Masters thesis — University of Amsterdam, 2024. Full text: https://archive.org/details/experiencing-the-elements-thesis-of-david-riley-campbell-at-the-university-of-amsterdam-2024
It's an academic attempt to explain ritual magic's persistence without reducing it to fraud or faith — as a technology of the self built from metaphor made flesh.
Contemporary ritual magic works as "self-building" through the embodied extension of conceptual metaphors — the elements are cultivated as bodily, metaphorically structured experience rather than believed-in abstractions; the thesis positions the practice in a methodological middle way between debunking and supernatural belief.
Why it matters
It's an academic attempt to explain ritual magic's persistence without reducing it to fraud or faith — as a technology of the self built from metaphor made flesh.
Use when: Ask what a practice does before asking whether it's true — ritual read as embodied self-fashioning explains its endurance better than debunking or belief.
