© Bernd-Christian Otto, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004466005_016 chapter 14 Fictional Practice from Antiquity to Today Bernd-Christian Otto The purpose of this concluding essay is to summarise and synthesise the find- ings of this book, to weave some red threads through the material discussed therein, and to identify different types and developments in the history of Western learned magic with regard to the relationship between fiction and practice. On the basis of the conceptual framework set forth in the introduc- tion to this volume—which understands fiction as “literature comprising nov- els and short stories based on imagined scenes or characters,” and practice as the “performance of rituals by people who have labelled these practices as ‘magic’ and/or who have adopted the title ‘magician’ while referring to them- selves”—this essay will look at the relationship between fiction and practice from three different angles. In Section 1, I will discuss cases in which fiction has informed practice; in Section 2, I will reverse the perspective and assemble cases in which practice has informed fiction; finally, in Section 3, I will focus on cases in which the boundaries between fiction and practice are significantly blurred, concluding with some unique types of ‘fictional practice’ that seem to have emerged as a culmination of this phenomenon. Assuming that the case studies assembled in this book are somewhat representative of the history of Western learned magic at large, I will finally argue that we can trace a historical development, with the nineteenth century as a significant watershed (see also the introduction to this volume), which may have led to a heightened degree of fiction-practice entanglements from the nineteenth century onwards, and provide some arguments for why this development may have occurred. 1 From Fiction to Practice I shall begin with the most obvious type of relation between fiction and prac- tice in the history of Western learned magic, namely the influence of fictional ideas, stereotypes, clichés, legendary tropes, and ‘book-length’ stories on the self-understanding and ritual designs of practitioners of magic. The first sub- section will focus on smaller narrative bits and pieces, such as stereotypic tropes and clichés or legendary motifs; the second subsection will deal with - 978-90-04-46600-5 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 11:09:32AM via University of Oslo