From Ancient Rome to Instagram:
Magical Writing Practices in
Contemporary Digital Culture
Rose Rowson
10620400
rMA Media Studies
University of Amsterdam
June 2015
Supervisor: Niels van Doorn Second Reader: Bernhard Rieder
Third Reader: Esther Peeren
Table of Contents
List of Figures……… 3
Introduction……… 4
Chapter 1: What is Magic?………. 6
Chapter 1.1 Magic, Religion, Science……… 6
Chapter 1.2 Performance vs. Magic: Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way……… 10
Chapter 1.3 Do You Believe in Magic?……… 12
Chapter1.4 Conclusion: Materiality, Labour, Community…….……… 14
Chapter 2: What is Writing?……….… 15
Chapter 2.1 Writing from Above: Foundations of the Written Word …………..……… 16
Chapter 2.2 Curses! The Transitional Written Word as Magical ……… 18
Chapter 2.3 Printer’s Devils……….……… 21
Chapter 2.4 The Problem with Phonetics: A Shift to Computation………..…23
Chapter 2.5 Conclusion: The Writing’s on the Wall ..…….……… 27
Chapter 3: (pre)Cyberspace Era Perspectives on Information Technologies……….……..……… 29
Chapter 3.1 Programming High Priests: Magic as Hierarchies of Power ………..……… 30
Chapter 3.2 Time Will Tell: Journalistic Perspectives on Computers and Magi ………….….…..…………. 32
Chapter 3.3 “cyber-candles will do fine”: Computers and/as Magic………35
Chapter 3.4 Conclusion……….37
Chapter 4: Magical Writing in Contemporary Digital Culture……… 38
Chapter 4.1 What is Contemporary Digital Culture?……….……..………… 38
Chapter 4.2 Literal Magic/Rhetorical Magic……….…..…… 39
Chapter 4.3 Automatic Magic: The Problem with Conflation……….….41
Chapter 4.4 “You Didn’t Say the Magic Word”: MediaWiki and Death Note Online…….…….………43
Chapter 4.5 On “Saucery”; or, Magic as Protection and Importance on Gmail and Tumblr………..….…….46
Chapter 4.6 #safetykitty: User Generated Deity………..……….………50
Chapter 5: Conclusion: From Ancient Rome to Instagram; Fearful Magical Futures………..53
Bibliography……….55
List of Figures
Figure 1: Bill Gates spins his disk of the cover of Time (Source: TIME Magazine) Figure 2: The rules of the Death Note (Source: Death Note Online)
Figure 3: Protective Sigils on Tumblr
Figure 4: Safety Kitty (Source: demon_violet)
Figure 5: Safety Kitty and her hashtag (Source: we_are_on_fleek3) Figure 6: Repost or die (Source: foxy_the_fox_foxy1987)
Figure 7: Bed Bugs (Source: creepypasta.sally.williams)
Introduction
In Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination (2005), media theorist Florian Cramer explores the cultural precedent for executable code in computation, proposing that its history extends further back than the invention of the computer, with its roots instead found in magic, Kabbalah, musical composition, and experimental poetry. He states that “the technical principle of magic, controlling matter through manipulation of symbols, is the technical principle of computer software as well. It isn’t surprising that magic lives on in software, at least nominally” (2005: 15). He uses a Google search of “magic” and “software” in combination to prove his point, and surely it does, yielding fifteen million pages that use both words. Performing a second Google search for only the term “magic”, Cramer’s third result down is a software company. Aside from the claim that both magic and software control matter through the manipulation of symbols, and that they are nominally linked, Cramer offers us no clues as to how and why magic and computational code came to be associated with one another historically. He also fails to provide an adequate definition of what he considers magic to be within his discussion, aside from quoting Aleister Crowley’s definition of his own brand of occult practice, that “magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will” (1986: xiii). Indeed, I performed the same Google search as Cramer, and found that ten years on from his experiment the terms “magic” and “software” together yield one hundred and eleven million results. A search for “magic” alone conversely to Cramer directs me to Canadian reggae-fusion one hit wonders Magic!, as well as card based strategy game Magic: The Gathering. Does this tell us that we have come to associate magic less with software? That magic and reggae-fusion are inextricably linked? That there are more websites online today than there were ten years ago? It certainly doesn’t help discover whether there was or is any link between digital computation and magic.
This is a gap that I want this thesis research to fill. While I have found that media theorists often describe the execution performed by computational code as magical, they seldom if ever provide a definition of what magic is and how its apparently fundamental qualities are embodied in computational code. As well as Cramer, this tendency to liken the executability of code has made cameos in the writing of Friedrich Kittler, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Mark C. Marino, amongst others. This discourse also exists within the programming community, who have been wont to describe themselves as priests and their skills as magical. And yet, there has not yet been a significant study on this association between magic and the written word as it applies to computational code, and the digital culture that surrounds it. Because Cramer was correct in this sense: to understand why magical qualities have been ascribed to computational code we must dig deeper. To truly understand this link, to find out why magic and code are mentioned in the same breath, I must first discern what magic is and what writing is. Have they always been inextricably linked? And if so, has the magic of writing changed as means of inscription have developed? Surely they have. It is not as easy as declaring that magic and writing have always been somehow linked, but to question how and why such associations were made, and how they have changed as the medium of writing has developed. In Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Friedrich Kittler notes that “to transfer messages from one medium to another always
involves re-shaping them to conform to new standards and materials” (265). As such, an important part of this study is to explore such re-shaping. In this thesis, I will be performing an analysis of magical writing from a materialist perspective, acknowledging that the power of inscription lies in its conditions of deployment. With limited space to cover a hefty portion of Western history to cover, it is necessary that I address the history of inscription in epochs, taking snapshots of certain practices in certain eras to give a flavour of the development of writing and its association with magic, rather than focussing on the minutiae that one may find in other studies.
In my first chapter, I pledge my allegiance to a certain definition of magic, which is concerned with human process and materiality. Thus, when I come to analyse my case studies of magical writing practices in contemporary digital culture, I take a far different approach to magic than is typically made within the field of new media. While within contemporary programming practices and media theoretical analyses, magic is taken as a means to describe abstraction and as an automated command of a process which is hidden, drawing on anthropological approaches to magic I shall on the contrary argue that magic is efficacious in its tangibility for the human subject, that it is the doing of magic that holds the key. Rejecting the colloquial use of magic as something that is automatic and instantaneous, I instead perform a combined analysis of both user and programming based magical writing practices, examining different approaches towards magic within contemporary digital culture. This research project is thoroughly interdisciplinary, drawing from various academic fields in order to discuss how and why magical writing practices are performed in contemporary digital culture. While I have had to draw from various sources, my aim with this thesis project is to provide a critique of approaches to magic within the field of new media. In this project I wish to offer a new perspective on contemporary digital culture, demonstrating the need to thoroughly critique metaphors that have been pervasive in both practical and academic approaches to contemporary digital culture. Covering subjects from Ancient Roman curse tablets to H. P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, on to Gmail importance indicators as magic and hashtags on Instagram as a means of protection, this thesis is a wide spanning examination of how the characteristic of magic as placed onto practices shape their meanings as they continue to develop.
