JAC Volume 12 Issue 2

For Emig, magic means the inexplicable and spontaneous materialization of a finished product; this is the familiar rabbit-out-of-a-hat definition. If we consider an alternate definition, grounded in anthropological and sociological conceptions of magic, we allow for a significant reversal of what magical and non-magical mean, a reversal that preserves the spirit but not the terminology of Emig's distinction. Daniel Lawrence O'Keefe synthesizes the major modern social theories of magic in Stolen Lightning in order to propose that magic is the "audacious individual use of existing powerful symbols" in which "there is always a curious tension between the traditional and the surreptitious, and hence between syllogism, implications from accepted truth, and an enthymeme that bends consensus to private ends" (73, 85). Such tensions define a social context in which magic "works because people agree it works" (96). Stopping short of concluding that magic is rhetoric, O'Keefe defines magic with rhetorical terms, and he concludes that a complex of social/rhetorical contingencies account for its effects. Magic is not the instant and arhetorical product of an otherworldly incantation; it is the process of inducing belief and creating community with reference to the dynamics of a rhetorical situation. Magic is a social act whose medium is persuasive discourse, and so it must entail the complexities of social interaction, invention, communication, and composition. Thus, magic becomes a term through which we can address, as John Briggs points out, "the rhetor's power over audiences and subject matters, the power of audiences and subject matters over the rhetor, the power of particular kinds of discourses" (363).

Understanding magic as a social and discursive process allows us to analyze and critique the powers at work in the "plain rhetoric" that mesmerizes audiences with its seeming clarity and simplicity (see Covino, "Magic"). Further, such a conception of magic may lead us to prefer a "magic rhetoric," if this means preferring a fertile, dynamic and fluctuant imagination to its opposite. In this essay, I wish to introduce some elements of such a rhetoric through a historical survey of pre-Enlightenment relationships between magic and rhetoric.¹ Specifically, I want to propose that the rise of current-traditional rhetoric coincides with the destruction and disappearance of the magical consciousness that makes participatory, exploratory, generative rhetoric possible. Before about 1700, rhetorical and magical invention were complementary and in some ways identical processes; recognizing their similarities may lead us to believe in magic again. To begin, I offer three propositions which, examined in the following order, suggest a chronology of magic/rhetoric marked by changing conceptions of "phantasy" and the limits of imagination:

1. Through the Renaissance, words possess actual (rather than symbolic) power as agents of magic, and their effects are understood to vary with changing contexts.
2. By 1700, a changing conception of mind and language eliminates both rhetorical invention (with its "cosmology" of topoi) and treatises on magic (with their cosmologies of natural and supernatural powers and phantasms) as authorized discourses.
3. In this century, an ostensibly non-magical "plain rhetoric" informs discourse prepared for mass consumption.

The Power of Words

For Renaissance magicians, inventing cosmic harmonies required a broad synthesis of religious, magical, and secular philosophies, and promised to expand the powers of human nature. This is the promise of Pico della Mirandola's "Oration on the Dignity of Man," which Francis Yates has called "the great charter of Renaissance magic" (Bruno 86). Pico draws from Christian neo-Platonism, Orphic hymns, Chaldean oracles, Hermeticism, and Zoroastrianism, giving most prominence to the invocatory power of language through his emphasis on the Cabala. The Cabala is constituted by a body of speculative philosophy which holds that specific combinations of letters and words contain and convey spiritual energy. A text of "hidden meaning" is available to the trained Cabalist, who is also able to invoke and control natural forces. Francis Yates summarizes the cabalistic tradition that Pico calls "the best established philosophy concerning nature" (Oration 64):

Beliefs about the magic powers of words occupy sophistic, hermetic, gnostic, cabalistic, and patristic philosophers from antiquity forward. In approximately 415 B.C.E., Gorgias writes that the power of speech can alter the soul:

The Twin Suppression of Magic and Rhetoric

Those preserving the rhetorical tradition are decidedly reactionary, advocating a new model of a mechanical universe in reaction to the threatening scope of the imagination that is allowed by magic and by classical conceptions of rhetoric. In this mechanical universe issuing from the Enlightenment, mind exists apart from matter. The separation of subject and object grounds empirical science and an emerging logical positivism, and requires a clear observation language (Berman 110). From the appearance of Peter Ramus' attacks on classical rhetoric in the 1540s through the 1660 establishment of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, rhetoric is reduced from the exploration of changeable truths to the production of direct, transparent propositions. The rhetor who once participated in a world of tentative perspectives (topoi), alert to the Greek doctrine of logos as magic (DeRomilly), is replaced by the technician fixed on clarity and precision, for whom words are lifeless (Covino, Art 82-83; Couliano 183).

