Past & Present

Past & Present 2008 199(Supplement 3):7-55; doi:10.1093/pastj/gtm058

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© The Past and Present Society

Introduction

S. A. Smith

In ‘Science as a Vocation’ (1918–19), Max Weber described modernity as a world ‘robbed of gods’. ‘The fate of our times’, he wrote, ‘is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the "disenchantment of the world" ’. This, he suggested, ‘means that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation ... One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform that service.’¹ Weber's use of the term ‘disenchantment’ (Entzauberung) is significant, for it suggests he had in mind subjective experience as well as forms of social organization. ‘The bearing of man’, he writes, ‘has been disenchanted and denuded of its mystical but inwardly genuine plasticity’. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, one can only conclude that if a process of disenchantment was under way during the twentieth century, it was hugely uneven. As Wolfgang Behringer has recently observed, it is probable that a majority of the world's population today believes in witchcraft, which would mean, in absolute terms, that there are vastly more believers than there were in 1600.²

It was as a historian of the twentieth century that I was drawn to the problem of disenchantment and the apparent persistence of ‘superstition’ in the modern world. The Communist societies on which I work—the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s and the People's Republic of China from 1949 to 1976—vigorously promoted ‘disenchantment’ of the world through state-coordinated efforts to root out what they called, in the Soviet case, ‘religion and superstition’ and in the Chinese case, ‘feudal superstition’. Their aim was nothing less than to recast social life and popular culture along lines of science, rationality, and philosophical materialism through a combination of education, propaganda, physical destruction of religious institutions, and the prosecution of religious and magical specialists. Yet the extent to which they failed—and the failure was a relative rather than an absolute one—is today glaringly evident. Following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, a rash of catchpenny books on fortune-telling and dream interpretation was published, faith healers (extrasens) appeared regularly on television, experts in astrology, apocalyptic prophecy and witchcraft were quick to advertise their services. That such interest is relatively ‘respectable’ is evident from the fact that in 2004 some parliamentarians hired Toizin Bergenov, a Siberian shaman, to purge the Russian duma of evil spirits that had been attracted by the negative energy of angry debates.³ This resurgence of what had formerly been condemned as obscurantism was as nothing, compared with the explosion of once vilified religious practices that took place in China, as it beat a hasty retreat from Maoism in the 1980s. The era of economic reform saw a dizzying rush to rebuild temples and ancestral halls, a resurgence of spirit mediums and exorcists, and widespread enthusiasm for divination and feng shui. ‘Jade emperors descended from heaven’ emerged to lead some popular protests, and religious cults—most notoriously Falungong, on which the Communist government cracked down in 1999—are flourishing. Clearly, despite Weber's prediction, ‘superstition’ lives on in the modern world.

It was with ‘superstition’ in the modern world—and more particularly, ‘superstition’ in the non-western world—in mind that a conference was organized at the University of Essex in May 2005, sponsored by the journal Past and Present and the university's Department of History. Superstition in Historical and Comparative Perspective set itself the task of examining the meanings and practices associated with the term ‘superstition’ over a period of more than two millennia, beginning in classical Greece and ending in contemporary Cameroon, traversing classical Rome, early medieval China, medieval Islam, medieval and early-modern Europe, and modern Latin America and Africa en route.⁴ Since the notion of superstitio was most influential in Europe, the conference was organized around a core of papers that dealt with superstition in medieval and early-modern Europe. This allowed for comparison of superstitio in Christendom with cognate notions and practices in societies where either the dominant faith tradition was non-Christian (Han China, medieval Syria) or where conversion to Christianity was mediated through the experience of colonialism (Mexico, Cameroon, South Africa, Puerto Rico).⁵

In modern usage, superstition has a relatively clear sense. According to Collins Dictionary, it is ‘irrational belief usually founded on ignorance or fear and characterised by obsessive reverence for omens, charms, etc.’⁶ Most contemporary definitions point to irrationality as the central characteristic of superstition, the term generally denoting beliefs or practices founded upon a faulty, non-naturalistic understanding of cause and effect. This notion of superstition is very much a product of the Enlightenment. Prior to the eighteenth century, superstition signified ‘bad religion’ rather than ‘bad science’.⁷ If there were common elements in pre-Enlightenment conceptions of superstition, it is that the beliefs and practices so designated were either deemed to be impure or excessive from the standpoint of religious orthodoxy or were associated with the manipulation of occult—usually, demonic—powers. The modern understanding of superstition has generally lost this connection with religious orthodoxy, although it retains an association with magic. Much superstitious belief today is still rooted in a conception of the world as one animated by supernatural beings, forces or relations and, to that extent, may be seen as essentially magical in character. Much superstitious behaviour is premised on the assumption that certain powers are operative in human existence, often for ill, and that certain objects or formulae (a lucky bracelet, a St Christopher medal carried in one's car), certain actions (touching wood, crossing one's fingers), or the avoidance of certain actions (walking under a ladder, the number thirteen) can be used to deflect harm or promote good. Such practices are unlikely to derive any longer from a coherent magical world-view. They are more likely to spring from beliefs that are only partially articulated such as that luck can be manipulated or influenced by present behaviour; that coincidences have deeper meaning than random accident; or that elements of a situation—for example, at the start of a journey or at birth—can predict its outcome. Certain beliefs such as ‘do not tempt fate’, ‘like cures like’, ‘begin well to continue well’, ‘anything unusual is likely to be threatening’, seem to reflect a rather sombre view of existence, where death and injury are ever-present dangers, where pride, achievement, or good fortune risk being punished, and where neighbours are likely to be jealous of success.⁸

Once one moves beyond this cluster of beliefs, use of the term superstition becomes more contentious. Beliefs in witchcraft, vampires, or alien abduction would be seen by many as forms of superstition on the grounds that they are irrational beliefs rooted in fear or ignorance. Yet they are more articulate and coherent bodies of belief than, say, belief in lucky numbers or touching wood, and may often be held as a matter of intellectual conviction. This is even more true of systematic sets of beliefs such as those of astrology, which long passed out of the realm of legitimate science but which continues to provide the basis on which millions each day seek to descry their futures. Use of the term superstition would be still more contentious when applied to bodies of belief that do not directly invoke a notion of supernatural causation yet which conflict with mainstream science, such as many forms of alternative health therapy or belief in telepathy or extra-sensory perception. In view of the uncertain boundaries of the contemporary term, then, when organizing the conference we did not lay down any definition of superstition and were content to leave this to contributors to decide.

Historically, superstitio—along with its non-Christian cognates—has proved a remarkably flexible and capacious category that has performed a wide variety of ideological functions and communicated a wide variety of social concerns and anxieties. From a historical perspective, superstition appears primarily to be a pejorative label applied by adherents of a particular religious or ideological orthodoxy to beliefs and practices of which they disapprove, usually those of the less educated and less powerful members of society. As a category of ascription, it may tell us more about those doing the ascribing than it does about the people so described.⁹ In his chapter Richard Gordon offers insight into the way in which in classical Rome use of the term served to bolster elite status by instantiating claims to belong to a ‘community of sanctioned practice’, legitimating its right to pass judgment on others, protecting its own intellectual claims from critical scrutiny and drawing attention away from areas of dispute, contradiction or anomaly. Looked at historically, superstition was largely, in the words of Jean-Claude Schmitt, a ‘discourse of authority, order and constraint’, concerned with the ways in which defenders of orthodoxy used linguistic and institutional forms of power to police the bounds of acceptable knowledge.¹⁰ Yet if the category of superstition is primarily one of ascription, this raises the interesting philosophical question of whether superstition is to be understood purely discursively, as a construct whose meaning is determined only within a specific historical and cultural field. If so, how does one account for the remarkable similarities between beliefs and practices classed as superstitious across different cultures and epochs? Does this justify treating superstition as a concept that denotes a class of really existing phenomena—ways of thinking about the way the world operates, particular practices designed to invoke forms of supernatural protection—that have features in common. Our contributors differ on this question. Most are content to treat superstition as a label, a historically changing category of ascription. In his contribution, however, Alan Knight offers a trenchant defence of superstition as a category that denotes real behaviour, specifically behaviour having a ‘non-scientific, non-naturalistic, hence in some sense supernatural, rationale’. His view is broadly in line with that of contemporary psychologists and social scientists of an earlier vintage. Hugh Bowden, too, assumes that superstition has a referent in the real and makes the stimulating suggestion that the kinds of practices satirized as deisidaimonia in classical Greece would today be classed as obsessive-compulsive disorder. In the second part of this introduction, this issue is explored further through an examination of the overlap between superstitious beliefs and practices and those of magic and religion. First, however, let us try to trace the shifting discourse of superstition from the ancient world to the present day, seeking to demonstrate how superstition has been used to define and shore up issues of religious identity and authority, ideological orthodoxy and political power.

	The development of the category of superstition

Top The development of the... Some analytical issues Notes

 
Like most ancient peoples, the Greeks worshipped a plethora of gods and inferior spiritual beings known as daimones, and sacrifices to these supernatural entities formed a key part of civic life. Hugh Bowden suggests that the term deisidaimonia, literally ‘fear of the gods’, was initially understood in a positive sense, to mean ‘respectful piety’. Plato, Xenocrates, Aristotle and other philosophers assumed that beings who were superior in nature and power would also be superior ethically, and they chose the word diamones to denote those lower spiritual beings, largely evil and certainly dangerous, who loomed large in popular belief.¹¹ From the late fourth century BCE, the term deisidaemonia thus took on a pejorative meaning, coming to signify an unhealthy attitude towards the gods. For Theophrastus (c.370–285 BCE), the deisidaimon was one who displayed an obsessive, fearful attitude towards supernatural beings; for Plutarch (c.46–c.120CE) he was someone whose fundamental orientation towards them was based on mistrust. Deisidaimonia thus acquired the sense of religion that had forgotten the necessity of balance and moderation. It is use of the term in this sense—which would be translated into Latin as superstitio—that inaugurated the tradition in which superstition served as a category buttressing a notion of ‘true religion’. Superstitiosus, as an adjective, is found in Latin as early as the works of Plautus (254–184 BCE), where it is used in the context of divination, a practice at the heart of the religio of the Roman world. Subsequently, however, coloured by the Greek philosophers’ critique of deisidaimonia, the term came to signify religion taken to excess.¹² As Richard Gordon explains, superstitio as a noun is of relatively late origin, appearing in extant Latin literature only in the work of Cicero in the first half of the first century BCE. For Cicero, Lucretius, and Seneca, it denoted excessive religious practices which, for Cicero, in particular, were associated with the lower orders: ‘Those who spent whole days in prayer and offered sacrifices that their children might outlive them are called "superstitious" ’.¹³ These writers also used the term in a second sense to denote non-Roman religion, and by the first century BCE, superstitio, especially when applied to foreign religions, carried a sense of political threat, a connotation that deisidaimonia lacked entirely.¹⁴ From the second century CE, superstitio was often used to denote the illicit cults, especially Christianity, that refused to honour the gods and the emperor, even by burning incense.¹⁵ Tacitus (c.56–c.117CE) described the spreading Christianity of his day as a dangerous ‘recurrent superstition’ that had invaded Rome from Judea.¹⁶ Superstitio thus came to focus political concern around the question of how the authorities should relate to religious beliefs and practices that were not part of state religion. At the same time, the term continued to carry earlier and broader associations, referring to matters as diverse as divination outside the framework of Roman religion, magic and excessive religious fear.¹⁷

Though riven by division from the first, Christianity established itself rather early as a more centralized and institutionalized religion than other contemporary faiths. Spreading through the Roman empire in the third century, it succeeded in converting between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of the population by 300, mainly in the eastern provinces.¹⁸ Fusing Jewish myths of the origin of evil with the daemones of the Graeco-Roman tradition, the early church fathers deployed the category of deisdaimonia/superstitio to denounce the Roman gods as idols and their oracles as the mouthpieces of daemones.¹⁹ This redefinition of superstitio as idolatry was at first restricted to polemicists, but by the end of the fourth century it had become accepted as the paramount meaning of the term in Roman law. Constantine's bestowal of unrestricted freedom of worship on Christians by the Edict of Milan (313) caused it to grow rapidly, as urban and administrative elites were drawn to it by the prospect of social advancement. Church and state cooperated intermittently to root out paganism, although it was not until 438 that the eastern Emperor Theodosius II (c.408–50), at a time of repeated pressure from Attila and the Huns, issued a code that banned all pagan rites as superstitio.²⁰

St Augustine of Hippo (354–430) played a seminal role in defining the Christian conception of superstitio, a conception that would remain authoritative for the next millennium. He construed superstitio within his larger theory of signs. Signs, he argued, are things whose significance exceeds their sensory appearance and are used to communicate. They are of two types: natural signs, such as smoke, and conventional signs (signa data), such as writing or music. Certain conventional signs, including superstitions, are superfluous or positively harmful since they are a medium through which men and demons can communicate. This idea of pacta significationum—‘pacts about certain meanings agreed with daemons by contract’—was to shape subsequent thinking about superstition, although it was not until St Thomas Aquinas that the idea of a pact with the devil acquired precision.²¹ Augustine reinforced the association of superstitio with the demonic, yet continued to use the term in the ways it had been used in the ancient world: to signal rites improperly performed or performed to excess and what he called ‘thousands of the most frivolous practices’, such as returning to bed if one sneezed while putting on one's slippers.²² Even such silly practices, however, were a potential danger in Augustine's eyes, since human folly could easily be exploited by daemones.