Chapter 1: What is Magic?
In order to discuss magical writing in contemporary digital culture, I must first provide some definitions for both magic and writing. I shall begin here with magic, before moving on to the subject of writing in chapter two. I am approaching the constituent elements of my discussion in this order because it is magic in turn that helps defines writing; as we shall see, magical qualities seep into my discussions of writing from the outset. As such, it is prudent to first tease out an idea of what magic is. This is easier said than done. Magic has been practiced in discrete cultural moments throughout human history, thousands of miles and thousands of years apart. For example, we think of Renaissance period alchemy and modern day Louisiana Hoodoo as being forms of magic, despite the fact that their composing qualities and practices are quite different. The same can be said for any number of magical practices. As such, it is not viable for me to attempt present magic here as a universally definable category. What I am going to do, however, is approach magic as something to be defined relationally. In classical anthropology, magic is often approached and thus defined in relation to religion and science. Magic has overlapping qualities associated with both, but is ultimately defined by what distinguishes it from religion and science. At the risk of making a foregone conclusion, it is rational at this point to posit that magic is generally considered as being able to do something. As such, having distinguished magic from science and religion, how can it be differentiated from performance? Having discussed magic in relation to performativity, before coming to my working definition of magic, I will tackle the concept of belief as applied to magic. Having done this, I will finally provide a working definition of magic, one which can be applied generally to writing practices as they transform in light of their specific material placements. In his paper “What is a Magical Text? Methodological Reflections aimed at Redefining Jewish Magic,” Judaism scholar Yuval Harari has argued that one can create culturally discrete definitions of magic using Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance. While this is certainly a useful approach for 1
analysing a discrete culture, as I need to apply magic to a longer view of cultural development, I have decided to create a very general definition of magic, that can be applied to magical writing practices from Ancient Rome to Instagram.
1.1 Magic, Religion, Science
In my first step towards providing a working definition of magic, I will consider classical anthropological debates. Bronisław Malinowski’s essay “Magic, Science and Religion” (1948) and Marcel Mauss’ book A
Wittgenstein’s family resemblance works on the proposition that while members of the same family may have shared
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attributes, these attributes are interchangeable, and no two members of a family’s attributes will be exactly the same. He uses the example of games to further elaborate on this overlap and absence of characteristics: gin rummy, Tetris, basketball, Scrabble, hockey, Call of Duty, solitaire, and so on are all understandable as games, but none share all the attributes of the others.
General Theory of Magic (1950) are of particular interest for me here because – as Malinowski’s title 2
suggests – they are concerned with the linkages and discrepancies between magic, science, and religion. They do so following Scottish anthropologist James Frazer’s highly influential text The Golden Bough (1890), which proposes that mankind progressed from practicing magic at a primitive level, which developed into organised religion, before coming to science at his most advanced. For Frazer, there is no constructive social relationship between these three categories, and each exists at odds with the others. Frazer argues that while magic and science work on similar approaches to the nature of our world – i.e., based on “the operation of immutable laws acting mechanically” (32) – for the primitive minds which concern Frazer, “magic is always an art, never a science; the very idea of science is lacking in [the] undeveloped mind [of primitive man]” (15). Indeed, he states that “it is a truism, almost a tautology, to say that all magic is necessarily false and barren; for were it ever to become true and fruitful, it would no longer be magic but science” (31). Frazer thus removes any personal agency from both the magician and the scientist, who have no personal power or influence over the ways of the world, for they are merely following the laws of nature. He presents religion, on the other hand, through its supplication to the higher being(s), as “clearly [assuming] that the course of nature is to some extent elastic or variable, and that we can persuade or induce the mighty beings who control it to deflect, for our benefit, the current of events from the channel in which they would otherwise flow” (32). Philosophers I. C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi criticise the “evolutionary scheme” that shapes Frazer’s approach to magic, science, and religion in The Golden Bough. They argue that while “magical thinking” may have developed into “religious thinking” and then onto “scientific thinking,” this does not dictate that one mode of thought abruptly ended and led to the next. They further argue that this scheme is unconvincing because it does not account for the link Frazer makes between magical and scientific thought: “It is hard to conceive of one way of ‘thinking’ giving way to another and then reasserting itself, unless it was possible for them to also coexist” (59). Despite the problems evident in Frazer’s work, it has nevertheless been influential, having sparked a continued anthropological interest in the links between magic, religion, and science.
While both Mauss and Malinowski draw on Frazer’s work, they rightly complicate his approach by conceding that magic, religion, and science are not fundamentally separate categories, but there exists a flow between the three. Let me begin with Malinowski. While he also focuses on so-called primitive man, Malinowski opens “Magic, Science and Religion” by stating that “There are no peoples however primitive without religion and magic. Nor are there, it must be added at once, any savage races lacking either in the scientific attitude or in science, though this lack has been frequently attributed to them” (1). Malinowski goes on to denounce the attitude within his field of anthropology, specifically that of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, that primitive man is “Incapable of dispassionate and consistent observation, devoid of the power of abstraction, hampered by ‘a decided aversion towards reasoning,’ […] unable to draw any benefit from experience, to
A General Theory of Magic was originally published in 1902, written in collaboration with Henri Hubert. It became
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more popular and influential when republished in 1950 with Mauss as its sole author, and that is the version I am using for my analysis.
