I agree, I think that is very much what is happening here. My BS detectors strongly mistrust the process of pejoration. Whatever you do, agency I think can be defined by you and/or your group controlling your own cultural narrative. But this needs to be a pro-active process, because once one’s own notion of one’s narrative is mostly reacting against others’ opinions, then it’s a failure. Becoming reactionary is an attempt to save face because one isn’t being pro-active, isn’t owning their terms. It’s rather plain to see when there are a list of what are essentially synonyms (sorcery, enchantment, shamanism, etc) but people avoid one term, with no real justification. It’s funny (as in “peculiar”) that people here are often eager to point out that words can have multiple meanings, but when I point that out in this discussion, all I got was awkward silence.
I’d say with the empirical state religions of Mesopotamia, from which Abrahamic religions largely derive. At that time, most of Europe, Asia, Americas, Australia, etc had religions which would basically be called “shamanic” - meaning by that they promoted direct experience of mystical ideas by the individual. But the ancient proto-Semitic religions, Khemetic, and Vedic religions were more heavily tied into statecraft and political power. Early Christianity struggled to define itself by oppressing Gnostics from the very beginning, who espoused a more direct yogic/magic interpretation.
Basically, religion as a tool of the state hinges entirely upon the notion of “Leave it to The Professionals!”, that ritual exists so that a special person, a priest who is recognized by the state, can claim to experience some religious state for you, interpret it for you, and then prescribe moral/behavioral edicts which have been approved by the state. This is implicit in the core creeds of later Christianity with the interpretation that Christ is not “merely” another death/resurrection avatar which anybody can relate to, but a separate, singular entity. Jesus died so that YOU don’t have to! And the priest will understand that so that YOU don’t have to! Mystical/magical interpretations of this have always been that Christ’s death and resurrection are a metaphor, and that you can do the same. Obviously, this would be total heresy to most followers of institutional Christianity, as it undermines the whole enterprise!
This is why there has been such fierce oppression of the Gnostics, Druids, witches, and practically every non-institutional and indigenous practice everywhere. Because it is easier to manage a society which is not populated by creative people and geniuses, so the technologies for changing states of consciousness are rigorously controlled. The most powerful technologies for affecting consciousness are ritual and drugs, and to perhaps a slightly lesser degree, sexuality. Hence the vague restrictions which still accompany these things in even nominally secular society. Governments, churches, and advertisers are certainly not opposed to these technologies in actuality. Rather, they prefer to exploit them for themselves - whilst alienating the average person from doing the same. In this sense, sorcery (or magic(k)) can be understood as the democratization of the processes of drastically altering one’s own consciousness at will. Contrasted against traditional “religion” (literally, to tie and bind), of using wetware to make your population think more or less the same way. It doesn’t really have anything to do with believing supernatural weirdness, that’s only what they tell the rubes.
That’s a sticky point, because I don’t know that there is a lot of consensus here. My (admittedly limited) experience is that much of the indigenous culture of the Americas is intimately involved with what can be called magic. I am not stuck on the term myself, but I do wonder about why so many (apparently) go out of their way to avoid it. Unfortunately, my intuition is that it is being done to appeal more to Western/European sensibilities, rather than because it somehow accurately reflects American traditions. I am curious if it might not be underlied by a (IMO misguided) desire for assimilation.
