Patrick Farmer
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patrickwilliamfarmer@gmail.com
In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici integrates an intriguing analysis of why magic can’t coexist with rhythms and values of industrial productivity. Attacks against witchcraft are found to be as essential to modern capitalism’s formation as enclosures. According to Federici, witch hunting was an attack against world’s magical view.
At magic’s basis is an animistic conception of nature who does not admit to any separation between matter and spirit, and thus perceives cosmos as living organism, populated by occult forces, where every element is in sympathetic relation with every element, everyone is in everyone always. Where nature is held as universe of signs and signatures, marking invisible affinities who require deciphering, every element – herbs, plants, metals, and human body – hold virtues and powers peculiar to them.
One strand of Hermeticism believes that Earthly changes are influenced by celestial heavens and can be produced human participation ith said elements in whom influences inhere. So in this sense, magic is as much a position as a practise, a pantheistic cosmology in whom everyone is invested with soul and ability to make soul. England’s Civil War of 1640s/50s saw a revival of Paracelsian ethics and ideas as part of radical doctrines of dissenting sects such as Diggers (let everyone quietly have earth to manure), advocates of cooperative farming of commons and cultivation of crops; Ranters (earth will be a treasury for all and not for some), Levellers, Seekers, Family of Love (who would attempt to undermine bases of patriarchal family, emphasising tenderness and quiet sympathy), Shakers, Muggletonians, Rosicrucians, and so on...