By Augustine's time, the western Roman empire was disintegrating as a unified political entity as Germanic peoples from northern and eastern Europe moved in by migration and invasion. By the fifth and sixth centuries, western Europe had become Christian, but the Church was losing the support of strong central institutions, spiritual as well as temporal, as it ceased to be an urban religion and expanded into agrarian society. The effect of harsh laws against paganism was still felt—the destruction of pagan temples was still continuing 250 years after Constantine—but the triumph of the Church was essentially ‘not one of obliteration but of widening embrace and assimilation.’²³ Much as it might fulminate against paganism, the Church was pragmatic enough to recognize that certain practices could be assimilated, with pagan heroes converted into Christian saints and pagan festivals converted to Christian festivals. The attitude was epitomized in the advice given by Pope Gregory the Great to Bishop Augustine on the eve of his commencement of missionary work in England (597–604): ‘the temples of the idols ... should on no account be destroyed’.²⁴ In general, it seems that public traces of paganism were indeed eliminated, whereas it proved much harder to curtail private practices such as the use of auguries, amulets, or witchcraft.²⁵ Churchmen, such as Caesarius of Arles (d.542) urged dogged pastoral work to eliminate the residues of Germanic and Celtic paganism and usually referred to these as superstitio. Homilies against superstitio increased during the sixth and seventh centuries and local church councils and bishops produced lists of forbidden practices—indiculi superstitionum—although punishments seem to have been fairly light. Churchmen might champion the superior efficacy of sacraments, blessings, and exorcisms against magic charms and amulets, but it is doubtful whether many of the laity appreciated the distinction between rites that drew on divine and those that drew on demonic power.²⁶

From the seventh century, aided in the eighth century by the rising power of the Frankish kingdom, the papacy extended its control across western Christendom. In 742 a reforming church synod, whose decisions were widely circulated, forbade the casting of lots and other forms of divination along with the use of amulets and incantations. By the ninth century, with Charlemagne ruling most of western Christendom, the Church no longer seems to have felt threatened by paganism, although scholars disagree as to the extent to which paganism persisted among the laity. A handful of theologians were positively sceptical about the efficacy of magic. The Canon Episcopi, collected and formulated by Abbot Regino of Prüm (c.840–915), condemned pagan practices as superstitio, yet played down the danger of sorcery on the grounds that it implied that demonic powers could rival those of God. Rather later, King Kálmán of Hungary (r.1095–1116) passed a law that denied the existence of witches, a view for which he might have been hauled before the Inquisition five hundred years later.²⁷ Historians today question the notion of ‘Carolingian scepticism’; but it seems that in this period the Church felt more confident that it could deal with the threat posed by superstitio than it would feel after 1000.²⁸

By the time the Slavic peoples were converted to Christianity in the ninth and tenth centuries, relations between the Byzantine Greeks and the Latin West were under great strain, and tension came to a head with the Great Schism of 1054. Russia, which was converted by official fiat in 988, remained under the authority of the Greek patriarch of Constantinople even after that city fell to the Ottomans in 1453. Initially, Christianity was confined mainly to cities and monasteries but it gradually reached into the fields and forests.²⁹ The political and territorial consolidation of Muscovy encouraged greater assertiveness on the part of the Russian Orthodox Church, and in 1589 it established its own patriarchate. By the sixteenth century, the lives of the population were regulated according to the church calendar, rites of passage were marked by Orthodox sacraments, and the cult of saints and of miraculous icons was entrenched.³⁰ In the process of conversion, however, the usual compromises with paganism had been made, and in 1551 the Church Council (Stoglav) made a preliminary attempt to standardize ecclesiastical practice and reform public morals, condemning raucous popular amusements, demanding the execution of fortune-tellers, astrologers, and magicians, and inveighing against practices such as omen reading, dream interpretation, or bathing in a river or lake during a thunderstorm.³¹ The Stoglav may tell us more about clerical concerns than about the resilience of supposed ‘pagan’ practices, but whatever its significance, its practical effect on popular religion was limited.

Of the world's faith traditions, Islam alone saw itself as a named entity from the first (the word ‘Islam’ occurs eight times in the Qur’n). Within less than a century of the death of Muhammad (632), it had spread as far west as the Atlantic and as far east as Central Asia, but in the process of expansion the unity that had characterized its first decades was fractured by political conflict and socio-cultural division. Over the ensuing centuries, contrasting traditions emerged that ranged from the charismatic Shi’ite cult of saints and imams in Iran to the austere legalism of the followers of Muhammad ibn ’Abd al-Wahhab at-Tamimi (1703–92) in what would become Saudi Arabia. Different cultures became islamized, as the Qur’n, the hadth (traditions relating the words and deeds of Muhammad), and the five pillars of faith (the confession of faith, the five daily prayers, alms, fasting during Ramadn, pilgrimage to Mecca) took root, but at the same time, elements of pre-Islamic cultures became grafted on to the new religion.³² Islam, for example, absorbed a rich culture of divination from Persia (although Shi’ites generally took a dim view of divination, as an irrational if not impious act). In due course, a sophisticated Arabic literature on divination developed that would become a source of fascination to intellectuals in twelfth-century Europe.³³ From Morocco to Indonesia, the use of charms and amulets (including texts from the Qur’n), the invocation of jinns, belief in the evil eye, sorcery, omens, and numerology became hallmarks of different Islamic cultures.³⁴ In South Asia, a sequence of Arab traders, central Asian and Afghan conquerors and migrants and, finally, Turkic Mughals introduced Islam where it interacted with the tribal customs and ‘Hindu’ faith to produce local forms characterized by the worship of charismatic saints (sufis), possessed of semi-magical and healing powers, celebration of the birthday of Muhammad, music and dancing.³⁵ These or similar local practices were frowned upon by many of the ‘ulam’, the religious scholars, and certainly by those of a more puritanical disposition such as the great medieval theologian Shaykh al-Islâm Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328). He affirmed the primacy of scripture and the shar’a and inveighed against deviations that he associated with bid‘ah (innovation, reformation) and shirk (idolatry). He took particular exception to the veneration of saints, since it flew in the face of the Qur’n's insistence on the absolute power and majesty of God. Centuries later, he would become a major influence on the theology of ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, the inspiration of present-day Wahhabis.³⁶ ‘His writings’, a present-day scholar has written, ‘were like a time bomb planted in the fourteenth and detonated in the eighteenth century whose shocks are still reverberating across the Islamic world’.³⁷ By no means all religious scholars were so intransigent in their attitudes to folk Islam. In South Asia and Indonesia, rural mullahs generally did their best to purge popular practice of un-Islamic innovations, yet their often imperfect knowledge of the shar’a meant that they viewed, for example, the use of amulets as entirely orthodox.

China's pluralist religious field makes it distinct from that of medieval Christendom and Islam, although the absence of a central authority regulating religious affairs has parallels with the latter. Some scholars are reluctant to see the three traditions of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism—especially Confucianism—as religions at all; yet they share certain family resemblances with the modern conception of religion insofar as they have canonical scriptures, a liturgy, clerical specialists and training centres. To complicate matters, the religion practised by most of the population corresponds to none of these traditions, although it is influenced by all three; and it fits much less well the modern conception of religion, since it is diffuse in nature and its local rituals are variable. Conventionally, the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), the subject of T. H. Barrett's chapter, is seen as the period when Confucianism was constructed as a set of cosmological and ethical doctrines serving the interests of state, although Barrett suggests that this is an oversimplification.³⁸ He deals mainly with the period of civil strife and rapid social change that accompanied the disintegration of the Han dynasty, a period when Buddhism and Taoism had not yet established themselves as separate, institutionalized religions. He suggests that official concern with yin practice—a term that connotes licentious, illicit, or excessive practices—particularly with the suppression of ‘licentious cults’ (yinsi), may mark a trend towards a more exclusive conception of religion. For more than 400 years following the collapse of the Han dynasty, China lacked a unified central government. This was a period of cultural efflorescence in which Buddhism and Taoism established themselves. Buddhism reached the peak of its influence in the early Tang dynasty (618–906), when unified government was once again re-established, and by the late Tang the impact of Taoism on popular religious culture was profound. Confucian polemics against the two religions erupted sporadically, and there were periodic efforts at suppression, but the state's policy in general was one of cooption. Indeed such was the potency of Confucianism as a socio-ethical orthodoxy that both religions accommodated to it.³⁹ Buddhist and Taoist elites from time to time sought to purge local practice of excesses and improprieties, but their efforts never went unchallenged; and by the time of the Song dynasty (960–1279), Buddhist elites were content to leave lay practice alone. Taoist elites proved rather more energetic in launching periodic drives to suppress ‘licentious shrines’ or ‘licentious sacrifices’ (yinsi), usually when these featured animal sacrifices, worship of unruly ghosts and nature spirits, or spirit mediums, but their capacity to reform local religion declined over time. More commonly, Taoism absorbed local deities into the orthodox pantheon, although it was probably less successful in this than Christianity, not least because of the absence of a centralizing authority.⁴⁰

During the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties, the authorities sought to propagate Confucian values among the populace, chiefly through the promotion of ancestor worship. Scholar-officials and local gentry struggled for moral authority with Buddhist and Taoist monks, and all intervened at times to mould local rituals in ways they considered theologically, aesthetically and politically acceptable.⁴¹ Elites ruthlessly suppressed the millenarian Buddhist sects that sprang up in this period, which they judged to be unequivocally ‘heterodox’ (xie), but proved more tolerant of cults they judged to be merely ignorant, deluded or wasteful. From time to time, magistrates shut down illicit temples or prosecuted illicit cults, such as that of the greedy and lascivious Wutong, god of wealth, and attacked spirit mediums, whose rituals of ecstatic possession offended Confucian norms of propriety. Yet the capacity of the authorities to purge popular cults of elements not in conformity with the canonical scriptures remained limited.⁴² The gap between the rather austere Confucianism of elites and the more prodigal and expressive religion of the masses probably increased in the late-imperial period, just as the gulf between elite and popular culture widened in Europe at roughly the same time.⁴³

From the tenth century, the population in western Europe grew and urban centres expanded for the first time since the break-up of the Roman empire. Ecclesiastical and secular elites imposed new forms of dependency on cultivators of the soil. During the twelfth century, intellectual life blossomed as cathedral schools and universities appeared, their growth spurred by the demand for clerics to staff the expanding bureaucracies of Church and state. Governments and legal systems became more structured and the Church, menaced by heretical challenges from the Waldensians and the Cathars from the late twelfth century, was pressed into clarifying the parameters of orthodox belief and practice.⁴⁴ As canon law developed and as ecclesiastical courts emerged, law increasingly became an instrument for regulating religious deviance, with specialised officials—inquisitors—appointed to root out heretics and violators of Church law. One facet of the twelfth-century renaissance was the development of an increasingly sophisticated and rarefied theology of the demonic by scholastic philosophers. William of Auvergne (c.1180–1249), bishop of Paris, and Albertus Magnus (1200–80), a German Dominican, combined Arabic learning with Aristotelian philosophy to defend a notion of ‘natural’ magic. Generally, however, magic came to arouse suspicion because of the fascination of a ‘clerical underworld’, to use Richard Kieckhefer's term, with black magic, alchemy and astrology.⁴⁵

St Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), synthesising Aristotelian thought with Augustine's theology of signs, did much to firm up the association of superstitio with the demonic pact. Superstitio, he averred, is ‘a vice opposed to the virtue of religion by excess ... either because it offers divine worship to something not deserving of it; or it offers worship in some manner which is unfitting’.⁴⁶ The offering of worship to a being other than God was clearly idolatrous and represented an ‘explicit’ pact (pactum expressum) with the devil. The worshipping of God in an unfitting manner was less serious, but still represented an ‘implicit’ pact (pactum tacitum). Aquinas offered the following example in relation to the wearing of relics: ‘If it is out of confidence in God and the saints, whose relics they are, this is not wrong. But if account were taken of some irrelevance, for example, that the locket is triangular and the like, which has no bearing on the reverence due to God and the saints, it would be superstitious and wrong.’⁴⁷ Such ‘trivial nonsense’ represented an implicit pact since by focusing on external signs, rather than on the worship of God, one left oneself open to the intrusion of demonic power. The problem was that since the Church itself dealt primarily in signs, Aquinas was forced back into arguing that only the Church could arbitrate between licit and illicit signs.

In this period, the prime concern of the Church appears to have been with heresy and magic, now understood as the deliberate manipulation of occult powers, rather than with superstitio. Nevertheless, the growth in the number of preachers, the appointment of inquisitors and the spread of annual confession after 1215 led to increased knowledge about the beliefs and practices of the populace, especially in the countryside. This fed the curiosity of the ecclesiastical authorities about the use of words, objects, gestures, and holy things for unauthorized purposes.⁴⁸ In his chapter, Michael Bailey shows that after 1400 the authorities revealed a new concern about the legitimacy of such practices as the use of charms, amulets, spells, or healing potions as they turned their gaze on superstitio among the laity. On the one hand, this reflected the increased capacity of church and secular courts to regulate popular practice and, on the other, a growing concern on the part of leading churchmen with the need for reform. The rise of learned demonology underpinned this intensified interest in the religious life of the people. By the early fifteenth century, the idea of witchcraft as a diabolic conspiracy, complete with sabbaths, sexual congress with the devil and marks of the devil, was fully elaborated.⁴⁹ By the middle of the century, it was being disseminated through sermons, ballads, and woodcuts, although historians disagree about the extent to which popular belief in maleficium (malevolent magic) was reconfigured by learned demonology. The convergence of belief in harmful magic with learned demonology, combined with the inquisitorial structures and procedures developed during the preceding two centuries, were factors that propelled the increase in the number of witch trials that began around 1430 in the western Alps. Stephen Bowd's chapter shows that witchcraft trials in the Val Camonica in northern Italy in the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries were fully articulated within the demonological paradigm. If learned demonology provided the intellectual rationale for witchcraft prosecutions, however, it is doubtful that it was the direct cause of the upsurge in witch trials, which peaked in the years between 1580 and 1620 and which was heavily concentrated in the fragmented territories of the Holy Roman Empire.⁵⁰ For most accusations of witchcraft were brought not by the authorities but by villagers and townsfolk who believed they were victims of maleficium. Increased popular anxiety about witchcraft appears to have stemmed primarily from social and economic factors, such as dislocation caused by crop failure, price inflation and epidemics—possibly connected to the Little Ice Age—and compounded after 1618 by the devastation of the Thirty Years War.⁵¹

With the Reformation, Protestants unleashed a ferocious onslaught on superstition of all kinds, massively expanding the category to embrace rituals that had hitherto been central elements of Christian orthodoxy, such as the seven sacraments, the invocation of saints, masses for the dead, vows and fasting. In accordance with the doctrine of justification by faith alone, reformers contended that humans could not access divine power through mere ritual acts, which must therefore be condemned as forms of idolatry. Calvin lambasted ‘sacrileges’ and ‘abominations’ from astrology—although he made an exception of what he called ‘natural’ astrology—to transubstantiation, condemning them as either ‘pure human invention’ or ‘devilish phantasmagoria’ that detracted from the glory of God.⁵² Beneath the violent theological diatribes between Catholics and Reformers certain shared assumptions persisted. Both continued to believe that the devil operated within the natural world, although their remedies for dealing with the demonic differed: Catholics continued to rely on sacraments and rituals while Protestants relied on prayer and God's providence. As Alison Rowlands’ chapter shows, however, Protestant clerics may have condemned recourse to spells or charms, yet Protestant layfolk were not prepared to give up practical ways of accessing magical power, which they creatively extended to include ‘reformed’ devices such as incombustible portraits of Luther.⁵³ Catholics and Protestants both continued to think of the material world as part of the cosmic order and thus susceptible to supernatural intervention; yet in attacking as idolatrous the notion that material objects and practices can transmit divine power, Protestant theologians helped to firm up the boundary between the spiritual and material realms.⁵⁴ A distinction emerged, for example, between supernatural ‘miracles’, where God intervened directly in creation, and ‘marvels’, or preternatural events, which depended on secondary causes, including the work of angels and demons. In the long term, this paved the way for a more materialist understanding of the operation of the natural world.⁵⁵

