Let us suppose that A is a multiple individual, a crowd with uniform reactions. B is a prophet, the founder of a religion, or a political leader, who, using magic techniques of persuasion, subjugates A. His techniques, like those of the physician, are equally admissible since, by gaining the social consensus, our manipulator himself dictates the rules of society.
Three hypostases: magician, physician, prophet. They are indissolubly bound together and have no precise line of demarcation. The “psychoanalyst” is also a member of the group, his sphere of action being confined to the illicit and the superhuman.
Along with specialization and delimitation of skills, we would tend to say that the two other practitioners of Bruno’s magic, the actual magician and the prophet, have now vanished. More probably, however, they have simply been camouflaged in sober and legal guises, the analyst being one of them and, after all, not the most important. Nowadays the magician busies himself with public relations, propaganda, market research, sociological surveys, publicity, information, counterinformation and misinformation, censorship, espionage, and even cryptography – a science which in the sixteenth century was a branch of magic. This key figure of our society is simply an extension of Bruno’s manipulator, continuing to follow his principles and taking care to give them a technical and impersonal turn of phrase. Historians have been wrong in concluding that magic disappeared with the advent of “quantitative science.” The latter has simply substituted itself for a part of magic while extending its dreams and its goals by means of technology. Electricity, rapid transport, radio and television, the airplane, and the computer have merely carried into effect the promises first formulated by magic, resulting from the supernatural processes of the magician: to produce light, to move instantaneously from one point in space to another, to communicate with faraway regions of space, to fly through the air, and to have an infallible memory at one’s disposal. Technology, it can be said, is a democratic magic that allows everyone to enjoy the extraordinary capabilities of which the magician used to boast.
On the other hand, nothing has replaced magic on its own terrain, that of intersubjective relationships. To the extent they have an operational aspect, sociology, psychology, and applied psychosociology represent, in our time, indirect continuations of magic revived.
What could be hoped for through knowledge of intersubjective relationships?
A homogeneous society, ideologically healthy and governable. Bruno’s total manipulator takes upon himself the task of dispensing to subjects a suitable education and religion: “Above all it is necessary to exercise extreme care concerning the place and the way in which someone is educated, has pursued his studies, under which pedagogies, which religion, which cult, with which books and writers. For all of that generates, by itself, and not by accident, all the subject’s qualities” (De Magia, LII). Supervision and selection are the pillars of order. It is not necessary to be endowed with imagination to understand that the function of Bruno’s manipulator has been taken into account by the State and that this new “integral magician” has been instructed to produce the necessary ideological instruments with the view of obtaining a uniform society .
Is the Western State, in our time, a true magician, or is it a sorcerer’s apprentice who sets in motion dark and uncontrollable forces?
That is very hard to say. In any case, the magician State – unless it involves vulgar conjurers – is vastly preferable to the police State, to the State which, in order to defend its own out-of-date “culture,” does not hesitate to repress all liberties and the illusion of liberties, changing itself into a prison where all hope is lost. Too much subtlety and too much flexibility are the main faults of the magician State, which can degenerate and change into a sorcerer-State; a total lack of subtlety and of flexibility are the main defects of the police State, which has abased itself to the status of jailer State. But the essential difference between the two, the one which works altogether in favor of the first, is that magic is a science of metamorphoses with the capacity to change, to adapt to all circumstances, to improve, whereas the police always remains just what it is: in this case, the defender to the death of out-of-date values, of a political oligarchy useless and pernicious to the life of nations. The system of restraints is bound to perish, for what it defends is merely an accumulation of slogans without any vitality. The magician State, on the other hand, only expects to develop new possibilities and new tactics, and it is precisely excess of vitality which impedes its good running order. Certainly, it too can only take advantage of an infinitesimal part of its magic resources. But we surmise that these are so extraordinarily rich, that, in principle, they should have no difficulty in uprooting the decayed tree of police ideology. Why does that not happen? Because the subtlety of those internal forces at play exhausts the attention of the magician State, which reveals itself ill prepared to attack the question of a fundamental and effective magic in its external relationships. This monster of intelligence finds itself without weapons when long-term operations are involved or when it ought to create a “charming” image in international relations. Its pragmatism, lacking in ceremony and in circumspection, results in an image which, however false, is nevertheless repugnant in its partners’ eyes, and this absence of promises and of Byzantine speeches, when all is said and done, proves as counterproductive as its obvious excesses of intelligence and its well-known incapacity to propose radical solutions.
If we can be surprised by the fact that the police-State can still function, we can just as well ask why the magician State, with boundless resources, functions so badly that it seems daily to lose ground vis-à-vis the ideological and territorial strides made by the other one.
The conclusion is ineluctable: it is that the magician State exhausts its intelligence in creating internal changes, showing itself incapable of working out a long-term magic to neutralize the hypnosis induced by the advancing cohorts of police. Yet the future seems to belong to it anyway, and even the provisional victory of the police State would leave no doubt concerning this point: coercion by the use of force will have to yield to the subtle processes of magic, science of the past, of the present and of the future.
– Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (1987), pp. 104-6