Even you are a magician

Yoga, horoscopes and LSD – how magic survived the Enlightenment and thrives today. By Clement Knox

communion between the individual and the cosmos.

What Gosden is encouraging us to recognise is many things we do today – from believing in star signs, to practising yoga, to taking part in psychedelic ayahuasca ceremonies – contain elements of magic, as he defines it, even if it makes us uncomfortable to think so.

Christianity tries to be more consoling than science but less weird than magic

Clement Knox is the author of Strange Antics: A History of Seduction (William Collins). Call 0844 871 1514 to order A History of Magic from the Telegraph for £22

Gosden is an archeologist by trade and many of the early parts of his book focus on the “deep history” of magic, going back as far as 40,000 BC. This grounding in the remote past is valuable evidence for his contention that magic properly belongs alongside science in the story of human intellectual development.

Graves and tombs were focal points where magic and science met. Trying to bring places of communion with the dead into rhythm with celestial movements led to technological innovations, such as the magnificent 3,200 BC circular tomb at Newgrange in County Meath, Ireland, with a ceiling aperture that lets in a ray of light to strike a stone at the winter solstice. Archaeological evidence dating to 27,000 BC shows that Palaeolithic humans were trying to do primitive astronomical calculations at burial sites.

Early modern astrologists, such as the British duo Simon Forman (1552-1611) and Richard Napier (15591634), who recorded 80,000 astrological calculations, mixed medical, celestial and magical observation. Isaac Newton studied alchemy and Biblical prophecy while laying the groundwork for the entirety of modern physics. Noting the historical interdependency between magic and science is wounding to our rationalist sensibilities, but it is necessary if we are to understand where we might be headed.

Part of Gosden’s argument is that organised religion was a relative latecomer to human society. Sophisticated magic and crude science predated it by some distance. The great monotheisms – Judaism, Islam and Christianity – all absorbed magical practices to win adherents and placate converts. This later left them open to mockery by deists and atheists – one only has to witness the scorn poured on the Catholic belief in transubstantiation since the Reformation.

Religion’s attempt to be less weird than magic but more consoling than science may, in the long run, have left it without a constituency. Gosden notes that quantum mechanics has “opened up new possibilities that the universe [has] a subjective dimension” and that speculative physics might yet re-enchant the cosmos. At the same time, an egalitarian magical vision, interested in knitting each human into the fabric of the natural world, might well be better adapted to our more individualist, ecoconscious age than the hierarchical religions of yesteryear. After all, magic has existed longer and in a wider variety of places than religion. “Magic,” Gosden notes, “is a constant factor in Europe’s past and present.” Why should it not continue to be one in our future?