Magicians of the Twenty-First Century: An Attempt at Dimensioning the Magician's Personality

INTRODUCTION Magic always has been a fascinating subject of research, but one mostly studied against the background of perceived ''false'' or atavistic think-ing—historically or culturally distant in primitive cultures. The lines of tradition within theories on magic that are still influential, such as those begun by Edward B. Tylor and James Frazer (evolutionary), Marcel Mauss and E ´ mile Durkheim (functionalist), and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (par-ticipatory), are based on this distance. 1 It was not until more recent approaches that interpret magic within the framework of the history of ideas as an element of an esoteric field of discourse that the perspective widened and became more unprejudiced. 2 Nevertheless, these developments did not result in a widely accepted academic definition. The problems of determining the relationship of magic to religion, science, and other fields of social action still persist. One reason may be that such definitions often depend on the individual worldviews and the cultural backgrounds of the scholars who formulate them. Another lies in the almost omnipresent assumption that magic does not work, in a literal sense. If a magical practice shows effects, this can be explained by numerous well-known psychological and sociological mechanisms that do not challenge the rationalistic ideology of science (i.e., overgeneralization, autosuggestion, errors in estimating chance, confirmatory bias, and the Barnum effect). Another perspective exists, however, derived from the personal (subjective) evidence of contemporary magicians in Western societies , who often know the discourses of academic rationality quite well and nevertheless do not conform to those explications.