Magic and Religion

Catalog description

This course is an introduction to magic, its academic study, and its practice across different religions. We will look critically at early scholarship that theorized about the nature of magic, seen as the irrational practice of “primitives;” and from there explore contemporary approaches that focus instead on individual magical practices within their specific cultures without value judgements. We will study specific cases of magic’s place in the “rational” West and how it has also formed part of different “World Religions.” We will conclude by exploring the ways in which magical practices exist even today in the digital age.