages, though some use the alternative "magico-
religious".
8 Leach, Rethinking Anthropology (London, 1961), 27.

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RELIGION AND MAGIC, II [ 95

together under a single head.9 Nevertheless, I felt no inhibition about

using the expression "magic" as a convenient label for bracketing
together a variety of specific practices which contemporaries usually
associated together, which had been classified as "magical arts" since
classical times, and which in any case I tried to describe in concrete
enough detail for it to have been reasonably clear at any particular
point as to just what I was talking about.
Perhaps I should have laid even more emphasis on the hetero-
geneity of these different activities, stressing how the nature of a neo-
scientific system of divination like astrology was quite different from
that of healing by charms or conjuring spirits; indeed, the distinction
between ars magica and scientia divinationis went back to the classical
period. But I think I described the individual practices and beliefs in
sufficient particularity for any serious confusion to have been avoided.
Only in the last few pages did I introduce, half frivolously, the quite
different definition of magic as ineffective technique (667-668). But
that sort of magic, which is of course universal, I was not the subject of
my book. Much of the magic with which I was concerned was certainly
ineffective, but ineffectiveness was not part of my definition of it; and
the question of whether Elizabethans would have accepted such a
definition does not arise. Many of Geertz's strictures relate, therefore,
to the last two pages of my conclusion, rather than to the main body
of the book. For there my working assumptions were no different from
those of the anthropologist, Nur Yalman, who speaks of "the practical
use of [supernatural or divine] powers for everyday purposes such as
healing or assuring luck and fertility-which in very general terms we
may refer to as magic"; though, like him, I would readily agree that
it is "not a uniform class of practices and beliefs which can be immedia-
tely discovered in every society." I fully recognize that for anthropol-
ogists the concept of magic is "one which has been battered about out

9 Cf. Robert-Leon Wagner, "Sorcier" et "Magicien." Contribution a l'histoire du

Vocabulaire de la Magie, these (Paris, 1939), 26n-27n. On the terminology used in the
late Roman period see Eliane Massonneau, Le Crime de Magie et le Droit Romain, these
(Paris, I933); H. Hubert, "Magia," in Ch. Daremberg and Edm. Saglio (eds.), Diction-
naire des antiquites grecques et romains (Paris, 1877-I919). In England the word "magic"
was established at least by Chaucer's time (see J. A. H. Murray [ed.], A New English
Dictionary on Historical Principles [Oxford, I888-I933]), but its semantic history needs
more investigation.
Io Cf. W. Michael Brooker, "Magic in Business and Industry: Notes towards Its
Recognition and Understanding," Anthropologica, IX (1967), 3-I9, where magic is
defined as repetitive, non-adaptive behavior.

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96 [ KEITH THOMAS
of useful recognition"" and I have no desire to follow their predeces-
sors in a search for the universal meaning of magic, religion or science.
But so long as we are concerned with the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, the analytic utility of these terms is surely adequate.
In any case, as my definition of magic implies, I did not suggest
that magic was always distinct from "religion." On the contrary, I
observed that "The line between magic and religion is... impossible
to draw in many . . societies; it is equally impossible to draw in
medieval England" (50). I would agree that "magic" is normally "best
regarded as an aspect of religious belief and practice that takes its special
force from the antecedent and deeply rooted recognition in many
societies of supernatural or divine power." I2 What I suggested in my
book was that a reclassification took place during the period with which
I was concerned, whereby those elements in religion which ultimately
came to be regarded as magical were gradually identified as such,
first by the Lollards, then by the Reformers (Ch. 3). I further urged that
a fundamental change took place in the idea of religion itself, as the
emphasis came to be placed on formal belief rather than on a mode of
living (76-77).I3 Far from ignoring the emergence of the term "magic"
as something separate from "religion," I pointed out that the classic
distinction between the two, normally associated with E. B. Tylor
and other nineteenth-century anthropologists, was in fact originally
formulated by the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers (6I). It was
they who first declared that magic was coercive and religion interces-
sionary, and that magic was not a false religion, but a different sort of
activity altogether. The error of Tylor and Sir James Frazer (but not,
I think, of Thomas) was to make this distinction universal by exporting
it to other societies.I4
Nevertheless, I am sorry if my use of the terms "magic" and
"religion" has caused confusion. As Evans-Pritchard says, "terms are
only labels which help us sort out facts of the same kind from facts
which are different or in some respects different. If the labels do not

