Magic, a History: from Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present
By Chris Gosden
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020

At the beginning of Chris Gosden’s new book Magic, A History: from Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present, he recalls a story from nearly a century ago, related in anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s book Witchraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. When Evans-Pritchard was living with and studying the Azande, a farming people in central Africa, he heard many tales of magic, and they were often combined with tales of tragedy. If a man was sitting in the shade of a granary and the granary collapsed and killed him, Gosden writes, “it was accepted that the ultimate cause of the granary’s collapse was that ants had eaten through its wooden supports.” But the ‘real’ question was: why had it collapsed right then, on that particular man? “A regular answer to this question was that its collapse was the result of witchcraft, leading to a further urgent set of queries as to who the witch was and what their motives had been,” Gosden writes. “No one doubted that a witch could make a granary collapse, because their will could act on material things, often from a distance.”

Instead, for Evans-Pritchard and his team, the inquiry would devolve to figuring out why such witchcraft had been performed. Was it a dispute over a marriage payment? Some private long-standing grievance between the witch and the dead man or his family? Gosden goes on: “The point here is that a belief in magic does not make people irrational, and that the contrast between magic and science is not between irrationality and rationality; rather, people work with various forms of logic that are argued from radically different premises.”

Since Gosden is a professor of European archeology at the University of Oxford, such an assertion is very nearly disastrous, obviously. 

It is indeed irrational to believe that a witch caused a granary to collapse, since it’s by definition irrational to believe things without proof. Proof is demonstrable and repeatable, and of course there’s never been a controlled and repeated demonstration of telekinesis, or the Force, or whatever Gosden is alluding to under the umbrella of “various forms of logic.” 

The termites who ate through the granary’s support beams are real, physical things, and the specific wood of those beams can be found in the crushed bodies of the guilty insects involved. Termites are known to eat wood and cause structures to collapse. The rational thing to believe in this scenario - the only rational thing to believe -  is that insects caused the granary to collapse and pure coincidence dictated who was killed. Believing a witch somehow caused the collapse in order to kill a personal enemy might be satisfying drama, but there’s never been any proof that humans have such powers.

It’s no fault to the Azande of the 1930s that they believed a witch was responsible, but it’s summarily damning for an Oxford professor in 2020 to believe it, or even entertain the possibility. If Gosden wants the freedom to believe that, his path is clear: line up 15 alleged Azande witches and get each one of them to collapse 15 granaries in a row on command while a battery of biologists record every minute of it. 

“Over the last few centuries, magic has developed a bad reputation,” Gosden writes, “partly as a result of the extravagant claims made by its more shady practitioners.” He goes on:

A most successful propaganda campaign has also been waged against magic by its cousins, religion and science. However, any strand of human behaviour that is so widespread and so long-lasting must be performing an important role for individuals and cultures.

This contention, which undergirds most of his book, is entirely true: any strand of behavior that’s lasted throughout the whole length of human history is eminently worth serious study. And for the bulk of Magic, a History, that’s just what Gosden does. His inquiry looks back to prehistoric times and ranges across the whole breadth of the world, from ancient China to the Eurasian steppes to the long Middle Ages in Europe. His endeavor is to understand the role of magic in human societies over the sprawl of 40,000 years, and although that’s a mind-bogglingly enormous goal, the book pulls in a fascinating array of cultures and aspects of magic rites and rituals. 

The book’s central weakness is, unfortunately, its central tenet: “Magical fictions are underpinned by magical fact.” 

There is no such thing as “magical fact.” Facts are things that can be isolated and verified. Magic has never been isolated and verified. When Gosden calls magic, religion, and science a “triple helix,” he’s simply incorrect. Religion is institutionalized magic - both traffic in claims about the supernatural, and the supernatural stands in stark opposition to science. The premise that magic as a human behavior is very much worth study is unquestionably true. The premise that magic as a human behavior is very much worth study because it’s in some way real is downright baffling.

“Hidden histories are being revealed,” Gosden writes. “There is still a tendency, even in sympathetic accounts, to say that people ‘resorted’ to magic, as if it were the last refuge of the incompetent.” 

Not the last refuge of the incompetent, but certainly the first refuge of the uninformed, and if Gosden doesn’t know that, he ought to. Since the tide of pseudoscience malarkey is lapping higher and higher in the 21st century, it’s worth remembering that you don’t need to subscribe to a subject in order to study it. In all of its nearly 500 pages, Magic, a History is never less than fascinating, but readers should have their eye of newt handy for some of its more outlandish credulity.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.