After 1570, a process of confessionalization got under way in which competing Churches crafted clear-cut identities for themselves. The clergy of different denominations strove to instruct their members in the doctrines and forms of worship distinctive to their confession, often in tandem with secular elites who struggled to regulate behaviour in public places.⁵⁶ Johann Ludwig Hartmann, the ecclesiastical Superintendent of the Lutheran city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and the subject of Rowlands's paper, exemplifies the new brand of conscientious cleric seeking to enforce ‘decency and good order’ in worship and public morals. For both Protestant and Catholic reformers, a key aim was to deter ordinary folk from ‘seeking success and security in their daily lives by their own efforts’.⁵⁷ With the Counter-Reformation, the regional offices of the Roman Inquisition subjected parish clergy to much closer scrutiny, concerned that many were unable to distinguish legitimate means of access to supernatural power, such as handwritten brevi containing biblical texts, from illegitimate ones, such as reciting verses from St John's gospel to cure fever. The number of prosecutions of Catholic layfolk for involvement in magical healing, divination and love magic increased in this period.⁵⁸ Superstitions—and the word was now invariably used in the plural—were defined and elaborated with increasing sophistication as reason came to organize the domain of Catholic theology.⁵⁹ With time, the field of rejected excesses became ever wider, as evidenced by the Traité des superstitions (1679) of Abbé Jean-Baptiste Thiers (1606–1703), which was designed to purge piety of credulity and belief in false miracles.⁶⁰ Yet if the laity on both sides of the Reformation divide acquired a much stronger sense of confessional identity, they proved at the same time ingenious in deflecting, adapting or reconfiguring top-down efforts to rid their faith of superstitious beliefs, customs, and festivals.

From around 1620, Russia's ecclesiastical and secular elites fell under the influence of ideas emanating from Kiev and other Orthodox centres of the Polish state, a process that gathered pace after 1650. The Polish word, zabobony, a translation of superstitio, was now occasionally used to denote beliefs and practices deemed to be at variance with Orthodoxy. Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich (r.1645–76) took the lead in driving through reforms proposed by Patriarch Nikon to standardize worship and improve the morals of clergy and laity. In 1648, he drafted a decree, On the Righting of Morals and the Abolition of Superstition, which aimed to ensure that divine service at parish level was performed in full and to eliminate ‘pagan’ revels, especially those connected to folk entertainers (skomorokhi). Four years later, sorcery was made a capital offence.⁶¹ By the 1680s, Church leaders had forced through the new liturgical order but at the expense of a schism that saw Old Believers set up communities to uphold the old liturgy. The hierarchy made an effort to assert its authority to recognize saints and miracle-working icons, but its capacity to impose its norms on lay piety remained limited, certainly by the standards of the confessionalizing Protestant and Catholic Churches.⁶² Only at this time did church services begin routinely to include sermons; only in the early eighteenth century was annual confession made mandatory; and it was well into the eighteenth century before parish registers and confessional books became widespread.⁶³

From the second half of the seventeenth century in western Europe, and from the eighteenth century in central and eastern Europe, the number of witch trials fell. This seems to have come about as a result of the secular authorities’ increasing unease about the conduct of trials and the reliability of verdicts.⁶⁴ This development preceded the rise of intellectual scepticism towards witchcraft, which only began to be significant towards the end of the seventeenth century. In 1691–3, the Dutch Reformed pastor, Balthasar Bekker (1634–98) published De Betooverde Weereld (The World Bewitched). In the spirit of Descartes, this argued that the material and spiritual worlds cannot interact except through humans, a claim that many theologians and philosophers rejected vigorously since it seemed to contravene scripture.⁶⁵ Nevertheless, in the course of the eighteenth century, a growing mood of scepticism began to influence lawmakers. In 1766, Maria Theresa, Holy Roman Empress, outlawed witch-hunting in Austria-Hungary in order to ‘uproot superstition and promote the rational judgement of crimes involving magic and sorcery’. The law referred sarcastically to the gullibility of the common people: ‘Any event which seems to them hard to explain (although caused merely by accident, science or speed) is ascribed to the activity of sorcerers and witches.’⁶⁶ Generally, the appeal to reason seems to have been connected more to changing standards of proof than to scientific developments, such as the advance of mechanistic philosophy that postulated objects as consisting of particles that interact in accordance with fixed natural laws.

Whether one may speak of a ‘scientific revolution’ in the seventeenth century remains moot. Some question whether anything akin to modern science existed in this period, arguing instead for a ‘diverse array of cultural practices aimed at understanding, explaining and controlling the natural world.’⁶⁷ Nevertheless in all areas of natural philosophy, the older systems of logic, observation, and categorization associated with Aristotelianism were undermined by new modes of thinking such as the mathematical rationalism of Descartes or the empiricism of Francis Bacon.⁶⁸ John Locke aspired to do away with ‘some of the rubbish that lies in the way of knowledge’, insisting that only the evidence of the senses could lead to knowledge and that only a community of free men could evaluate this knowledge.⁶⁹ Such developments further served to call into question the idea that divine, demonic, or occult forces operate routinely in the sphere of nature.

The intensity of literature criticizing superstition increased between 1680 and 1725, which may be seen as the first phase of the Enlightenment. In advocating religious toleration on grounds of reason and natural morality, Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) polemicized against the ‘idolatry’ of the Catholic Church and against superstition in general.⁷⁰ Diderot and Voltaire initiated the more radical Enlightenment critique that consigned all organized religion, but especially the Catholic Church with its claim that ritual could activate divine power within the world, to the lumber-room of superstition. In the Philosophical Dictionary [1764] Voltaire linked superstition to tyranny and reason to virtue and order in the body politic.⁷¹ These radicals saw superstition as a syndrome rooted in dread and anxiety and argued that it produced intolerance and censorship.⁷² In his fine defence of the radical Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel argues that it ‘eradicated magic and belief in the supernatural from Europe's intellectual culture’.⁷³ Yet by no means all Enlightened thinkers subscribed to the assault on religion. In recent years, many historians have emphasized the role played by religion—Pietism in Germany, rational Dissent in Britain and Jansenism in France—in fostering the enlightened commitment to reform and progress. Such moderate thinkers, however, were no less hostile to superstition than the radicals, since superstition offended against their ideal of ‘reasonableness’ in religion.⁷⁴

The French Revolution expanded on the political implications of the Enlightenment critique of religion and superstition, particularly following the subordination of Church to state in the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (12 July 1790) and the refusal of many Catholic clergy to swear an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. Superstition became more strongly attached to political ‘fanaticism’, to conspiracy by priests and tyrants against the people and to the slavish loyalty displayed by sections of the populace to throne and altar. In 1791, Saint-Just proclaimed: ‘Fanaticism is the work of European priestcraft. A people which has suppressed superstition has made a great step towards liberty’.⁷⁵ As this suggests, the target of the revolutionaries was the Church, that is, organized, revealed religion, not least because of its hold over the nation's schools. But superstitious belief was also attacked, albeit never systematically, on the grounds that it conflicted with the canons of reason.⁷⁶ During the dechristianization campaign of 1793–4, the Jacobins accused priests of impeding the realization of equality by setting themselves up as an intermediate caste between God and man.⁷⁷ Robespierre's Cult of the Supreme Being was, according to Mona Ozouf, unconsciously influenced by the pre-revolutionary critique of superstition, insofar as it aimed to purge away all superfluity. ‘For the Revolutionary cult to live, all that was needed, it seems, was a mass of renunciations’.⁷⁸

Attacks on superstition became a staple of nineteenth-century radical politics. In the Rights of Man (1791) Thomas Paine classified governments as being founded on superstition, power, or the rights of man. While languishing in a French jail in December 1793, he commenced writing the Age of Reason, which begins: ‘The total abolition ... of everything appertaining to compulsive systems of religion ... has rendered a work of this kind exceedingly necessary, lest, in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true.’⁷⁹ Paine's book gained notoriety for its attack on ‘revealed religions’ and became a founding charter for freethinkers and rationalists through the nineteenth century. Superstition became synonymous with resistance to progress, and reason and popular education were celebrated as its antidotes. The international socialist movement took up the cause of science and reason. The Internationale, penned by Eugène Pottier to celebrate the Paris Commune of 1871, proclaimed ‘la raison tonne en son cratère’, an emphasis still more pronounced in the English translation. ‘For reason in revolt now thunders/And at last ends the age of cant/Away with all your superstitions/Servile masses arise, arise’. However, there were always currents on the left—from William Blake to Georges Sorel—that were sceptical if not hostile to what they perceived to be the sterile cult of reason. Marx's hostility to religion, moreover, sprang not from Enlightenment rationalism but from left Hegelianism. Nevertheless, in the second half of the nineteenth century, the dominant trend—exemplified by the Second International—was to marry Enlightenment faith in the liberating power of reason and science to a materialist epistemology. Engels typified this in his polemical counterposition of ‘materialism’ to ‘idealism’.⁸⁰ Within this discourse, superstition possessed its modern sense of misplaced assumptions about causality derived from an erroneous understanding of nature. In the Dialectics of Nature, for example, Engels had great fun exposing the fraudulence of phrenology.⁸¹

But the attack on superstition was by no means confined to the left. In the course of the nineteenth century, governments in Europe came to see themselves as having a mission to civilize their citizens, principally by providing schooling for the masses. A side-effect to elementary education, in addition to instilling rudiments of literacy, arithmetic and religious knowledge, was to convince children that magical forces had no power over their lives. In Prussia, for example, the government sought to combat the more egregious manifestations of folk religion and medicine through schooling, improved religious instruction, the popularization of medical knowledge and, in the longer term, through strengthening economic security and overcoming rural isolation. On occasion, it invoked the law to prosecute cunning folk, wise women, or fortune-tellers for ‘fraud’. Following the unification of Germany, the offence of criminal mischief was extended to include the ‘encouragement of superstition’.⁸² The campaign by ‘enlightened’ European governments to persuade citizens that magical forces had no dominion over their lives complicated relations with the Catholic Church. In the Rhine province, annexed to Prussia in 1822, the Church supported the government's efforts to promote medical over magical treatment of illness by discouraging clergy from exorcising the mentally disturbed or by reading religious texts over the sick person (Überlesen). Yet demand from the laity for such services continued apace and clergy continued to provide them.⁸³ By the late nineteenth century, moreover, the Catholic Church, faced by the Kulturkampf in Germany and everywhere by the rising forces of secularism, deliberately embraced a less rationalistic, more emotional version of the faith that, inter alia, entailed a reaffirmation of miraculous apparitions.⁸⁴

As Simon Dixon's chapter shows, in Russia paganism was only supplanted by superstition (sueverie) as the principal focus of ecclesiastical and secular concern under Peter the Great (r.1682–1725). The Spiritual Regulation of 1721, which embodied Peter's aspiration for a root-and-branch reform of the Church, expressed concern over ‘superstitious practices’ ranging from holy fools, ‘shriekers’ (klikushi), improbable versions of saints’ lives, false miracles and icons, and bogus relics.⁸⁵ Its author, the Jesuit-educated but Protestant-influenced Ukrainian bishop, Feofan Prokopovich, aimed to reform popular piety by raising the educational standard of the parish clergy and by placing the Church under government supervision. He defined superstition as ‘that which is superfluous, not essential to salvation, devised by hypocrites only for their own interest, beguiling the simple people, and like snowdrifts, hindering the passage along the right path of truth’.⁸⁶ The term sueverie, while focusing on the magical ‘excesses’ of popular piety, had broad connotations, and was used to condemn Old Believers or heretics such as Dukhobors, Muslims and Buddhists.⁸⁷

Subordinated by Peter and expropriated by Catherine, the Orthodox Church entered the nineteenth century in a divided and disoriented state. From the 1820s, however, it became more assertive, as evidenced by its campaigns to convert Muslims and to assert central authority over local parishes and to catechise the laity.⁸⁸ The consequence was that by the 1880s the Orthodox Church had acquired a sharper sense of confessional identity. However, distaste for the rationalist reforms of Peter on the part of Church leaders, combined with still inadequate numbers of educated clergy, meant that the centralized regulation of popular piety had made only limited headway. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, moreover, faced by resistance from local communities and by a rising tide of Protestant and other religious dissent, the Church relaxed its reforming drive.⁸⁹ As in France and Germany, the hierarchy responded to the challenges posed by secularism, socialism and heresy by endorsing more emotional and expressive forms of piety.⁹⁰ By the time of the 1905 Revolution, as Dixon shows, churchmen were caught between defending the miraculous against a sceptical and highly secular intelligentsia and invoking rationalist criteria when faced with what they saw as popular ‘excesses’. Exactly similar tensions were evident in the Mexican Church, as Alan Knight shows.