construct or comprehend even the most elementary laws of nature” (9; Malinowski quoting from Lévy-Bruhl’s How Native’s Think (1910)). Malinowski uses his fieldwork from the Trobriand Archipelago in Melanesia to argue that, on the contrary, primitive people are indeed capable of reason, being skilled fishermen, traders, manufacturers and gardeners. Yet despite this reason and skill, they still employ magic. This, Malinowski argues, is because “even with all their systematic knowledge, methodically applied” (13), these primitive people know that they cannot know everything. Or, rather, despite their rational capability to create a functioning society, they know they are still at the mercy of the forces of nature they cannot control. This is why, as a canoe is built using the requisite skills and materials, it also has magic performed on it to ensure safety within the unknowable conditions of the sea. It is crucially important here to note that magic does not replace labour. The canoe must be built, or the crops must be yielded, and so on, through labour and knowledge. But magic can supplement this labour, and in “precarious conditions, [primitive man] holds fast to the safety and comfort of magic” (14). In other words, Malinowski proposes that magic is performed as a method of alleviating fear in the face of uncertainty, done in specific circumstances for specific results. It is on this point that Malinowski makes the distinction between magic and religion: that “while in the magical act the underlying idea and aim is always clear, straightforward, and definite, in the religious ceremony there is no purpose directed toward a subsequent event” (21) .3
Mauss agrees with Malinowski on the last point, that the rituals of magic oppose those of religion as they are functional, whereas religious rituals are “directed towards more metaphysical ends” (174). However, Mauss further elaborates on the difference between magic and religion as having its base in institutionalisation of practices. He states that “religious rites […] even fortuitous and voluntary ones, are always predictable, prescribed and official” (29). Magical rites, in comparison, “may occur regularly (as in the case of agricultural magic) and fulfil a need when they are performed for specific ends (such as a cure), [but] are always considered unauthorised, abnormal and, at the very least, not highly estimable” (29). As such, the difference between magic and religion for Mauss lies firstly in whether direct causation occurs as a result of a ritual, but moreover in the formalisation of practice. He notes in the prologue to A General Theory of Magic that “Magic is an institution only in the most weak sense; it is a kind of totality of actions and beliefs, poorly defined, poorly organised even as far as those who practise it and believe in it are concerned” (13). Without a formal structure like the church, magic becomes illicit, an other. Mauss acknowledges that both religion and magic are social phenomenon, with the underlying difference between the two being that religion is practiced in public, while magic is secret. He states that while “religion in all its aspects is essentially a collective phenomenon” (111), the social aspect of magic is crucial for its continued practice, with collective agreement on the efficacy of a ritual leading to the belief and subsequent repetition of said ritual. Mauss further notes that magic holds some similarity to science, in that it is concerned with natural causality and a reverence for nature: “the magician is a person who, through his gifts, his experience
We can appreciate this as fully different from Frazer’s argument that religion is bound to supplicating the gods and
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asking them for specific things, which Malinowski would conversely view as magic. While a far more detailed analysis of the difference between these approaches could be performed, there is too much additional material to cover in this research to allow time to dwell on Frazer for too long.
or through revelation, understands nature and natures; his practice depends on this knowledge” (94). Mauss does, however, fall into a similar trap to Frazer, likening magic to a primitive form of science, rather than a category of thinking and doing which is completed in itself. Upon making his conclusions, Mauss notes that “Magic has no genuine kinship with anything apart from religion on the one hand and science and technology on the other” (174). Does this dictate that magic sits comfortably between religion and science, in a holding position of the void between the two?
In On The Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (2010), French sociologist Bruno Latour presents a more contemporary approach to the question of religion in relation to science. He argues that they are “two regimes of invisibility” (112) that must be overcome. The invisibility of religion lies in our inability to recreate the events as they took place in scripture: as such we must have faith that such events occurred and in their irreproducibility. The invisibility of science lies in that in order to “see” science we must examine it in laboratory conditions, outside of its natural existence where it is often invisible to the naked eye. Latour argues that these apparently diametrically opposed systems have been incorrectly reduced to caricatures of belief (religion) and knowledge (science); he argues on the contrary that we must view religion and science – in light of their invisibility – as part of “the same broad set of [mental] competences applied to two chains of mediators going in two different directions” (122). What Latour does moreover is argue that by trying to “freeze-frame” – i.e., remove and examine in isolation – individual instances of belief or knowledge in relation to religion and science respectively “forbids the meaning to be carried in truth” (122). In other words, we should “not isolate an image out of the flows that only provide them with their real […] meaning” (123). Latour doesn’t want us to think about religion and science as based upon belief and knowledge, but the intersection he places between the two is nevertheless a useful tool to think about the place of magic in this study, and indeed what magic is. This is not to say that magic can sit comfortably in the middle ground between religion and science; rather we can use this arguably false dichotomy of belief and knowledge to assist with feeling out the “truth” of magic that is carried in its meaning, as Latour has attempted to do with religion and science. What can be understood from Mauss and Malinowski is that magic does indeed exist in a space between knowledge and belief, which itself is mediated by uncertainty. While a group such a Malinowski’s Trobriand islanders may have knowledge of their surroundings, and have the rationale and skills to perform tasks for the prosperity of their societies, the knowledge that they cannot know everything necessitates the use of magic.
I. C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi state that “In spite of all the wars waged between science and religion in the West, in spite of a long and deeply entrenched tradition of hostility, the two now coexist cosily. Magic, however, is still the outcast […] Religion, as practised in the West, is not practical but moral; whereas science and magic both claim immense pragmatic value […] A Westerner may invest much in religion, but unlike the primitive magician he expects no immediate practical returns from his rituals” (58). From this statement, as well as the work of Frazer, Mauss, Malinowski, and Latour, one crucial characteristic of magic that we must take with us is that it is able to do something. But can it be as simply stated as this? In the next section of this chapter I will consider magic in relation to performative utterance, considering what overlaps
exist between the two and how magic differentiates itself. In doing this, I will also introduce the magick of Aleister Crowley, and in doing so justify why I am not going to include Crowlian magick as a part of my wider discussion of magical writing practices. While I shall go on to dismiss Crowley, I am including him here because his definition of magick is the one taken as read by Florian Cramer in his claim that magic lives on in the executability of computational code. While my attention shall not be fully devoted to computation until further on in my analysis, I wish to address Crowley now in my defining stages of the term magic so I will not have to devote any more time to him later on in this research.
1.2 Performance versus Magic: Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way
In his book Magick in Theory and Practice, occult practitioner Aleister Crowley famously decreed that 4 “Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will” (xiii). This is very vague and general: Crowley defines the action of breathing as magickal , as it embodies the will-to-live. In The 5
Magick of Aleister Crowley: A Handbook of the Rituals of Thelema (2003), Lon Milo Duquette defines Will as any willed action, giving the examples of “brushing your teeth, walking the dog, or even paying your taxes” (11), if it plays a part in your wider universal purpose. Under Crowley’s purview, any of the above actions are magickal because they are wilfully performed by the individual. Something being wilful in Crowley’s religion of Thelema does not refer to stubbornness, but rather of a person engaging with their true purpose, which is achieved in line with the will of the universe. Duquette further states that any “habitual or reactive behaviour that overrides the momentum of one’s life focus” (11) is not magick. This could include, for example, scratching at chickenpox in your sleep, smoking a cigarette, or having one too many drinks. At first glance, Crowlian magick appears to be far too general to be of any use to us here, as we have already explored the social position of magic in relation to science and magic. Indeed, Crowley doesn’t consider magick to be the same as magic, stating that “All the works of witchcraft are illusory; and their apparent effects depend on the idea that it is possible to alter things by the mere rearrangement of them” (24). In Crowley’s magick, there is no magic. In which case, if he so shuns association with the object of my study, why discuss Crowley at all? This is because Crowley provides a means for me to discuss what magic is not: namely, performance. Marcel Mauss notes that “the kind of traditional practices which might be confused with magical activities include legal actions, techniques and religious ritual” (23): I do not wish to risk such a confusion here, particularly as later on in my analysis I will be discussing the performativity of computational code. While both magic and performance do things, I must here work to establish why they are not the one and the same thing. I will as such propose that Crowley’s prerequisites for Will to be accomplished are strikingly similar to the felicity conditions that allow performative acts to happen. I will
Crowley uses the word “magick” with an added k to differentiate his practice from other forms of magic
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While Crowley himself uses the term magical without his special added k, I will be using one here as shorthand to
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indicate when I am specifically discussing Crowlian magick rather than any other kind of magic.
perform this analysis by concentrating on J. L. Austin’s concept of performative utterances – or speech acts – as presented in his classic book How To Do Things With Words (1962). I am using Austin’s speech act theory as a means to discuss performance as it is primarily concerned with words, which I must necessarily return to in my discussion of writing.
