Has science vanquished magic? While many prominent popularizers of science think so, professional history of science scholarship suggests otherwise. Here is a constantly updated list of key readings for those who want to study the complex historical relationship of the sciences with magic for themselves.
For the sake of brevity and with a broad audience in mind, the below list of titles is limited to books, omitting journal articles and chapters in edited volumes (and omitting valuable titles in languages other than English).
(To the disadvantage for readers without academic affiliation, scholarly articles are usually hidden behind paywalls – however, authors occasionally upload PDF files of their works on Academia.edu or ResearchGate, or on their institutional websites, so a web search is always worth a shot.)
A great starting point for those wishing to investigate transformations of scientific knowledge and practice from ‘natural magic’ and related traditions to modern ‘scientific naturalism’ is IsisCB Explore, an excellent open access literature search engine supported by the History of Science Society and other scholarly bodies. Apart from books and chapters in edited volumes, it includes articles in history of science, medicine and technology periodicals (such as Isis, History of Science and the British Journal for the History of Science to name just a few) which have published key texts that fundamentally changed historians’ understanding of the relationships between the sciences and the ‘occult’ over time.
The following list of books is necessarily selective and incomplete. In my view, however, most of these titles are required reading for anybody who wants to understand the complexities of historical and ongoing interactions between science and magic. (If you’re overwhelmed by this relatively long list, you can click here for a much shorter one.)
Disclaimer: If you buy any of the titles using the provided weblinks below, this will support running Forbidden Histories as your purchase might yield a small commission (at no extra cost for you). Some titles are hair-raisingly expensive, so if you want to own a copy or can’t borrow them in your local or university library, I recommend comparing prices for second-hand copies on Abebooks.
Ancient (Pre-Socratic) to Medieval
Dodds, Eric Robertson. The Greeks and the Irrational. University of California Press, 1951 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Edelstein, Emma J., and Ludwig Edelstein. Asclepius. Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies (second ed.). Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998 (studies in ancient temple medicine and related magic-medical traditions) [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Lloyd, Geoffrey E. R. Magic, Reason and Experience. Studies in the Origins and Development of Greek Science. Cambridge University Press, 1979 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Luck, George. Arcana Mundi. Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds. A Collection of Ancient Texts. Second ed. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Principe, Lawrence. The Secrets of Alchemy. University of Chicago Press, 2013 (probably the best introduction to alchemy currently available in English, covering the ancient, medieval and early modern periods) [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Thorndike, Lynn. A History of Magic and Experimental Science. Vols. 1-3. Macmillan (vols. 1-2) and Columbia University Press (vol. 3), 1923-1934 [Buy on Abebooks] [Buy on eBay].
Early Modern (Scientific Revolution to Enlightenment)
Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford University Press, 1999 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. Zone Books, 1998 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Davies, Owen. Magic. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2012 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Grafton, Anthony. Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer. Harvard University Press, 2001 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Harkness, Deborah E. John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature. Cambridge University Press, 1999 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Heilbron, John L. Galileo. Oxford University Press, 2010 (includes references to Galileo’s practice of astrology) [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Henry, John. Knowledge Is Power. How Magic, the Government and an Apocalyptic Vision Inspired Francis Bacon to Create Modern Science. Icon, 2002 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Heyd, Michael. “Be Sober and Reasonable”. The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 63). Brill, 1995 (a key study of how attacks on ‘enthusiasm’ – a then common pejorative term for unchurched or alternative spiritualities that bypassed scriptural authority – powerfully contributed to the ‘decline of magic’ during the Enlightenment) [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Hunter, Michael. The Occult Laboratory. Magic, Science and Second Sight in Late Seventeenth-Century Scotland. Boydell, 2001 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Hunter, Michael, The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment. Yale University Press, 2020 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Principe, Lawrence M. The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2011 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Revolution (2nd updated ed.). University of Chicago Press, 2018 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Midelfort, H. C. Erik. Exorcism and Enlightenment: Johann Joseph Gassner and the Demons of Eighteenth-Century Germany. Yale University Press, 2005 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Moran, Bruce T., Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution. Harvard University Press, 2005 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Moran, Bruce T., Paracelsus: An Alchemical Life. Reaktion, 2019 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Thorndike, Lynn. A History of Magic and Experimental Science. Vols. 4-8. Columbia University Press, 1934-1958 [Buy on Abebooks] [Buy on eBay].
