ON HIS MAJESTY'S VERY SECRET SERVICE

Francis Young. Magic in Merlin's Realm. A History of Occult Politics in Britain. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Journalists often use the language of magic to describe political events. They refer to the "Dark Arts” of politics, political advisors are described in semi-occult terms as 'Svangalis' or 'Rasputins', who “drip poison” into the ears of our political leaders. In this book Dr Francis Young shows how the idea of magical involvement in the political life of Britain has a long history and has played a major role in the political life of the country.

🔻

MAGICAL LIFE

Spenser Kansa. Wormwood Star, The Magical Life of Marjorie Cameron. Mandrake, 2020.

This is the first ever biography of Marjorie Cameron who as an artist, occasional actress and supposed witch circulated in the American Underground art world and film scene from the 1940s-60s. Whilst never being as narcissistic, as say anyone living in Andy Warhol's factory, her self-effacement and mysterious reticence didn't prevent her from being noticed. Cameron was a distinctly odd woman attracted to magic pursuits and all those round her instantly picked that up.

🔻

ALL TIED UP

Adam Begley. Houdini, the Elusive American. Yale University Press, 2020.

From the beginning, Houdini’s life was surrounded by deception. In an account of his life he said he was born on April 6th, 1863 “in the small town of Appleton in the state of Wisconsin”. In fact he was born Ehrich Weiss on March 24th of that year in Budapest, not arriving in the USA until he was four years old.

🔻

NOT ALWAYS FAMILIAR…

Maja D’Aoust, Familiars in Witchcraft: Supernatural Guardians in the Magical Traditions of the World, Destiny Books. 2019.

I really wanted to like this book. I like the idea of the author of an occult work being an expert practitioner – Maja D’Aoust is known, apparently, as The Witch of the Dawn. This book is also peppered with her own often-Picasso-esque artworks, which while perhaps not appealing to all tastes, are certainly skilled and intriguing, helping to draw the reader into the subject at a deeper level. They’re a good idea and work more often than not.

🔻

HOUSEHOLD INSURANCE

Brian Hoggard. Magical House Protection, the Archaeology of Counter-Witchcraft. Berghahn, 2019.

I learnt a new word reading this book: apotropaic, which is defined as “having the ability to ward off evil”, from the Greek αποτρέπειν, to ward off; from απο- ‘away’ and τρέπειν ‘to turn’) This is the term used to describe objects, signs and other indicators that are left in houses, stables and other buildings to ward off malignant spells and curses that may be placed upon then by malevolent agencies.

🔽

JUST LIKE THAT . . .

Gustav Kuhn. Experiencing the Impossible - The Science of Magic. MIT Press, 2019.

This is a superb title for a book that examines such a fascinating subject. Magic performed for entertainment works when it appears that something impossible has just happened before our very eyes, even at close range. We are delighted and baffled at the same time. Somehow we know that our senses have been deceived but have no idea how it was done. 

🔽

THE FALL AND RISE OF MODERN MAGIC

Edward Beyer and Randall Styers. Magic in the Modern World: Strategies of Repression and Legitimization. Penn State U.P., 2018.

Until recently, the idea that magic had been gradually removed from the modern world – the idea of ‘disenchantment’ - had been the standard attitude of historians and other scholars for over a hundred years. It was been perhaps expressed most clearly in Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). 

🔽

MAGIC, TREASON AND PLOT SHOULD NEVER BE FORGOT

Francis Young. Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval and Early Modern England: A History of Sorcery and Treason. I.B.Tauris, 2018.

The purpose of this book is to establish magical thinking, and in particular magical treason, as an essential part of the history of the medieval and early modern periods and worthy of detailed study. 

🔻

QUIET DAYS IN HASTINGS

Antony Clayton, Gary Lachman, Andy Sharp and David Tibet. Netherwood - Last Resort of Aleister Crowley. Accumulator Press, 2017 (Revised hardback edition)

Seventy years ago, at 11 am on Monday 1st December 1947, Aleister Crowley died in his bed in room 13 at 'Netherwood', the Hastings boarding house where he had spent the last three years of his life. 

