Theory of magic

Drawing on some theories and concepts from symbolic anthropology and ritual studies, recent scholarship on early Christian meal practices has paid considerable attention to their function by formation of early Christian identities. The goal of this paper is to complement these insights by using some cognitive theories of ritual, enabling to analyze meal practices on the level of psychological mechanisms underlying their cognitive processing. The hypothesis is that these mechanisms were in some extent responsible for formation of interpretation of meal elements as disposing special quality, which can be documented in early Christian sources of different provenience since the end of the first century (e.g. Did. 9:5; Ign. Smyr. 7, Eph. 20; Just. 1 Apol. 66). It will be argued that formation of these interpretations was driven by cognitive mechanisms responsible for evaluation of ritual efficacy, activated in the meal context by invention of social restrictions (restrictions of participation and presiding) in the processes of ritualization. From this perspective, conceptual blending of meal elements with Jesus and their ingestion with gain of eternity in John 6 will be analyzed as reflecting this interpretation in given community and thus comparable to extant alternatives.

Magic, as perceived through the linguistic lenses of Indo-European *mag(h)-, Sanskrit māyā and Pharaonic Egyptian heka, is semantically bound to the notions of ability, effectiveness and power. This complex operates upon an onto-cosmological hierarchy involving the facility to master the continuum between essence and manifestation. It is via this continuum that humans are able to climb the ladder of being to establish themselves as gods (with commensurate power). Conversely, via this continuum, gods are able to affect (and effect) phenomenal appearance.

Among the Greeks, this continuum was articulated in terms of a divine and usually invisible underpinning to the manifest cosmos, on which basis the poles of the hierarchy became established in terms of phenomenal and intelligential orders of existence. Cosmological intermediaries were paralleled in the psychological and ontological spheres, serving both to separate and bridge the dualities of heaven/earth, reason/sense, and psyche/body. In Neoplatonism, Theurgy, and Sufism, the concept of imagination became revivified as a locus of theophany, ontological transition, and cosmic liminality. A tripartite cosmological motif becomes apparent; imagination—the mundus imaginalis—is understood as a mesocosmic process between micro- and macrocosmic extremes.

Centrifugal and centripetal phases are seen to characterise the transitions between essence and manifestation. The dialectic of the former is unitive and oriented toward the unmanifest. It proceeds by the integration of that which is Other to form a perfected whole (signified by androgyny, consubstantiality, harmony). The dialectic of the latter is divisive and oriented toward the manifest. It proceeds by the dis-integration of the whole to engender an Other (signified through contrasexuality, hypostasis, tension). Given this, magic may be understood as the availing of the mesocosmic imagination in order to ‘shift the veil of māyā’ and hence (i) reveal absolute reality (integrality and Gnosis) or (ii) effect creative action in the realm of manifestation (phenomenal appearance, manipulation of images). Hence, the acquisition of divine power is tantamount to deification; the enactment of divine power to reification.