Egil Asprem‘s upcoming online lecture on April 15, 5 p.m. (CET) is titled Romani entrepreneurial magic and the persuasiveness of ritual deception: Sleight-of-hand as artifice of magical power.
Please find the link to the Zoom meeting, the abstract, and the speaker’s short bio below.
Join the Zoom meeting here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83619121074?pwd=s9hf1kCgzYaVdw96MQ4bkE6QzSLtGH.1
Meeting ID: 836 1912 1074
Passcode: 240020
Abstract
Talk of deception in the domain of the religious or sacred usually evokes distinctions between genuine practitioners and impostors. That dichotomy is problematic: The human ability to suspend disbelief in the face of the obviously artificial or hyperbolically exaggerated is as central to religion and magic as it is to the enjoyment of theatre or film. Yet equating artifice with deception and fraud is a persistent delegitimization strategy, particularly vis-à-vis the foreign, deviant and other.
This lecture explores dynamics of deception, dissimulation and suspension in the context of early-modern service magic by focusing on a type of service provider commonly associated with the fraudulent: the “gypsy”. Nineteenth-century scholars of “gypsy lore” were fascinated with the hokkano baro, or “great trick”, a confidence game attributed to Romani women. George Borrow, Charles Leland and others saw it as evidence of a grand diffusion of fraud and superstition to Europe from the east. These narratives must be rejected. Instead, records of Romani service magic provide unique insights into how deception, sleight-of-hand and clever narrative framing can work as persuasive techniques that, to clients, manifest rather than feign magical power.
Short biography
Egil Asprem is professor in the history of religions at Stockholm University, Sweden, specializing in the study of esotericism, magic, occultism and related currents. In recent years he has focused on how the Romani peoples have been entangled with European magical traditions since the late Middle Ages.