Friday, March 1, 2013

Free Friday

What is magic?  and how is it different from religion?

I'm thinking about this a lot lately as I research for my thesis and try to unravel the intermingled and entangled idea of those things we call magic and religion in the ancient world and whether we really can separate and define them in such a way.  I guess in some sense this can be applied to today's society as well.  As much as we've been living with this division of magic and religion (Thank's Frazer) is there really this great divide?  The answer to that probably depends on how you define religion.  For myself I always think of big organized religions when I say the word and yet lately I've been becoming more aware that this definition really isn't accurate, that isn't what religion is.  Who decides what it is?  Society?  Because that really seems to be how this all works, that society comes to some agreement that religion is A and magic is B and superstition is some vague in between   This really doesn't help anything at all.  Sure people have worked hard to create definitions of religion but I've yet to really find one that works for me, I've yet to really succinctly define it or magic myself.  So I'm curious and I ask you to think, What is the difference?

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