The word “magic” has become one of those nebulous terms that can mean almost anything. It can even have contradictory meanings. Magical thinking should be avoided, but it’s wonderful when something works like magic. Superstitions, tarot cards, and aura massage might fall under the rubric of magic, but a professional magician doesn’t actually perform magic. He creates illusions. Voodoo used to be thought of as a kind of magic, but now, it’s considered a folk religion. Likewise, I remember being accused of “believing in magic” after giving someone a Wikipedia-level description of quantum mechanics years ago. The word “magic” itself seems, well, magic. It can stretch or bend to describe almost any interaction between a person and the material world. In common usage, it moves fluidly between religion and science as a kind of invisible placeholder. But as anthropologist Chris Gosden tells us in Magic: A History, despite its sometimes-elusive nature, magic plays a fundamental role in being human. Maybe this accounts for our fascination with it.
Near the beginning of Magic, Gosden explains, “For tens of thousands of years, and in all parts of the inhabited world, people have practised magic.” And this fascinating book mirrors that vast scope, spanning chronologically from the very beginnings of our species to modern neopagans attempting to respond to climate change. Magic shows us polar shamans and African cults, Native American sweat lodges and European witches. Covering such a broad swath of human experience makes the book more entertaining, but it also drives home Gosden’s point that magic is universal. As he writes, “Magic can be scholarly and philosophical, leading on to larger questions about the nature and meaning of reality, or homespun and practical, used to remove warts or cure a sick cow. It is experimental, changeable and inventive.”
Perhaps its necessarily mercurial nature is what makes magic so difficult to define. In trying to pin it down, Gosden also explains the role that magic plays relative to other fundamentally human pursuits: “My definition of magic emphasizes human connections with the universe, so that people are open to the workings of the universe and the universe is responsive to us. Magic is related to, but different from, the other two great strands of history, religion or science: the former focuses on a god or gods, the latter a distanced understanding of physical reality.”
Science, religion, and magic. This is the “triple helix” that Gosden believes makes us human. “A choice between magic, religion and science,” writes Gosden, “is unhealthy, and each does have a history. … Magic knits us into a dense skein of connections with all other things, living or inorganic.” Magic provides, argues Gosden, the emotional immediacy that science lacks. And as far as religion goes, Gosden writes that “it is important to recognize that for a long time organized religion was found only in a small area of the globe: that area between the central Mediterranean and South Asia. It is only in the last two millennia that religions such as Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Islam have spread.” Magic is religion’s older and, for much of human history, more popular brother. Whether Gosden is describing oceanic rocks with reputations for flying or strange amalgamations of animal and human skeletons in ancient Near East mass graves, he gives us a guided tour of magic throughout human history that is as breathless as it is compelling.
The standout chapter of the book must be the one on the history of Chinese magic. Painting in broad strokes, Chinese culture has always been one of the most secular in the world, emphasizing the here and now over the transcendent and devoting more energy to cutting deals with ancestors than to venerating gods. As Gosden writes, “Chinese cosmologies were closer to a double than triple helix, with magic and science taking up most cultural and intellectual space.” Magic, being a kind of instrumental transaction between a human and the universe, took on much of the responsibilities that in other cultures might fall to religion. And science was affected by the immediacy and instrumental nature of magic. As Gosden explains:
Science stands back from the world, which an older Chinese culture refused to do, because it felt deeply involved. Science developed abstract quantities, such as an undifferentiated form of time in which each minute is the same as every other in terms of duration. … For Chinese culture, time was a series of qualities, pertaining to favourable or unfavourable moments for action. Mathematics was well developed but helped to map the shapes of time, the topology of good and bad.
It’s an interesting chapter set alongside many others, but I think it also underscores what might be the book’s only weakness: I’m still not convinced that magic should be put on the same footing as science and religion. The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke coined the dictum that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” but it’s not if you understand how the technology works. And for all of Gosden’s insistence that magic is a rational activity, it still can’t explain itself. Magic, lacking critical distance, is inarticulate to its adepts. Lacking the transcendent, or metaphysical, distance of religion, it’s morally mute as well. Magic, like science, can’t tell you what you should want but simply provides a method of getting it.
That said, magic is universally human, and it’s important to understanding the human mind. We intuit that the world is made up of forces that are mysterious to us, and we have a natural desire to participate intimately with these forces. Magic is rich with examples of how this innate human desire to cut side deals with reality has manifested throughout history, be it carving symbols in elk antler or Aleister Crowley casting spells. But let’s hesitate before we place wizards alongside engineers and priests.
Scott Beauchamp is an editor for Landmarks, the journal of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy. His most recent book is Did You Kill Anyone?
