ABSTRACT
Evans-Pritchard and Lévy-Bruhl were formative in the early development of ideas about magic, and at the heart of this debate is an exploration of the very nature of human thought. Their exchange of ideas has huge implications for understanding magic in its essence as a human process of mind. This chapter sets out an imagined, constructed dialogue—a fictional documentary—built up from the author's reading of their correspondence and other related works. It presents a few biographical details to give us greater insight into what the ramifications of the conversation might have been. The chapter focuses on the conversation between the anthropologist and the philosopher on mystical mentality. The real value of Lévy-Bruhl’s thinking on mystical mentality is his aim to study human nature through the adoption of a philosophical concept called participation, a defining characteristic of mystical mentality. Participation is the key to an understanding of magic,.