In his theorems for Will, and as such magick, to be accomplished, Crowley states that “The first requisite for causing any change is through qualitative and quantitative understanding of the conditions” (xiv). For Crowley, the embodiment of Will is enabled through conditions of “psychological, physiological, and physical law” (98). To help the would-be practitioner of magick to understand this, he offers “a very simple example of a magical act: that of a man blowing his nose” (97). In order for the nose to be successfully blown, it must be the man’s Will to blow his nose. Furthermore, his nose must be “capable of being blown”, assumably by having nostrils, as many noses tend to. Finally, the man must have “at command an apparatus capable of expressing his physical Will in terms of material force” (98) – in other words, having a paper tissue, handkerchief, or pavement on which to eject his build-up of mucus. Without such mental, bodily, and material conditions, the nose, according to Crowley, would “will remain unblown through all eternity” (98). In How to Do Things with Words, Austin similarly argues that certain felicity conditions must be in place for a speech act to be performed. He greatly elaborates on these conditions throughout the book, but surmises them thus: “There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, the procedure having a certain conventional effect, the procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons under certain circumstances” (26). An oft cited example of a speech act is that which is said by an officiant during a marriage ceremony: “I now pronounce you husband and wife.” This statement in itself is not performative, and is said in circumstances such as children at play, or by actors in a film, without being lawfully binding. For such a speech act to be illocutionary, it must be said not only in the mental, bodily, and material conditions essential for Crowley’s nose blowing Will to be enacted, but furthermore conditions upon which it can socially and lawfully be agreed that a couple are indeed married. Speech acts or performatives do things, in a similar way that magick as Will does something. Magic, at a base level, also does something. So what is the difference between performativity and magic?
For Crowley in particular, for True Will to be enacted, the individual must have knowledge of themselves and of their surroundings. He uses the example of a man who wishes to be a painter, and his failure in that endeavour being due to “ignorance of [his] own True Will, or of the means by which to fulfil that Will” (xiv). For Crowley, magick is “a question of discovering and employing hitherto unknown forces in nature” (xvi): as such, magick is a practice based upon accumulating knowledge of both yourself and the world around you, in order to enact your True Will. Speech act theory is itself, in a different way, concerned with knowledge or certainty. In order for a marriage ceremony to be correctly performed, one must be certain of the felicity conditions. There is no room for ambiguity when pronouncing a couple to be married. The officiant and the couple know that the conditions are just so that the speech act can be effectively performed. So, while performance in these examples is enacted with the precedent of absolute knowledge that they will be efficacious, magic is on the contrary an act of contingency. For a performative utterance or Crowlian Will,
control over a given situation is implied by the performance itself; magic, on the other hand, is enacted in the awareness that control is not implicit, and must be gained through ritual. Belief in and performance of magic is, as such, done in acknowledgement of uncertainty. So, the real discrepancy between performance and magic lies in the difference between ambiguity and control. While those who perform magic believe in its efficacy, for Crowlian Will, belief in the self is all that is required. Moreover, for a speech act such as “I pronounce you man and wife” or “I declare this legislative session open” – although, I hasten to add, not all speech acts – the difference also lies in institutionalisation. While I can declare that I do not believe in the institution of marriage, this does not detract from the married-ness of other people in the eyes of the law. Even if I were to get married, declaring that I do not believe in marriage as the speech act is spoken in felicitous conditions, the notion that I do not believe in marriage does not lawfully unmarry me. But how can we think about belief in relation to magic?
1.3 Do You Believe in Magic?
In this chapter thus far we have seen that magic exists as a social category alongside religion and science, enjoying parallels and overlaps of interest with both. We have also seen that magic is distinct from performativity, in that performativity requires certain controlled conditions as precedent to be enacted, while magic is an active acknowledgement by the practitioner that they do not have control. But what exactly can be understood by the term belief? In this final section before concluding this chapter, I will consider several different approaches to belief in tandem with arguments made by Mauss and Malinowski. Through doing this, I wish to construct an understanding of belief in a magical context that can then assist us in creating a definition of what magic is.
In the titular essay in On The Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, Latour opens his discussion by stating that “belief is not a state of mind but a result of relationships among people” (2010: 2). By this, Latour is indicating that belief is not only defined by how one community forms its practices, but by how communities perceive each other. In his analysis, Latour works to eradicate the distinction between fact and fetish, or between the found and the made. He starts to do this through an imagined conversation between West Coast Africans and their colonial invaders, the Portuguese. In this imagined dialogue, the Africans do not or cannot distinguish between having fabricated their idols, and worshipping them; the Portuguese argue that if the idols are made, they are therefore false and illusionary. The Portuguese, or the “Moderns,” distinguish between facts as objective and fetish as fabricated and as such subjective. A fact, in the Modern view, is autonomous, existing on its own without the need for human intervention. A fetish, on the other hand, is fabricated, and involves human beings projecting their beliefs onto a passive object. Latour, working against this view, argues that both facts and fetishes are constructed, and comes to propose the portmanteau factish as a means of understanding this. The Moderns approach fact as being able to crush fetish, as the latter is constructed and the former is not. Latour, on the contrary, argues that fact is just as constructed as
fetish . In Pandora’s Hope (1999), Latour states that “if we now speak of factishes, there exist neither beliefs 6
(to be fostered or destroyed) nor facts (to be used as a hammer)” (1999: 287).
While the Moderns approach anything that has been constructed as false, Latour argues that “it is because it is constructed that it is so very real, so autonomous, so independent of our own hands” (1999: 275). He states that “if the iconoclast could naively believe that believers exist who are naive enough to endow a stone with spirit […], it was because the iconoclast also naively believed that the very facts he employed to shatter the idol could exist without the help of any human agency” (1999: 274). For Latour, therefore, the concept of belief is projected by Moderns onto those who worship fetishes: they know that their fetishes have been fabricated by their own hands, and thus do not have to believe in their power, as they know that through their very creation the fetishes have power. I find Latour’s approach to belief as a category that must be eliminated problematic. In Latour’s view, belief is always projected by Moderns as a means of differentiating themselves from savages, who themselves apparently do not believe in anything. In doing so, Latour paints belief as negative, a derogatory characteristic that Moderns place upon savages and, in doing so, embody themselves.
