Has science vanquished magic? While
many prominent popularizers of science think so, professional history
of science scholarship suggests otherwise. Here is a short list of
basic and introductory readings for those who want to study the complex
historical relationship of the sciences with magic for themselves.
For the sake of brevity and with a
broad audience in mind, the below list of titles is limited to books,
omitting journal articles and chapters in edited volumes (and omitting
valuable titles in languages other than English). Unfortunately for
readers without an academic affiliation, scholarly articles are usually
hidden behind paywalls – however, authors occasionally upload
PDF files of their works on Academia.edu or ResearchGate, or on their
institutional websites, so a web search is always worth a shot.
A great starting point for those wishing to investigate transformations
of scientific knowledge and practice from ‘natural magic’
and related traditions to modern ‘scientific naturalism’
is IsisCB Explore,
an excellent open access literature search engine supported by the
History of Science Society
and other scholarly bodies. Apart from books and chapters in edited
volumes, it includes articles in history of science, medicine and
technology periodicals (such as Isis, History of Science
and the British Journal for the History of Science
to name just a few) which have published key texts that fundamentally
changed historians’ understanding of the relationships between
the sciences and the ‘occult’ over time.
The following list of books is deliberately basic and introductory,
and necessarily selective and incomplete. In my view, however, most
of these titles are required reading for anybody who wants to understand
the complexities of historical and ongoing interactions between science
and magic. (If you’re overwhelmed by this relatively long list,
you can click here for a much shorter one.)
Disclaimer: If you buy any of the titles using the provided
weblinks below, this will support running Forbidden Histories as your
purchase will yield a small commission (at no extra cost for you).
Some titles are hair-raisingly expensive, so if you want to own a
copy or can’t borrow them in your local or university library,
I recommend comparing prices on sites other than Amazon, such as Abebooks.
Ancient (Pre-Socratic) to Medieval
Dodds, Eric Robertson. The Greeks and the
Irrational. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1951
[US
readers]
Edelstein, Emma J., and Ludwig Edelstein. Asclepius.
Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies. Second
ed. 2 vols. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998 (studies
in ancient temple medicine and related magic-medical traditions) [US
readers]
Lloyd, Geoffrey E. R. Magic, Reason and Experience.
Studies in the Origins and Development of Greek Science. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979 [US
readers]
Luck, George. Arcana Mundi. Magic and the Occult
in the Greek and Roman Worlds. A Collection of Ancient Texts.
Second ed. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006 [US
readers].
Thorndike, Lynn. A History of Magic and Experimental
Science. Vols. 1-3. New York: Macmillan (vols. 1-2) and Columbia
University Press (vol. 3), 1923-1934 [US
readers].
Early Modern (Scientific Revolution to Enlightenment)
Clark, Stuart. Thinking with
Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999 [US
readers].
Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders
and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. New York: Zone Books, 1998
[US
readers].
Davies, Owen. Magic. A Very Short Introduction.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012 [US
readers].
Heilbron, John L. Galileo. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010 (includes references to Galileo’s practice
of astrology) [US
readers].
Henry, John. Knowledge Is Power. How Magic, the
Government and an Apocalyptic Vision Inspired Francis Bacon to Create
Modern Science. Cambridge: Icon, 2002 [US
readers].
Hunter, Michael. The Occult Laboratory. Magic,
Science and Second Sight in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland.
Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001 [US
readers].
Newman, William R. Gehennical Fire: The Lives
of George Starkey, an American Alchemist in the Scientific Revolution.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002 [US
readers].
Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Revolution.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998 [US
readers].
Thorndike, Lynn. A History of Magic and Experimental
Science. Vols. 4-8. New York: Columbia University Press, 1934-1958
[US
readers].
Vickers, Brian, ed. Occult and Scientific Mentalities
in the Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984
[US
readers].
Webster, Charles. From Paracelsus to Newton.
Magic and the Making of Modern Science. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982 [US
readers].
Westman, Robert S. The Copernican Question. Prognostication,
Skepticism, and Celestial Order. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2011 (like Heilbron includes information on Galileo
and astrology) [US
readers].
Westman, Robert S. Copernicus and the Astrologers.