It is likely that, as in Russia, most of the population in nineteenth-century Europe remained relatively untouched by Enlightenment rationalism, continuing to live in a world suffused with magical belief and practice. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the gulf between elite and popular cultures had become so wide that members of the educated classes became fascinated by the foreignness of popular culture. The term Volkskunde appeared in 1782 and around the same time the first chair in the subject was founded at Göttingen.⁹¹ The fascination with popular culture reflected, on the one hand, a romantic reaction against the Enlightenment and, on the other, the growth of national sentiment. When the Brothers Grimm began to collect folktales (Märchen) in 1806 it was in the conviction that they constituted a repository of the wisdom of the Volk superior to the lucubrations of philosophers.⁹² In her chapter Alexandra Walsham shows that in England the roots of the new scholarly discipline of ‘folklore’—a term that came into existence in 1846—can be traced back to Tudor polemics against Catholic superstition and to interest in ‘curiosities’ of a slightly later vintage. The exponents of folklore were impelled by interest in the ‘quaint remnants of a way of life that they were convinced was fading rapidly into oblivion’, ‘superstitions’ representing a particular source of fascination. As a scholarly discipline folklore came to develop later in the nineteenth century within a fashionable evolutionary paradigm, magic, religion, and science being seen, respectively, as successive stages of human cognitive development. E. B. Tylor (1832–1917), Professor of Anthropology at Oxford from 1896, construed superstitions as ‘survivals’ or ‘vestiges’ of previous stages of development of the human species in its evolution ‘from savage through barbaric to civilised life’.⁹³ Sir Laurence Gomme (1853–1916), a founder of the Folklore Society (1878), argued that superstitions represented ‘the survival of traditional ideas or practices among a people whose principal members have passed beyond the stage of civilization which these ideas and practices once represented.’⁹⁴ Most notably, Sir James Frazer's, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, the third edition of which appeared in twelve volumes (1907–22), which construed magic and religion as primitive but precocious attempts at scientific reasoning.⁹⁵ For these pioneers, it was precisely the irrationality of superstitions that proved they were survivals of an earlier stage of human development. The work of Tylor and Frazer focused scholarly interest in superstition as a key to understanding the ‘primitive mind’, an interest that would be maintained from Lucien Levy-Bruhl to Claude Levi-Strauss. Frazer distinguished between ‘civilised’ and ‘savage’ modes of thought, seeing the latter as groping, ‘pre-scientific’ attempts to comprehend nature. Levy-Bruhl recast the distinction as one between ‘logical’ and ‘pre-logical’ modes of thought, arguing that civilized thinking was rational, logical, and scientific, whereas primitive thinking was affective, poetic and magical.⁹⁶ This interest in the ‘primitive mind’ had a profound impact not only on the discipline of anthropology but also on the nascent disciplines of psychology and psychoanalysis. More generally, and in contrast to the philosophes, who had believed in the innate virtue of natural man and in the power of education, these trends signalled the rise of a darker view of man as naturally prey to passions and prejudice.

In the course of the nineteenth century, interest in superstitions—understood now as the lore of the Volk—came to be utilized in various ways by nationalists, especially those of a cultural or ‘ethnic’ type. In Greece, belief in demons, fairies and spirits known as exotika (literally, ‘things outside or beyond’), though long frowned upon by the Orthodox Church, was still strong. This posed a problem for Greek nationalists since popular belief in these creatures, on the one hand, seemed to cast doubt on the self-identification of Greece as a Christian nation and, on the other, seemed to embody a link with ancient Greece. Nationalism appears to have become a vector through which belief in exotica continued into the twentieth century.⁹⁷ More typically, cultural nationalists engaged with superstition as a way of criticizing statist versions of the nationalist project. In Japan, anxiety that the traditional culture of the people was vanishing generated a critique of the Meiji definition of national identity in civic terms and of its programme of civilization and enlightenment.⁹⁸ In 1910, Yanagita Kunio published Tales of Tono, which purported to be a transcription of tales told to the author by inhabitants of this remote region in north-east Japan. Presenting these tales of the uncanny as an expression of what was enduringly Japanese, he used them to counter the Meiji emphasis on ‘reason’ along with its supposed containment of ‘imagination’. As Marilyn Ivy notes, ‘anxieties about cultural transmission, valorizations of the unwritten, discoveries of the marginal, and textual constructions of the ‘folk’ are replicable constituents of modern cultural nationalisms throughout the world.’⁹⁹

Ideas of civilization and progress, as well as guns and trade, propelled European imperial expansion in the nineteenth century. Crucial to the civilizing mission was the work of Christian missionaries who came in the course of the nineteenth century to interest themselves in native ‘superstitions’. Initially, in West Africa missionaries and travellers showed little interest in native ‘paganism’—beyond noting its supposed obsession with the ‘fetish’—dismissing it as ‘a positive evil depressing society below the moral level attainable by unaided natural reason.’¹⁰⁰ Later, as the paternalistic project of moral improvement became overlaid by more racialized understandings of social development, missionaries became important cataloguers of indigenous religions, even as they dismissed it as idolatry and superstition.¹⁰¹ Paradoxically, whilst missionaries presented themselves as opponents of magic and idolatry, they frequently appeared to indigenous peoples as remarkably effective manipulators of occult power. In the 1930s, the Dutch Montfort missionaries confounded the Muedans of Mozambique by telling them, on the one hand, that the spirit objects in their houses were worthless and that sorcery (uwavi) was superstition and, on the other, that uwavi was the work of Satan and a dangerous force.¹⁰² Generally, however, African converts turned the ‘civilization’ and moral uplift offered by the missionaries to their own advantage, in a process described by the Comaroffs as one ‘in which signifiers were set afloat, fought over, and recaptured by both sides of the colonial encounter’.¹⁰³ Much like the pagans of seventh-century Germany or the Mixtecs of Oaxaca after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, they ‘converted Catholicism to themselves’, recognizing Christ, Mary and the saints as versions of African gods and spirits, not so much in an act of conversion as one of cosmological augmentation.¹⁰⁴

Twentieth-century revolutions embraced Enlightenment confidence in the essential rationality and virtue of man and rejected all forms of irrationalism, not least the superstition incarnated in the Catholic Church. Like their French predecessors, the leaders of the Mexican Revolution were concerned to effect a moral regeneration of the people, to create modern citizens who were educated, secular and loyal to the state. As Knight explains, in 1926 Plutarco Elías Calles called for a radical anti-clerical revolution, a ‘psychological revolution’, which would break the hold of the Church over the masses. Initially, this plunged the nation into a religious civil war, the Cristero rebellion, which devastated much of central-western Mexico. Between 1930 and 1936, revolutionary leaders made a second, more sophisticated attempt to eliminate ‘fanaticism’ and superstition, using iconoclasm, civic rituals, education, theatre, language, art, and poetry.¹⁰⁵ Knight doubts that it had much impact, certainly never gaining the same level of support as the agrarian revolution. Perhaps because it was more short-lived, perhaps because it met with a greater level of popular resistance, cultural revolution in Mexico was even less effective than similar campaigns in Russia and China.

The Bolsheviks, standing in the same Enlightenment tradition that championed reason as the source of progress in society, viewed the application of scientific knowledge to nature and society as the key to human advance. To this they added the ‘scientific’ materialism of the Second International. As in Mexico, their immediate concern was to break the institutional power of the Church. Between 1922 and 1925, and again during the ‘cultural revolution’ of 1928 to 1931, they launched a frontal assault on the Orthodox Church that significantly weakened its institutional base. At the same time, they began seriously to consider how best to spread ‘science’—nauka, a word that connoted enlightenment and progress in general—among the ‘dark’ and ‘backward’ masses. In this endeavour, they were following in the footsteps of the liberal and radical intelligentsia of the nineteenth century who believed that social progress was dependent on raising the cultural level of the common people. In December 1921, the Central Committee set up an Anti-Religious Commission whose remit was to integrate anti-religious education and propaganda into ‘general cultural and political-enlightenment work’. The objectives of anti-religious work were: ‘first, the destruction of animistic understandings of natural and social phenomena; second, the dissemination of a materialist philosophical and natural-scientific and social-scientific outlook; third, a historical-materialist analysis and critique of religion.’¹⁰⁶ Yet the Bolsheviks never came close to fashioning a coherent strategy to realize these aims. There was no agreement on strategic questions such as the political importance to be assigned to the struggle against religion; whether that struggle was necessarily a matter of long-term education and propaganda or whether it could be speeded up through carnivalesque agitation of the kind favoured by the Young Communist League; or, finally, whether religion would simply wither away as the social conditions of the masses improved in the course of socialist construction. The various organizations charged with anti-religious education were at sixes and sevens on these matters. Schools and kindergartens were regularly condemned for ignoring the anti-religious education of children. The Young Communist League and the Pioneers initially favoured stunts designed to mock the religious, such as letting pigs loose in church, while the Union of Godless, formed in 1925, condemned such activities in favour of more systematic agitation.¹⁰⁷

Following the brutal collectivization of agriculture (1929–33), which was accompanied by the arrest of priests and the closure of churches, commentators began to pay attention to the persistence of superstition among the rural populace. The traumatic changes unleashed on the countryside caused many to revitalize religious and folkloric idioms, such as those of the Antichrist and the Last Days, of miracle-working icons and ‘heavenly letters’, in an effort to put meaning on the upheavals that were tearing their lives apart.¹⁰⁸ Writing of children's anti-religious education, one prominent psychologist noted:

We have conducted a broad and organised struggle (in the press, in schools, clubs etc.) against god and the emotions associated with him, religious morality and rituals ... and systematically or piecemeal this has influenced our children. But we have conducted almost no struggle against beliefs in house sprites, wood sprites etc., and the remnants of the ancient religion of clan society ... . These are not mere trifles. They continue to live on through grandmothers, grandfathers and mothers, servants and the like. They are transmitted to children, infecting their weak consciousness and burdening their emotions with heavy, oppressive fear.¹⁰⁹

A ‘broad and organized’ struggle against superstition failed to materialize, not least because at a time of Terror and impending war, the state had more important things on its mind. A process of secularization got under way in the 1930s, as a consequence of the break-up of rural communities, urbanization, schooling, military service and—later—the general application of technology to social life. Yet a recent historian has argued, ‘there is no indication that scientific-atheistic propaganda made the slightest impact on the mentality of the wider population’.¹¹⁰

Where a single powerful Church existed—as in Mexico or Russia—revolutionary states were compelled to confront it in order to establish a monopoly of power. Nationalizing states in countries with pluralist religious traditions, however, sometimes sought to create national Churches or to promote religious institutions that adopted a modernist discourse on civilization and culture.¹¹¹ In Japan Meiji reformers attacked Buddhism and its local network of temple parishes at the same time as they created a national ‘church’, state Shinto, in an attempt to shift the religious loyalties of the populace from the local community to the nationalizing state.¹¹² Chinese nationalism, by contrast, was less mystical, less concerned with religion, more sympathetic to an Enlightenment discourse of ‘science and democracy’, the slogan taken up by New Culture radicals during the May Fourth Movement of 1919.¹¹³ In 1898, the Qing dynasty, as part of its belated effort at reform, began to turn temples and traditional academies into modern schools. The leading Shanghai newspaper, Shenbao, welcomed this on the grounds that the gods to whom Buddhists and Taoists sacrifice ‘are all uncanonical absurd deities which no gentlemen would want to mention’.¹¹⁴ The modern term for superstition, mixin—literally ‘confused belief ’—entered Chinese as a loan-word from Japanese at this time. In the very last years of the Qing dynasty, a rather surprising amount of energy went into ‘reforming customs’ (fengsu gaige) expressed in lectures, periodicals in the vernacular, pamphlets and novels.¹¹⁵ Henceforward, a key component of reformist discourse in China—one that remains vital to the present day—would be that modernization entails the overcoming of ‘feudal superstition’.

The republican government established in 1912 took aim at the field of popular religion, deeming it to fall far short of the implicitly western criteria of politically acceptable modern religion. The New Culture Movement (1915–20s) repudiated the Confucian tradition tout court, and stepped up the attack on superstition, which was now deemed to include ancestor worship and the other Confucian rituals.¹¹⁶ Only with the formation of Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang government in 1928, however, did the anti-superstition campaign take off in earnest. In the course of two years, a spate of directives was issued banning occupations linked to divination, astrology, fortune telling, geomancy and spirit mediumship (August 1928); methods of cure involving the gods (April 1929); and the making and selling of ‘superstitious objects’, such as paper money and talismans (March 1930).¹¹⁷ The new Shanghai Municipal Government introduced regulations to eliminate ‘feudal’ elements in funerary rituals—such as the wearing of the uniforms of Qing officials or the carrying of banners announcing the arrival of an official—and to limit expenditure on such proceedings. In Zhejiang the provincial government declared: ‘Superstition is a hindrance to progress. Appealing to the authority of the gods is a policy that keeps the people ignorant.’¹¹⁸ The ability of the Guomindang government to enforce these ordinances, however, was patchy, and most remained a dead letter. Nevertheless by 1937, when Japan invaded mainland China it is estimated that one half of the million or more temples that had existed in 1900 were no longer functioning.¹¹⁹

The ideal of Enlightenment modernity entailed that the workings of society be made transparent through the application of reason to human action. However, as Peter Geschiere, Basile Ndjio and Lauren Derby show in their respective chapters, modernity in the late twentieth century was seen—especially by the poor in the indebted and dependent societies of the South—to generate ‘the very opacities of power it claims to obviate’. In many parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, the effect of global capitalism has been to revitalize what Todd Sanders and Harry West call ‘occult cosmologies’, cosmologies that present the world as one animated by secret, unseen or mysterious powers.¹²⁰ In the words of these writers, ‘belief in indecipherable power constitutes modernity's dark Other—an Other condemned as "superstition" ’.¹²¹ Peter Geschiere, in his pioneering work on Cameroon, demonstrated how witchcraft operates as an allegory that serves to conceptualize, cope with, and criticize modernity.¹²² Different African societies deploy different occult idioms—allegories of cannibalism, vampirism, shape-shifting and money magic—and in different contexts, but they tend to identify exploitation with depraved and gluttonous consumption and to criticize the fact that people are commodified while money and possessions acquire the attributes of living things.¹²³ In his chapter, Basile Ndjio shows why it makes eminent sense for Cameroonians to conclude that the suddenly acquired wealth of a minority of formerly marginalized young men arises from the mystical theft of the vital powers of other people. Like peasants in Soviet Russia in the 1930s, Cameroonians and Puerto Ricans, the subject of Lauren Derby's intriguing chapter, are reconfiguring longstanding cultural idioms in order to make sense of new social and economic instabilities, psychological pressures and cultural uncertainties that accompany this latest phase of globalized capitalism. This suggests that while modernity may have brought rationalization in many spheres, it has also bred its own forms of enchantment, a point to which I shall return in conclusion.

