Magic, Mystery, and Science: The Occult in Western Civilization

Rating:
Summary: Truth=Revelation + Reason + Tradition
Review: "Magic, Mystery, and Science" is a historical survey of the "occult" in Western culture. That includes things like numerology, astrology, cabala (of Madonna fame), alchemy, witches and witch-hunts, New Age, hypnosis, ESP, UFO's and alien abductions, Gnosticism, near-death experiences, Satan and demons, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The authors attempt as neutral an approach as possible to these ideas. They aren't debunking skeptics or gullible suckers. This book reminds me of Jeffrey Burton Russell's magnificent series of volumes on the devil. Those books were objective, informed, and thorough in intellectual, historical, and literary approaches. Like this book, they are also a lot of fun to read because the subject is so fascinating. "Magic, Mystery, and Science" is unusually accessible for a university press offering, and at 390 pages it doesn't feel rushed or incomplete although it covers hundreds of years of history.

The art on the cover neatly depicts the theme of the book. It's an old painting that depicts an alchemist in search of the "Philosopher's Stone" (a stone that heals, purifies and perfects anything it touches.) Instead, the alchemist accidentally discovers phosporus. Burton and Grandy perceive the occult as a "third stream" of knowledge in Western Culture, along with Greek rationalism and orthodox Judeo-Christianity. Science, religious faith and "magic" (some would use the word "intuition" instead) are three ways of apprehending the truth that are designed to be used in conjuction with each other. The authors spend a lot of time debunking the rigid naturalism that emerged out of the Enlightenment that reduced human beings in essence to biological robots helpless in the grip of natural forces. Practitioners of the occult were grasping for a way out of this trap. Burton and Grandy point out that in the Renaissance science and magic often went hand in hand together. Isaac Newton not only discovered gravity but was a determined if unsuccessful alchemist. Many thinkers considered reality as all of one piece and made no distinction between the natural and what was called (incorrectly) the supernatural. Thus the cover image of the alchemist who becomes a scientist almost in spite of himself.

The authors aren't propogandists for the occult. They include an absorbing chapter on Nazism and the occult and show how Hitler as a young man became obsessed with a mystical, sexually charged form of anti-Semitism that he transmitted like a virus to the whole German nation. They also painfully depict the stupid atrocites of the European witch-hunts. There's also some rather funny descriptions of the fakeries and con-artistry of 19th century American Spiritualists, all of whom turned out to be frauds. The authors can see clearly how such figures as Gurdjieff and Blavatsky could seem at once impressive and silly. The UFO phenomenon and Whitley Strieber also take a big hit from these guys.

But on the whole Burton and Grandy seem determined to clear some room in Western culture for revelation, for epiphany, for the possibility that humans can come to know some things about the natural order that science alone is too earthbound and clumsy to grasp. Late in the book the authors discuss quantum physics and how it has replaced stultifying "classical" materialism:

"So the hope of producing a comprehensive theory of the universe founders on the realization that we inevitably participate in nature: nature is a game that allows no spectators. We cannot sit in the audience and blithely take in the play; we are on the stage, deeply involved and unpredictably ratcheting up the world's complexity while attempting to understand it...it would appear that the smallest parts of nature are capable of timelessly registering faraway changes. Space and time, the great separating modalities of classical science, no longer seem so absolute." (page 326)

This is a good, interesting book.