To continue my discussion of belief, I want to retain the idea by Latour that the power of an object is defined through a human’s relationship with it, with the act of fabrication in itself giving power to an object. This will be an important point to return to later in this research when I begin to discuss magical writing practices. However, I feel that Latour’s rejection of belief as a concept is not useful to dwell upon here. I indeed must take the role of the Modern in my analysis and make the assumption that those who practice magic believe in it. While Latour denounces belief in the face of fetish because the creator of said fetish knows it has been created by his hand, I have discussed the use of magic up until this point as at odds with absolute knowledge, and finding its necessity in uncertainty. I propose that for an idol or a magical rite to be fabricated, there must first have existed a moment of uncertainty, a point where that rite or idol was needed. But, as Latour would surely reply, if such a rite or idol was created, there must first exist a confidence in such an idol or rite to catalyse their fabrication. He states that “nonhumans are at once pliable and durable; they can be shaped very quickly but, once shaped, last far longer than the interactions that fabricated them” (1999: 210). While I concede that nonhumans are indeed pliable and durable – think, for example, of the Christian crucifix – I believe that Latour underestimates the time span of interactions and fabrications. I would like to posit that for magic, belief is tied up in the fabrication of rites and idols, and such fabrication occurs not in a moment, but in a continuous action. Mauss states that “Magical beliefs, of course, derive from experience: nobody seeks out a magician unless he believes in him; a remedy is tried only if the person has confidence in
Latour uses the discovery of microbes by Louis Pasteur to elaborate upon this. He argues the conditions through which
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Pasteur performed his experiments were fabricated, but this does not remove from the concept of pasteurisation becoming accepted as fact and/or truth. “The artificiality of the laboratory does not run counter to its validity and truth; its obvious immanence is actually the source of its downright transcendence. How could this apparent miracle be obtained? Through a very simple setup that has baffled observers for a long time and that Pasteur beautifully illustrates. The experiment creates two planes: one in which the narrator is active, and a second in which the action is delegated to another character, a nonhuman one” (1999: 129)
it” (114). If magical belief derives from experience, I would therefore posit that such belief is maintained through sustained efficacious fabrication. In other words, belief in magic is made through successful doing in the face of uncertainty.
To further elaborate on this assertion, I will now turn to Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek in his approach to belief. In The Sublime Object of Ideology (2008) he argues, following Jacques Lacan, that our emotions and our beliefs lie not in our interior thoughts, but rather “belief […] is radically exterior, embodied in the practical, effective procedure of people” (31). The example Žižek takes to make his point is a writing practice: Tibetan prayer wheels. He describes the practice thus: “You write a prayer on a paper, put the rolled paper into a wheel, and turn it automatically without thinking […] In this way, the wheel itself is praying for me – or, more precisely, I am praying through the medium of the wheel” (32). The example that Žižek uses is taken from a religious context; as we have come to understand, religious rituals act towards a metaphysical end, as opposed to the causal purpose of magical rituals. For magic, belief is also expressed through doing, but moreover with the expectance that it will yield a specific result. Indeed, even more so than religion, magic is “embodied in the practical, effective procedure of people.” Malinowski argues that magic is a “special mode of behaviour, a pragmatic attitude built up of reason, feeling, and will alike. It is a mode of action as well as a system of belief, and a sociological phenomenon as well as a personal experience” (Malinowski 8). That fabrication in turn consolidates belief. For magic, unlike religion, and similarly to science, belief is a feedback loop, and cannot be rendered separate from the repeated action of doing. As Mauss states, “actions which are never repeated cannot be called magical” (23). Belief is thus not only a projection by others onto practitioners of magic. Rather, belief is collectively embodied in the thoughts and sustained fabrication of a community.
Chapter Conclusion: Materiality, Labour, Community
It has been my aim in this chapter to create a working definition of magic. By exploring these different approaches to magic(k), performance, and belief, I have also aimed to highlight what magic is not. As such, for the purpose of this thesis research, I deem magic to be a collectively understood conflation of belief and fabrication, legitimised through sustained and efficacious action. While exterior to the institutions of church or state, magic is nonetheless social. A Mauss states, “if the whole community does not believe in the efficacy of a group of actions, they cannot be magical. The form of the ritual is eminently transmissible and this is sanctioned by public opinion. It follows from this that strictly individual actions, such as the private superstitions of gamblers, cannot be called magical” (23). As well as being collectively embodied yet distinct from the institution, I define magic as different from performative utterance or Crowlian Will because its successful deployment is first dependent on an acceptance of uncertainty. Why use magic? Because we do not and cannot know the entire truth of our world. In my discussion of magic, I have found the action of magic to be tied up in volition of an individual inherently tied up in community practice, to depend on material conditions to deploy, and be a supplement to labour.
Chapter 2: What is Writing?
Having now formed a definition of magic for the context of this research, I must now analyse what writing is. At first glance, this is a relatively simple question: structuralist linguists would argue that writing is a system of signs that materially represents speech. But this is surely not all writing is: as a material entity, as opposed to ephemeral speech, writing can travel in space and time, leaving traces of its development in its wake. As such, writing can surely do things that speech cannot. Despite the unique characteristics of writing that distinguish it from speech, claims have been made that speech has more power than the written word, or the written word only becomes powerful once it has been read aloud. In this chapter, I will be challenging these claims, by examining several moments in Western history. To do this, I will primarily be drawing on Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the Word (1982) and Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962). I will also be questioning what writing is with an eye on Friedrich Kittler’s concept of the discourse network. Rather confusingly translated from the German aufschreibsystem – literally, system of inscription – Kittler describes discourse networks as “the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data” (2004: 369). This is not wholly dissimilar to Michel Foucault’s episteme as discussed in The Order of Things (1970), the episteme being the conditions of possibility by which knowledge exists. While Foucault frames the episteme as “configurations within a space of knowledge” (xxiv), Kittler’s discourse network on the contrary is specifically concerned with the materiality of inscription and its surrounding mechanisms as a means of collecting and processing knowledge. As such, I believe it is prudent within this thesis project to approach magical writing practices as deeply material, following on from my definition of magic in the previous chapter, which states that magic depends on certain material conditions to be efficacious.