11 Yalman, "Magic," in David L. Sills (ed.), International Encyclopaedia of the Social

Sciences (n.p., 1968), IX, 522; Needham, Belief, Language, and Experience, 2o8n.
12 Yalman, "Magic," 522.
13 I wrote these pages before I came across Smith, Meaning and End of Religion, but I
think my description closely parallels his account of the shift from the concept of
"religiousness" to that of"religion" (ibid., 39).
14 I note that even the reviewer (Randal Keynes) of Religion and the Decline of Magic
in the avant-gardeJournal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (III [I972], 154), acquits
me of using "Frazerian" terms of reference.

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RELIGION AND MAGIC, II | 97

prove helpful we can discard them. The facts will be the same without
their labels." I' I claim no universality for a distinction between magic
and religion, but I do suggest that in European history, at least, it is
analytically useful to distinguish those religions which, like medieval
Catholicism, credited their rituals with physical efficacy from those
which, like eighteenth-century deism, did not. I devoted a good deal
of space to describing how the sectarians, by engaging in prophecy
and religious healing, brought back into religion much of the magic
which the Reformers had cast out (Ch.5). But I also stated that "at the
end of our period we can draw a distinction between religion and magic
which would not have been possible at the beginning" (640).
To that extent I did discuss the emergence of the label "magic."
I explained how churchmen of every denomination used the term to
brand as implicitly diabolical all unauthorized attempts to manipulate
the supernatural, including many folk practices previously regarded
by their adherents as godly (I92, 256, 265-267); and how Protestants
applied the same description to cover any claims to manipulation made
by the Church itself. The dividing line between "magic" and "religion"
was hardened by the parallel attempts of Protestant and Catholic
Reformers to eliminate all popular rites of unauthorized or ambiguous
status.16 The Catholics did not abandon all claims to supernatural
manipulation, but the more austere position of the English Protestants
generated the very categories which anthropologists themselves are
only now beginning to discard (61).
Nevertheless, Geertz has a point. I should have devoted more
space to a proper semantic discussion of how the boundaries between
"religion," "magic," and "science" shifted and reshifted, according to
the varying outlooks of different social and religious groups.17 I should
have shown, for example, how the category "natural magic" melted
away altogether, part becoming science, the rest being discarded as
obsolete. I should also have paid more attention to the changing
vocabulary in which magical practitioners and magical activities were
described; and I should have considered more explicitly how far the
practitioners of magic themselves regarded their activities as magical.
For I think it quite wrong to suggest, as does Geertz, that the only

15 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford,

1937), iI.
r6 On this theme see Jean Delumeau, Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire (Paris, I97I).
I7 This criticism is also well made by Keynes in Journal of the Anthropological Society
of Oxford, 154.

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98 | KEITH THOMAS

contemporaries who used the term "magic" were those who rejected
it. If that had been so we should never have encountered women
claiming to be "good" witches or intellectuals boasting of their
magical powers. Of course, some wizards saw themselves as possessed
of a special kind of "cunning" (i.e. knowledge or technique), but others
unashamedly confessed to attempting to manipulate the supernatural.
To that extent the modern definition of magic was accepted by many
of its practitioners themselves.
Even so, I am now more sensitive to the intricate problem of
shifting vocabulary and classification than I was when I wrote the
book. I can see a lot of historical work waiting to be done in this area,
not just on magic, but also on social class, kinship, age-groups, and
other fundamental categories. For, from the anthropologist's point of
view, much of what historians call social change can be regarded as a
process of mental reclassification, of re-drawing conceptual lines and
boundaries. My book was meant to demonstrate a hardening of mental
divisions, between natural and supernatural, between the moral order
and the natural order; which, I take it, is what Max Weber meant by
the disenchantment of the world. I cannot, therefore, agree with
Geertz in dismissing as a boring non-question the problem of how far
the various practices which I identified as magical did in fact decline.
On the contrary, I maintain that in England magic declined in a
double sense: The clergy abandoned all claims to be able to achieve
supernatural effects; and the practice of the various magical arts
diminished in prestige and extent. I also think that this declining faith
in the physical efficacy of religious ritual and in the power of the
cunning men, poses some crucial historical issues. Despite the popular
survival (perhaps even to a greater extent than I suggested (665,
666-667) of many of the practices and attitudes which I discussed,I8
I remain convinced that what I called "the decline of magic" has to be
regarded as one of the great historical divides.