	Some analytical issues

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It is evident that the meanings of superstitio and its cognates in other cultures are broad, ranging from immoderation and excess, to vain or empty belief, to folly and irrationality, to the downright illicit or heterodox. In spite of this, certain features common to the discursive use of the term can be discerned. First, there is the sense of a norm being transgressed, often because the restraint deemed appropriate to encounters with the sacred is absent. Second, there is frequently an idea of beliefs and practices carried over from the past. This was already well established by the Middle Ages in Europe, where superstitio was associated with hangovers of pagan practice, an idea buttressed later by nineteenth-century evolutionism. Third, although the sense of superstition as ‘bad science’ is consolidated in the modern era, the idea of superstition as failure to think clearly is there from the first: evident in Theophrastus's satirization of those who respond to seeing a weasel by throwing three stones across its path. As Bowden points out, for Theophrastus, as for the moderns, such behaviour was essentially trivial, whereas from classical Rome through to the Enlightenment, superstitio often signalled belief and practice that was harmful and possibly dangerous. Tacitus called it ‘deadly’ (exitiabilis), Suetonius referred to ‘new and evil superstition’ (superstitio nova ac malefica), and the medieval Church increasingly saw superstitio as verging on the heretical.¹²⁴ Fourthly, notwithstanding huge variety across space and time, there is a surprising degree of consistency in the kinds of beliefs and practices that are classed as superstitious. Many appear to be rooted in an animistic or polytheistic view of the world that sees the human and natural worlds as an organic whole, energized by supernatural beings, forces, or relations. Within this world-view, the success or misfortune of the individual or of society is seen to depend on maintaining harmony with the supernatural entities that animate existence.¹²⁵ Much superstitious behaviour seems rooted in the assumption that the supernatural forces at work in maintaining cosmic order can be manipulated to deflect harm or to produce a desired outcome. In this respect, it overlaps significantly with magic. The semantic field in which the category of superstition has operated historically may be imagined as a triangular one, bounded at one corner by magic, at another by ‘true religion’, at another by rationality and science.

1) Superstition as magic
The first serious attempt to conceptualize magic was made by Frazer. Magic, he argued, is a technical act that depends on two laws: the law of similarity, where the practitioner imitates the desired effect so as to make it happen; and the law of contagion, where the practitioner acts upon an object that has been in contact with the thing he wishes to affect. Frazer saw both as forms of sympathetic magic in that they assume that things act on one another through secret sympathy, through some ‘invisible ether’.¹²⁶ Scholars were not slow to point out that sympathetic magic by no means exhausts the range of magical practices. Divination, for example, is concerned with predicting an outcome or reaching a correct decision; and across many cultures, thoughts or words are believed to have the capacity to influence people or the material world, an insight seized on by Freud who argued that the magician and the obsessional neurotic share a belief in the omnipotence of thought. Roger Bastide charged Frazer with equating magic with the rules that govern its technique, that is, with mistaking its means for its end, and insisted that ritual is constitutive of magic, since it is ritual that mediates supernatural agency, and without which its efficacy cannot be guaranteed.¹²⁷ Marcel Mauss contested Frazer's assumption that magic is a hangover from the past, arguing that a practice can only be understood in terms of the social conditions that reproduce it in the present and fix its place within the contemporary ensemble of social practices.¹²⁸ Notwithstanding these differences, all these pioneers tended to agree that the fundamental characteristic of magic was that it entailed the manipulation of occult powers for the achievement—or avoidance—of practical effects.

Some historians may bridle at this essentially utilitarian conception, countering that the meanings of magic in historical context are far richer and more complex than this allows. Stuart Clark, for example, rejects the attempt to construct a general concept of magic for this reason: magic, he argues, is simply ‘what in particular cultural settings it is construed to be.’¹²⁹ For much of European history, magic was defined very precisely by educated elites as an activity that involved the human invocation of demonic powers. This may seem to be a very culturally specific notion, yet the idea of magic as principally about the manipulation of demonic power is also there in Islamic and Chinese cultures. The central, though not exclusive, sense of the Arabic notion of magic (sihr) is action effected through solicitation of demonic forces. It comprises a very wide range of forms of knowledge about the causal mechanisms of nature and the affinities that bind mankind and the cosmos, but all, in the words of Toufic Fahd, represent ‘the debris of celestial knowledge transmitted to mankind by fallen angels’.¹³⁰ In Chinese the words for magic—moshu, wushu—also imply the manipulation of occult, possibly demonic power; and the word for sorcery, yaoshu, has definitely evil connotations. There were, of course, many salient differences between magic in imperial China and magic in medieval Europe. For example, it is much harder to make a distinction between religion and magic in the Chinese case: over the centuries, the concern of classical Taoism with magic, alchemy and exorcism seeped into popular religion and, more crucially, popular religion is fundamentally concerned with improving the lot of the worshipper in this world. When a Taoist priest (daoshi) stages public ceremonies to call down gods to make rain or fine weather, or when a non-ordained Taoist ‘rites master’ (fashi) fashions charms and spells, or when a spirit medium (wupo) casts out evil spirits from the sick, it is doubtful that the average bystander sees these as activities intrinsically different from burning incense to the gods.¹³¹ Magical activity of a private, individual kind existed in China, and often it worked according to the mimetic principles outlined by Frazer: for example, stabbing an image would bring harm to someone or placing the image of a tiger's head above a door would dispel spectres.¹³² Generally, however, magic was a more public activity than in medieval Europe, and it was also one that was more specialized and professionalized.¹³³ In 1963, in Pi county in Sichuan province the authorities counted no fewer than twenty different types of practitioner of ‘feudal superstition’, including Taoist priests and rites masters, spirit mediums, sorcerers, many varieties of fortune-teller (those using the eight-character method, palm-reading, physiognomy etc.), yin-yang specialists, and feng shui specialists.¹³⁴ Finally, we may note that the make-up of the field of ‘magic’ in China was rather different from that in medieval Europe. There was less concern with maleficium—although malevolent witchcraft (gu) did exist – and more concern with discovering hidden and future things through forms of divination. In this respect, magic in imperial China was not dissimilar to magic in ancient Rome. Cultural differences in understandings of magic existed, therefore, and it is the task of the historian to attend to these, but it is not clear that historical and cultural variation, ipso facto, rule out a more abstract conception of magic: at the very least, some working definition appears to be a precondition for comparison across space and time.

In what is perhaps the most sophisticated treatment of magic to date, Stanley Tambiah argues that it should be understood as having a dual structure: on the one hand, it appears to imitate the logic of technical action by seeking to transform nature; on the other, it is performative in that it ‘consists of acts to create effects on human actors according to accepted social conventions’.¹³⁵ He agrees with Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) that although magic may be a false technical act, it is a true social act, insofar as it acts upon people rather than nature; and while not denying that magic aspires to be causally efficacious, he is concerned to point up its capacity to facilitate social communication, exchange and participation, as well as its capacity to organize experience into a coherent vision that can motivate social action. Several contributors to the volume emphasize these latter aspects, seeing magic and superstition primarily as activities that create meaning through ritual and through participation in a world of symbols. This perspective draws analytical attention away from the irrational character of superstition towards engagement with its potential for creating meaning. In her fine study of superstition in nineteenth-century France, Judith Devlin adopts just such a semiological approach. When people fling mud at a statue of Saint Laurent to obtain a cure for eczema, for instance, this action is only ‘tenuously connected with the desired results’ and should rather be understood as a form of catharsis that provides spiritual consolation and relief from psychological pressure.¹³⁶ Whether the fragmented activities we bundle together as superstition in the modern world, however, have the same capacity as traditional magic to engender social communication may be doubted.

The consequence of too artificial a separation of the social from the cultural aspects of magic and superstition was evident in the debate between Keith Thomas and Hildred Geertz, sparked by publication of his magnum opus, Religion and the Decline of Magic.¹³⁷ Thomas connected medieval religion and magic to the powerlessness of people in the face of poverty, sickness, and disaster,¹³⁸ but Geertz criticized him for construing magic in essentially utilitarian terms. The implication of his argument, she averred, is that magical beliefs are discarded once they cease to be of practical value. In addition, she reproached him for not locating the meaning of magic in a coherent cosmology, insisting that magical beliefs possess an autonomous existence and systematic coherence. Thomas countered by agreeing that magical rituals may indeed be thoroughly permeated with meaning, but insisted that their function was essentially practical: ‘they were meant to work’. The exchange echoed the debate as to whether magic is essentially a technical or a symbolic act. As we have seen, there is no reason to think it cannot be both. In respect of Geertz's claim that magical notions were embedded in ‘covert, closed systems of ideas about reality’, Thomas was surely correct to insist that this is an empirical question. Pointing out that magic in early-modern England consisted of layers sedimented over time—Christian, pagan, Germanic, and classical—he doubted the wisdom of over-emphasizing the coherence of its ideas and assumptions. It needed to be demonstrated, he argued, that those who believed in fairies or consulted astrologers saw these activities as systematically related.¹³⁹

2) Functions of superstition
For those who believe that superstition is a category that refers to real beliefs and practices of a broadly magical type, the question arises as to what social or individual functions such beliefs and practices perform. Starting from the premise that magic ‘fulfils some vital function, has some task to accomplish, represents an indispensable part of a working whole’, Malinowski argued that it was essentially a means of coping with uncertainty and a lack of control over the environment: ‘Man resorts to magic only where chance and circumstances are not fully controlled by knowledge’.¹⁴⁰ Today, such functionalism is no longer fashionable, since it foregrounds the way that beliefs and practices secure order in society to the detriment of their intellectual content, treating ideas as instruments to the achievement of certain ends or as rationalizations of social necessity. Yet if there are problems with functionalism as a mode of explanation, it does not follow that a particular practice—however overdetermined with meaning—may not also fulfil a social function, including a latent one. Indeed most of our contributors assume that at the most general level superstitions serve, variously, to create a sense of predictability in an uncertain environment, to help people deal with feelings of powerlessness, to cope with personal or collective loss, or to create a sense of assurance as they pass through critical rites of passage. Such rudimentary functions registered, however, the historian's task remains that of interpreting the specific ways in which superstitious beliefs and practices serve to make such uncertainty or unpredictability meaningful.

Virtually all who write about superstition at some point allude to the affective states that inspire it: to the ways in which, for example, situations of uncertainty or social strain give rise to feelings of anxiety, vulnerability, or envy. This suggests that we may usefully look to psychology for insights into the functions and meanings of superstition. Malinowski, despite his functionalism (which in principle entails a rejection of psychological explanations of social phenomena), nevertheless had recourse to psychology when accounting for the magical practices of the Trobriand islanders. These practices, he argued, derived from an inability to master the environment, and this inability produced a state of tension—feelings of fear and anxiety—that magic served to resolve. It is because superstition so often has such an affective dimension that psychologists have been drawn to it. Like an earlier generation of social scientists, they treat superstition as a referential rather than an ascriptive category, that is, they assume that it describes real habits of mind and types of behaviour.¹⁴¹ Unlike social scientists, however, they perceive it as fundamentally rooted in the satisfaction of emotional rather than social needs, and tend to be more concerned with the irrational behaviour of individuals than with the social significance of such behaviour. That said, there is little unanimity among them as to the psychological mechanisms that motivate irrational behaviour. Gustav Jahoda construes superstition largely as behaviour designed to reduce anxiety and promote a sense of order, regularity and meaning, i.e. as a response to a sense of loss of control over one's environment. Rather tentatively, he also suggests that it may represent a regression to infantile emotional attitudes or a reversion to ideas and beliefs acquired during early emotional learning.¹⁴² Jean Piaget, drawing a parallel between the thinking of children and the ‘pre-logical thinking’ of ‘primitive’ peoples as described by Levy-Bruhl, saw superstition as an extension of the animistic or anthropocentric thinking typical of small children. Children, he argued, cannot grasp the idea of physical necessity and assume that the physical world can be manipulated through thought or ritual. Superstitious behaviour emanates from the failure fully to transcend this stage of childhood development.¹⁴³ Behaviourist psychologists took a very different tack, seeing superstition as an expression of the human need to find patterns and regularities in the surrounding world, a need, they suggest, that has evolved as a survival mechanism. B. F. Skinner (1904–90), for example, conceived superstition as a conditioned response acquired as the result of an accidental connection between behaviour and reinforcement.¹⁴⁴ Human beings, he and others argued, have an innate tendency to assume causal relationships between experiences: thus the gambler who wears a certain tie when he wins the jackpot cannot resist wearing the same tie again, convinced that it is the tie, not luck, that has led to success.

Psychoanalytical interpretations of superstition focus much more on unconscious motivations. Freud's views, which evolved over time, were heavily influenced by the contemporary interest of anthropologists in the ‘primitive mind’. In the Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) he construed superstition as the projection on to the external world of thoughts, fears, and desires that were the object of repression. By 1913, when he published Totem and Taboo, he drew an interesting analogy between the practitioner of magic and the obsessional neurotic: both, he argued, believe in their capacity to affect the external world through thoughts, feelings and wishes. For the neurotic individual, the projection of psychic motivations on to events in the external world derives from a failure to transcend the phase of narcissism. He wryly noted a similarity between his own thinking and that of the superstitious person: ‘the compulsion not to let chance count as chance, but to interpret it, is common to us both.’¹⁴⁵ In 1939, Roger Money-Kyrle, a former analysand of Freud and a practising anthropologist, made an attempt to harness psychoanalysis and anthropology to the study of superstition. Drawing upon Melanie Klein's theory of child development, with its dark emphasis on infantile dependency, splitting, aggression, and illusions of omnipotence, he contended that the source of all irrationality lies in the inability to transcend a childish stage of development that sees things and persons as inhabited by spirits and things and persons as capable of emitting supernatural power. ‘The infant's failure to distinguish between fantasy and reality leads to neurotic anxiety, perhaps the strongest and most persistent drive in his life’.¹⁴⁶ Superstition, like an obsessional symptom, was, he concluded, an irrational method for dealing with irrational anxiety. Finally, in an ingenious if ultimately unconvincing application of a Freudian perspective to the history of superstition, Nicole Belmont argues that superstition lies midway between the compulsive rituals of the neurotic, which are private and fragmented, and the systematic rituals of religion, which are stereotyped and communal, insofar as it shares the diversity of the former and the stereotypicality of the latter. Superstition caters to the collective need for exteriorization, a need to project on to the external world that which emanates from the unconscious and is censored by the conscious mind. However, in the wake of the Enlightenment, she contends, religion ceased to fulfil a function of exteriorization, coming to focus exclusively on ‘interiorisation’—‘un mouvement de retour sur soi-même’—thereby leaving superstition to provide the ritualized mechanisms through which unconscious needs and instincts could be externalized.¹⁴⁷

