Love is magic

The argument

Magic designed to cause feelings of love has been an important part of many cultural attitudes to love. Love spells were relatively common in Ancient Greek and Roman societies. Court records of love potions-turned-accidental-poisonings indicate that love potions were not unusual. Love spells were largely considered masculine endeavours, cast on the recipients of male lust. Love magic has been a part of multiple other disparate cultures since this time. Records of love spells have been found in 15th century England and 18th century Russia. Magic spells have been regarded throughout time and place as a viable path towards a deep, mutual love. It is the perfect way to create positive energies and to for one to receive back the love they are giving out.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The evidence assembled points the other way. Finding love magic in ancient Greece and Rome, in fifteenth-century England and in eighteenth-century Russia — societies separated by language, religion, technology and centuries — is a demonstration that widely different cultures converged on the same practice for the same purpose. That is the signature of something cross-cultural, and it is the pattern a defender of universality would cite. An argument for culture-specificity needs cases where the notion of love itself differs, not cases where the same notion recurs and the same remedy is reached for. The argument also never reaches the notion at issue. Love spells are a technique for obtaining or compelling love, and their existence tells us that people in many places wanted love badly enough to seek supernatural help; it does not tell us what any of those societies took love to be. The one variation actually described concerns who cast the spells — a masculine endeavour directed at the objects of male desire in the ancient cases — which is a fact about gender and social power rather than about differing conceptions of love. The final paragraph also changes register. Having reported historical practice in a descriptive voice, it asserts that magic is a viable path to deep mutual love and a way to create positive energies — a claim about efficacy stated in the encyclopedia's own voice rather than attributed to the practitioners described. Whatever its merits, it is not evidence for the position and does not follow from the historical material. Stronger support for culture-specificity is readily available: arranged marriage traditions, courtly love as a medieval European invention, and languages that divide the emotional field quite differently. The argument reaches for the one line of evidence that undercuts it.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Love magic appearing in ancient Greece and Rome, fifteenth-century England and eighteenth-century Russia shows widely separated societies converging on the same practice for the same purpose, which is evidence of a cross-cultural constant rather than of culture-specific notions of love. [Rejecting P2] Spells are a technique for obtaining love and evidence that people wanted it badly enough to seek supernatural help; they do not establish what any of these societies took love to be, and the one variation described — that casting was a masculine endeavour aimed at the objects of male desire — concerns gender and social power rather than conceptions of love. [Rejecting C] The conclusion therefore does not follow from the premises, and the closing assertion that magic is a viable path to mutual love and a way to create positive energies states an efficacy claim in the entry's own voice rather than reporting what practitioners believed — neither evidence for the position nor consistent with the descriptive register of the rest.