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''Oriental Magic'', by Idries Shah, is a study of magical practices in diverse cultures from Europe and Africa, through Asia to the Far East. Originally published in 1956 and still in print today,〔Octagonpress.com page on ''Oriental Magic''〕 it was the first of this author’s 35 books. The work was launched with the encouragement of the anthropologist, Professor Louis Marin,〔Member of the Institut de France, Director of the Ecole d”Anthropologie de Paris and Deputy-President of the International Institute of Anthropology〕〔 "Dr. Louis Marin hailed his anthropological text ''Oriental Magic'' as an important work—and he is head of the Paris School of Anthropology."〕 who in his preface to the book stressed its “scholarly accuracy” and “real contribution to knowledge”. Magic had long been considered outside the discipline of academic study, but Shah’s approach, which involved five years of study and field work, was – very unusually for the 1950s – multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural. His documented material came from archaeology, anthropology, history, religion, and psychology, as well as from artefacts, obscure manuscripts, and an impressive range of expert informants, who made (often unpublished) specialist material available to him. As a result, the secrecy and obfuscation around magical operations and practitioners was defused by the author’s informed, dispassionate approach to the array of arcane information he had assembled, some of it printed for the first time. ''Oriental Magic'' seems also to have been a clearly stated invitation for magic in general to be investigated as any other subject in the West would be, with coolness, objectivity and scientific method. The book in itself can be seen as providing a ground plan for future researchers, signalling useful directions their investigations might take, and specifying topics which might yield to further study. ==Content== The author examines a vast accumulation of materials on human beliefs, magical practices and ceremonies, from North Africa to Japan. Among much else, these include a conspectus of Jewish, Tibetan, Arabian, Iranian and Indian magic, an account of Sufism and its origins, legends of the sorcerers, examples of alchemy, talismans and magical rites found in the cultures studied, and topics such as love magic, the witchdoctors of the Nile Valley, the ‘singing sands’ of Egypt, subcutaneous electricity, and the prehistoric sources of Babylonian occult practices. There are also personal accounts of, for instance, Shah’s ‘training’ under a Ju-Ju witch doctor, a demonstration of Hindu levitation, and translations of what were considered secret alchemical and magical formulae. Shah finds that magical origins in High Asia have influenced communities halfway across the world, and that the westward drift from that original source might explain the great similarity in magical beliefs, practices and terminology in places as diverse as China, the Near East, Scandinavia and Africa. The type of witch-doctoring (shamanism) practised in the east, for example, is duplicated among the Finns, the Sami, and even the American Indians. The author tracks distortions from original sources, winnows fact from supposition, allows for alternative explanations of phenomena, such as physiological and psychological responses which are separate from the apparent “magic”, and shows how much dross has accumulated around many of the practices he inspects. But he suggests there also remains a residue of what, in magical terminology, could be called “pure gold”, and that some of this “gold” is likely to reflect hitherto little-understood forces “which may very possibly be harnessed to individual and collective advantage”. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Oriental Magic」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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