Vickers, Brian, ed. Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance. Cambridge University Press, 1984 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Walker, Daniel Pickering. Spiritual & Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000 (first published in 1958) [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Webster, Charles. From Paracelsus to Newton. Magic and the Making of Modern Science. Cambridge University Press, 1982 (& other editions) [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Westman, Robert S. The Copernican Question. Prognostication, Skepticism, and Celestial Order. University of California Press, 2011 (like Heilbron addresses Galileo’s practice of astrology) [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Westman, Robert S. Copernicus and the Astrologers. Smithsonian Libraries, 2016 [Open Access PDF].
Yates, Frances A. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964 (somewhat dated, but still a classic worth reading) [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Modern (late Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries)
Ankarloo, Bengt, and Stuart Clark, eds. Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Volume 5. The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999 (includes the chapter “Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment, Romantic and Liberal Thought” by medical historian Roy Porter, probably the best available account of the decline of magic during the Enlightenment, arguing it had little to do with advances in science or medicine) [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Collins, Harry M., and Trevor J. Pinch. Frames of Meaning: The Social Construction of Extraordinary Science. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982 (not exactly history, but a now classical sociological study of the controversies around alleged psychokinetic phenomena. Includes encounters with the professional debunker, James Randi). [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Crabtree, Adam. 1988. Animal Magnetism, Early Hypnotism, and Psychical Research, 1766-1925: An Annotated Bibliography. Kraus International Publications [Very rare, but click here for a free digitized version] [Search on Abebooks].
Crabtree, Adam. From Mesmer to Freud. Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing. Yale University Press, 1993 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Cunningham, Andrew, and Nicholas Jardine, eds. Romanticism and the Sciences. Cambridge University Press, 1990 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Darnton, Robert. Mesmerism and the End of Enlightenment in France. Harvard University Press, 1968 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Ellenberger, Henri F. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. Basic Books, 1970 (the classical history of the unconscious, showing that theoretical and clinical approaches to unconscious cognition have always been pervaded by debates over transcendental functions of the mind) [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Gauld, Alan. The Founders of Psychical Research. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968 (still by far the most accurate and reliable history of the Society for Psychical Research) [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Gauld, Alan. A History of Hypnotism. Cambridge University Press, 1992 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Gregory, Frederick, Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany (Studies in the History of Modern Science 1). Springer, 1977 (unsurpassed study of debates over materialism in German science. Not strongly focused on the role of occult movements, but still indispensable for a qualified understanding of developments that gave rise to an initially anti-materialistic ‘scientific naturalism’ not only in Germany, and should therefore be read together with Frank Turner’s seminal study below) [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Harrington, Anne. Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler. Princeton University Press, 1996 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Josephson-Storm, Jason A. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. University of Chicago Press, 2017 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Mauskopf, Seymour H., ed. The Reception of Unconventional Science (AAAS Selected Symposia Series, 25). Westview Press, 1979 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Mauskopf, Seymour H., and Michael R. McVaugh. The Elusive Science. Origins of Experimental Psychical Research. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 (a balanced history of the laboratory of parapsychology at Duke University) [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Noakes, Richard, Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain. Cambridge University Press, 2019 (offers surprising findings concerning serious interest in psychic phenomena by elite British physical scientists in the 19th and early 20th centuries) [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Shamdasani, Sonu, ed. Théodore Flournoy. From India to the Planet Mars. A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages. Princeton University Press, 1994 (a new contextualized edition of a classic text marking a brief but important period, when experimental studies of trance mediumship competed with physiological psychology) [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Shamdasani, Sonu. Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology. The Dream of a Science. Cambridge University Press, 2003 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Taylor, Eugene. William James on Exceptional Mental States. The 1896 Lowell Lectures. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Taylor, Eugene. William James: On Consciousness Beyond the Margin. Princeton University Press, 1996 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Turner, Frank M. Between Science and Religion. The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England. Yale University Press, 1974 (with important chapters on ‘the other Darwin’, Alfred Russel Wallace, and his preoccupation with spiritualism, and on two founders of modern psychical research, F.W.H. Myers and Henry Sidgwick) [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Winter, Alison. Mesmerized. Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain. University of Chicago Press, 1998 [Buy on Amazon] [Buy on Abebooks].
Thanks for the excellent list and comments. I will be giving an all-day seminar in Beijing soon on “Magic and Psychology,” with a magician as a co-presenter to illustrate the principles I will discuss.
Some recent books with an early modern focus that could be included are Liana Saif, The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy, Florian Ebeling, The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus, and Tara Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire. Despite all the recent work that’s been done on alchemy, I think Allen Debus’s The Chemical Philosophy is still well worth reading.
Many thanks for these suggestions! Will check them out.
I would strongly recommend adding Lauren Kassel’s “Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman: Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician”. (And if reading isn’t someone’s jam, there’s a game that was made about his life, diagnoses, and practice called Astrologaster. It’s available on Steam.)