Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 5806417" data-attributes="member: 6670763">I've actually been to a seminar about this last semester.It was about Religion and Magic, and at the end of the semester most students agreed on a model that could easily have been described as arcane and divine magic.The primary distinction we discovered is that thar religious rituals/divine magic are repeating periodic activities that sustain the long term good relationships between the community and the gods and spirits, while magic ritual/arcane magic is done on behalf on the individual as a solution to a singular problem.To ensure the anual harvest, a priest would perform a ritual on behalf of the whole community every year. But to get a love spell on the woman you want to marry or to have your neighbor cursed, you would visit a wizard.However, this separation seems to be confined to ancient the mediteranean societies, from which they spread through the modern western and islamic worlds. It's not a fictional separation, but one that has been a fundamental part of western-christian culture for a very long time. However in other major cultural areas, like East-Asia, such a seperation does not exist. You still have the two purposes, but they are very often unified in the same person.</blockquote>