Magic and Witchcraft with Phillips Stevens

As a Peace Corps volunteer in Nigeria in his early 20s, Phillips Stevens witnessed an act of sorcery that blew his mind. He turned that moment into a 50-year career as a cultural anthropologist at the University at Buffalo, exploring religion, spirituality and the supernatural in cultures across the world. In this episode, Stevens joins host Tom Dinki to share insights from his new book, “Rethinking the Anthropology of Magic and Witchcraft: Inherently Human.” He explains why magical thinking isn’t a relic of the past—it’s hardwired into us, a survival strategy that still shapes how we navigate the unknown and process the unthinkable. From common superstitions and religious rituals to conspiracy theories like QAnon, Stevens shows how belief in magic and witchcraft persists, and what makes it inherently human. 

Credits: 
 
Host: Tom Dinki
Guest: Phillips Stevens
Writer/Producer: Laura Silverman
Production and editing by UB Video Production Group 

Coming Nov. 4: An AI pioneer who blends scientific expertise with a love of language, Rohini Srihari is the ideal person to reimagine chatbots. In the next episode, she shares with host Cory Nealon how she’s developing conversational AI that's more empathetic and purposeful, to be used in mental health care and to help people with motor neuron diseases like ALS.

Transcript

Tom Dinki: Phillips Stevens was a fresh Yale graduate in the early 1960s when he joined the Peace Corps to teach English in Nigeria. It was there that he was first introduced to sorcery.

Phillips Stevens: I was refereeing my school's boys table tennis team in the championship match when suddenly there was chaos outside.

Tom Dinki: A young boy from Stevens’ school had tried to put a curse on the opposing team using an item picked up from a local market: an iron padlock covered in hyena fur. This act was so chilling to the community that the boy was suspended, and the match had to be replayed. Stevens’ team lost. But the incident sparked his curiosity in the power of magical thinking, leading to a 50-year career as a cultural anthropologist at the University at Buffalo, where he dove deep into the roots of religion and spiritualism in human culture. Stevens has used his retirement to summarize his life's work into a book called “Rethinking the Anthropology of Magic and Witchcraft.” The book's subtitle is “Inherently Human,” and indeed, Stevens argues that belief in the supernatural is hardwired into our very nature—an evolutionary adaptation that helps us make sense of our lives and provides a scapegoat when things don't go our way. 

Welcome to Driven to Discover, a University at Buffalo podcast that explores what inspires today's innovators. My name is Tom Dinki, and in this episode, I'll be speaking with Professor Stevens about how belief in magic makes us human. 

Phil, thanks for joining us. I'm curious whether you grew up in a religious or spiritual household.

Phillips Stevens: Thanks for having me. I was raised in a loosely structured religious household. We observed the main tenets of New England Protestantism. We went to church on Sundays as a family, but otherwise we were kind of loose about religion. But it was a good introduction to the structure of religious faith.

Tom Dinki: So, after college, you teach English in Nigeria, where you were exposed to sorcery during a table tennis match. Why did this incident fascinate you so much?

Phillips Stevens: Well, it was stunning to me, absolutely stunning. And I was 21 or 22 years old, but even today, I remember the details vividly. My students, whom I got to know pretty well, were terrified of this fairly simple little act that this boy had conducted in the open, in plain sight of everybody, and so all of that stimulated my thinking, and I was determined to explore, ‘What did this mean?’ and ‘What kind of thinking is involved here?’.

Tom Dinki: Later, as an anthropologist, you came to realize that we're lacking standardized definitions of magic and witchcraft. You wrote a book about this in your retirement. So, how do you define magic and witchcraft?

Phillips Stevens: I first conceptualized this book in the 1980s. I had come to realize that not only is there no standardized definition, but that the concepts of magic and of witchcraft constitute fundamental human ways of thinking. I was finding the same beliefs in many different cultures around the world, and I came to the conclusion that what we're dealing with here are fundamentally human beliefs. 

So, I came to identify six principles, as I called them, of magic. The first essential principle is the concept of power, that everything in the world, everything in nature, has a power within it, and I'm talking about spiritual things as well as material things here. This is a universal belief. 