Many of my critics have accused me of being unfair to religion.

Geertz, however, thinks that I have been unfair to magic, by suggesting
that it dealt with only a limited number of problems, by contrast with
religion, which was an altogether more elaborate affair, a mode of
living and a coherent system of explanation (153-I54, 636-637). I
should have done more, she thinks, to bring out the hidden conceptual
i8 Cf. E. P. Thompson, "Anthropology and the Discipline of Historical Context,"
Midland History, I (I972), 53-55.

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RELIGION AND MAGIC, II | 99

foundations on which magical practices rested, to show that they were

built upon an alternative but equally coherent cosmology. Instead, she
suggests, I crudely treated magic rituals as mere psychological re-
sponses to immediate needs, thereby failing to see that men would not
have turned to them in the first place if they had not already thought
them to possess some intellectual plausibility. Belief-systems, she
argues, have an independent life of their own, whereas I have simply
discussed them in utilitarian fashion, implying that magical beliefs
arose to fit immediate practical needs, only to be discarded once those
needs had evaporated.
I hope that my picture of the relationship of magical beliefs to
practical needs was not really so crude. I fully realize that modern
cognitive anthropologists are reluctant to treat mental activity as a
mere epiphenomenon of the social and economic infrastructure. Far
from being economic determinists, they are more likely to maintain
that cultures are not so much material phenomena as "cognitive
organizations of material phenomena." 9 Similarly, those influenced
by Levi-Strauss assume that modes of thought are determined by the
inherent qualities of the human mind.20 I, too, agree that symbolic
forms have an autonomous reality, that rituals are not derived from
sentiments, that psychological needs do not create beliefs, and that
magic would never have been practiced unless it had first been thought
plausible.21 Magic was stylized and inherited; men did not invent it at
moments of stress and it did not cater for every problem (656) any
more than witchcraft was invoked to explain every misfortune (538-
539). I certainly did not suggest that magic was a mere alternative to
technology, the one going out when the other came in.22 On the
I9 Stephen A. Tyler (ed.), Cognitive Anthropology (New York, 1969), 3.
20 Cf. Nur Yalman, "The Raw: the Cooked:: Nature: Culture," in Edmund Leach
(ed.), The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism (London, I967), 71-89.
21 A classic refutation of the cruder functionalist view may be found in Levi-Strauss,
Totemism, Ch. 3. But it should be noted that even writers of a more functionalist
orientation have been careful to emphasize that situations of tension do not in them-
selves explain occult beliefs. See, e.g., Max Gluckman "Moral crises: Magical and
Secular Solutions," in Gluckman (ed.), The Allocation of Responsibility (Manchester,
1972), 4, I3.
22 But contrast E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford, 1965),
113 ("the advances of science and technology have rendered magic redundant"). Since
Geertz (above, 84n) suggests that I have misunderstood Evans-Pritchard's argument, it
is perhaps worth pointing out that Evans-Pritchard remarked of Malinowski's findings
that "his general conclusions as to the function of magic in society are fully borne out
by the Zande data" ("The Morphology and Function of Magic," American Anthropol-
ogist, XXXI [I929], 621).