🔽

ILLUSTRATING MAGIC

Owen Davies (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft and Magic, Oxford University Press, 2017.

The back cover declares that this addition to the Oxford Illustrated History series tells ‘The 4000-year story of witchcraft and magic – from the ancient world to Harry Potter… and beyond’ – a bold promise to deliver in 300 pages.

🔻

HEAVYWEIGHT MAGIC

David J Collins (editor). Magic and Witchcraft in the West: From Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

This is a huge collection of twenty scholarly essays covering the history of magic and magical thought from ancient Egypt and the Near East to modern Neo-Paganism. The contributors are all professors and and lecturers at universities in Britain and America, in fields such as history, religion, anthropology and the history of art.

🔻🔻🔻

THE TRUMPET OF VENUS

Robin E. Cousins. Dr. Dee and the Dark Venus; The Enigma of the Tuba Veneris. Neptune Press, 2012.

Many people will have heard of the Tuba Veneris, ‘The Trumpet of Venus’, also called Libellus Veneri Nigro Sacer, ‘The Little Book Sacred to the Black Venus’ , because of its inclusion in bibliographies of Dr. John Dee, but few can have had the opportunity to read it.

🔽

NORTHERN ECHOES: MEETING THE SHAMANS

Ernest(o) de Martino. Magic: Primitive and Modern. Tom Stacy, 1972.

This was a book which had quite an influence on me as a 21 year old student, introducing me to shamanism and to radical ideas of what one might later see as a proto-post modernist nature. Ernesto de Martino (1908-1965) was an Italian anthropologist and philosopher who undertook an intellectual journey from fascism to communism, perhaps seeing both as forms of civic religion.
🔻

THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN

Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician, Hampton Roads Press, 2014 (first published 1978)

---

Robert Conner, Magic in Christianity: From Jesus to the Gnostics, Mandrake, 2014

These two new releases complement each other neatly, one being a reprint of a ground-breaking study and the other a survey of the work that built on it. As Bart D. Ehrman notes in his foreword to the new edition of the late Morton Smith’s Jesus the Magician, its appearance in 1978 marked a watershed in New Testament scholarship, as it introduced a new, and to many unwelcome, factor into the already problematic quest for the ‘historical Jesus’.
🔻

ESSENTIAL CROWLEY

Henrik Bogdan and Martin P. Starr (editors). Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism bills itself as ‘The first collection devoted to critical studies of Aleister Crowley.’ It consists of fourteen essays that examine Crowley’s thought, work and influence from different scholarly perspectives, with an introduction by the editors and a context-setting foreword by Wouter J. Hanegraaff (one of the best concise introductions to the Western esoteric tradition I’ve read).
🔻

TREASURE TROVE

Johannes Dillinger. Magical Treasure Hunting in Europe and North America. Palgrave Macmillan. 2011.

When we think of treasure hunting today, the image that comes to mind is of an individual with a map and a metal detector scanning open farmland or on a beach. We see it in strictly practical terms: someone in the past has lost or hidden money, jewels or valuable artefacts, and the treasure hunter attempts to locate them through scientific equipment or by deciphering clues in maps, documents or the landscape itself.
🔻

VICTORIAN OCCULTISM

Alison Butler. Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic: Invoking Tradition. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Many people today tend to view the Victorian period as one of dour Puritanism and dull conventionality, however the reality was often very different, and in many ways it was more tolerant than our own age is of various forms of dissidence and eccentricity. One manifestation of that eccentricity was the commitment of a number of solid members of society to forms of ritual magic.
🔻

BLACK BOOKS

Owen Davies. Grimoires: A History of Magic Books. Oxford, 2010.

Davies's review of the grimoire is a fascinating book, and although scholarly, it is written in an accessible and often amusing manner. It traces this form of literature back to the classical period, where the Roman Empire collected and melded the magical traditions of the Egyptian and Hebrew worlds.

🔻