This thesis emerges from a fundamental contradiction of contemporary society: despite the dominance of scientific rationality and technological progress, forms of mythical and magical thinking continue to persist in public discourse and everyday practices. Mythical thinking is understood as an epistemic modality that is no less logical than scientific thinking, but rather operates according to a different internal logic. Lévi-Strauss demonstrates that mythical thinking is neither a beginning, a blueprint, nor an unfinished fragment of a larger whole; rather, it is a well-articulated system independent of science, operating through a different, heterogeneous yet nevertheless limited repertoire of pre-existing elements – the logic of the intellectual bricoleur (Lévi-Strauss, 2004: 24, 28–29). Magical thinking, in turn, is understood as an operative practice that, within modernity, is not a remnant of premodern consciousness but a recodification of an ontological substratum that no historical episteme has been able to eliminate – nor indeed could it.
The central thesis of this study is that magical thinking in modernity does not appear as an external alternative to science, but rather as its shadow: an internal excess of the rational order that is not an external threat, but an inseparable by-product of the very epistemological and technological apparatuses of rationality. This thesis operates on two inseparable levels: the level of thought and discourse, where magic functions through epistemic gaps and narrative patterns, and the level of material objects and practices, where magic resides in the things we wear, possess, and use ritualistically. The aim of this research is to construct a genealogy of this process, tracing its development from early modernity to contemporary culture. The theoretical framework is built upon five key authors. Each selected author addresses a dimension of the problem that the others, on their own, cannot fully explain. Max Weber serves as the point of departure because he formulates the diagnostic question that enables an understanding of rationalization as a process of the disenchantment of the world and the loss of existential meaning: how the rationalization of the world produces its own opposite in the form of a structural void of meaning. Michel Foucault translates Weber’s diagnosis from the existential to the epistemological level and, through the concept of the episteme, reveals the historical contingency of knowledge, showing how magic was epistemologically excluded but not eradicated. Silvia Federici extends this perspective through a materialist genealogy of capitalism, demonstrating that the establishment of modern rationality was grounded in the violent dispossession of communities and the erasure of magical forms of knowledge. Claude Lévi-Strauss, through the concepts of the bricoleur and the engineer, provides a framework for understanding the persistence of mythical thinking, while E. E. Evans-Pritchard, through his analysis of Azande witchcraft, empirically demonstrates that magic does not replace natural causality but complements it on a different level of causation – not how a misfortune occurred, but why it happened to this particular person and why at that particular moment. The material-cultural analysis (Mauss, Appadurai, Kopytoff, Miller) demonstrates that magical objects did not disappear with the rise of capitalism; rather, they were forcibly displaced from communal ritual practices into the humble invisibility of consumer objects. The concluding section examines contemporary perceptions of artificial intelligence as a paradigmatic example of the recodification of the ontological substratum, representing the return of the magical both at the level of discourse and at the level of material objects.
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