Cultural appropriation & the magical world

The picture illustrates what you find if you take apart one of the packets of joss paper. There is a great tradition of Chinese magic, often in a form of sigilisation, & many things that are recognisably sigils are visible in the picture.
I have commented before on this blog about the presence of African traditional magic - or rather in that case, charlatans taking money off people & pretending to be magical practitioners - in our European cities. In fact it is difficult to live in one of our modern diverse cities & be unaware, if you have an eye for magic, of the different kinds of magic going on. There is some recognisable Afro-Caribbean magic in Brum, for example. Of course to the magical person there is always an ambivalent dividing line between magic & religion, & one also sees Islamic magic, Chinese magic, Catholic magic, & what have you. For the purposes of completeness, my point here is that you will find quasi-magical, quasi-religious, & quasi-cultural practices originating in all the originating worlds of a population. Church of England magic? Ooooh, yes.
However in our white Anglo-Saxon culture there is a specific tradition of locating magic in what were traditionally considered 'exotic' cultures. I suspect this is an element of the tendency in European culture to make magic OK as long as someone else does it - you have to employ someone else to do the dirty work for you.
Alongside this our approach to other cultures - whether imbued with ideas of mystery, of 'darkness', or concpets of the 'noble savage' - has traditionally seen them as the source of magical knowledge. And of course this has come in fashions - there was a time when anything magic was almost always dressed up in Egyptian clothing. Another example would be the qabilistic undergirding of so much modern magic. Yet another would be the influence of the 'hippie' understanding of eastern mysticism since the 1960s.
In more recent times an awareness of 'cultural appropriation' - which means a more powerful culture taking aspects of a less powerful culture - has led to a discomfort with where we posit the sources of our magic. Perhaps the best example of this would be the Native American wannabees in the States.
Both of these positions make me intensely uncomfortable. The reality is that all cultures & religions at all times have had a culture-specific form of magic. Prophets & priests have also always gone off the rails into the domain of magic. And the simple fact it that the majority of these systems bear more than a passing resemblance to each other.
A further reason why either stealing from another culture because it's seen as magical or studiously avoiding cultural appropriation are both approaches that lead to a magical dead end is found in the nature of magic. In a magical world view, everything in the world is connected to everything else in some way. What usually differentiates the magical world view from most religious world views is that the magical practitioner is seen as part of this interconnected world, & indeed has some level of control over it. I therefore have both the liberty & duty of care which comes with this interconnectedness. It behoves me to be a good guest in a world I'm not native to, but there is no guarantee where the next magical inspiration will come from.
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