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talores's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
milliereads99's review against another edition
4.0
Very interesting book but, given the extensive subject matter, it was often quite superficial. I wanted to understand and know more about particular subject matters but I suppose that’s something I would have to look elsewhere for. I still really enjoyed reading and would recommend to anyone who is looking to brush the surface of a history of magic.
wbharper's review against another edition
4.0
Chris Gosden’s survey of the history of magic is deeply informed by anthropology; he is an archaeologist of prehistoric Europe. In a book like this, I am sure that this much for specialists to criticize. However, Gosden’s trick is to add depth as well as breadth and there is much interesting detail as well as a satisfying big picture. His panorama encompasses cultures across the world, from prehistory to the present. I have a liking for grand projects and this one hit the mark. Each chapter has a multitude of interesting vignettes, and if the book has a weakness it is in that some feel a little slighter than others - the book could have easily been longer.
Magic has only acquired a poor reputation, Gosden argues, due to the “extravagant claims made by its more shady practitioners.” It can, in fact, help us rediscover a better way in relating to the universe. Science and technology have allowed us to understand and alter the natural world, but they have also brought us to the brink of catastrophe. Magic offers the possibility of a more balanced, communal, participatory relationship with the universe, a means of “calm[ing] the energies” of science and technology. Magic may be highly culturally specific - understanding other traditions without being subsumed and consumed by them is extremely difficult - and it is important not to romanticize it. But Gosden makes some intriguing parallels to be drawn between different eras and cultures, all the same.
Gosden’s thesis is that magic forms part of a “triple helix” of magic, religion and science that under-girds human culture. It must be said that this is a very neat, social-scientific categorization - but an important point in the book is that the three strands are not inherently exclusionary. He identifies five very broad ways in which human cultures have related to magic: magic as the dominant force (e.g. pre-bronze age Egypt and Mesopotamia, prehistoric Eurasia); magic and an emphasis on human lineages (China, much of Africa, the Pacific); magic and religion as equals (Mesopotamia and Egypt, ancient India); religion dominant and magic ambiguous (ancient Israel, Greece and Rome, early medieval Europe); and science, religion and magic regarded (roughly, very roughly in some cultures) in that order as guides to understanding the universe (post-medieval Europe, modern colonial societies). Similarly, magic is classified into types: relationship work (e.g. kinship with the land, plants and animals); apotropaic (protective) magic; divination; understanding the past; dying, death and the dead; medicine, sickness and possession; transformation (craft, alchemy, monsters and hybrids); desire (love and sex); malign magic (witches, sorcery, curses, counter-cultures). I recount these taxonomies because 1) I like lists and 2) it is important to elaborate the extreme variety that magic has taken. Gosden touches on all of these in concise, scholarly fashion. I’ll discuss just a couple of examples.
Fascinatingly, magic is not purely an archaic and ossified phenomenon. As colonial powers invaded Africa, magic evolved new strains of reaction and resistance. Central to the ideology of colonialism is the idea that free, democratic cultures have evolved beyond the need for magic, while “traditional” societies are still mired in credulity and hierarchies of exploitative hucksters. Of course, modern Western merito-/technocracies could never fall into such error. Yet colonial invasions caused indigenous cultures to evolve a wide range of responses. They responded with new philosophies and new magical traditions (e.g. Vodun/Voodoo), and selectively borrowed some from their oppressors.
Alchemy is an often-cited rebuttal to the traditional positivist and rationalist framework of a destined and unproblematic advancement of science. It is clearly not regarded as scientific, yet utilized methods associated with science and itself made scientific discoveries. Isaac Newton, possibly the greatest figure in the development of modern science, had an even more intense and consuming interest in theology and alchemy. Of course, magic declined in the early modern period (partly through violent campaigns against it), and the Enlightenment heralded a new age where science has been considered dominant (though it was far from the death-knell for religion, and had its own magic-adjacent manifestations). I don’t think that I am the only educated person to still live primarily in the afterglow of Gibbon and Lecky and the great historians and philosophers of the Enlightenment (to whom could be added the early anthropologists Tylor and Frazer, to whom magic and myth were superseded by religion, and then science, as approaches to understanding the world).
“Magical thinking” is today usually an insult, used to expose childish or irrational thinking. But it doesn’t do justice to what is an immensely deep and complex history of human attempts to derive meaning from the world. To bring in some contemporary concerns: consider the anti-vaccination movement, or even the QAnon cults. These strike me as more a misapplication of reason than an application of magical thinking - making connections of disconnected events and people, and propounding misunderstandings of basic science. Regardless of how deranged and fearful their claims, adherents attempt to ground them in some kind of empirical view of the world. It is just that their preferred version of the world and their cited evidence are transparently imaginary, and merely accord with their racism and paranoia. In a sense, it is the consequence of being too far abstracted from the real world, the opposite of authentic participation.
