THE HISTORY OF MAGIC FROM ALCHEMY TO WITCHCRAFT, FROM THE ICE AGE TO THE PRESENT
CHRIS GOSDEN Viking, 502pp, £25, ebook £12.99
‘It is rare for me to criticise a book for not being long enough,’ Stuart Kelly confessed in the Scotsman. ‘ The
History of Magic is erudite, accessible and expansive. I have some caveats, but that does not take away from a quite remarkable and endlessly interesting volume.’
Gosden’s aim in this ‘comprehensive and remarkable book’, Clement Knox explained in the
Telegraph, ‘is to rescue magical belief from the enormous condescension of posterity’. Magic, science and religion, Gosden contends, are all ways of understanding our place in the cosmos, but magic is older than religion and science, and better. ‘Religion’s attempt to be less weird than magic but more consoling than science may ... have left it without a constituency,’ Knox shrewdly noted.
Stretching back 40,000 years, this history of magic ‘is breathtaking in scope’, John Carey allowed in the
Sunday Times, yet ‘no matter how many words you use to pin it down, its nature is to evade definition…. It should be said at once that this is not a book for everyone,’ Carey warned. ‘For many readers its pages will be full of fascinating discoveries. For others, the same pages will be full of meticulously catalogued nonsense.’
John Gray in the New Statesman described it as a ‘bold, gripping and arrestingly readable universal history of magic… Magical thinking will remain a powerful force in human life,’ he continued. ‘What this shows isn’t the potency of magic, however. The true meaning of magic is that the human mind cannot bear much reality.’