With a few millennia to cover and limited space to do so, this chapter will make quite a few time jumps before arriving more or less in the present. On our way there, I will touch upon the role of writing in the foundation of world religions; Greek and Roman spells; the perfectionist wrath of medieval book scribes; and the trouble with phonetics and computation. Echoing the anthropological arguments from the previous chapter, for the writing practices I shall discuss here, magic is sandwiched somewhere between religion at the foundation of writing, and science as we move towards computation. I shall cover my topics here relatively quickly: it is not the purpose of this research to dwell upon the minutiae of Mesopotamian trade secrets, or the daily life of a scribe in the Middle Ages. What this chapter intends to do, on the contrary, is show what writing was, what it has become, and how that transformation relates to magical qualities as applied to inscription. I will be arguing that the written word has been associated with the supernatural since more or less its conception; and that in order to study how and why these uncanny qualities of writing have seeped over into our contemporary digital sphere, we must once again question what writing is.
2.1 Writing from Above: Foundations of the Written Word
As Walter Ong notes in Orality and Literacy, the consensus is that the first instance of a writing system occurred in ancient Mesopotamia, approximately 3500 B.C.E.. This was an ideographic protoscript: in other words, it made direct illustrations of concrete objects, intended as a method to assist trade relations, with particular symbols representing barley, livestock, and so on . This system was first inscribed onto stone and 7
clay tokens, immediately material and able to do what speech alone could not: objectively confirm that a trade of goods had taken place. Starting as pictograms, the system developed into cuneiform – a writing system using wedges – thereby becoming more abstract. Able to convey more nuanced meaning than concrete drawings of cows, the use of writing thus extended beyond the marketplace and into other facets of life in Mesopotamia, including politics, the military, and religion. Around two millennia after this cuneiform was developed, Semitic people in the same geographic region as Mesopotamia conceived the first alphabet. Ong notes that “every alphabet in the world — Hebrew, Ugaritic, Greek, Roman, Cyrillic, Arabic, Tamil, Malayalam, Korean — derives in one way or another from the original Semitic development” (87). The development of an alphabet as opposed to an ideographic or cuneiform system marks the shift to phonetic writing, wherein each discrete symbol or combination of symbols directly relates to the sounds that make up words. The written form of the English language, for example, uses the Latin alphabet to represent the distinct sounds – or phonemes – that make the spoken form of the language understandable. With this system, a native or fluent speaker should be able to “sound out” the written script, transferring its material presence as an inscription into an oral rendition. It was at this moment of the alphabet, Ong proposes, that writing became a system of symbols that represent speech.
While Ong argues that the use of written language was well established as an economic device before it was used for “imaginative creations” (84), Judaeo-Christian, Samaritan, and Gnostic foundation myths are all based upon letters of the alphabet. These creation myths can be distinguished by the number of letters that were allegedly used to create the world. As detailed by Judaism scholar Tzahi Weiss, Samaritan, Jewish, and Gnostic foundation texts claim that God created the world either through the tetragrammaton – הוהי, often transliterated into Latin script as YHWH; – all 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet; or all 24 letters of the Greek alphabet. Weiss notes that “these three traditions [demonstrate] that in several late antique contexts, the belief that the world was formed by means of letters was familiar and accepted” (105). These foundation myths incorporated writing systems after the fact, as it were, of the development of writing by man. I posit that these legends therefore imply that although writing systems were first utilised by man for economic reasons, they were not conceived by man and man’s ability to write is in fact the result of divine intervention: these creation myths present writing as an inherent characteristic of the universe, the world inscribed by god. This also signifies that the written word exists with a purpose greater than enabling the trade of cattle; rather, it is the very essence of the divine within our human world.
For detailed discussions of writing in ancient Mesopotamia, see Jean Bottéro’s Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning and
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the Gods (1992)
This concept of written language as a gift from a higher power is recounted in Plato’s Phaedrus, wherein Plato’s Socrates tells the story of the god Thoth offering King Thamus the gift of writing to distribute to the people of Egypt. As paraphrased by Erik Davis in Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998), “[Thoth] promised Thamus that the new invention would not only augment memory, but amplify wisdom as well. Thamus carefully considered the matter, weighing the pros and cons of this major communications upgrade. Finally, the king rejected the gift, saying that his people would be better off without the new device. And reading between the lines of the story, it’s clear that Socrates and Plato agree” (1998: 29-30). Here Plato clearly does not believe that writing is the underlying essence of our 8
world, but nevertheless subscribes to the notion – at the very least allegorically – that writing was passed onto man by a higher power. Using Socrates as his surrogate, Plato criticises writing as “[creating] forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves” (Phaedrus). In an irony pointed out by Davis, copies of the Phaedrus can be found “in the philosophy section of your local bookstore,” augmenting memory and creating forgetfulness in philosophy students worldwide. Davis further argues that Plato’s exposure to writing shaped his thought process (31), echoing McLuhan – “Plato shows no awareness here or elsewhere of how the phonetic alphabet had altered the sensibility of the Greeks; nor did anybody else in his time or later” (25) – and Nietzsche’s aphorism, “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts” (Kittler 1999: 200).
Returning to the realm of religion and the gift of literacy, this concept of thought process development as influenced by the written word is also apparent in the foundations of Islam. As recounted by Kittler, the archangel Gabriel descended from heaven to ask Mohammed to read a verse from the Qur’an: “Mohammed, however, answers that he, the nomad, can’t read; not even the divine message about the origin of reading and writing. The archangel has to repeat his command before an illiterate can turn into the founder of a book based religion. For soon, or all too soon, the illegible scroll makes sense and presents to Mohammed's miraculously alphabetised eyes the very same text that Gabriel had already uttered twice as an oral command” (1999: 7). Kittler here presents Mohammed’s instantaneous embrace of the written word as deterministic: for the longevity of Islam, it is imperative that its teachings be transferred into inscription. In Judaeo-Christian biblical texts, there is also the example of Belshazzar’s feast in the Book of Daniel. Belshazzar and his cohorts eat and drink from holy vessels looted from Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, when a hand appears, inscribing the words “ןיסרפו ,לקת ,אנמ ,אנמ” (“Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin”) on the wall. Unable to understand this message, Belshazzar summons Daniel, who interprets it as predicting the imminent fall of Babylon to the Medes and the Persians. In this case, the devout Daniel is able to construe meaning from the word of God, while the blasphemous Babylonians cannot, and subsequently pay with their lives. In these biblical examples, the written word is the technology that links together gods and their disciples. Religion as an institution is enabled by its believers and their ability to “select, store, and process relevant
Just to reiterate: Davis is of course referring to Plato’s imagined version of Socrates for his own purposes in the
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Phaedrus. Socrates himself did not write anything down.
data” (Discourse Networks 1800/1900 369). Writing is a form of divine intervention: a gift, a warning, a set of rules from a higher being. The durability of the written word as opposed to its ephemeral oral counterpart as used in these cases is indicative of the telos of inscription technologies: to manipulate the human mind, and to spread the word of god.