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 I00 I KEITH THOMAS

contrary I pointed out that Lollards and Protestants rejected magic

long before the practical needs for which it catered had received any
alternative technological solution (77, 656-666). When I wrote of a
shift from reliance on magic to sturdy self-help, I had in mind not a
psychological change so much as a doctrinal one. It was not that
Lollards and Protestants had stronger personalities than their pre-
decessors, but that their convictions about the relative scope for human
action and supernatural aid were different. The crucial shift was
"attitudinal," in that it reflected a changing attitude to the relationship
of God and man.23 But to say that is not to invoke a psychological
interpretation but to appeal to something nearer to the ontological
one which Geertz prefers; though, to the extent that religious beliefs
affected men's outlook and behavior, the change, of course, also had
psychological implications.
Neither was my treatment of witchcraft primarily psychological
in character. I tried to show that witchcraft beliefs were not private
delusions, generated by situations of stress, but were anchored in a
culturally acceptable view of reality (Chs. 14, I5). They were part of
a much larger corpus of assumptions about the universe. A person who
believed in witchcraft was not necessarily a paranoiac. On the other
hand, it took a specific social situation to bring witch beliefs into
action; and when they came into action in the form of witchcraft
accusations they had, like all other human actions, their psychological
dimensions, being rooted in a variety of emotions, uppermost among
which was guilt (Ch. 17). But it was not guilt about turning old
women from the door which generated the concept of witchcraft, any
more than it was a declining sense of guilt which led to its decay. A
psychological explanation of the kind advanced by LeVine may just
possibly help to explain why, in a society holding witch beliefs, some
individuals levied witchcraft accusations while others in a similar
situation did not. But it certainly cannot explain the growth of skepti-
cism about the possibility of witchcraft as such. If that skepticism
began among the social elite it was not because the members of that
elite had stronger egos, but because their social situation (superior

23 A vivid illustration of the change is provided by the medieval story of the Hunger-
ford man who, in the dry summer of I259, set out to water his fields, but was miraculously
paralyzed for blasphemously attempting to mitigate the effects of a divinely-ordained
drought (Henry Richards Luard [ed.], Annales Monastici [Rolls Series, London, I864-
69], II, 351-352). By the seventeenth century the fatalism implicit in anecdotes of this
kind had been officially repudiated.

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RELIGION AND MAGIC, II I10

education, greater mobility, more access to news and information)

exposed them to a wider range of intellectual experience. And if
witchcraft accusations at the village level also declined, that was because
of a decline in the frequency of the kind of ambiguous social situation
which engendered such accusations, not because of a change in the
personality type of English villagers.24
I therefore sympathize entirely with Geertz in her suspicion of
any shallow functionalist attempt to treat popular beliefs as simple
defences against anxiety, vain compensations for technological in-
adequacies. I can well understand why many anthropologists prefer to
study ideas as self-contained systems of thought, concentrating solely
on their internal logic and their ontological structure. Yet, though I
recognize that the persistence of magical beliefs is a problem in the
history of cognitive structures, I also think that the historian would be
ill-advised to separate such beliefs from their social and technological
context. It may not be true to say that magical beliefs are only to be
found in "pre-industrial" societies. But it is unquestionably true that
it is the technological gap between man's aspirations and his limited
control of his environment which gives magical practices their rele-
vance. As I suggested (637, 667), magical rites may have also had their
expressive aspects, but in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England
their purposes were usually strictly practical. If contemporary doctors
had been cheaper and more successful, people would not have gone to
charmers. If there had been a police force to trace stolen goods there
would have been less recourse to cunning men.25 If the Church had
been able to cater for all practical needs there would have been no
wizards.26 Counter-witchcraft, magical healing, exorcism, were not
just expressive or symbolic rites; they were meant to work. The cunning
24 LeVine's ingenious addition to my argument is apparently based on my earlier
brief statement, "The Relevance of Social Anthropology to the Historical Study of
English Witchcraft," in Douglas (ed.), Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations, 47-79,
rather than on my book (LeVine, Culture Behavior, and Personality, 255n). It seems to
arise from his assumption that a decline in the belief in the mystical interdependence of
individuals and their neighbors must necessarily have had a psychological cause (ibid.,
264-265). But he does not say why he finds the more conventional social and intellectual
explanations of this phenomenon inadequate.
25 For continuing resort to a diviner in circumstances when the prospect of police
detection is thought unlikely or undesirable see Richard W. Lieban, "Shamanism and
Social Control in a Philippine City," Journal of the Folklore Institute, II (I965), 47-49.
According to a seventeenth-century divine, "People weary of their Christianity because
it easeth them not of the little discontentments of their estate in this world which they
meet with"; they therefore went to magicians (Herbert Thomdike, An Epilogue to the
Tragedy of the Church of England [London, I659], III, 290).