As Ioan Couliano explains in Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, "The transition from a society dominated by magic to a predominantly scientific society is explicable primarily by a change in the imaginary" (xix). Couliano concludes that "the Renaissance conceived of the natural and social world as a spiritual organism in which perpetual exchanges of phantasmic messages occurred. That was the principle of magic. . . . The Reformation destroys this structure of phantasms in motion; it forbids the use of imagination and proclaims the necessity for total suppression of sinful nature" (221). The phantasm that Couliano mentions here is something like an imaged archetype, a non-linguistic element of common sense which resides in the soul and—through the mediation of imagination—determines, or interprets, the language of the exterior world: "Imagination translates the language of the senses into fantastic language so that reason may grasp and understand phantasms" (11).² A magic world populated by myriad phantasms—images that constitute a cosmology of interactive powers—offers the possibility for phantasy, for an imagination consistently engaged in the transfiguration of the soul, in the interplay of phantasms.

The play of the intellect and the spirit, that activity of the alchemist and cabalist which is licensed in a magical world, was repressed in the course of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. One of the most fierce denials of the phantasmic intellect came from Peter Ramus, who challenged the mnemotechnic practice, central to classical rhetoric, of converting sense perceptions into phantasmic images, replacing this mode of imagination with imageless dialectical order (Yates, Art 231-36). Ramus's decimation of phantasy coincides with his elimination of rhetorical invention (Murphy 12-13). Couliano emphasizes the cooperative effort by Catholic and Protestant forces to censor phantasy in the Reformation: "They seem to be at one concerning the impious nature of the culture of the phantasmic era and the imaginary in general" (203).

In The Reenchantment of the World, Morris Berman recognizes that the establishment of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge is the culmination of a developing fear of mystical "enthusiasm"; a magical epistemology was seen as a radical affront to the Protestant and rationalist establishment of new hierarchies (see also Thomas 641-47). Eventually, even those in the elite class who had once given credence to hermetic, cabalistic, and alchemical philosophies (Isaac Newton, for one) became opponents of magic:

The magic and rhetoric that disappeared—with their emphasis on imagination, phantasy, and amplification—were progressive forces. In the context of the Enlightenment, they became subversive forces. Magic survived in secret societies such as the Rosicrucians and Freemasons (Johannisson 253-60). A rhetoric with imaginative scope and a cosmology of phantasms emerged in the poetry and poetics of Romanticism, in the language of magic. The Romantic movement was an attempt to reaffirm the magical properties of language. As Anya Taylor points out in Magic and English Romanticism, Romantic thinkers turned to magic in order to recall pre-Enlightenment conceptions that license the powers of imagination, and to find a language for intellectual and political revolution:

Drawing elemental forces into communion is the activity of the Romantic magical imagination, "coercing all things into sympathy" (Wordsworth 2.390). Romantic writers called themselves magi, and their major critical theses—Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, Shelley's Defense of Poetry—claim that the time has come to react against scientific reductionism with visionary scope; like alchemists forging new realities, they call up a sympathetic universe. With the supernatural as his vehicle, Coleridge declares in the Biographia that "I will cause the world of intelligences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you" (13.7-8). Shelley writes in the Defense that the "alchemy" of poetic imagination produces new lexicons of thought, new associations which eventually resonate in the political reorganization of society: poetry "marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts" which effect "revolutions in opinion" (111-15). The mythologies of Blake, the enchanted dreamscapes of Coleridge in "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan" and Keats in Endymion, the Faustian desires of Byron in Manfred and Shelley in Alastor, all appeal to the "witchery" of language, and aim to reform the public imagination by defining writing as a liberatory force that can construct alternate realities (Taylor 38-63).

Magical Thinking and Liberatory Rhetoric

What is at issue then is not whether rhetoric is magic, but what kinds of magic/rhetoric produce what kinds of effects. Still enclosed in the Enlightenment privileging of plain, unambiguous maxims, we are too often victims of a repressive magic that limits the possibilities for action. Couliano associates such magic with the hypnosis induced in a "police State," in contrast to the flexible but inefficient "magician State":

Countering such sorcery means disrupting it by employing the pre-Enlightenment magical/rhetorical belief in a cosmology of possibilities for re-ordering discourse and reality, through writing that creates new phantasms, new magic rhetorics. One of these new rhetorics is Mary Daly's Wickedary, a "dictionary for witches" which reminds us—in its vicious parody of Webster's patriarchal dictionary and the sexist epistemology it enforces—that the root of the word "grammar" is "grimoire," that language is a book of spells, that each spell is, as Kenneth Burke says, a strategy calculated to address a situation "in the name of" a certain power (3-4). For Daly, a new cosmology of powers requires a new lexicon, as wickedly funny as it is insistent upon wild intellectual play. Here is her definition of "Metapatriarchal Metaphors":

Alertness to the historical, conceptual, and practical correspondences between magic and rhetoric motivates Daly's call for a new celebration of "complex multiple meanings," which entails the magical disestablishment of "archetypal mummy terms" that are "reiterated in the halls of academentia" (242). Hers is a radical recognition that magical thinking can coincide with a liberatory rhetoric, and a warning that we choose well the discourse, and the attendant powers, that we invoke.

University of Illinois
Chicago, Illinois

NOTES

Works Cited