3) Superstition and religion
The study of superstition can enable us better to understand the historical evolution of the category of ‘religion’, in that it focuses analytical attention on the authorizing processes by which religion is given form and meaning across time and space. A major problem in thinking about how religion and superstition mutually constitute one another is that our modern conception of religion cannot be mechanically applied to past societies. In the classical world neither deisidaimonia nor superstitio functioned as straightforward antonyms to civic religion although, as Hugh Bowden and Richard Gordon show, both were inseparable from an idea of appropriate ritual. Religio turns out to have been as polyvalent a term as superstitio, its meanings ranging from activities associated with worship of the gods, ‘scrupulous attention to detail that links humankind to divinity by virtue of a code of conduct reciprocally binding on both sides’ (Gordon), to something close to superstitio itself. A large part of the problem derives from the fact that in pre-modern societies religion did not occupy a clearly demarcated social space in the way that it does in modern societies, since the whole of social life was permeated by beliefs and practices we would class as religious. In a celebrated work, Wilfred Cantwell Smith argued that the modern conception of religion as a system of belief embodied in a bounded community did not appear until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as fall-out from the polemics and apologetics unleashed by the Reformation and Wars of Religion. Prior to this, he contended, practitioners of different faith traditions spoke of ‘faith’, ‘obedience’, ‘piety’, ‘truth’ or ‘the way’. In none of the classical languages except Arabic, he observed, is there a term that corresponds to the modern notion of religion. In particular, he suggested that practitioners could only think of their faith as a religion once they could see it from the perspective of outsiders.¹⁴⁸

In the modern period, superstition plays a vital function in helping intellectuals and political leaders create a category of religion, as is evident in Asia. The Arya Samaj, a Hindu revivalist group founded in 1875, sought to constitute Hinduism as a ‘purified’ and ‘rational’ religion, based on ancient texts rather than ‘superstition’, that could both claim universality with Christianity and to be the national religion of ‘Indians’.¹⁴⁹ ‘Science was not locked in battle with religion but concerned with specifying its domain, disengaging it from what appeared as superstition.’¹⁵⁰ In Japan and China the creation of a modern category of religion was implicated in state-building and here, too, superstition served a vital function, coming to signify the unscientific excrescences of which traditional religion must be purged if it were to become a religion worthy of the modern nation. In Japan Buddhism struggled to reinvent itself as a modern, socially conscious, cosmopolitan, yet quintessentially Japanese religion in the face of persecution during the Meiji Restoration.¹⁵¹ In China the modern idea of religion (zongjiao) arrived along with the notion of superstition at the end of the nineteenth century. As in Japan, it became a catalyst for the reconfiguration of Buddhism and Taoism as modern religions. Under the Guomindang, the two faiths strove to reconstitute themselves as institutionalized religions separate from the field of local popular practice, founding national associations to represent their interests, so that they might qualify for the freedom guaranteed to recognized religions under the constitution.

In drawing attention to the authorizing processes by which ‘religion’ is made and remade across time and space, superstition reminds us of the relationships between religion and power. Talal Asad is critical of the tendency of contemporary anthropologists to define religion in terms of belief and cultural meaning and to separate these issues from problems of power. Religion, he argues, must be construed as ‘a concrete set of practical rules attached to specific processes of power and knowledge’.¹⁵² This almost certainly gives too little weight to religion's symbolic dimension—Asad has Clifford Geertz in his sights—but it points up the inapplicability of the contemporary western ideas about religion to many cultures of the past. Ideas of the transcendent—of the divine as standing apart from the cosmos—for example are absent from many of the world's leading religions, including those of the Greeks, Romans and Chinese. The many-centred cults of Chinese religion are not usefully thought of as coherent systems of beliefs or symbols: indeed for China's rulers, belief, far from being the ground of social action, was construed as the expression of the correct performance of ritual.¹⁵³ The modern conception of religion fits Islam much better: here there was a word for religion—dn—yet it related to how one lives more than to what one believes. ‘The virtuous Muslim is not an autonomous individual who assents to a series of universalizable maxims but an individual inhabiting the moral space shared by all who are bound to God (the umma).’¹⁵⁴ Asad thus argues that coherence in religious systems derives not from symbols but from acts of power by which authoritative institutions enforce standardized interpretations. What matters, he argues, is ‘how authorizing processes represent practices, utterances or dispositions so that they can be discursively related to general (cosmic) ideas of order.¹⁵⁵ The relevance of this perspective to the study of superstition is obvious. As we saw in relation to the medieval Church, its authorizing processes ranged over a wide domain, including the repudiation or appropriation of pagan beliefs and practices, the legitimation of saints, shrines, and relics, as well as the designation of certain beliefs and practices as superstitio. In determining the boundaries of legitimate belief, superstitio was a critical means used by the Church to buttress its authority to determine truth from error. That the subtlety of its distinctions between, say, superstitio and heresy or, in the post-Tridentine Church, between sacraments and sacramentals, may have been lost on the faithful, does not invalidate the general point. Whether Asad is correct to reject religion entirely as a category of analysis is more moot. In an argument analogous to Clark's on magic, he argues that religion is not an analytical category, since it abstracts a set of practices from their historical context and subsumes them into a speciously universalist concept. Yet the fact that one falls back into using the term ‘religion’, even if in scare quotes, suggests that, as with magic, there are certain family resemblances between activities centred on supernatural beings and forces across different cultures.

4) Superstition and rationality
The modern conception of superstition seizes on irrationality as its defining characteristic, whether that is understood to mean a faulty understanding of the operation of cause and effect, a failure to distinguish appearance from reality, a failure to apply inductive reasoning, or simple ignorance. Just as study of superstition illuminates the processes whereby the category of religion was constituted in past societies, so it can shed light on past societies’ understanding of what is reasonable and their criteria of rationality. In the modern West rationality is a very broad term whose connotations range from formal notions of efficiency and consistency to substantive notions of autonomy or self-determination.¹⁵⁶ Analytical philosophers tend to define the concept narrowly to denote the rules of logic and the constraints of consistency, coherence and non-contradiction in argument. Social scientists and philosophers disagree as to whether this conception of rationality has universal applicability. The late Richard Rorty was an eloquent exponent of the view that what counts as rational is entirely determined by the language and culture of a particular community, and that the modern scientific conception of rationality is one conception among many, neither better nor worse than its competitors.¹⁵⁷ Peter Winch argued similarly that there is no ‘norm for intelligibility in general’: ‘criteria of logic ... are only intelligible in the context of ways of living or modes of social life.’¹⁵⁸ What counts as a good reason, in other words, is particular to context: Galileo relied on observation and experiment, Bellarmine relied on scripture. By contrast, scholars such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Ernest Gellner and Steven Lukes argue in different ways that rationality is a substantive concept, relating to rules of logic and inference and to values of consistency and non-contradiction, that has analytical applicability to other cultures.¹⁵⁹ Historians may feel sympathetic to contextualists such as Rorty or Winch, insofar as they know that standards of rationality in the past societies are grounded in values, norms, and expectations very different from our own. This is not, however, necessarily to concede the argument to contextualists. Charles Taylor, for example, recognizes that the opponents of Galileo had good reason for their beliefs, grounded as they were in fundamental assumptions about the ordering of the cosmos, yet he insists that a substantive distinction can be made between ‘atheoretical cultures’, where understanding the universe and attunement to it are inseparable, and modern scientific culture, where understanding and attunement are entirely dissociated. Moreover, he insists that modern scientific culture is self-evidently more effective in understanding and manipulating nature, although its claims for understanding the meaning of existence are by no means self-evidently superior.¹⁶⁰ From a different angle, MacIntyre argues that however much an investigator may seek to privilege native categories of thought and criteria of rationality, at best he or she can do so only in dialectical engagement with the categories of understanding he or she has inherited.¹⁶¹ Alan Knight addresses this issue in his chapter.

The relevance of the rationality debate to the study of superstition lies in the fact that the latter, in illuminating the grounds on which champions of orthodoxy demean or debar forms of knowledge, reveals deeper criteria according to which a particular society deems something to be reasonable. In medieval Europe, Richard Kieckhefer argues that people saw magic as entirely rational: first, because it actually worked, that is, its efficacy was demonstrated by evidence recognized within the culture as authentic; and secondly, because its workings were governed by principles—of theology or of physics—that could be coherently articulated.¹⁶² In China, as in classical Greece, there were thinkers who are often classed as ‘rationalists’—although whether that is legitimate is touched on in T. H. Barrett's paper. The philosopher Wang Chong (27–c.100 CE), for example, scoffed at the idea that one could determine the will of Heaven by divination with stalks and ridiculed shamans for practising deceit on simple people.¹⁶³ Yet the principal criterion of reasonableness in imperial Chinese culture had little to do with understandings of causality in nature: rather it was concerned with how a particular belief or practice stood in relation to the ‘right and correct teaching’ (zheng) of the state, more specifically, to the Confucian ‘doctrine of propriety and ritual’ (lijiao). Categories of yin—understood as illicit or excessive—and xie - understood as outright heterodoxy—were defined in respect of the extent to which they deviated from correct teaching.¹⁶⁴ Rationality thus had little to do with rules of logic or non-contradiction in argument (which is not to say that these went unrecognized), and very much to do with Winch's ‘ways of living or modes of social life’. Such ‘context-dependent’ rationalities,¹⁶⁵ while not meeting contemporary criteria of scientificity, could nevertheless accommodate naturalistic understandings of cause and effect or of inductive reasoning quite comfortably. E. E. Evans-Pritchard famously argued that witch beliefs among the Azande are explanations that supplement rather than deny natural causation. When a granary collapses on the men taking shelter beneath it, no one questions that this is due to termites eating through the poles on which it stands. But they point out that this does not explain why it fell on those particular men at that particular time.¹⁶⁶ Magic and superstition can work perfectly well in tandem with scientific modes of thought, since they serve better to explain the specificity of cause, and this remains as true in the contemporary West as among the Azande in the 1930s.

5) Elite versus popular
We have seen that the category of superstition was central to the articulation of relations between, on the one hand, the official, the orthodox, and the clerical and, on the other, the popular, folk, or lay. There was often a significant disjunction between these two levels, as many of our essays reveal: men (be they Dominican friars or Communist cadres) trained to uphold a textual tradition and oriented towards abstraction, came face to face with an unlettered populace, oriented to the world in more immediate, concrete ways. In classical Rome superstitio was already strongly associated with the vulgus; and following the fusion of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the landed Gallo-Roman aristocracy in the fourth and fifth centuries, the distinction between privileged elites and the common people was sharpened, so that paganus, which meant ‘pagan’ by the fifth century, eventually produced the French words for ‘peasant’ (paysan) and ‘pagan’ (païen). In medieval Europe, superstitio continued to be strongly associated with rustici, pauperes, populares and vetulae (wretched old women), suggesting that elite discourse was permeated as much by male chauvinism as by class condescension.¹⁶⁷ This comes across clearly in Stephen Bowd's paper. In the discourse of superstition, rural folk generally, and women in particular, were overwhelmingly the target of elite scorn. Later, in a different way, the trope of survivalism within the discipline of folklore would reinforce this bias towards the rural.¹⁶⁸

Historical study of superstition, however, provides as many challenges to the elite-popular distinction as it does endorsements of it. According to Peter Brown, the distinction between elite and popular religion was a product of the Enlightenment; David Hume, in particular, arguing that the popular classes were intellectually incapable of appreciating God's design in the rational universe, since their inability to think abstractly caused them to personalize as gods the unknown forces that governed their condition.¹⁶⁹ Several of our contributors are rightly cautious about counterposing elite to popular religion, not least because local elites themselves often subscribed to beliefs and practices castigated as superstitious by the defenders of orthodoxy. In medieval England, for example, the educated were as likely as the uneducated to use bits of paper on which prayers were written as charms.¹⁷⁰ Often we appear to be looking not at ‘popular’ variations or deviations from orthodox practice, but at ‘local’ or ‘vernacular’ practice. William Christian has advocated abandoning the term ‘popular religion’ in favour of ‘local religion’, which he defines as a style of religion shared by members of all social classes within a particular locale. In this view, local religion was not a ‘little tradition’ but a localization of the ‘great tradition’.¹⁷¹ As this formulation suggests, the relationship between the official and the local was by no means always one of opposition: local believers adjusted official doctrine and ritual to fit their needs and might find it in their interests to cooperate with the representatives of the ‘great tradition’.¹⁷² Secondly, even an official/local distinction may simplify reality in too dichotomous a fashion. As Tim Barrett shows in his paper, the terminology referring to ‘licentious cults’ in late Han China was not presented in terms of a two-tier distinction, but in terms of a gradation of religious observances appropriate to one's place in the social order. A similar linkage of religious practice to gradations of social status was apparent in the classical world. Thirdly, agency in the relationship between the official and the local/popular was by no means always top-down, that is, a straightforward matter of elites seeking to suppress or reform local belief and practice. Even in the long term, elites were not guaranteed to prevail in contests with popular practice. In Poland, for example, house sprites (domowe) were condemned as a species of inferior devil during the Counter-Reformation, yet by the nineteenth century the Church had been forced to embrace them, reclassifying them as guardian angels.¹⁷³ In thinking about superstition, then, we are not always dealing with a two-tiered, top-down relationship but with what Jean-Claude Schmitt calls a model of ‘multiple poles and complex relations’, with ‘local theatres of ambition and conflict that bring into play a particular segment of society.’¹⁷⁴

6) Superstition and modernity
Finally, we turn to the question of whether the onset of modernity leads to a decline in superstition; and if so, what the intellectual, technological, and social factors are that underpin any such decline. If we consider superstition in the narrow sense defined at the outset, and from the vantage point of the developed world, then Steve Roud is undoubtedly correct to conclude that: ‘As a society we are immeasurably less superstitious than we used to be. We do not know so many superstitions, we do not believe so deeply, we do not act upon them so much, and the ones we still possess have been generally sanitised.’¹⁷⁵ The advance of modern science has discredited once widespread ideas that occult forces are operative in nature and that the supernatural regularly intervenes in the world. More generally, it has led to a scaling down of religion's claims to explain the realm of nature with respect to a whole range of issues such as the origins of the universe, the Earth and of mankind. The advance of science, however, has not led to the complete discrediting of religion: rather it has forced a redefinition of its sphere of competence from all-encompassing cosmology to a discourse concerned with questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. Moreover, it is not the scientific account of the world per se that has weakened supernatural understandings of the cosmos so much as the application of science to the natural and social worlds. The rise of modern farming methods, for example, means that in the developed world, at least, there is less need to worry about the potentially catastrophic effects of drought, floods, or invasions of pests, so magical practices concerned with protecting and ensuring the fertility of crops and livestock have been marginalized or else have vanished. Technology, however, cannot be separated from the wider socio-economic changes that have accompanied the rise of industrial capitalism. Keith Thomas, whilst arguing that magic first came under pressure from more coherent intellectual currents such as empiricism and rationalism, nevertheless attributed its decline primarily to socio-economic factors such as the growth of urban living, the spread of an ideology of self-help and increased control of the environment.¹⁷⁶ Thus the decline of superstitions associated with farming, for example, has been due not simply to the application of modern farming methods, it also reflects the steep decline in the numbers in the developed world who gain their livelihood from the land. The break-up of self-contained rural communities and the shift of population from the countryside to the towns have destroyed the contexts in which superstitious beliefs and practices connected with the agricultural and calendrical cycles once thrived.

