Coming to Believe

How do people come to believe in things that are esoteric, unprovable, and not widespread in the culture? The best book I know on this question is anthropologist T.M. Luhrman's Persuasions of the Witch's Craft (1989). I used this book way back in graduate school, but one of the drawbacks of that kind of scholarship is that I was just diving into it for use in one particular argument and never read it cover to cover until now.

Luhrman investigated the world of British magical practitioners, both Wiccans and the neo-Hermeticists who follow the "Western Rite." She did a staggering amount of work. She somehow got invited into the meetings of a dozen different schools and covens, participated in many rituals, interviewed hundreds of people, and read a library's worth of books. She found that the people who were drawn to magical practice were not crazy or poor, but were on the contrary educated, middle class folks, many of them from the computer world. How did they come to believe in the efficacy of magic?

Luhrman introduces a concept she calls "interpretive drift", a

slow shift in someone's manner of interpreting events, making sense of experiences, and responding to the world. People do not enter magic with a set of clear-cut beliefs which they take to their rituals and test with detachment. . .  Rather, there seems to be a slow, mutual evolution of interpretation and experience, rationalized in a manner which allows the practitioner to practice. Magicians did not deliberately change the way they thought about the world. Becoming involved in magic is exciting, and as the neophyte read about the practice and talked to other practitioners he picked up intellectual habits which made the magic seem sensible and realistic. He acquired new ways of identifying events as significant, of drawing connections between events, with new, complex knowledge in which events could be put into context. (12)

Luhrman also noted that the vast bulk of accummulated magical lore and the difficulty of mastering certain techniques gave adepts a sense of being real experts.

I would argue that the rift between magician and non-practitioner is carved out by the very process of becoming a specialist in a particular kind of activity. Becoming a specialist often makes an activity seem sensible. The specialist learns a new way of paying attention to, making sense of and commenting upon her world. The important point is that the significant features of becoming a specialist can be identified. There are new ways to define evidence which offer grounds to the expert that the non-specialist cannot see, and ways to order event so that the specialist sees coherence where the non-specialist sees only chaos; there is a body of specialist knowledge which given discrimination and depth to the specialist's interpretations; there is a semi-explicit philosophy which creates the assumptions which frame most conversations. . . .

The striking observation is that in the course of practising magic the magic comes to seem eminently reasonable to the magicians, and that rather than realizing that their intellectual habits have changed they feel that they have discovered that the ideas behind magic are objectively true. (114)

I think this model explains a great deal of human belief.