Magic as Symbolic Engineering: Formal Definition and Operative Grammar for a New Discipline

The academic study of magic already exists in recognizable institutional forms: peer-reviewed journals such as Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (Penn) and Correspondences (open-access), graduate programmes at the University of Amsterdam and Exeter, and a growing body of historical and anthropological scholarship from Mauss (1902) through Tambiah (1990) to Josephson-Storm (2017). This literature, however, overwhelmingly treats magic as a historical object, cultural formation, or system of stigmatized knowledge. The present paper argues for magic as an operative discipline of symbolic engineering, in which symbols, rituals, names, interfaces, and recursive procedures are studied as real techniques for reorganizing perceptual, institutional, and material relations. A formal definition is proposed comprising five atomic operations—manipulation, construction, interconnection, destruction, and rotation—and a governing telos of guided transformation, together with a disciplinary grammar, a taxonomy of subfields, and a programme of research. This intervention does not reject the existing field but extends it from description to operation, and from disciplinary analysis to symbolic engineering. 30 citations across two citational fans: outer fan (speech act theory, legal performativity, semiotics, media theory, category theory, computational semiotics, poetics) and inner fan (esotericism, Hermetic studies, Kabbalistic scholarship, ritual anthropology, cognitive science of magic, history of magic). Five ASCII figures. Three formal propositions. Seven subfields defined. Five-document research programme proposed. ~6,600 words. Crimson Hexagonal Archive Working Paper.