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  1. Economic production and the spread of supernatural beliefs
    Author: Araújo, Daniel; Carrillo, Bladimir; Sampaio, Breno
    Published: December 2021
    Publisher:  IZA - Institute of Labor Economics, Bonn, Germany

    Religion and beliefs in the supernatural are present in all societies. Yet, studies about the spread of small-scale supernatural belief systems remain quite limited. In this work, we test the anthropological hypothesis that historical dependence on... more

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    Location:
    ZBW - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft, Standort Kiel
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    DS 4
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    Religion and beliefs in the supernatural are present in all societies. Yet, studies about the spread of small-scale supernatural belief systems remain quite limited. In this work, we test the anthropological hypothesis that historical dependence on pastoralism favored the adoption of customs that contributed to the reduction in witchcraft beliefs. Pastoral societies were characterized by the use of social strategies as a way of mitigating the risks inherent in pastoral production, making the practice of accusations of witchcraft a barrier to maintaining their existing social ties. Consistent with this hypothesis, we document that people descending from historically more pastoral societies have a lower level of contemporary belief in witches. The results using an instrumental variable based on the ecological determinants of pastoralism corroborates our main analysis. We further show that the main mechanism behind our result seems to be pastoralist groups - freedom of movement and an increase in social ties, proxied by the level of trust in relatives, neighbors, courts, and local councils. We also show that the reduced belief in witches increases references to witchcraft in pastoral societies - oral traditions, narratives, stories, jokes, and proverbs, possibly because the lack of fear makes pastoralists more willing to speak, sing and joke about the supernatural. Finally, we test for the importance of cultural persistence by examining people who live today in locations with low levels of suitability for pastoralism but belong to ethnic groups that have historically lived in areas with high levels of suitability and show that the reduction in belief in witchcraft persists.

     
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    Source: Union catalogues
    Language: English
    Media type: Book
    Format: Online
    Other identifier:
    hdl: 10419/250599
    Series: Discussion paper series / IZA ; no. 14938
    Subjects: culture; pastoralism; persistence; superstition; witchcraft
    Scope: 1 Online-Ressource (circa 66 Seiten), Illustrationen
  2. Entangled Magic in the Medieval Latin West
    Author: Page, Sophie
    Published: 2023

    This article focusses on the history of learned magic in late medieval Europe, breaking a period of about 500 years into chronological stages to explore how medieval supporters and critics of magic represented the art and responded to each other’s... more

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    Index theologicus der Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen
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    This article focusses on the history of learned magic in late medieval Europe, breaking a period of about 500 years into chronological stages to explore how medieval supporters and critics of magic represented the art and responded to each other’s arguments, then reframed their own in a continuous dynamic entanglement. In this period learned magic texts from diverse religious and cosmological traditions (primarily Christian, Jewish, Arabic and Greco-Roman) circulated among people familiar with, and emotionally invested in, a great variety of institutional and informal rituals. Sources reveal a vibrant culture of exchanges of texts between members of religious orders, physicians and lay men, clerics and lay women - a culture of entanglement: discussion, borrowing, critique and adaptation alongside practitioner-client relationships and necessary secrecy and concealment.

     
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    Source: Union catalogues
    Language: English
    Media type: Article (journal)
    Format: Online
    Other identifier:
    Parent title: Enthalten in: Entangled Religions; Bochum : Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 2014; 14(2023,3) Absatz 1-43; Online-Ressource

    Subjects: astrology; cosmology; magic; necromancy; superstition
  3. Kometenforschung zwischen Aberglauben und Science-fiction: Gottes flammende Bußprediger ; Comet research between superstition and science fiction
    Author: Grimm, Gunter E.
    Published: 2002

    An overview on some 'scientific' opinions about comets in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. more

     

    An overview on some 'scientific' opinions about comets in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

     
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    Source: BASE Selection for Comparative Literature
    Language: German
    Media type: Article (journal)
    Format: Online
    DDC Categories: 830
    Subjects: Fakultät für Geisteswissenschaften » Institut für Germanistik » Literaturwissenschaft und Literaturdidaktik; comet research; superstition; science fiction
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    All rights reserved ; info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess