ABSTRACT
We tend to associate magic with traditional tribal, pre-industrial or pre-modern societies. Modern societies are usually perceived as ones in which scientific and technological rationality prevail so thoroughly as to yield no place to magical thought and behaviour. They are ‘disenchanted’ in the original and literal sense in which Max Weber used the term to refer to a diminution of the magical and mysterious realm. Apart from the predominance of science and technology, the fact that modern societies are largely Western societies and Christian by tradition and that Christianity, to a very considerable extent, eliminated the magical dimension, further explains the association between magic and ‘primitive’ or traditional societies. The fact that those societies which became modern earliest are Protestant by tradition and Protestantism in particular took a stringent anti-magical stance further reinforces this association.
