Hi, I’m John Green. Welcome to Crash Course Religions. In some Christian traditions, people experience glossolalia, or the “gift of tongues.
” It’s described as a gift from the Holy Spirit that allows the receiver to speak a language they don’t understand. But this gift isn’t unique to Christianity. When spirit mediums aim to speak with the dead, they sometimes enter a trance where, in a similar way, a new voice flows through them.
One of these is often recognized as a religious experience, while the other is often considered magic or superstition. So, what’s the difference between a spell and a prayer? Between channeling spirits and channeling the Holy Spirit?
Where’s the line between religion and magic? [THEME MUSIC] Like religion, magic means different things to different people. Like, to me, it means being terrified as a child of a man who apparently had the ability to spontaneously generate guinea pigs from a top hat because, as he later explained to my mom, rabbits were too expensive.
But that’s not the only definition of magic. Also like religion, there’s no one way to do magic. The word groups together a bunch of diverse practices that call on invisible powers to influence the physical world.
Rituals deemed “magical” are often personal, private, and goal-oriented, striving to heal, defend, or transform someone’s life. Like when I convince myself that if I just win this game of video game soccer, AFC Wimbledon will win a game of actual soccer. That’s magical thinking, right?
In some traditions, people gain magical abilities by chance. Like tangki, spirit-mediums in parts of China and southeast Asia, who are believed to heal the sick and bring good luck, piercing their own skin as they write messages from the spirits possessing them. Only those born at certain times and on certain dates are capable of becoming tangki.
But in other traditions, anyone can learn magic by studying the Occult, or secret knowledge of supernatural forces. Like Wicca, which aims to revive the pagan worldviews of pre-Christian Europe. Most Wiccans practice magic alone, but they also come together at seasonal gatherings called sabbats and in networks called covens.
Because regardless of how it’s practiced, the idea of “magic” often comes with negative stereotypes — some view it as dubious or even demonic, reserved for sinners, charlatans, and people who don’t know better. And pop culture hasn’t always helped with that. But it wasn’t always this way.
The English word “magic” comes from the ancient Greek “mageia,” a word they got from the Persian “magi. ” Which you might recognize as another name for the wise men who went all out for the Virgin Mary’s baby shower. In ancient Greece, people from all walks of life sought out things like amulets and potions for protection, healing, and occasional revenge.
Mageia was seen as closer to philosophy and medicine than spirituality and religion. But no one really called their own practices “mageia. ” Greek and Roman authorities used the term to demonize people they didn’t like or rituals they found weird or spooky.
In fact, the Greek philosopher Celsus hurled allegations of “magic” at someone you may have heard of—Jesus Christ. Fast forward to medieval Western Europe, and these accusations went into overdrive. Christianity was growing, and the Church saw magic as a threat — something that only those in league with the devil practiced.
Accusations of magic and witchcraft were often lobbed at women and people in marginalized communities, and for centuries in Europe and eventually North America, this had deadly consequences. It’s estimated that over fifty thousand people were executed across Europe for witchcraft between the 15th and 18th centuries — the vast majority women, and often single women who were deemed dangerous because they weren’t tied to a man. In New England, between 1638 and 1725, women with little power were disproportionately accused of witchcraft.
During the infamous Salem witch trials of 1692, an enslaved indigenous woman named Tituba was one of the first to be accused after confessing to “signing the devil’s book” and bewitching young girls—though scholars today argue it’s almost certain her confession was coerced. By the 19th century, the meaning of the word “magic” had evolved further. Scholars saw it as irrational, theorizing that magic was the earliest stage of cultural development, followed by religion, and, eventually, science — once a culture had shaken off its old superstitions.
But no one could agree on where to draw the line between magic and religion. Bronislaw Malinowski argued religions asked spiritual beings for help while magic manipulated those spiritual beings. Émile Durkheim, meanwhile, said that religions were communal, while magic was more of a solo thing.
But whatever the rule, there were always exceptions to it. And, even academics today can’t agree on a definition of magic. Scholar Drw Wilburn names a variety of qualities that make something “magic,” including attempting to manipulate objects, and using religious practices like prayer and sacrifice, and performing actions to serve an individual.
Other scholars see magic as a quality of a ritual, where you’re working toward a specific effect. Still others see “magic” as a term that maligns legitimate practices and doesn’t have a practical use at all. And it gets even more complicated when you consider how to apply these boundaries, which were conceptualized in Western Europe, to the rest of the world.
Like, the Islamic term “siḥr” often gets translated as “magic,” even though it describes things that wouldn’t fit in the English category — like gossip and slander, not just sorcery and demons. Plus, traditions like Tibetan Buddhism just aren’t so keyed-up over the difference between prayers and spells. And that's something I think about a lot, because religion and magic have often overlapped in my world.
I used to be a student chaplain at a children’s hospital, and I developed a private superstition: I always laid out my shoes and my chaplain jacket in a very particular way designed to ward off injuries and illnesses among the kids in the hospital, which I guess is a private and superstitious practice like magic. But I would also pray for the protection and health of all children in the hospital, which I suppose is a religious practice. It is not just common for these things to co-exist; I would argue it’s almost inevitable.