The second item is the idea of forces in nature. I came to conclude that, properly, magic does not deal with spirits. Universally, spirits are conceptualized as sentient and willful. They are beings with wills. They can make up their own minds. But there is a class of supernatural agencies, which are not beings; they are amorphous forces. They have power themselves, but they are also programmed during the times of the creation to do specific things. 

Thirdly, there's a belief that everything in the cosmos—past, present and future—is interconnected, actually or potentially, with everything else. So magic works by projecting power along these invisible pathways between things in the universe. 

Now, how does it work? You need symbols. A symbol does more than just represent something. A symbol can take the place of—it can stand in for the thing it represents. And if the thing the symbol represents has power, then the symbol itself becomes powerful. Words are symbols, and speech is usually involved in magical ritual. They contain the meaning and the power of their own meaning. Universally, there is restriction on speech, certain things that people may not say in certain situations, and part of the reason for such restrictions is the danger of curse, like the kind of curse that that little boy was working on at the table tennis match. 

Now, all of this works according to two fundamental principles, first described by the British folklorist James George Frazer. One is the principle of similarity. Things that resemble other things have a causal relationship with those other things. Now that resemblance is not just shape or form; it can be sound, it can be texture, it can be behavior, it can be color. And the second principle is contact. Things that have been in contact with other things retain some of the essence of those other things after they are separated. And again, that contact doesn't need to be physical; it can be associational. 

So, these are the six principles of magic, and they are absolutely universal. And the fact of their universality suggests to anthropologists that there's something fundamental, deeper than culture, going on here—suggesting that each of these principles of magic is somehow rooted in our evolutionary biology, and they govern the way the human brain works, which was probably critical to our survival as a species in our early evolution. 

Now, witchcraft is quite different. Witchcraft is an inherent ability, in certain people only, to undertake a variety of terrible things and fantastic things. I have identified 11 fundamental fears, human fears, that are embodied in the witch, and three fantasies. 

Clip from “The Wizard of Oz”: I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too! 

Phillips Stevens: Panhuman fantasies that are found in folklore, children's stories, that are also in the witch. Now the witch is not a universal creature, but in societies that don't have witches, they nevertheless have these fundamental fears and fantasies that are manifested in other supernatural beings. Some of the fears include the fears of conspiracy, the fears of social subversion, the fears of nocturnal activity, the fears of spread of disease. These are things that witches do. They steal children. 

Line from “Come Little Children” (sung): Come little children, I’ll take thee away. 

Phillips Stevens: They engage in illicit sexual behavior. They ritually murder their human victims. They dismember their bodies. And they engage in cannibalism and vampirism. These are two universal aspects of utter disgust. And finally, they are involved in death. And the three universal fantasies are flying, transformation—witches can change themselves into any other form or invisibility—and thirdly, they have special relationships with animals. They have a pet, which is called in old Middle English the familiar, which shares the witchcraft power and can go out and do the dirty work while the witch is at home with an alibi.

Tom Dinki: You said earlier that magical thinking is an evolutionary adaptation. What exactly makes it a beneficial trait?

Phillips Stevens: A fundamental function of magical thinking is to establish for the individual a sense of control which gives that person a sense of confidence in a vast, confusing and indifferent world. The reverse of magic is taboo. Taboo is also a magical concept. It is the avoidance of establishing a magical connection. Taboos help us to avoid dangerous things by putting a supernatural veneer over it—poisonous things, decaying things, rotting things, dangerous things and so forth. And with the fears of the witch, people stay in at night where they belong. They bond together to provide social solidarity, which is important in human evolution, to be aware of and avoid disease-causing things, and the instinctive protection of children. And of course, we revere life, and witches are anti-life. They are the embodiments of death—indeed, violent, bloody death.

Tom Dinki: I think many people today would say they don't believe in magic, but we do still see elements of it, as well as cannibalism, vampirism, witches, in many conspiracy theories, right?

Phillips Stevens: The 1980s and early 1990s, America and the rest of the world were in a state of panic over satanic cults, and the story of the cults embodied many of the attributes of the classic witch. But the satanists stole children, murdered children, engaged in cannibalism and vampirism, and child sexual trafficking. Does it ring a bell? These fears have emerged again in the past several years. The existence of QAnon as a reality has never been demonstrated, but there are a lot of people who claim that it's real, and it embodies some of these same fundamental fears that were evident in the witch of the early Middle Ages and of classical times as well.

