ABSTRACT
In close reference to each ethnographic case study, this chapter examines how modern Western magic can be conceived as acts of participation in alternative worldviews through communicative ritual performances designed to initiate an esoteric experiential mode of being. Throughout this process the body emerges as the locus of interaction with ‘natural’ and ‘spirit’ forces and entities characteristic of Western magical rhetoric by producing the ‘phenomenal field’ of the ritual setting through the construction of a symbolic, physiological, and subtle ritual body. This theoretical and methodological paradigm is reinforced by anthropological studies of ritual, and, in particular, Tambiah’s conception of ritual as performative communication and Bell’s notion of the ritual body as the nexus for unifying all elements of ritualisation into a situational and strategic action interacting with a symbolically constituted spatial and temporal environment. To further understand how the magicians of this study embody and participate in the cosmological structure of each ritual in designated space and time, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment and Smith’s theory of ritual space are introduced. Finally, Schilbrack’s metaphysical embodiment is addressed to understand how the construction of the ritual body induces metaphysical inquiry and self-transformation of the human condition by means of ritual.