That said, it is a moot point whether the modern world—menaced as it is by the threats of environmental or nuclear annihilation—is self-evidently a less risky place than the pre-modern world. As Anthony Giddens puts it: ‘For hundreds of years, people worried about what nature could do to us—earthquakes, floods, plagues, bad harvests and so on. At some point, somewhere over the past fifty years, we stopped worrying so much about what nature could do to us and started worrying about what we have done to nature.’¹⁷⁷ Certainly, those in the developed capitalist world live longer and healthier lives than their forebears, but any enhanced sense of security may be offset by an enhanced sense of risk, brought about by the hectic pace of change to which our lives and environment are subject. To take one example: although the advance of modern medicine and the decline of epidemic disease have greatly improved our chances of living relatively healthy lives, the threat of disease or of a life-threatening accident are not ones against which we can calculate or control. Moreover the inherent complexities of modern medicine, combined with the fact that medical experts frequently disagree, mean that feelings of uncertainty about the efficacy of treatment or perceptions of risk attached to treatment and its side effects remain entrenched. It is thus not accidental that healthcare is an area where alternative therapies based on notions that conflict with western biomedicine flourish. Nor, more fundamentally, does science provide an answer to ethical questions or the ultimate questions of existence. And if we think of superstition in the broader sense—as beliefs and practices that conflict with the canons of scientific rationality—then the Enlightenment prognosis of a steady advance of reason and social progress looks much less persuasive. Writing of the urban legends—alligators in the New York sewers, the vanishing hitchhiker, spiked Coca Cola—that proliferate in the USA today, Linda Dégh writes of an ‘irrationality explosion’.¹⁷⁸ Yet it is one that exists within a social world that is fundamentally organized by science and instrumental rationality. So whilst superstition in the narrow sense—those myriad beliefs and practices that have been traditionally mobilized to deflect harm or promote good—may have declined in the developed world, it is not self-evident that superstition in the wider sense of beliefs that conflict with science and rationality has been decisively eroded by the intellectual, technological, and socio-economic changes we associate with modernity.¹⁷⁹ Modernity has dramatically increased our understanding of the conditions under which we live and, in many respects, at least in the developed world, has immeasurably increased socio-economic security, but in key areas of personal and social life we continue to live with risk and uncertainty and we continue to search for meaning beyond the sphere of quotidian existence. Indeed superstition, once associated with a world peopled by too many gods, may persist in part as a stubborn response to a world robbed of gods.

In the last analysis, however, we must be critical not only of seeing superstition as a kind of hangover from the traditional world but also of a binary way of thinking that sees modernity and superstition as fundamentally antithetical. Certainly, superstition has served as a powerful counterpoint to modernity, a foil against which modernity can be conceptualized. Yet as we saw in relation to the dependent societies of the ‘south’ and their encounter with globalized capitalism, in reality magic and the supernatural may be constitutive elements of modernity. Superstition, rather than being modernity's ‘Other’, is frequently inextricably entangled and complicit with it. Moreover, it is not only in the dependent societies of the south that modernity generates the opacities of power it is supposed to render transparent. As already noted, few of us understand the ‘magic’ of modern medicine or the communication technologies that govern our lives. More crucially, modernity produces its own forms of enchantment. We are all aware, for example, of the ways in which advertising promotes consumption through a kind of associative magic that invests products with powers and qualities they do not have. Similarly, modernity produces enchantment in the concealments of state power so ably discussed by Robin Derby, or in the ways that markets and commodities fetishize social relations, or in the wonders of modern technology, not least in computer-simulated virtual worlds. At best, then, Weber's ‘disenchantment of the world’ has been a highly uneven process. It may yet prove to characterize the general direction of global historical developments, but it could turn out that modernity is but the latest stage in an ongoing cycle of disenchantment or re-enchantment.¹⁸⁰

	Notes

Top The development of the... Some analytical issues Notes

 
¹ From H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds), Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London, 1970), 155, 139.

² Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts (Cambridge, 2004), 7.

³ The Times, 15 May 2004.

⁴ The title of the conference placed the word ‘superstition’ in inverted commas to signal that it was to be understood as a category of ascription. This is the sense in which the term is used in this introduction. It would be tedious, however, to put the term in inverted commas throughout.

⁵ Dr Yahya Michot presented a paper to the conference on ‘Superstition Between Entertainment and Religion: Ibn Taymiyya's Viewpoint’ which will be published elsewhere.

⁶ Collins English Dictionary: Complete and Unabridged, 6th edn (Glasgow, 2003), 1619.

⁷ The phrase is taken from Mary O’Neil, ‘Superstition’ in Mircea Eliade (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Religion (16 vols.), vol. 14 (London, 1987), 165.

⁸ Steve Roud, The Penguin Guide to Superstitions of Britain and Ireland (London, 2003), x, xii.

⁹ I use the term ‘category of ascription’, rather than, say, ‘category of attribution’ or ‘category of evaluation’, because in social theory ascription is a term generally encountered in discussions of social status, for example, in debate about ‘achieved’ versus ‘ascribed’ status. My use of the term is intended to signal that the attribution of the label ‘superstitious’ is not only about policing the boundaries of acceptable knowledge but also about the production and negotiation of status between differentially empowered groups.

¹⁰ Jean-Claude Schmitt, ‘Les superstitions’, in Jacques le Goff (ed.), Histoire de la France religieuse, vol. 1 (Paris, 1988), 423.

¹¹ Dale B. Martin, Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians (Cambridge MA, 2004), 76–7.

¹² Denise Grodzynski, ‘Superstitio’, Revue des études anciennes, 76 (Jan–Jun 1974), 39.

¹³ Cicero, ‘On the Nature of the Gods’, 2.28. Cited in Martin, Inventing Superstition, 130.

¹⁴ Martin, Inventing Superstition, 131.

¹⁵ Grodzynski, ‘Superstitio’, 47.

¹⁶ Martin, Inventing Superstition, 2.

¹⁷ M. Salzman, ‘Superstitio in the Codex Theodosianus and the Persecution of Pagans’, Vigiliae Christianae, 41 (1987), 172.

¹⁸ Frank Trombley, ‘Overview: the Geographical Spread of Christianity’ in Margaret M. Mitchell and Frances M. Young (eds), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 1, Origins to Constantine (Cambridge, 2006), 313.

¹⁹ Schmitt, ‘Les superstitions’, 430.

²⁰ Salzman, ‘Superstitio’, 176.

²¹ Dieter Harmening, Superstitio: Uberlieferungs- und theoriegeschichtliche Untersuchtungen zur kirchlich-theologischen Aberglaubensliteratur des Mittelalters (Berlin, 1979), 305–8.

²² De Doctrina Christiana, 2: 20. St Augustine, The Confessions, The City of God, On Christian Doctrine, 2nd edn (Chicago, 1990), 728.

²³ Ramsay Macmullen Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven, 1997), 158.

²⁴ Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, 1991), 308, 205, 267, 213.

²⁵ Ian N. Wood, ‘Pagan Religions and Superstitions East of the Rhine from the Fifth to the Ninth Centuries’, in G. Ausenda (ed.), After Empire: Towards an Ethnology of Europe's Barbarians (Woodbridge, 1995), 253–68.

²⁶ Karen Jolly, ‘Medieval Magic: Definitions, Beliefs, Practices’, in Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Brian P. Levack, and Roy Porter (eds), Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: the Middle Ages (London, 2002), 17.

²⁷ Peter Dinzelbacher, ‘Superstition’, in Richard Golden (ed), The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: the Western Tradition (Santa Barbara, 2006), 4, 1091–2.

²⁸ Michael D. Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe: A Concise History from Antiquity to the Present (Lanham, MA, 2007), 69, 91.

²⁹ Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus 750–1200 (London, 1996), 230.

³⁰ Daniel H. Kaiser, ‘Quotidian Orthodoxy’, in Valerie A. Kivelson and Robert H. Greene (eds), Orthodox Russia: Belief and Practice Under the Tsars (University Park PA, 2003), 179–92.

³¹ Robert O. Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy, 1304–1613 (London, 1987), 119; Russell Zguta, Russian Minstrels: A History of the Skoromokhi (University Park PA, 1978), 61.

³² Mark R. Woodward, ‘Popular Religion’, in John L. Esposito (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, (New York, 2001), 336–8.

³³ Toufic Fahd, La divination arabe: études religieuses, sociologiques et folkloriques sur le milieu natif d'Islam (Leiden, 1966).

³⁴ T. Fahd, ‘Rukya (Charms)’ Encyclopaedia of Islam VIII: 600a; Ph. Marçais, ‘Ayn (Evil Eye)’, ibid., VIII: 600a; T. Fahd, ‘Fa’l’ (Omens)’, ibid.: II: 758b.

³⁵ Rafiuddin Ahmed, ‘Popular Religion in South Asia’, in Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, 346–50.

³⁶ It is not without irony that Ibn Taymiyya should himself become the target 350 years later of another scourge of the superstitious, Pierre Bayle, who accused him of reinforcing ‘sotte credulité’ because of his hostility to the translation into Arabic of the Greek philosophers. Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man, 1670-1752 (Oxford, 2006), 621.

³⁷ Frederick M. Denny, ‘ "God's Friends": the Sanctity of Persons in Islam’, in Richard Kieckhefer and George D. Bond (eds), Sainthood: its Manifestations in World Religions (Berkeley, 1988), 77.

³⁸ Kwang-ching Liu, ‘Introduction’ in Kwang-Ching Liu (ed.), Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China, (Berkeley, 1990), 4–5.

³⁹ Richard Shek, ‘Taoism and Orthodoxy: the Loyal and Filial Sect’ in Kwang-Ching Liu and Richard Shek (eds), Heterodoxy in Late Imperial China (Honolulu, 2004), 149.

⁴⁰ Paul R. Katz, ‘Taoism and Local Cults: A Case Study of Marshal Wen’, in Kwang-Ching Liu and Richard Shek, Heterodoxy in Late Imperial China (Honolulu, 2004), 175, 196.

⁴¹ Romeyn Taylor, ‘Official Religion in the Ming’, in Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote (eds), Cambridge History of China, vol. 8, part 2, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644 (Cambridge, 1998), 886–9.

⁴² Donald S. Sutton, ‘Shamanism in the Eyes of Ming and Qing Elites’, in Kwang-Ching Liu and Richard Shek (eds), Heterodoxy in Late Imperial China (Honolulu, 2004), 209–37.

⁴³ Katz, ‘Taoism’, 229. See Peter Burke on the loss of biculturalism of the elites: Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978), 280–1.

⁴⁴ Bailey, Magic and Superstition, 77–9.

⁴⁵ Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1990), 12, 183.

⁴⁶ St Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, vol. 40, Superstition and Irreverence, eds Thomas F. O’Meara and Michael J. Duffy (London, 1968), 5.

⁴⁷ Aquinas, Summa, 85.

⁴⁸ Harmening, Superstitio, 33–42.

⁴⁹ Bailey, Magic and Superstition, 127.

⁵⁰ Bailey, Magic and Superstition, 165.

⁵¹ Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts, 88, 131; Alison Rowlands, Witchcraft Narratives in Germany: Rothenburg, 1561–1652 (Manchester, 2003).

⁵² Jean Delumeau, ‘Les reformateurs et la superstition’, in Actes du colloque L’Amiral de Coligny et son temps, (Paris, 1974), 451–87.

⁵³ Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: the Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997).

⁵⁴ Carlos M. N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge, 1986).

⁵⁵ Willem Frijhoff, ‘Popular Religion’, in Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett (eds), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 7, Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution, 1660–1815 (Cambridge, 2006), 188–9.

⁵⁶ Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe's House Divided, 1490–1700 (London, 2003), xxiv.

⁵⁷ Clark, Thinking with Demons, 474.

⁵⁸ Mary R. O’Neill, ‘Sacerdote ovvero strione: Ecclesiastical and Superstitious Remedies in 16th Century Italy’, in Steven L. Kaplan (ed.), Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Berlin, 1984), 60.

⁵⁹ Bernard Dompnier, ‘Les hommes d’Église et la superstition entre XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’ in B. Dompnier (ed.), La Superstition à l’âge des Lumières (Paris, 1998), 13.

⁶⁰ Dompnier, ‘Les hommes d’Église’, 23–4.

⁶¹ Robert O. Crummey, ‘Ecclesiastical Elites and Popular Belief in Seventeenth-Century Russia’, in James D. Tracey and Marguerite Ragnow (eds), Religion and the Early Modern State (Cambridge, 2004), 55–9.

⁶² Paul Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia: the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford, 1992).

⁶³ Valerie A. Kivelson and Robert H. Greene, ‘Introduction’, in Kivelson and Greene (eds), Orthodox Russia, 8.

⁶⁴ Bailey, Magic and Superstition, 173–4.

⁶⁵ Andrew Fox, ‘Balthasar Bekker’ in Richard Golden (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: the Western Tradition (Santa Barbara, 2006), vol. 1, 106–7.

⁶⁶ Gábor Klaniczay, The Uses of Supernatural Power: The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1990), 171.

⁶⁷ Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1997), 3. For a defence of the scientific revolution thesis, see Richard S. Westfall, ‘The Scientific Revolution Reasserted’, in Margaret J. Osler (ed.), Rethinking the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 2000), 41–58.

⁶⁸ Bailey, Magic and Superstition, 204; Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton NJ, 1983), 271, 268.

⁶⁹ Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London, 2001), 4.

⁷⁰ Anthony McKenna, ‘Bayle et la superstition’, in Dompnier (ed.), La Superstition à l’âge des Lumières, 49–65.