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102 KEITH THOMAS

folk discharged a limited number of functions; people went to them

at times of need, for highly practical purposes and in a distinctly
utilitarian frame of mind. Their prestige depended upon their supposed
efficacy, and earlier anthropologists were right to point out how the
self-confirming nature of their activities prevented clients from
realizing that they were not efficacious.
Conversely, a belief which lost its practical relevance was likely
to wither. This seems to have been what happened with witchcraft.
Despite what Geertz says, it is by no means clear that witch trials
ceased because of a change in men's cosmological assumptions. On
the contrary, prosecutions stopped, less because of disbelief in the possi-
bility of witchcraft than because of the difficulty of proving it in any
particular instance; the well-publicized exposure of fraudulent accusa-
tions made men more aware of the epistemological difficulty of telling
a true accusation from a false one; just as on the Continent the traumatic
effect of prosecutions which got out of hand ultimately sapped men's
faith in the judicial procedure.27 And once the trials stopped, it was
only a matter of time before the laws changed and the reality of the
idea itself gradually faded (453, 573-576).
We are still, I think, very much in the dark, historians and anthro-
pologists alike, as to the precise mechanism by which collective beliefs
change over long periods of time. But no satisfactory future inter-
pretation of the process will be able to ignore the fact that beliefs
derive much of their prestige from their social relevance. Their internal
structures have their own logic and this logic is not utilitarian. But if
we are to understand why the beliefs are held or rejected, we must
examine their relationship to the society in which they operate. It
would, for example, be quite unsatisfactory to explain the decline of
Christian belief in modern times merely by indicating ways in which
ancient theology has lost its intellectual plausibility. We should also
have to consider the changing fortunes of the Church as an institution
and take account of the growth of rival agencies of education, welfare,
and entertainment. Similarly, in asking why one type of medicine is
accepted today rather than another, for example, why osteopathy or
acupuncture lack prestige, we are dealing less with an intellectual
question than a social one; we have to answer it by following the
fortunes of the professional organizations which determine what the
27 Cf. Robert Mandrou, Magistrats et Sorciers en France au XVIIe siecle (Paris, I969);
H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562-1684: The Social
and Intellectual Foundations (Stanford, 1972), e.g., 162-163.

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RELIGION AND MAGIC, II 103

reigning orthodoxy shall be. We cannot study belief-systems in a

void; we have to determine what gives them their social credibility.
If it remains true that the content of such beliefs cannot be explained by
psychological reductionism or by sociological functionalism, it is also
true that changes in belief are very difficult to account for in structuralist
terms. To understand why men's basic assumptions change it is
insufficient to expose the inner logic of their systems of thought; we
have also to take account of the relationship of those systems to the
external social context, modified though human awareness of that
context may be the persistence of antique categories of thought. As
Douglas has remarked: "It should never again be possible to provide
an analysis of an interlocking system of categories of thought which
has no demonstrable relation to the social life of the people who think
in these terms." 28
Geertz, however, maintains that faith in astrology or spells was
sustained by a particular view of reality. Such faith could only decline,
she says, when "this deeper substratum of convictions about the nature
of the universe begins to fall apart." Why then have I not exposed this
substratum in all of its detail ? Well, to some extent I tried to do so. I
indicated some of the assumptions underlying healing rituals and witch
beliefs (Chs. 7, 14-16); and I discussed the rationalizations put forward
by Renaissance intellectuals, with their microcosm and macrocosm,
and their animate universe-rationalizations, however, which I main-
tained had little to do with the actual practice of magic at the village
level (I85, I90, 222-223). To the wizard, as to his clients, the source of
his power was often unclear. Recourse to him did not necessarily
reflect subscription to some alternative view of reality, any more than
a visit to an orthodox physician indicated a clear grasp of the principles
of Galen (I9I, 257, 264). Men went in a spirit of "try anything which
works"; and the symbolism of the wizard's rituals was highly limited
in its implications. I readily admit that I may have been less sensitive to
the symbolic or poetic meanings of these magical rites than I should
have been.29 But I am not convinced that a more sensitive observer
would find behind them a view of reality comparable in coherence to
28 Mary Douglas, "The Healing Rite (review article)," Man, V (1970), 303. Cf. her
assertion (on the basis of John Middleton, The Religion of the Lugbara [London, I960])
that "The only way in which a witch-dominated cosmology can be transformed is by
a change at the level of social organization" (Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology
[London, 1970], I2I).
29 As is urged by Thompson, "Anthropology and the Discipline of Historical
Context," 49.

