The History of Magic Quotes

“Magic combines what Western thought has often separated as the physical and the psychological or emotional realms.”
― Chris Gosden, Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

“My definition of magic emphasizes human connections with the universe, so that people are open to the workings of the universe and the universe is responsive to us.”
― Chris Gosden, Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

“There is now a great emphasis on cause and effect, with earlier forms of thought focusing on resemblances, such as famously through the Greek and then Medieval notion of the Humours, in which Earth, Air, Fire and Water were linked to the constitution and condition of the human body. Those who embrace a scientific attitude stand apart from the universe, attempting to understand it in an abstract manner in order to then manipulate it.”
― Chris Gosden, Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

“The rise of monotheism gives religion a more transcendent aspect, investing power in a single God beyond the world. However, the emphasis on angels and demons in Israel and angels, demons and saints in Medieval Europe softens such transcendent powers. Greek and Roman gods can be approached and bargained with, but are capricious and hard for mortals to understand.”
― Chris Gosden, Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

“Magic and religion were seen as complementary, not mutually exclusive approaches, and it is very difficult to identify a clear boundary between the two. Science starts to emerge through a more abstract and mathematical understanding, especially in Mesopotamia and India.”
― Chris Gosden, Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

“Magic is older than religion and science, helping to give birth to them.”
― Chris Gosden, Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

“Science separates people from the world, whereas magic immerses us in it, raising also questions of our moral relationship with the universe in a way that science does not.”
― Chris Gosden, Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

“The practices and philosophy of magic come from a sense of kinship with other living things, the landscape and the heavens.”
― Chris Gosden, Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

“Human history as a whole is made up of a triple helix of magic, religion and science, the boundaries between which are fuzzy and changing, but their mutual tension is creative. A choice between magic, religion and science is unhealthy, and each does have a history. If we concentrate on magic and science for a moment, magic knits us into a dense skein of connections with all other things, living or inorganic. Science creates the powerful fiction that we can stand apart from the workings of the universe and contemplate it in a disinterested and objective manner.”
― Chris Gosden, Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

“Magic works through human participation in the universe. In religion the primary human relationship is with one god or many gods. Science distances people from the world, taking them out of it, which leads to their observing and understanding physical operations in abstract terms, before applying that knowledge for practical ends.”
― Chris Gosden, Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

“Magic combines what Western thought has often separated as the physical and the psychological or emotional realms. Magic comes in a great range of forms of participation, which it is helpful to break down further. Three forms of participation can be distinguished: transcendence, transformation and transactions.”
― Chris Gosden, Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

“For the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, magic was a humanization of the universe”
― Chris Gosden, Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

“My definition of magic emphasizes human connections with the universe, so that people are open to the workings of the universe and the universe is responsive to us. Magic is related to, but different from, the other two great strands of history, religion and science: the former focuses on a god or gods, the latter a distanced understanding of physical reality.”
― Chris Gosden, Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

“An initial counter to a radical scepticism is that magic does not derive from strange whims or deliberate irrationality. Much effort has gone into the construction of a mechanistic universe in Western thought, in which planets or atoms are moved by forces, and living things are characterized by biochemical reactions or sometimes the firing of neurons. Equal effort in other cultures has gone into denying differences between the animate and the inanimate, the living and non-living, the human and non-human.”
― Chris Gosden, Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

“Words are not the only means of access to the intellect if we accept that bodies are intelligent too, acting in skilled and purposive manners.”
― Chris Gosden, The History of Magic: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

“Many people in the world make no distinction between a human realm, which might be called ‘culture’, and the rest of the world, which we could term ‘nature’. If kinship between people and other entities is emphasized, a quality of cousinhood or a familial relationship with the world generally emerges, and maintaining good social relations requires a normal degree of effort.”
― Chris Gosden, Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

“The most different part of the world is Australia. Aboriginal people do not so much have a relationship with the land as see themselves as part of the land. Songs, art, dances and indeed culture as a whole all derive from the land, which in turn had been shaped by human ancestors at some point in an unfathomable past.”
― Chris Gosden, Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

“Across the vast grasslands and forests of the Steppe in Central Asia and west into Europe, the world was animated by spirits, some originally human, others less so. There is great variety across these huge spaces. Linguists talk of dialect chains, sets of related languages, in which adjacent forms of speech are mutually intelligible with some effort, but, as you move along the chain, comprehension decreases.”
― Chris Gosden, Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

“Human life in the Americas shows huge variety, with shamanic practices in various places; these may have an ultimate historical root in Siberia, the homeland of American populations.”
― Chris Gosden, Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

“Having said that, many hierarchical societies did not develop in this way. In East Asia, the ruler was the head of the most powerful lineage. An important aspect of their role was to question and intercede with human ancestors, who could, if approached correctly, help to guarantee the well-being of their descendants. Here there was no pantheon of gods, and it is likely that the ultimate divine creative force, such as Di in China, who is sometimes described as a god, might have been seen as the original ancestor.”
― Chris Gosden, Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

“The point here is that a belief in magic does not make people irrational, and that the contrast between magic and science is not between irrationality and rationality; rather, people work with various forms of logic that are argued from radically different premises.”
― Chris Gosden, Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present