With these religious approaches to the written word, I want to emphasise that supernatural qualities have been placed upon inscription technologies since their inception. In contemporary Western society, although increasingly secular, there remains a cultural awareness of these foundational texts, and the relationship of the written word with divine power. This is not to say that whenever a word is written, one recalls the finger of god engraving the ten commandments into stone atop Mount Sinai. Rather, I want to argue that through the development of inscription in the Western world, there has been a steady fascination with the idea of words being able to do something. Moving on with my brief history of the written word, I want to emphasise this fascination and in doing so challenge arguments made in particular by Ong that writing is “dead” and not powerful as a material entity, and also the Saussurian view that writing is only a representation of speech.
2.2 Curses! The Transitional Written Word as Magical
In the previous section, I highlighted the importance of the written word to the foundation of major world religions, arguing that the idea of writing being able to do something has existed not since the dawn of the written word, but as soon as the written word became advanced enough to be used as a method to describe its own creation. Despite the evidence that I have put forth, linguists often argue that magical power is present only in the spoken word, or when the written word is read aloud. These arguments tend to be made while comparing literate and non-literate societies, with Walter Ong in particular making the generalisation that “deeply typographical folk” are unable to think of words as primarily oral when written down, and thus do “not so readily associate [words] with magic, for they are not actions, but are in a radical sense dead, though subject to dynamic resurrection” (32) . Ong’s text was thematically followed by Marshall McLuhan’s The 9
Gutenberg Galaxy, which further explores the development of typographical man. In this text, McLuhan describes the era before the printing press as “primitive” (142). McLuhan uses the terms “primitive” and “auditory” or “audile-tactile” interchangeably (21), indicating a similar approach to Ong. McLuhan founds the adequate advancement of man beginning with the development of moveable type.
I will address the development of the printing press and magic associated with the printed word in the next subchapter. In the mean time, I will use two examples to argue for magic as associated with the written word in itself due to material conditions specific to inscription. These are Ancient Greek and Roman curse tablets, and Medieval book curses. As with my prior examples of religious foundation texts, these curse
There is a strong history within horror fiction of a written document being able to unlock all kind of terrible ills once it
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is read aloud. Examples of this in feature film include The Mummy (1932/1999), The Evil Dead (1981), Evil Dead II (1987), and The Cabin in the Woods (2012).
tablets and book curses are based in part upon religious belief. Following my definition of magic in chapter one, however, I have deemed these examples to be magical as they use writing as a means to perform a specific ends, practiced by individuals but more importantly legitimised through group belief. Of course, Ancient Greece and Rome and Medieval Europe are not “deeply typographical”; neither are they illiterate. Rather, they lie in a transitional phrase of growing literacy, where the technologies enabling writing are still being developed. My examples of curse tablets and book curses emphasise the importance of materiality to the written word in and of itself during this developmental stage, not just as undead marks empowered by speech. For these examples, the alleged primary orality of words holds no influence over their magical power as incription. Ong states that “In western classical antiquity, it was taken for granted that a written text of any worth was meant to be and deserved to be read aloud” (112), before rather amusingly using the example of Greek Tragedy to legitimise his point. While it goes without saying that plays are written down with the understanding that they will be memorised and performed aloud to an audience, Ong uses this example to propose that all that is written down is meant to be spoken. Ong is unable to conceive that writing may be able to do something all by itself: as a call to a malevolent deity, or as a faithful protection of scripture.
Archaeological evidence of curse tablets, also known as tabella defixiones or katadesmos, has been found throughout the Greco-Roman world. Typically made of lead, clay or wax, these curse tablets feature inscriptions, with the writer asking the powers that be to perform some generally negative change upon a person or object. These tablets were then typically fixed with a nail, and buried underground or dropped in a well . Aside from standard forms of written Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, archaeological remains of these 10
curse tablets have also included incomprehensible script – or voces mysticae – which is unrelated to any known language. In his extensive study of curse tablets, John G. Gager proposes, quoting from Stanley J. Tambiah’s “The Magical Power of Words,” that “the voces mysticae represent ‘the language that demons can understand’” (9). While Tambiah discusses the language of demons as vocally performed in Sinhalese exorcism ceremonies, Gager materialises this approach. Tambiah emphasises that although there is “a prevailing misconception that Sinhalese mantra are largely unintelligible or even nonsensical […] the ‘demon language’ is consciously constructed to connote power, and [… is] based on the theory of language that demons can understand” (177-178). He further argues that it is irrelevant whether or not the exorcist fully understands the words in a spell, what matters is that their construction is based upon the logic that demons can understand them. While these Sinhalese ceremonies are vocal, the voces mysticae are decidedly material. As opposed to Ong's assertion that the power of words is derived from their enunciation, voces mysticae are powerful on the basis that they cannot be read and therefore cannot be spoken. And while their inscription indicates that the writer believed deities could interpret the writing, it would be incomprehensible to the writer and their fellow humans. Quite apart from letter combinations not corresponding to meaning, writing voces mysticae in an unknown script leaves them literally unpronounceable, but nevertheless material marks that are imbued with meaning and belief.
My brief description of curse tablets here is made with reference to John G. Gager’s extremely detailed study Curse
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Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World (1992)
In the case of curse tablets, given their nefarious nature, the writing of an incantation as opposed to speaking it also helped establish some space and time between the invoker and divine being they were envoking. As argued by magician-cum-linguist Patrick Dunn: “To write down a spell and drop it in a well is to send it like a letter to the underworld. It simultaneously curses and keeps the curser at arm’s reach from the powerful and sometimes unpredictable chthonic deities. More pleasant spells were probably spoken, not written, and therefore were ephemeral” (70-71). For the casting of these curses, belief in the ability of the written word to do something specifically without needing to be read aloud is inherently tied up in the material basis of the inscription. Belief in and fear of the chthonic deities influences the material deployment of the spells: such is the power that these mortals wish to invoke, the further away from it they can be, the better. So, as opposed to Ong, these words are actions in themselves, acting without the alleged power of speech and within the rubric of material inscription.
