Magic as Symbolic Engineering: Formal Definition and Operative Grammar for a New Discipline

The academic study of magic already exists in recognizable institutional forms: peer-reviewed journals such as Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (Penn) and Correspondences (open-access), graduate programmes at the University of Amsterdam and Exeter, and a growing body of historical and anthropological scholarship from Mauss (1902) through Tambiah (1990) to Josephson-Storm (2017). This literature, however, overwhelmingly treats magic as a historical object, cultural formation, or system of stigmatized knowledge. The present paper argues for magic as an operative discipline of symbolic engineering, in which symbols, rituals, names, interfaces, and recursive procedures are studied as real techniques for reorganizing…