I’m not a believer in astrology, or chaos magic, or animism. As much as any “man of science” I scoff at crystals and quack cures. But if we can learn from these traditions something that can help us be closer to the world, to preserve and participate in its processes at a deeper level, I am all for that. Is this possible? I am not sure, and Gosden does not go into too much detail or depth on this point. We do face ecological disaster, but he is short on specifics on how thinking of the world in a magical way can help - he alludes to the Gaia hypothesis, consciousness, quantum theory, and other suggestive ideas, but I would have liked more discussion. But this book genuinely broadened my thinking.
Magic has only acquired a poor reputation, Gosden argues, due to the “extravagant claims made by its more shady practitioners.” It can, in fact, help us rediscover a better way in relating to the universe. Science and technology have allowed us to understand and alter the natural world, but they have also brought us to the brink of catastrophe. Magic offers the possibility of a more balanced, communal, participatory relationship with the universe, a means of “calm[ing] the energies” of science and technology. Magic may be highly culturally specific - understanding other traditions without being subsumed and consumed by them is extremely difficult - and it is important not to romanticize it. But Gosden makes some intriguing parallels to be drawn between different eras and cultures, all the same.
Gosden’s thesis is that magic forms part of a “triple helix” of magic, religion and science that under-girds human culture. It must be said that this is a very neat, social-scientific categorization - but an important point in the book is that the three strands are not inherently exclusionary. He identifies five very broad ways in which human cultures have related to magic: magic as the dominant force (e.g. pre-bronze age Egypt and Mesopotamia, prehistoric Eurasia); magic and an emphasis on human lineages (China, much of Africa, the Pacific); magic and religion as equals (Mesopotamia and Egypt, ancient India); religion dominant and magic ambiguous (ancient Israel, Greece and Rome, early medieval Europe); and science, religion and magic regarded (roughly, very roughly in some cultures) in that order as guides to understanding the universe (post-medieval Europe, modern colonial societies). Similarly, magic is classified into types: relationship work (e.g. kinship with the land, plants and animals); apotropaic (protective) magic; divination; understanding the past; dying, death and the dead; medicine, sickness and possession; transformation (craft, alchemy, monsters and hybrids); desire (love and sex); malign magic (witches, sorcery, curses, counter-cultures). I recount these taxonomies because 1) I like lists and 2) it is important to elaborate the extreme variety that magic has taken. Gosden touches on all of these in concise, scholarly fashion. I’ll discuss just a couple of examples.
Fascinatingly, magic is not purely an archaic and ossified phenomenon. As colonial powers invaded Africa, magic evolved new strains of reaction and resistance. Central to the ideology of colonialism is the idea that free, democratic cultures have evolved beyond the need for magic, while “traditional” societies are still mired in credulity and hierarchies of exploitative hucksters. Of course, modern Western merito-/technocracies could never fall into such error. Yet colonial invasions caused indigenous cultures to evolve a wide range of responses. They responded with new philosophies and new magical traditions (e.g. Vodun/Voodoo), and selectively borrowed some from their oppressors.
Alchemy is an often-cited rebuttal to the traditional positivist and rationalist framework of a destined and unproblematic advancement of science. It is clearly not regarded as scientific, yet utilized methods associated with science and itself made scientific discoveries. Isaac Newton, possibly the greatest figure in the development of modern science, had an even more intense and consuming interest in theology and alchemy. Of course, magic declined in the early modern period (partly through violent campaigns against it), and the Enlightenment heralded a new age where science has been considered dominant (though it was far from the death-knell for religion, and had its own magic-adjacent manifestations). I don’t think that I am the only educated person to still live primarily in the afterglow of Gibbon and Lecky and the great historians and philosophers of the Enlightenment (to whom could be added the early anthropologists Tylor and Frazer, to whom magic and myth were superseded by religion, and then science, as approaches to understanding the world).
“Magical thinking” is today usually an insult, used to expose childish or irrational thinking. But it doesn’t do justice to what is an immensely deep and complex history of human attempts to derive meaning from the world. To bring in some contemporary concerns: consider the anti-vaccination movement, or even the QAnon cults. These strike me as more a misapplication of reason than an application of magical thinking - making connections of disconnected events and people, and propounding misunderstandings of basic science. Regardless of how deranged and fearful their claims, adherents attempt to ground them in some kind of empirical view of the world. It is just that their preferred version of the world and their cited evidence are transparently imaginary, and merely accord with their racism and paranoia. In a sense, it is the consequence of being too far abstracted from the real world, the opposite of authentic participation.
I’m not a believer in astrology, or chaos magic, or animism. As much as any “man of science” I scoff at crystals and quack cures. But if we can learn from these traditions something that can help us be closer to the world, to preserve and participate in its processes at a deeper level, I am all for that. Is this possible? I am not sure, and Gosden does not go into too much detail or depth on this point. We do face ecological disaster, but he is short on specifics on how thinking of the world in a magical way can help - he alludes to the Gaia hypothesis, consciousness, quantum theory, and other suggestive ideas, but I would have liked more discussion. But this book genuinely broadened my thinking.