⁷¹ Roy Porter, ‘Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment, Romantic and Liberal Thought’, in Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Brian Levack, and Roy Porter (eds), History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, vol. 5, The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, (London, 1999), 222.

⁷² Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 97.

⁷³ Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (New York, 2001), 11.

⁷⁴ Helena Rosenblatt, ‘The Christian Enlightenment’ in Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett (eds), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 7, Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution, 1660-1815 (Cambridge, 2006), 283–301.

⁷⁵ Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (London, 2006), 224.

⁷⁶ Emmet Kennedy, A Cultural History of the French Revolution (New Haven, 1989), 344, 360–1.

⁷⁷ Philippe Bourdin, ‘Révolution et superstition: L’exemple du Puy-de-Dôme’, in Dompnier (ed.), La Superstition à l’âge des Lumières, 213, 234.

⁷⁸ Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge MA, 1988), 270.

⁷⁹ Tom Paine, The Age of Reason (London, 1938), ch. 1.

⁸⁰ Teodor Shanin, ‘The Question of Socialism: A Development Failure or an Ethical Defeat?, History Workshop, 30 (1990), 68–74.

⁸¹ Friedrich Engels, ‘Natural Science and the Spirit World’ (1878) in The Dialectics of Nature (London, 1940).

⁸² Nils Freytag, ‘Witchcraft, Witch Doctors and the Fight against "Superstition" in Nineteenth-Century Germany’ in Willem de Blécourt and Owen Davies (eds), Witchcraft Continued: Popular Magic in Modern Europe (Manchester, 2004), 29–45.

⁸³ Freytag, ‘Witchcraft’, 33–5.

⁸⁴ David Blackburn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany (Oxford, 1993), 45–9. In France, too, the Church selectively supported miracles, prophecies, and local cults in its war against rationalism and free-thinking. Thomas A. Kselman, Miracles and Prophesies in Nineteenth-Century France (New Brunswick NJ, 1983), ch. 7; Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (London, 1999), 212–14. These authors all stress the ‘feminization’ of Catholicism as an element in this shift away from rationalism.

⁸⁵ Eve Levin, ‘False Miracles and Unattested Dead Bodies: Investigations into Popular Cults in Early Modern Russia’ in James D. Tracy and Marguerite Ragnow (eds), Religion and the Early Modern State: Views from China, Russia and the West (Cambridge, 2004), 257.

⁸⁶ Christine Worobec, Possessed: Women, Witches and Demons in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, 2001), 29.

⁸⁷ E. B. Smilianskaia, Volshebniki, bogokhul’niki, eretiki: narodnaia religioznost’ i ‘dukhovnye prestupleniia’ v Rossii XVIIIv. (Moscow, 2003), 15.

⁸⁸ Simon Dixon, ‘The Russian Orthodox Church in Imperial Russia, 1721–1917’, in Angold (ed.), Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 5, 328.

⁸⁹ Gregory Freeze, ‘Institutionalizing Piety: The Church and Popular Religion, 1750–1850’, in Jane Burbank and David L. Ransel (eds), Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire (Bloomington IN, 1998), 236.

⁹⁰ Nadieszda Kizienko, A Prodigal Saint: St John of Kronstadt and the Russian People (University Park PA, 2000), 285.

⁹¹ Frijhoff, ‘Popular Religion’, 204.

⁹² Burke, Popular Culture, 11.

⁹³ Porter, ‘Witchcraft and Magic’, 265.

⁹⁴ George Laurence Gomme, Folklore as an Historical Science (London, 1908), 157.

⁹⁵ Porter, ‘Witchcraft and Magic’, 266.

⁹⁶ Gustav Jahoda, The Psychology of Superstition (London, 1969), 99–100.

⁹⁷ Charles Stewart, Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture (Princeton, 1991), 9.

⁹⁸ Gerald Figal, Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan (Durham NC, 1999).

⁹⁹ Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago, 1995), 86, 73.

¹⁰⁰ Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Actions, 1780-1850 (Madison, 1964), 496.

¹⁰¹ See, for example, the valuable work by the French Jesuit, Henri Doré, Recherches sur les superstitions en Chine, 18 vols. (Shanghai, 1911–38).

¹⁰² Harry G. West, Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique (Chicago, 2005), 126.

¹⁰³ John and Jean Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, 1991), 18.

¹⁰⁴ West, Kupilikula, 126.

¹⁰⁵ Matthew Butler, ‘Revolution and the Ritual Year: Religious Innovation and Conflict in Cristero Mexico’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 38:3 (August 2006), 465–90; Adrian Bantjes, ‘Burning Saints, Molding Minds: Iconoclasm, Civic Ritual and the Failed Cultural Revolution’, in William H. Beezley, Cheryl English Martin, and William E. French (eds), Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico, (Wilmington DE, 1994), 261–84.

¹⁰⁶ Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii, f.17, op.69, d.438, ll.9–14.

¹⁰⁷ S. A. Smith, ‘The First Soviet Generation: Children and Religious Belief in Soviet Russia, 1917–41’, in Stephen Lovell (ed.), Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe (Palgrave, 2007), 79–100.

¹⁰⁸ Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin (Oxford, 1996), ch. 2; Steve Smith, ‘Heavenly Letters and Tales of the Forest: "Superstition" against Bolsherism’, Forum for Anthropology and Culture, 2 (2005), 316–39.

¹⁰⁹ E. Perovskii, ‘Antireligioznoe vospitanie v shkole: ob ateisticheskikh i religioznykh predstavelenii detei’, Religioznik, 1935, no.1, 26–31.

¹¹⁰ Michael Froggatt, ‘Science in Propaganda and Popular Culture in the USSR under Khrushchev (1953–64)’, PhD, Oxford University, 2005, 60.

¹¹¹ Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham MA, 2003), 103–22.

¹¹² Helen Hardacre, Shinto and the State, 1868-1988 (Princeton, 1991).

¹¹³ Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford, 2004), 121.

¹¹⁴ Vincent Goossaert, ‘1898: The Beginning of the End for Chinese Religion?’ Journal of Asian Studies, 65:2 (May 2006), 311.

¹¹⁵ Goossaert, ‘1898’, 322.

¹¹⁶ Daniel W. Y. Kwok, Scientism in Chinese Thought, 1900–1950 (New Haven, 1965).

¹¹⁷ Rebecca Nedostup, ‘Religion, Superstition and Governing Society in Nationalist China’, Columbia University PhD, 2001, ch. 6.

¹¹⁸ Shanghai shi zhinan (Shanghai, 1933), 141–2.

¹¹⁹ Vincent Goossaert, ‘Le destin de la religion chinoise au 20ème siècle’, Social Compass, 50: 4 (2003), 436.

¹²⁰ Todd Sanders and Harry G. West, ‘Power Revealed and Concealed in the New World Order’, in Harry G. West and Todd Sanders (eds), Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order (Durham NC, 2003), 16.

¹²¹ Sanders and West, ‘Power Revealed’, 7.

¹²² Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (Charlottesville VA, 1997).

¹²³ Elizabeth Isichei, Voices of the Poor in Africa (Rochester NY, 2002); James Kiernan, ‘Introduction’, in James Kiernan (ed.), The Power of the Occult in Modern Africa (Berlin, 2006), 1–18.

¹²⁴ L. F. Janssen, ‘ "Superstitio" and the Persecution of Christians’, Vigiliae Christianae, 33 (1979), 134.

¹²⁵ Stephen Wilson, The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-Modern Europe (London, 2000), xvii.

¹²⁶ James G. Frazer, The Magic Art (2 vols), vol. 1, (London, 1902), ch. 3.

¹²⁷ Roger Bastide, Éléments de sociologie religieuse (Paris, 1935).

¹²⁸ Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert, ‘Introduction a l’analyse de quelques phénomènes religieux’, Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres, vol. 1, (Paris, 1968), 22–6.

¹²⁹ Clark, Thinking with Demons, 216.

¹³⁰ T. Fahd, ‘Sihr (Magic)’ Encyclopaedia of Islam, (CD Rom) (Leiden, 2002), IX: 567b.

¹³¹ J. J. M. de Groot, The Religion of the Chinese (Westport CT, 1980; orig. 1912), 56–7.

¹³² Henry Doré S.J., Researches into Chinese Superstitions, trans. M. Kennelly, S.J., vol. 5 (Taipei, 1966; orig.1918), xiii; Ibid., vol. 4 (Taipei, 1966; orig. 1917), 478.

¹³³ Hsiao-Tung Fei, Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley, (London, 1939), 166–7.

¹³⁴ ‘Pixian Xipu gongshe fengjian mixin huodong de qingkuang’ [‘Report on feudal superstitious activities in Xipu Commune in Pi County] 10 Jan. 1963, Sichuan Provincial Archive, 29–99.

¹³⁵ Stanley J. Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge, 1990), 82.

¹³⁶ Judith Devlin, The Superstitious Mind. French Peasants and the Supernatural in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, 1987), 54.

¹³⁷ Hildred Geertz and Keith Thomas, ‘An Anthropology of Religion and Magic: Two Views’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 6 (1975), 71–110.

¹³⁸ Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971), 761–2.

¹³⁹ Willem de Blécourt, ‘On the Continuation of Witchcraft’, in Willem de Blécourt and Owen Davies (eds), Witchcraft Continued: Popular Magic in Modern Europe (Manchester, 2004), 337–8.

¹⁴⁰ Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘Anthropology’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, First supplementary volume (London and New York, 1926), 132.

¹⁴¹ Stuart A. Vyse, Believing in Magic: the Psychology of Superstition (Oxford, 1997).

¹⁴² Gustav Jahoda, The Psychology of Superstition (London, 1969), 146.

¹⁴³ Jean Piaget, The Child's Conception of the World (London, 1929), 169–70; Piaget, ‘Causality and the Child’ in Howard E. Gruber and J.Jacques Vonèche (eds), The Essential Piaget (London, 1977), 138–46.

¹⁴⁴ B. F. Skinner, ‘ "Superstition" in the Pigeon’, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38 (1947), 168–172.

¹⁴⁵ Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 6, Psychopathology of Everyday Life (London, 1960), 257.

¹⁴⁶ Roger Money-Kyrle, Superstition and Society (London, 1939), 91.

¹⁴⁷ Nicole Belmont, ‘Superstition et religion populaire dans les sociétés occidentales’ in M. Izard and Pierre Smith (eds), La Fonction symbolique: essais d’anthropologie (Paris, 1979), 53–70. For pioneering works that apply psychoanalytical perspectives to the history of witchcraft, see Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil (London, 1994); John Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (New York, 1982).

¹⁴⁸ Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (London, 1962).

¹⁴⁹ Maria Misra, Vishnu's Crowded Temple: India since the Great Rebellion (London, 2007), 70–2.

¹⁵⁰ Gyan Prakash, ‘Between Science and Superstition: Religion and the Modern Subject of the Nation in Colonial India’ in Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels (eds), Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment (Stanford, 2003), 41, 45.

¹⁵¹ James Edward Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution (Princeton, 1993).

¹⁵² Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, 1993), 42.

¹⁵³ Evelyn Rawski, ‘A Historian's Approach to Chinese Death Ritual’ in James L. Watson and Evelyn S. Rawski (eds), Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China (Berkeley, 1988), 28.

¹⁵⁴ Asad, Genealogies, 219.

¹⁵⁵ Asad, Genealogies, 37.

¹⁵⁶ Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge, 1983), 1.

¹⁵⁷ Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge, 1991).

¹⁵⁸ Peter Winch, Idea of a Social Science (London, 1963), 100–1.

¹⁵⁹ See the essays in Bryan R. Wilson (ed.), Rationality (Oxford, 1974).

¹⁶⁰ Charles Taylor, ‘Rationality’, in Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (eds), Rationality and Relativism (Oxford, 1982), 87–105.

¹⁶¹ Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘The Idea of a Social Science’ in Wilson, Rationality, 128–30.

¹⁶² Richard Kieckhefer, ‘The Specific Rationality of Medieval Magic’, American Historical Review, 99:3 (1994), 813–36.

¹⁶³ Michael Loewe, ‘The Religious and Intellectual Background’ in Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe (eds), Cambridge History of China, vol. 1, The Ch’in and Han Empires, 221BC – AD220 (Cambridge, 1986), 673, 681–2.

¹⁶⁴ Richard Shek, ‘The Alternative Moral Universe of Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China’, in James D. Tracy and Marguerite Ragnow (eds), Religion and the Early Modern State (Cambridge, 2004), 15.

¹⁶⁵ Steven Lukes, ‘Some Problems about Rationality’, in Wilson, Rationality, 194–213.

¹⁶⁶ E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged with introduction by Eva Gillies (Oxford, 1976), 22.

¹⁶⁷ Pierre Boglioni, ‘Le sopravvivenze pagane nel medioevo’ in Peter Slater (ed.), Traditions in Contact and Change. Selected Proceedings of the XIV Congress of the International Association of the History of Religions (Waterloo, 1983), 350.

¹⁶⁸ On charms, spells, mascots, and amulets in the London borough of Southwark, see Sarah Williams, ‘Urban Popular Religion and the Rites of Passage’, in Hugh McLeod (ed.), European Religion in the Age of Great Cities, 1830–1930 (London, 1995), 216–38.

¹⁶⁹ Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints (Chicago, 1981), 13–15.

¹⁷⁰ Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, 1994), 266–9.

¹⁷¹ William Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton NJ, 1981).

¹⁷² E. Badone, ‘Introduction’, in Ellen Badone (ed.), Religious Orthodoxy and Popular Faith in European Society (Princeton NJ, 1990), 5.

¹⁷³ A. C. Schiffmann, ‘The Witch and Crime: the Persecution of Witches in Twentieth-Century Poland’, ARV: Scandinavian Yearbook of Folklore, 43 (1987), 147–65.

¹⁷⁴ Jean-Claude Schmitt, Le corps, les rites, les rêves, le temps: essais d’anthropologie médiévale, (Paris, 2001), 19.

¹⁷⁵ Roud, Penguin Guide, xviii.

¹⁷⁶ Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 769–74.

¹⁷⁷ Anthony Giddens, ‘Risk and Responsibility’, Modern Law Review, 62:1 (1999), 3.

¹⁷⁸ Linda Dégh, Legend and Belief: Dialectics of a Folklore Genre (Bloomington IN, 2001), 21.

¹⁷⁹ For some statistics on the extent of superstitious belief in the USA today, see Vyse, Believing in Magic, 16–18.

¹⁸⁰ See the various essays in Meyer and Pels, Magic and Modernity (Stanford, 2003).

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