My second example of the magical power of writing during the transitional phase of growing literacy are Medieval book curses. Before the advent of the printing press, books – and most particularly the scripture – were laboriously hand copied by monks, whose sole task it was to ensure an exact replica was produced. Production values were high: not only because of the time and effort that went into creating a single book, but because these books contained the word of god. In Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses (1983), Mark Drogin states that as a scribe went about the process of his copying, he knew that “to make an error was to commit a sin […] if he believed, religiously, in the power of his task, he knew that his labour with pen was the equivalent of another’s with sword or battering ram: his was the responsibility of fighting the devil by multiplying God’s words” (12-14). The Christian Bible – unlike the Torah or the Qur’an – was not written in a sacred language, and as such “was never explicitly worshiped as a cultic object.” On the other hand, “Christians were more interested in the text as a vehicle for the transmission of the logos, God’s spoken word and transcendental plan” (Erik Davis 1998: 40). As such, the same language that the Bible was written in could be used as a means of protection, as well as spreading the word of God. This was not, Drogin notes, by official decree the church. He quotes from the Council of Paris in 1212, where it was officially ruled that “from the present date, no book is to be retained pain of incurring a curse {i.e. stop trying to scare off potential borrowers by laying anathemas}, and we declare such curses to be of no effect” (62). However, this official word did not cease the the practice of placing curses on books, with Drogin noting that the choice to place curses on volumes ultimately “seems to have been primarily the decision of the scribe” (62), which was given legitimacy as it developed into a community practice, with books all over Medieval Europe including curses added by scribes.
Drogin notes that the popularity of placing curses upon books did not abate until the advent of the printing press in the mid-15th century, “which finally made the production of books so economical that a single volume ceased to represent an enormous expense calling for heavenly protection” (100). This statement tightly binds these book curses with their means of production. Although the word of God continued and continues to be spread through the use of books, the task of copying out the good word was no longer placed in the hands of the scribe monks. Indeed, while the word of God remained precious, the means
by which it was transported became cheaper. Monks placed curses onto books to protect them from being stolen, damaged, or destroyed: this was linked not only to the scripture as sacred, but moreover to the time and effort it took a monk to write out a single book by hand. Dedicating months to a single purpose in human eyes warrants protection. As we can see from these examples of the transitional written word, writing is not deemed powerful only when it is read aloud. Rather, its power is inherently linked to its materiality. While human labour performing the divine work of God warranted some written security measures, the mechanised production of a book, by contrast, has less value. This is not to say that magic as it was applied to inscription disappeared once its means of production and distribution changed. Rather, as these methods changed, so did the role of magic. I have this far emphasised human process as linking magic to inscription. But how does this change when the human moves further away from their writing?
2.3 Printer’s Devils
The first European book printed, The Gutenberg Bible, was initially associated with magic. When Gutenberg’s associate Johann Fust first arrived in Paris in the mid-15th century, selling copies of the Bible for almost ten times less than that charged by scribes, he was welcomed with open arms. When he produced copies to match demand and halved his price again, however, Parisians became suspicious. How was he producing the Bibles so quickly? And at such a low price? Upon inspecting their newly purchased books, they discovered that each edition seemed to be an exact replica of the last. Not an exact replica as a scribe would produce, with all the words present and accounted for. Rather, each letter of the alphabet was identical in all its appearances throughout, even when two different copies were compared. Having never seen a printed book before and unable to comprehend how the Bibles had been created, Fust was arrested under the charge of witchcraft and associating with the devil. Indeed, such was the hysteria that surrounded these mass produced tomes, that the red ink used on detailing was believed to be Fust’s own blood. We can see in this example that it is not what the writing says that makes it magical, or in this case, associated with magic, but it is rather its material existence and means of production.
While the hysteria surrounding printing has clearly subsided over the last six hundred years, magic has nevertheless continued to be associated with the printed word. As with the Gutenberg Bible, this association is not linked only to what the books said, but more crucially to their means of production and distribution. One such example of this is fictional play The King in Yellow. A false document featured in several of author Robert W. Chamber’s short stories, The King in Yellow is a play that causes anyone who reads beyond the end of its first act to go mad. It appears most prominently in “The Repairer of Reputations” (1895), in which the protagonist describes the fits of joy and terror that befell him after he accidentally glimpsed the opening page of the second act. The narrator notes that “when the French government seized the translated copies which had just arrived in Paris, London, of course became eager to read it. It is well known how the book spread like an infectious disease, from city to city from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by Press and pulpit, censured even by the most
advanced of literary anarchists” (“The Repairer of Reputations”). While it is never explicitly stated how, indeed, The King in Yellow spread like an infection, I posit that this spread was enabled, of course, by mechanical reproduction. While somehow retaining the horrific and compulsive reaction brought on by reading the words, a mechanical printer – unlike a scribe – would not have to read them to reproduce the book.
The magic of the printed word lies not only in the production of books, or even necessarily the reading of said books. Rather, I propose it lies in the mechanisms that mediate a book’s existence in the world: referencing systems and libraries. Indeed, as Kittler states in Discourse Networks 1800/1900, “all libraries are discourse networks” (369), as they are intimately concerned with the structuring of knowledge through the organisation of the written word. To briefly consider this assertion, I will turn to the intertextual relationship between Chambers’ fictional play The King in Yellow and H. P. Lovecraft’s more notorious imagined grimoire, the Necronomicon. In Necronomicon Files: The Truth Behind Lovecraft’s Legend, Daniel Harms and John Wisdom Gonce note that Lovecraft “tells us in ‘History of the Necronomicon’ that the Necronomicon inspired Chambers to write about [The King in Yellow]. However, Lovecraft did not encounter [Chamber’s] book until May of 1927” (25). While Lovecraft first featured the Necronomicon in his 1924 short story “The Hound,” by attributing it as an influence to an earlier work Lovecraft lends authenticity to his fictional creation. The inclusion of the Necronomicon by other authors associated with Lovecraft in their own stories spreads the legend of the grimoire further. In “Forbidden Words: Taboo Texts in Popular Literature and Film” (2015), Stephen Whitty states that given the detailed and plausible history Lovecraft constructed for his creation – including relevant name checks such as Elizabethan occultist John Dee – is it “any wonder that people still wander into bookstores and university libraries, looking for a copy?” (7). As we can understand, and in consideration of Kittler, Lovecraft and his associates intentionally manipulated the creation of a discourse network, using mechanisms intended to reinforce the legitimacy of a work to create a false history, an imagined reality has seeped over into our own, where the dangerous Necronomicon exists, and can be found if you follow the right channels.
This idea of searching for the non-existent, the unknowable, the magical, is a notion that permeates Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel” (1941). In this story, the narrator is one of many men who was born in and inhabits an endless library, made up of room upon room of all the books possibly written using 25 basic symbols: 22 letters, the comma, the full stop, and the space. A great many of these books are gibberish, but the library also seemingly includes every book ever written, in multiple languages. While these “perfect” books exist, alongside them also exists imperfect versions, which may have one letter out of place, or thousands. Given the surplus of information in the library, the narrator notes that superstitions have sprung forth, with groups of inhabitants scouring the great depths of the library for the Crimson Hexagon, in which they believe to be held books containing magic. As we can understand from both Borges’ allegory for the unknowability of our existence, and Lovecraft’s manipulation of citation systems, as the written word became mechanised there arose with it new ways for magic to be associated with it. For these, it is not necessarily human production of inscription that offers it magical power, but rather
