Contemporary magical practices: Historical bases for typology

Despite the claims of the contemporary society to progressive scientific rationality, it is difficult not to notice in our everyday life increasingly more manifestations of the “magic” in quite standardized forms, typical for the “consumer society”. The absence of an established sociological tradition for conceptualizing the magic and of the systematized empirical data for the study of its current forms explains the need for the reconstruction of the general logic of the revival of the magical/esoteric as a sociocultural phenomenon. The authors identify four conditional periods of the “magical renaissance”, which allowed the esoteric movement to acquire its features of a countercultural movement, criticizing the social order and providing space for experimental construction of identity and non-conformist self-expression (this is not a stereotypical secret community, closed to the uninitiated and hidden from the public, but rather open, internally differentiated systems of diverse structures and holistic ideas about the world order, which combine intuitive and spiritual beliefs with religious and scientific elements). In the Russian history, there are relatively synchronous waves of popularity of esoteric practices (with the exception of the second stage of the magical renaissance), so the authors identify common features of esoteric movements: a high level of commercialization, relative institutionalization, the predominance of people with higher education among members and followers, countercultural orientation, visual aestheticization, the private nature of practices, etc. Thus, the form, content and symbolic load of magical rituals of current esoteric movements can be considered in a structural-functional context - through collective problems, requests and needs reflected in ritualized actions (esoteric practices) which only look like manifestations of the archaic magical thinking.