In an interview on Magic

When did the whole history of magic actually kick off?

According to Lynn Thorndike, author of the eight-volume treatise History of Magic and Experimental Science,  it dates back to the earliest form of writing in Ancient Babylonian stone tablets.

And there’s this idea that books and magic go hand in hand, books being a way for people to record their secrets.

Yes, some cultures put oral knowledge above written works as a means of transmitting the truth, but when you record something in writing it’s preserved, so it doesn’t get corrupted by oral tradition.

And what is it about this book that really grabs you?

It’s not a book where you read all eight volumes in a row, but it has a huge wealth of information from a polyglot scholar who spent decades researching his subject. He used so many extracts from original sources. Also, when Thorndike was writing in the early 20th century, there was this academic notion of societal progress as a linear progression. There were three stages of human intellectual development from magic to religion to science. But Thorndike came along and said, actually, when you look at the history of science you find that magic is central to it right up until the 18th century.

What did he see as the link between magic and science?

His idea was that the basis of science is experimentation and a lot of learned magic is actually about trying to discover the secrets of the natural world. To a certain degree, magic and science had exactly the same aims.

So why was it that reviewers at the time weren’t happy with his theory?

Well, because it screwed up the whole idea of there being some sort of linear progression. For 2,000 years scientists were exploring aspects of magic to help them with their work. Alchemy is a classic example. Even Newton was interested in it, because scientists knew so little that any form of experimentation that could help them understand was a good idea.

In an interview on the Origins of Curiosity

Your third pick runs up to 14 volumes in some editions. Why should we bother with it?

This is a crazy, multi-volume set authored by a historian called Lynn Thorndike in the early 20th century. He sets out at the beginning his notion that the history of magic and of experimental science are closely allied, and that in some ways magicians were the first experimental scientists. He initially just wanted to look at that idea in the 11th and 12th centuries in Europe, but somehow he ended up doing the whole job, from ancient times through to the end of the 17th century, which was when magic started to disappear from European society.

Thorndike himself is quite intolerant of these magicians, and sees what they were saying as crazy and completely unsupportable. But nevertheless this was an early effort to try to be sympathetic to what in previous times had just seemed like pure superstition – the idea that there were magical forces.

There are still a lot of folk who believe in the occult today.

The problem for this tradition of magic is that all of the stuff in it which was of any value – ideas of occult forces that fed into, for example, Newton’s conception of gravity or early studies of magnetism – eventually became assimilated into science. What was left was the folk traditions that have always existed, that really are pure superstition. So if you talk about the occult now, it is clearly discredited. Any value in that kind of thinking had long since transferred itself onto science, and we’re just left with the residue. But there’s a continuity between those early ideas about magic which goes through Rosicrucianism and eventually comes out in Mormonism in the United States.

So Mitt Romney believes in magic, then?

Well, there’s a close connection between ideas of the occult and any sort of fundamentalist religion – and certainly Mormonism. This, and things like homeopathy, are what we are left with from what were once serious intellectual traditions.