The Religious Can It Be Defined?

Magic versus religion. In contrasting the so-called "great religions' and others, the term magic is often employed to describe the latter. In the past, this usage was popular because it seemingly supported the superiority of the "great religions." There, a religious ceremony, so the argument went, was designed to elevate, to praise, etc., while a magical rite of savages was thought to be able, "falsely, of course," to manipulate the objects and circumstances of the real world.

Even when a somewhat more balanced view of non-Western humanity began to dawn, the topic of magic proved to be surprisingly slippery, despite the fact that at first blush it seemed to represent an apparently neat and well-defined category. Recognizing the difficulty, social scientists tried repeatedly to redefine the difference between religion and magic. To the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, it lay in the fact that a religious rite was obligatory, while a magical one was optional. Frazer, also much quoted on the topic of magic, subdivided the category into types, such as "contagious magic," "imitative magic," etc. He considered magic "false science": Science worked, magic did not. The British social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, consistent with his view that all cultural behavior was "functional," i.e., directed toward the goal of satisfying physical needs, advanced the suggestion that magic had a definite practical purpose, while religious rites were expressive without purpose. Harking back to Frazer's "false science," he felt that magical practices attempted to bridge the hiatus between knowledge and practical control, so that magic was applied when the practitioner felt that there was an element of uncertainty involved. In a now-famous example (1954), he described how in the Trobriand Islands, where he did fieldwork in the first decade of this century, no fishing magic was used to enhance the catch and provide protection within the lagoon. Such rituals were carried out only on the high seas.

Weston La Barre attempted to stretch the phenomena of religious behavior to fit the Procrustean bed of Freudian psychoanalysis. As to the nature of magic, he makes the intriguing suggestion that "mothers make magicians; fathers, gods" (1970: 109). In an entirely Freudian vein, he points to the distinction between the father figure as instilling fear, while the infant can summon the mother simply by crying. In the same way, magic is an outcry for help: "Magic is ... an oral context adaptation: the magic cry summons succorance, coerces reality, and the inchoate infant ego emotionally consumes the world" (1970: 95). Magic is seen as the "self-delusory fixation at the oral-anal phase of operation" (1970: 10).

Upon closer scrutiny, none of the suggestions advanced by the above writers holds up. Rites are not either elevating or manipulative, obligatory or optional, abstract or practical. They usually combine these various features, which in addition do not correlate with a religious/magical opposition. Contrasting magic as "false science" and our presumably "true" one is so ethnocentric, it hardly warrants comment. In fact, Malinowski was the one who early pointed out that non-Western societies had "true" science, or else how could they have survived? As to La Barre, he twists his own metaphor later in the same discussion. Mothers, he continues, do not "make" magicians, in the way fathers "make," i.e., become overpowering "supernatural" entities. Rather he finds that the magician, far from being the mother, is the child crying to the "supernatural."

No matter how we turn the individual arguments, the difference between magic and religion remains unclear. As Dorothy Hammond says, "Examination of the concept [magic] indicates that the distinction between magic and religion, whether phrased as dichotomy or polarity, is unwarranted.... That the distinction has led only to confusion supports the judgment that the abstraction is based in misinterpretation" (1970: 1355).

Definitions of Religion With the concept of magic as a useful category within the religious realm out of the way, we now need to ask, What then is religion? How can it be defined? As can be expected, the literature abounds in suggestions. To cite a few examples, there is the famous minimal and descriptive one by the British social philosopher Edward Tylor: "It seems best ... to claim as a minimum definition of religion the belief in Spiritual Beings" (1871: chap. 11). The Austrian anthropologist Father Wilhelm Schmidt went the historical route:

Original religion revolved around the worship of a high god. Out of this Urmonotheismus there later arose, through a process of degenerative speculative thought, such concepts as spirits and ghosts, animal and plant souls, multiple gods, and wide variety in worship. (Paraphrased in Lessa and Vogt, 1965: 21)

Clifford Geertz suggests a normative formulation:

[Religion is] a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and longlasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. (1966: 4)

The influence of Freud can clearly be discerned in the psychological definition proposed by La Barre:

In a sense religion is the group dream, or perhaps nightmare, that teaches men the proper stance vis-à-vis the parental divine, as characteristically shaped in that society, but in either case now "unreal" except psychologically. (1970: 12–13)

And then there are also structural definitions, such as this one by Melford E. Spiro:

Every religion consists of a cognitive system, a set of explicit and implicit propositions regarding the superhuman world and man's relation to it, which it claims to be true. (1966: 96)

In addition to these carefully crafted definitions, we frequently encounter what Kroeber and Kluckhohn, in a book on definitions of culture, term "incomplete definitions" or "on-the-side stabs in passing" (1952: 141). Here, for instance, is one by Joseph Campbell, an author on comparative religion, from an article written for the educated lay reader:

These three lower chakras correspond to man's life in his naive state, turned outward upon the world. A religion that concerned itself with only these lower chakras, one that cared little for inward and mystical realization, would...