Le pratiche magiche tra passato e presente

Abstract

Both in the contemporary Sicilian magic and folkloric reality and in the Egyptian civilization, though with different historical and cultural assumptions, the beliefs which underlie the magic and religious rituals and the ritual symbols substantiating them (acts, words, items, sounds, etc.) show the need to gain control over the mishaps of this world and to command life processes. They reveal the urge to solve the states of individual or collective crisis, to overcome pain, illnesses, death setting up a positive dialogue with supernatural forces and trascendental entities, variously imagined and represented. In order to escape actuality in obiecto, man has, in intellectu, constantly and arbitrarily circumscribed discreta from the place-time continuum assigning each of them qualities (values, features, functions, powers, etc.) and built causes and causal and relational chains between things and facts of the world, attempting at the same time to exert forms of control over them.