Chapter 5 introduced readers to myths that might save liberalism by valorizing individuals who give themselves to a collective. Chapter 6 then explored the ritualized contexts in which those stories are told. In this chapter I want to explore the magical feelings that serve as the source of myths and which are weaved into, and brought to life through, ritual encounters. Magic, I will argue, is crucial to activating people because it opens a small crack in the veneer of there is no alternative, revealing another world that runs in parallel to our own and which, in that moment, feels almost within reach.

More so even than myth and ritual, magic is a term that has historically been used to delegitimize certain ways of understanding the world. Early colonial theorists of magic like Edward Tylor saw it as a competitor to science; a backwards way of thinking that would pass away or else be consigned to the ‘peripheries’ of the world once most of the global population had been educated (see also Gosden 2020).

Yet not only is magic not dead but it seems to be more alive than ever at present, from sub-Saharan Africa, to China, to North America. In sub-Saharan Africa, as the economy rapidly modernizes and peasants begin to sell their labour, claims abound that witch managers must have put a spell on workers (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 1998; Federici 2013, 170, 239). In China, burning money remains an important means of communicating with the dead (Zhang 2015). In the US, during the presidency of Donald Trump, both pro-and anti-Trump groups turned to casting spells in order to protect him and rid themselves of him respectively (Asprem 2020). If we expand the frame to include conspiracy theories, suddenly it feels as if we’re drowning in magical thinking (Ward and Voas 2011). The QAnon conspiracy, for example, which says that the world is run by an elite ring of satanic paedophiles, became almost as popular as some world religions in the US (Russonello 2021), as well as quickly spreading to a number of European countries.