Magic vs. Religion: A Socio-Legal Study from Durkheimian Theory

Abstract

Colombia's Law 133 on Religious Freedom establishes in its Article 5 that neither magic, parapsychology, nor Satanism are part of the scope of the law, that is, of religion. Is it possible to justify this exclusion from the perspective of Emile Durkheim's sociology of  religion? The objective of this paper is to offer some clues that would contribute to an affirmative answer to this question. The main arguments revolve around the idea that individual relationships are established between these phenomena, while collective 
relationships prevail among religious phenomena. In Durkheim's words: the magician has no church, he has clients. Although both are collective phenomena, they differ not by ontological parameters but by axiological ones, since the values and sentiments that each society develops are what mark the distinction: religion is morally superior to magic. To support this argument, this paper proposes to describe and analyze these phenomena in light of the sociology of religion of Durkheim and his team from the Année Sociologique.