Not-Knowing Magic: Magical Memory and Ineffability in Contemporary Cyprus and Orkney

ABSTRACT

Our research explores the modern status of magic in two different island settings: Cyprus and Orkney. While historically and ethnographically addressing the gradual dissolution of magical traditions in our respective fieldsites, our aim is nevertheless to explore the means and instances by which magic continues to manifest in everyday narratives and practices. We approach this objective by critiquing the suggestion contained, but often not articulated or theorised within anthropological literature, that humans ‘know’ magic. We show that magic in these two island settings persists through a collective awareness of historical, social, and cognitive incompleteness, accumulated and contained within dormant magical memory. Hence, we gesture to the unknowability contained and nourished in social and cognitive processes, through which the possibility – future and past – of magic is thought of and narrated in disenchanted worlds. As we suggest, not-knowing does not signal lack of knowledge but a mode of thinking specific to modernity.

KEYWORDS:

• Magic
• modernity
• disenchantment
• memory
• knowledge

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the three Ethnos anonymous peer-reviewers for their pertinent and helpful comments and suggestions. This research has been supported by the grant ‘Magical thinking in contexts and situations of unbelief’, part of the Understanding Unbelief programme, funded by the John Templeton Foundation (JTF grant ID #60624) and managed by the University of Kent.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See Irvine and Kyriakides (2018) for a discussion of the relationship between magic and rationalisation and a consideration of Weberian theories of disenchantment in relation to these fieldsites.

2 The word stems from goiteuo, meaning to charm or seduce something or someone. Binding spells called goeties were common in the ancient world (Gager 1992).

3 Melting alloys such as solder, lead or tin for purposes of divination is called molybdomancy. In other parts of the Mediterranean olive oil is often used instead (Galt 1982).

4 Rebecca Bryant (2004) relevantly argued that such modern processes of essentialisation undertaken by Cypriots who were striving to attain the modern standing provided by Europe effectuated a nationalist divide between Greek and Turkish Cypriots on the island.

5 Erving Goffman (1953: 316–317), who carried out ethnographic research in Shetland, the island group to the north of Orkney, frames the ‘problem’ of belief in the Second Sight as an intergenerational issue: discomfort among the younger generation on occasions when their apparently rational elders engage in serious conversation about such ‘superstition’. It is interesting to consider that here both the dynamic of awkwardness and the sense of this being a passing belief and something more likely to be heard among the ‘old folk’ persist.