Even those of us who don’t believe in the supernatural still wish and hope, after all. While this hierarchy of “magic bad, religion better, science best,” has a long and sordid history, it doesn’t help us understand why people practice magic. Let’s head to the Thought Bubble… Three snakeskins.
A sacrificed sheep. Three days and three nights without food, water, or clothes. That’s what it took for author Zora Neale Hurston to be welcomed into the world of Hoodoo.
Before Hurston was a novelist, she was an anthropologist. She came to New Orleans in the late 1920s to study this closely guarded, often misunderstood tradition. Hoodoo had started with enslaved people, who adapted west and central African rituals at a time when openly practicing their traditions was a crime.
Hoodoo combined knowledge of plants, spirits, and ancestors, and was believed to have the power to hurt people or help them. Hurston went all-in, earning experts’ trust and training with them for months. Some specialized in death.
Others had recipes for changing someone’s mind, dealing with a bad landlord, or landing a job. They taught her their spells for the hard parts of life: betrayal, break-ups, gossip, loneliness. Like, to keep a secret, you could write it down, fold the paper up, and slip it into a corpse’s hands, whispering the secret in its ear.
Or to split up spouses, you could put dirt from a fresh grave in the corners of their bedroom, while repeating, “Just fuss and fuss till you go away from here. ” Hoodoo was full of supernatural solutions for everyday problems, including protection from violence — a major concern for generations of Black Americans. And because Hoodoo didn’t shy away from that reality, it gave a sense of power to people who’d been without it for so long.
Today, some Hoodoo practitioners embrace the “magic” label, while others claim it's just a way of life. Either way, as Hurston wrote in 1931, “Nobody knows for sure how many thousands in America are warmed by the fire of hoodoo. ” Thanks, Thought Bubble.
Whether we call it religious, spiritual, or magical, traditions like Hoodoo often reflect the social conditions of the people practicing them. And by the 1930s, anthropologists like E. E.
Evans-Pritchard were starting to argue that “magic” wasn’t necessarily at odds with rational thinking. People often used both magical and scientific reasoning to explain events. For example, if a building fell down and killed someone, the Azande of what’s now South Sudan might suggest witchcraft as the reason why this terrible accident happened at that moment to that person.
But they’d also diagnose that termites had gnawed the wooden beams and caused it to collapse. Where science could answer the question “why,” magic could answer the question, “why me? ” Magical practices are essentially strategies that help people make sense of the world and manage its uncertainty, like a 22-year-old chaplain who doesn’t know what the night holds in store.
And, often we see very similar strategies within established religions. Consider protective objects, like this Jewish amulet created to shield a young girl from evil forces. Or this shirt wrapped with verses from the Qur’an and the ninety-nine names of God, intended to protect the person wearing it.
We also find the use of specific words or phrases of power in many established religions. Like the Hindu mantra “Om navah shivaya,” which people repeat to bring healing and calm. Or how some Muslims say ayat-al-kursi twice a day for protection.
Or how I recite the Lord’s prayer when I’m on an airplane. Twice actually, once when it takes off and once when it lands. And it’s not weird.
Nobody thinks it’s weird. What might otherwise be called “magic” sometimes goes by another name, like “miracles. ” There’s a long history of Catholic reports of the Virgin Mary appearing in shrouds, the sky, and statues weeping tears or blood.
Some Hindu gurus gain authority through healing, mind-reading, and conjuring. And in Myanmar, Buddhist weizza or “wizards” are said to have special powers to heal, fly, and turn metal into gold. When we recognize how common magical practices are–even among established religions–we can see how they respond to the many uncertainties and fears that make us human.
These days, magic is as commonplace as good-luck charms and as visible as witches sharing spells on TikTok. And while some stigma remains from centuries of bad PR, many magical communities are reclaiming their identities. For example, brujería has roots in Indigenous practices that were punished, demonized, and driven into hiding by colonizers and the Catholic Church, leading to centuries of stigmatization throughout Latin America and the Afro-Caribbean.
But today’s brujas are working to reclaim their image, by talking publicly about how their practices help them find balance and a feeling of connection to their ancestors. It’s important to remember that these categories are created. They’re created by us.
And we create categories like “magic” or “religion” to make sense of the world around us. They may just be words, but words cast ideas into the world — and those ideas create structure and meaning in societies, building and reinforcing systems of power. These words can even conjure illusions — like the idea that some people deserve persecution or that their practices are somehow inferior to others’.
But when we part that veil and peer beyond, we can see that the lines that would divide us are murky at best. And that the definition of magic is as malleable as we need it to be. Sometimes we bend it to wield power, others to fight against it.
But one thing is certain: these traditions can conjure feelings of empowerment, resilience, and connection even in a world that’s difficult and uncertain. And no matter which way you define it, there’s a certain magic in that. In our next episode, we’ll ask the question, “What does it mean to be Hindu?
” I’ll see you then. Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Religions, which was filmed at our studio in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our community on Patreon.
