Magic occupies a remarkably contested position within the depth-psychology corpus, where it functions simultaneously as a primitive cognitive error, an irreducible psychic reality, a gateway to the unconscious, and an operative principle of the soul’s encounter with matter. Freud, following Frazer and Tylor, reads magic reductively as the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’—the confusion of ideal connection with real connection, a trace of archaic animism that psychology is charged with superseding. Jung, by contrast, approaches magic as something that ‘accords with unreason’ and therefore eludes rational comprehension; in the Red Book he explicitly declares that ‘magical understanding is what one calls non-comprehension,’ repositioning magic not as error but as the mode in which psyche touches the incomprehensible. Von Franz extends this into the history of science, tracing alchemy’s techno-magic as the matrix out of which both psychological and physical inquiry emerged, and finding in Ficino, Bruno, and Avicenna sophisticated doctrines of imaginatio with genuine ‘magical-creative effects’ on matter. Neumann situates magic within the evolution of consciousness, linking food magic, fertility magic, and love magic to the primordial governance of the Feminine archetype. Harrison, writing from classical scholarship, restores magic’s original civic and royal dignity, identifying it as a drōmenon—a thing predone—bound to the service of the gods rather than to hole-and-corner charlatanism. The corpus thus spans from Freudian demystification to Jungian rehabilitation, with von Franz and Neumann charting the developmental and cosmological middle ground.
It is an error to believe that there are magical practices that one can learn. One cannot understand magic. One can only understand what accords with reason. Magic accords with unreason, which one cannot understand.
Jung’s Red Book delivers the corpus’s most radical statement on magic: it is constitutively incomprehensible, belonging to the domain of the irrational that reason cannot assimilate, and therefore cannot be ‘learned’ as a technique.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
the true explanation of all the folly of magical observances is the domination of the association of ideas… mistaking an ideal connection for a real one.
Freud, citing Frazer, reduces magic to a cognitive confusion between associative links in thought and causal links in nature, making it the psychological predecessor of science rather than a valid mode of engagement with reality.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913thesis
First and foremost magic is a drōmenon, a thing predone. The rain-maker jingles his rattle and shakes his water-cart, he does something… the essence of magic is I’ll do, and I’ll do, and I’ll do.
Harrison grounds magic in ritual action rather than belief, identifying its essence as performative doing—a collective, state-sanctioned drōmenon—rather than the private sorcery of later popular imagination.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912thesis
‘the art of the magician is the service of the gods’… No statement could well be more contrary to current feeling about magic. We associate magic rather with demons than with gods.
Harrison recovers the archaic equation of magic with the service of gods and kingly duty, arguing that the later demonization of magic represents a fall from its original social and sacred function.
, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912thesis
‘All the power of magic consists of love. The working of magic is a certain attraction of one thing for another through natural similarity… and that is the real magic.’
Von Franz, citing Ficino, presents Renaissance Neoplatonic magic as grounded in cosmic Eros—the sympathetic attraction binding all parts of the world—aligning magic with the animating principle of the psychoid realm.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
The ancients devised magic to compel fate. They needed it to determine outer fate. We need it to determine inner fate and to find the way that we are unable to conceive.
Jung reframes magic as the depth-psychological equivalent of ancient fate-compulsion: where archaic peoples used it to master external contingency, the modern task is to employ its analogous function for the determination of inner destiny.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
‘Magic is not easy, and it demands sacrifice.’… ‘The sacrifice that magic demands is solace.’
In dialogue with his soul, Jung’s Red Book frames magic as a demanding inner discipline whose cost is the relinquishment of comfort, positioning it as a path requiring genuine psychic sacrifice.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009supporting
magic, which was originally governed by the Feminine, began no doubt as ‘food magic’ and developed by way of fertility magic into sexual or ‘love magic.’
Neumann traces a developmental sequence within magic itself—from alimentary to fertility to erotic forms—anchoring its origin in the Feminine archetype and demonstrating the etymological unity underlying these transformations.
, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955supporting
Avicenna strongly advocated the doctrine of an imaginatio that had magical-creative effects. Since archetypal ‘forms’ exist in the soul, matter can be influenced by them.
Von Franz locates in Avicenna a philosophically rigorous doctrine linking psychic imagination to material effect, establishing a tradition in which magic is the operative mode of the archetype’s interface with physical reality.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
The most primitive magic rites were connected with fertility… The hand is central to all magic. It is symbolic of man’s power to tame and shape nature consciously, to put its energies to creative use.
Nichols connects the Magician archetype of the Tarot to the earliest fertility rites, reading the magical hand as the symbol of conscious human agency applied to natural energy.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting
Kāma is of the essence of magic, magic of the essence of love; for among nature’s own spells and charms that of love and sex is pre-eminent. This is the witchcraft that compels life to progress from one generation to the next.
Zimmer identifies magic with Kāma—desire and love—arguing that erotic compulsion is the primordial form of magic, binding creatures to the cycle of existence and underpinning all subsequent magical vocabulary.
, Philosophies of India, 1951supporting
None has so completely overcome magic in its characteristic world of thought as has the Greek. In the Homeric world, magic possesses no importance, whether we look at gods or men.
Otto argues that the Greek spirit achieved a unique and thoroughgoing transcendence of magical thinking, reading Homeric religion as the historical document of this decisive turn away from enchantment.
, The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion, 1929supporting
Western alchemy originated in Alexandrian times when the philosophical mind of the Greeks encountered the techno-magic of the Orient and the North African cultures.
Von Franz identifies the origin of alchemy in the creative collision between Greek rationalism and oriental techno-magic, establishing magic as the generative matrix from which both alchemical and, ultimately, scientific inquiry emerged.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
The ‘favorable day’ accords with the basic tenet of nearly all magic, to take the time into account.
Von Franz identifies the attention to propitious timing—kairos—as a cross-cultural principle underlying magical practice from Babylonian alchemy onward, linking it to the concept of synchronicity.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
rooted in the magic power of the word, of the secret primal word; it is the belief (which lies at the base of all magic) in the power of the bound over the unbound, of rigid knowledge over swarming perils.
Rank locates the foundation of all magic in the belief that formulated, bound knowledge—supremely the word—can constrain and dominate the chaotic, unbounded forces of existence.
, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932supporting
it is essentially a relationship to the personified magic helper, a role which obviously a psychoanalyst… is able to play satisfactorily for the person who is seeking the personified magic helper.
Fromm psychologizes the ‘magic helper’ as a projective figure onto whom the individual displaces autonomous selfhood, finding this dynamic operative in the transference relationship of psychoanalysis itself.
, Escape from Freedom, 1941supporting
Levi considered high magic a mystical path to enlightenment. The goal was self-mastery and the development of one’s will. To him magic was ‘a science which confers on man powers apparently superhuman.’
Place presents Lévi’s synthesis of high magic as a unified mystical science oriented toward self-transformation and will-development, connecting Hermeticism, Kabbalah, and Tarot within a single operative doctrine.
, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, 2005supporting
it also aimed at turning one into an efficient religious ‘magician’ who could produce parapsychological effects in the outer world.
Von Franz describes Giordano Bruno’s quaternarian mandalas as instruments for producing genuine parapsychological effects, situating Renaissance magical practice at the interface between inner reconstitution and outer psychoid influence.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
there is more in common than one might at first think between the average Westerner’s acceptance of the efficacy of aspirin and the African villager’s acceptance of a spell from the witch doctor: neither understands, or even asks for, a causal explanation.
McGilchrist, via Robin Horton, relativizes the distinction between magical and scientific belief, arguing that both rest on authority and experience rather than understood causation, complicating the Frazerian hierarchy.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside
Rain is produced magically by imitating it or the clouds and storms which give rise to it, by ‘playing at rain’, one might almost say.
Freud illustrates imitative magic through rain-making rituals, demonstrating the mimetic logic—doing in miniature what one wishes nature to do at large—that underlies this class of magical observance.
, Totem and Taboo, 1913aside