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104 KEITH THOMAS

that offered by the theologians. I am prepared, in other words, to

question whether magic always had the "philosophical underpinnings"
with which Geertz credits it.
At this point it should be stressed that anthropologists differ
greatly among themselves as to how much coherence they should
expect to find when studying the beliefs of other peoples. Cognitive
anthropologists seem to posit a unitary "culture," albeit one com-
prising separate infra-cultures. French structuralists have always looked
for coherence and sometimes surprise their more skeptical, empirically
minded, behaviorally-oriented British colleagues by the symmetry of
the elegantly articulated cosmological systems which they claim to
have found among indigenous peoples.30 Even at the level of consciously
articulated beliefs it is clear that some anthropologists have developed
schemes which in the opinion of others go far beyond the evidence of
the ethnographic data. If there is room for this type of argument when
we are dealing with contemporary Africans or Indians, who can be
observed and questioned, how much more uncertainty must there be
when we come to consider illiterate Englishmen who lived three or
four centuries ago. Of course we must persist in our effort to recreate
their mental world. But in the present state of knowledge it is impossible
to maintain for certain that that world was a coherent one. In my book
I wrote that "what we are faced with in this period is not one single
code, but an amalgam of the cultural debris of many different ways of
thinking. Christian and pagan, Teutonic and classical; and it would be
absurd to claim that all these elements had been shuffled together to
form a new and coherent system" (627-628). As Levi-Strauss himself
admits, "the nearer we get to concrete groups the more we must
expect to find arbitrary distinctions and denominations which are
explicable primarily in terms of occurrences and events and defy any
logical arrangement." In the sixteenth century even contemporary
intellectuals failed to produce a genuinely coherent rationalization of
magical practices.31

30 See A. I. Richards, "African Systems of Thought: An Anglo-French Dialogue

(review article)," Man, II (1967), 284-298.
31 Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London, 1966), I55. D. P. Walker, Spiritual
and Demonic Magicfrom Ficino to Campanella (London, I958), 75, 96. I am equally hesi-
tant about adopting Thompson's suggestion ("Anthropology and the Discipline of
Historical Context," 51-53) that what contemporary authorities regarded as the religious
"ignorance" or "skepticism" of the lower classes was really a coherent alternative system
of religious symbolism. The popular utterances which I quoted (Ch. 6) seem too
heterogeneous to be easily fitted into any coherent alternative (or alternatives) to orthodox

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RELIGION AND MAGIC, II I105

No doubt I should have looked not only for conscious rationaliza-

tions (which at village level are obviously seldom to be found), but
also for less conscious underlying structures of thought. More, for
example, might have been said about the relationship of magical
methods to the widely prevailing conception of all knowledge as a
search for resemblances and correspondences, and thus itself a form of
divination. For at this time the affinity of human beings and nature
was presupposed; and language itself was seen as part of the natural
world, rather than something external to it. Foucault, who has done
most to develop this theme, remarks of the intellectual changes of the
seventeenth century that

This new configuration may, I suppose, be called "rationalism"; one

might say, if one's mind is filled with ready-made concepts [!], that
the seventeenth century marks the disappearance of the old superstitious
or magical beliefs and the entry of nature, at long last, into the scientific
order. But what we must attempt to grasp and attempt to reconstitute
are the modifications that affected knowledge itself, at that archaic
level which makes possible both knowledge and the mode of being of
what is to be known.32

