Magical Persistence. Rethinking the Vedic Taxonomy of Wisdom with Jonathan Z. Smith’s Approach to Alterity and Canon

This paper reflects about the ways we use comparison to explore data, semantics, and functions, which initially reflected various historical contexts,5 but which modern scholars later labelled as ‘magic.’ To this end, in the first part of this article, I will touch upon some methodological questions that concern comparison, focusing on Smith’s reflections about the scholarly criteria for selecting comparison data and his critical use of taxa, similarities and differences for the historical study of religious phenomena. In the second part, I suggest applying J.Z. Smith’s criticism of the scholarly use of ‘the magical’ outside the cultural contexts in which the terms ‘magic’ and ‘magical’ initially occurred and in which they were semantically shaped. This approach will enable me to identify the taxonomies that articulate the ‘study of magic’ outside the Mediterranean world, especially in the study of Indian antiquity. I will discuss the impact of ‘magic’ understood, in Smith’s view, as a “second-order category,” on the scholarly understanding of the Vedic taxonomy of tradition. To do this, I will focus on the first centuries before the Common Era when the mainstream Brahmanical tradition started to be described as four-fold wisdom. To illustrate my argument, I will adopt Smith’s theorization of canon as a paradigm and I will analyze the historical arrangement of religious sources of tradition within the Brahmanical schools.