Tom Dinki: I think many conspiracy theories often take real threats, such as human trafficking, but maybe imbue it with more fantastical elements, like cannibalism and vampirism. Why do you think we do this?

Phillips Stevens: These are visceral fears. They get us. They interfere with rational thinking. They emerge in times of extreme social anxiety. And a general function of all of them is to organize people and bring people together in opposition to some other, with a capital ‘O’. The same function as the witch provides in the idea of the scapegoat—someone else to blame for some social misfortune.

Tom Dinki: What are some ways we all practice magic in our everyday lives, maybe without even realizing it?

Phillips Stevens: Everybody is superstitious to a certain degree, and most superstitions are examples of magical thinking. If you have a lucky charm, an item which became important to you, and you keep it with you, it becomes part of your identity. You get into a morning routine, and you feel uncomfortable if you get out of that routine. The classic superstitions, like opening an umbrella in the house. An umbrella is designed for protection from the storm. The storm is disorder, potentially violent, outside. The inside is domesticity, order, calm, peace, right? You don't want to bring the storm into the house. The principle of contact—there it is. Stepping on a crack, crack represents damage, and the damage can be contagious and bring you some kind of misfortune. One of the things about magic in its interrelationship with religion is that the individual can take power from one source and use it for his or her own purposes. A good example of this is the Christian cross, which is an incredibly powerful symbol. Individuals take it and hang it around their necks, under their clothing. Why? Are they consciously trying to protect themselves from evil? Probably.

Tom Dinki: And your book mentions that belief in magic has often been regarded as separate from religion throughout most of history, but the truth is probably a bit more complicated than that, right?

Phillips Stevens: In fact, religious ritual involves a number of magical elements, like the reverence for relics of saints. Pieces of bone or things that the saints wore or used have power, right? And I've heard Catholics talk about the superstition about the statue of Saint Joseph. If your house won't sell, what do you do? You bury a statue of Saint Joseph outside the yard. The religious ritual itself may involve colors, for example, and the transference of power. That's what baptism is all about. Holy water is a good example. If you understand the difference between holy water and ordinary water, then you've got it. You can understand magical thinking. Holy water is chemically no different, right? But there is an invisible essence in holy water which all believers are absolutely certain about.

Tom Dinki: I think conventional wisdom is that, as technology advances and we gather more scientific knowledge, belief in the supernatural decreases. Do you think this is actually the case, and do you think it will be the case going forward?

Phillips Stevens: Well, certainly over the centuries, belief in the supernatural has been replaced by scientific knowledge, but it will never disappear. It serves positive functions in people. It gives people confidence. It answers questions. The average person has a limited knowledge of science and technology, especially today, when science has become so specialized, different scientists are unaware of the details of their colleagues, right? But spiritualism and supernatural beliefs serve us a totally separate function, and they will not disappear. 

Tom Dinki: So how should we respond when people come forward claiming they've experienced something supernatural?

Phillips Stevens: They might be lying if they have a fantastic story, but it's better to assume that they really did experience this, even though no one else around them experienced the same thing. This is another feature of humanity. It has to do with perception. It has to do with neurobiology. It has to do with emotion. All of those things together can create a sensation or a sense, a perceptual sense that individuals can experience it as real for them. And so the relation of a supernatural event by an individual should be responded to sympathetically, I think.

Tom Dinki: Because we also can't prove that a supernatural event didn't occur, right? There's no proof that it didn't occur.

Phillips Stevens: We need to recognize that supernaturalism is outside of science. Faith is outside of science. Science requires measurement. The most bizarre evidence of things we're talking about here is the concept of quantum entanglement. Albert Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance”—the scientifically measurable fact that tiny particles, subatomic particles, that are very remote from each other have an interaction with each other. This borders on what, for me, is the mystical. It may very well be that magical thinking is based in fact. There may be, ultimately discoverable, some evidence for remote connections between things, just as in the case of quantum entanglement. But for now, it is outside of science, and it cannot be tested by the methods of science. So we have to recognize that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God, or beliefs in magical action in the universe.

Tom Dinki: Phil, thanks so much for joining us.

Phillips Stevens: Well, it's been fun. Thanks for having me.