Here, I admit, my competence failed me. No doubt this abdica-

tion was the result of being reared in an educational tradition whose
products must inevitably recoil from Levi-Strauss' suggestion that the
investigator should attempt to transcend empirical observation so as
to achieve a deeper reality.33 But it is also the consequence of approach-
ing my subject historically. For historians, as Levi-Strauss has remarked,
tend to organize their data "in relation to conscious expressions of
social life," whereas anthropologists proceed "by examining its un-
conscious foundations."34 This dictum is obviously only a half-truth,

theology, though they do suggest a widespread tradition of materialism. Thompson

points to the coherent universe implicit in Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge,
but this is surely a clear example of the difference between art and life. Nevertheless, I
readily agree that my crude concept of "popular ignorance" needs a lot of refiing.
32 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London,
I970), pt. I, ch. I; 54. It ought perhaps to be added that Foucault denies that he is a
"structuralist," attributing this aspersion to "certain half-witted 'commentators"' (xiv).
33 Levi-Strauss, "Introduction a l'oeuvre de Marcel Mauss," in Marcel Mauss,
Sociologie et Anthropologie (Paris, 1960), xxxiii. On the British empiricist's distaste for
any enquiry into underlying structures or hidden realities see David Goddard, "Anthro-
pology: The limits of functionalism," in Robin Blackburn (ed.), Ideology in Social
Science. Readings in Critical Social Theory (London, 1972), 62.
34 Levi-Strauss (trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf), Structural
Anthropology (London, I968), i8.

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IO6 I KEITH THOMAS

since, from the days of Marx, if not earlier, many historians have
sought to uncover the invisible foundations of society.35 But whereas
historians are quite used to dealing with the notion of underlying social
structures, they are much less accustomed to searching for invisible
mental structures, particularly the mental structures underlying
inchoate and ill-recorded systems of thought, which are only articulated
in a fragmentary way. These are structures of which the average mem-
ber of the society concerned is, almost by definition, unable to give a
coherent account, any more than he can describe the analytical structure
of the language which he speaks. Indeed one anthropologist has re-
marked of the unconscious thought-structures of Levi-Strauss that they
tend to be "at least three degrees removed from the ethnographic
data."36
At a rather less inaccessible level, however, I would fully agree
that more justice needs to be done to the symbolism of popular magic.
Just as the mythology of witchcraft-night-flying, blackness, animal
metamorphosis, female sexuality-tells us something about the
standards of the societies which believed in it-the boundaries they
were concerned to maintain, the impulsive behavior that they thought
it necessary to repress; so we can learn from the language of white
magic-sympathy and antipathy, narrative charms, and the symbolism
of salt or south-running water. But it remains to be established whether
these charms and rituals always constituted a coherent system or
whether, as is implied in the old-fashioned definition of"superstition"
(627-628), they were just unintegrated remnants of older patterns of
thought. At present it would seem common sense to assume that in a
changing society mental coherence is no more to be expected than
social coherence. Just as sociologists have to come to terms with the
fact that nearly every society contains institutions which are obsolete
or dysfunctional, so anthropologists have to be prepared for mental
inconsistencies. They also have to consider the problem of how to
handle the immense range of variations, chronological, social, and
regional, presented by a society as diverse as seventeenth-century
England; for the range of mental sub-universes is much wider than

35 Cf. Maurice Godelier, "System, Structure and Contradiction in Das Kapital,"

in Michael Lane (ed.), Structuralism: A Reader (London, 1970), 341; Levi-Strauss,
Structural Anthropology, 23.
36 Richards, "African Systems of Thought," 297; Aidan Southall, "Twinship and
Symbolic Structure", in J. S. La Fontaine (ed.), The Interpretation of Ritual. Essays in
Honour of A. I. Richards (London, I972), 74.

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RELIGION AND MAGIC, II | 107

that postulated by Geertz's simple distinction between literate and

illiterate, and the boundaries between them are far from clear-cut.
Anthropologists tend to feel a priori that some coherence must underlie
apparently conflicting symbolisms, just as a grammar is known to
underlie human discourse. But this coherence will not be found for
early modern England until some immense technical problems have
been solved.37 Meanwhile we must, I think, continue to question
whether a seventeenth-century magical practice (or for that matter a
modern superstition, such as a refusal to walk under ladders) is neces-
sarily embedded in a closed system of ideas in the way that Geertz
assumes.

