Book Reviews

E. R. Dodds: From the Greek Oracles to Modern Trance Mediumship? Introducing the Forbidden Histories Reading Group.

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I’m very excited to introduce a brand-new feature to you: The Forbidden Histories Reading Group (https://www.reddit.com/r/ScienceMagicReadings). The first reading will be E.R. Dodds’s The Greeks and the Irrational. For a schedule and further information watch this video. Reading groups are not your thing? You may still enjoy the video, which addresses a possible link between … Read more

“The Experimental Fire” and “The Secrets of Alchemy”

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Readers interested in the history of alchemy will be pleased to hear that Jenny Rampling’s long-awaited “The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300-1700” (University of Chicago Press) has now been published. Offering plenty of new original insights into the alchemical practices of figures such as John Dee (and fellow spirit conjuror, Edward Kelley), the book … Read more

“Paracelsus: An Alchemical Life”

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The Swiss Renaissance physician and natural philosopher Theophrastus von Hohenheim (aka Paracelsus) has been praised as a ‘father’ of modern toxicology by some, and derided as a self-evident pseudoscientist and charlatan by others. Aspects of his supposed and actual ideas have been claimed by humanistic proponents of holistic medicine as well as by Nazism, and … Read more

Anti-Fascist Holism and Jewish Parapsychology: Another Look at Hitler’s Monsters

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The latest issue of Aries, the prime academic journal for the study of Western esotericism, includes a comprehensive assessment of Eric Kurlander’s Hitler’s Monsters by Eva Kingsepp at Karlstad University, Sweden. Whereas the first part of my own review here on Forbidden Histories was concerned with Kurlander’s evidence-free depiction of ‘mainstream’ science’s relationship with parapsychology … Read more

Magic and the Human Sciences: Jason Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment

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I may have developed a bit of a reputation as a harsh reviewer of historical studies which in my opinion do a poor job at engaging with primary sources and original contexts (such as a recent book on the heretical science of William James, and a study of German occultism and the Third Reich). By … Read more

Hitler’s Monsters? A Look at German “Scientific Occultism” and Fascism

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In case you haven’t noticed, American and British politics are in utter shambles. A climate science-denying President of the supposedly United States gets away with racial slurs and refusals to renounce sympathies with Neo-Nazis, and while I don’t think it’s fair to say that everybody who voted for Brexit is a racist, correlations between racial … Read more

William James on Exceptional Mental States

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Eugene Taylor, whose death in January 2013 was a heavy blow to history of psychology and William James scholarship, was one of the few modern historians to fully acknowledge and try to make sense of James’s by no means casual occupation with spiritualism, telepathy and other unorthodox areas of inquiry. The main fruits of Taylor’s … Read more