Introduction: Western Learned Magic as an Entangled Tradition
Entangled Religions - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Religious Contact and Transfer April 14, 2023 Bernd-Christian Otto
The introduction to a special issue proposes analyzing Western learned magic as an entangled tradition, calling for an interdisciplinary, transcultural, and transreligious perspective on its history. A working heuristic of seven types of entanglement is offered, with special emphasis on ritual hybridisation—processes where rituals reflect millennia-long textual-ritual transmission across cultural and religious boundaries. The introduction summarizes six contributions from a September 2019 workshop at the University of Bochum's Center for Religious Studies, which explore this entangled history.