I fear that these rather dogmatic counter-assertions are no substitute

for the detailed discussion which Geertz's observations deserve. But
having ventured thus far into this rather abstract methodological
domain I would like, before retreating from it, to suggest a few con-
clusions which seem to have emerged from this exchange of views.
The first is that historians must recognize that much of their work does
not easily lend itself to cross-cultural comparison (and this, I confess, is
something of which I am now much better aware than I was). This is
not to say that historical data should not, where possible, be presented
in a form suitable for such comparison, but merely that the problems
of such comparison are much greater than is usually appreciated. It
remains helpful to compare material aspects of different civilizations;
and it is also possible (though not easy) to compare different kinds of
social structure. But when one enters the domain of "culture" and
ideas, or indeed that of any behavior in which the actor's intentions
become important, then the work of comparison becomes infinitely
more difficult, primarily because of the absence of any agreed set of
universally applicable concepts. It is significant that some anthropol-
ogists now despair of the possibility of such comparison and urge their
colleagues to concentrate on the cultural particularities of individual
societies38 while those who continue to offer global comparisons aim
primarily to isolate the natural qualities of the human mind (for example,
the tendency to group categories in sets of binary oppositions), qualities
which are so timeless and general as to be of little historical interest.
The essential point, as one cultural anthropologist puts it, is "that
classifications appropriate to a comparative study are on a different

37 It must be said that none of the sociological and anthropological works to which
Geertz refers (note 2I) even begins to handle variations on a comparable scale.
38 E.g., Needham, introduction to Rethinking Kinship and Marriage, cviii.

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108 | KEITH THOMAS

conceptual level, serving different purposes, from the categorical

distinctions that make best sense of phenomena within a particular
society." 39
My second conclusion is that historians are going to have to come
to terms with the methods and approaches of structural analysis. When
I wrote my book, the anthropological monographs available were
mostly those written in the older functionalist tradition and I fear that
Religion and the Decline of Magic reflects that fact. Uncertain though I
remain about the methodology involved, I welcome the prospect of
more work by historians on the hidden structure of ideas. I differ from
some anthropologists, however, in thinking that attention has to be
paid to the actual content of those ideas no less than to their structure.
Historians will continue to be more interested in local and temporal
differences of content rather than in structural similarities.
My third conclusion is simply the hope that the next few years
will see a sustained onslaught on the various problems which my book
leaves unresolved. The task is both sociological and intellectual. We
need to clarify the human context in which magical practices were
invoked and witchcraft accusations levied; we also have to account for
the changing formation of mental structures. It would be wrong to
categorize the inquiry as primarily sociological or primarily intellectual.
At present it seems obviously both; though in the end we may have a
better idea of whether and how far intellectual changes are related to
social ones. To that extent we are dealing with the very hardest kind
of historical problem, and one which, I suspect, neither historians nor
anthropologists have yet directly faced up to.
Finally, there remain my own mistakes and limitations. Even if
some of Geertz's criticisms are off the mark, she is right to detect
sundry minor inconsistencies of approach and definition.40 But it is
fair to say that the main substance of Religion and the Decline of Magic is
what anthropologists would call ethnography rather than theory; and
the ethnography at least is, I hope, reasonably sound. I therefore take
comfort from the (possibly sad) fact that humdrum ethnography tends
to outlive even the most dazzling theoretical construction. If I were to

39 Ward H. Goodenough, in Goodenough (ed.), Explorations in Cultural Anthropology:

Essays in honor of George Peter Murdock (New York, I964), 9.
40 I cannot accept her charge (above, 74) that, in crediting some medieval theologians
with a symbolic view of the sacraments, I am "projecting onto them an interpretation
which cannot possibly be theirs." In fact, such a view, though frequently overlaid, had
been in circulation since the time of St. Augustine or even earlier. See, e.g., C. W.
Dugmore, The Mass and the English Reformers (London, I958), 5, 7, I3-I4, 78-79.

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RELIGION AND MAGIC, II i 109

rewrite my field notes I think that I should probably now cast them
into a slightly different conceptual framework. But that is something
which the critical reader can easily do for himself. Besides, as the great
historian said when he belatedly realized that he had postdated the
start of the decline of the Roman Empire by over a century, "Of what
avail is this tardy knowledge? Where error is irreparable, repentance
is useless." 4I

41 Edward Gibbon (ed. J. B. Bury), The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London,
1900), I, xxxv.

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