Washington, DC: Smithsonian Libraries, 2016. [Open
Access PDF]
Modern (late eighteenth to twentieth
centuries)
Ankarloo, Bengt, and Stuart Clark, eds. Witchcraft and Magic in
Europe. Volume 5. The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Philadelphia,
PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999 (includes the chapter “Witchcraft
and Magic in Enlightenment, Romantic and Liberal Thought” by
medical historian Roy Porter, probably the best available account
of the decline of magic during the Enlightenment, arguing it had little
to do with advances in science or medicine) [US
readers].
Collins, Harry M., and Trevor J. Pinch. Frames
of Meaning: The Social Construction of Extraordinary Science.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982 (not exactly history, but
a now classical sociological study of the controversies around alleged
psychokinetic phenomena. Includes encounters with the professional
debunker, James Randi). [US
readers].
Crabtree, Adam. 1988. Animal Magnetism, Early
Hypnotism, and Psychical Research, 1766-1925: An Annotated Bibliography.
White Plains, NY: Kraus International Publications [Very
rare, but click here for a free digitized version] .
Crabtree, Adam. From Mesmer to Freud. Magnetic
Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1993 [US
readers].
Cunningham, Andrew, and Nicholas Jardine, eds. Romanticism
and the Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990
[US
readers].
Darnton, Robert. Mesmerism and the End of Enlightenment
in France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968 [US
readers].
Ellenberger, Henri F. 1970. The Discovery of
the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry.
New York: Basic Books (the classical history of the unconscious, showing
that theoretical and clinical approaches to unconscious cognition
have always been pervaded by debates over transcendental functions
of the mind). [US
readers]
Gauld, Alan. The Founders of Psychical Research.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968 [US
readers].
Gauld, Alan. A History of Hypnotism. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992 [US
readers].
Gregory, Frederick. 1977. Scientific Materialism
in Nineteenth Century Germany (Studies in the History of Modern
Science 1). Dordrecht: Springer (unsurpassed study of debates over
materialism in German science. Not strongly focused on the role of
occult movements, but still indispensable for a qualified understanding
of developments that gave rise to an initially anti-materialistic
‘scientific naturalism’ not only in Germany, and should
therefore be read together with Frank Turner’s seminal study
below) [US
readers].
Heyd, Michael. “Be Sober and Reasonable”.
The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth
Centuries (Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 63).
Leiden: Brill, 1995 (a key study of how attacks on ‘enthusiasm’
– a then common pejorative term for unchurched or alternative
spiritualities that bypassed scriptural authority – powerfully
contributed to the ‘decline of magic’ during the Enlightenment)
[US
readers].
Josephson-Storm, Jason A. The Myth of Disenchantment:
Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017 [US
readers].
Mauskopf, Seymour H., ed. The Reception of Unconventional
Science (AAAS Selected Symposia Series, 25). Boulder: Westview
Press, 1979 [US
readers].
Mauskopf, Seymour H., and Michael R. McVaugh. The
Elusive Science. Origins of Experimental Psychical Research.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 (a balanced history
of the laboratory of parapsychology at Duke University) [US
readers].
Midelfort, H. C. Erik. Exorcism and Enlightenment:
Johann Joseph Gassner and the Demons of Eighteenth-Century Germany.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005 [US
readers] [UK readers] [Search on Abebooks].
Shamdasani, Sonu, ed. Théodore Flournoy. From
India to the Planet Mars. A Case of Multiple Personality
with Imaginary Languages. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994 (a new contextualized edition of a classic text marking a brief
but important period, when experimental studies of trance mediumship
competed with physiological psychology) [US
readers].
Shamdasani, Sonu. Jung and the Making of Modern
Psychology. The Dream of a Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003 [US
readers].
Taylor, Eugene. William James on Exceptional
Mental States. The 1896 Lowell Lectures. New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1983 [US
readers]. Read
my review here.
Taylor, Eugene. William James: On Consciousness
Beyond the Margin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1996 [US
readers].
Turner, Frank M. Between Science and Religion.
The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974 (with important chapters
on ‘the other Darwin’, Alfred Russel Wallace, and his
preoccupation with spiritualism, and on two founders of modern psychical
research, F.W.H. Myers and Henry Sidgwick) [US
readers].
Winter, Alison. Mesmerized. Powers of Mind in
Victorian Britain. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1998 [US
readers].
