! Art. 5.-MEDIEVAL MAGIC. 1. A History of Magic and Experimental Science during the First Thirteen Centuries of our Era. By Lynn Thorndike. Two vols. Macmillan, 1923. 2. The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion. By Sir James George Frazer. One vol. Macmillan, 1922. 3. The Origin of Man and of his Superstitions. By Carveth Read. Cambridge University Press, 1920. 4. Magical Jewels of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. By Joan Evans. Clarendon Press, 1922. 5 Arabic Thought and its Place in History. O'Leary. Kegan Paul, 1922. By De Lacy 6. Bantu Beliefs and Magic. By G. W. Hobley. Witherby, 1922. And other works. IF the average reader were asked what magic was, it would probably seem a very simple thing to give a reply. But it is not at all simple: some of the keenest intellects of our time have been trying to answer that question for the last half century and have not arrived at anything like unanimity, and our great national dictionary gives an unusually long and embarrassed definition of the word. This vagueness of use is part of the history of the subject. To-day magic is altogether outside the domain of religion or of science: in the Middle Ages it was an unexplored part of the province of science, extending on its borders into the counter-religion of witchcraft: in the period of barbaric communities it is, as Sir James Frazer teaches us, the soil in which the first germs of political and religious hierarchies come to life in the really primitive man-pack, magic, religion, and science are undistinguishable constituents of the chaotic and limited notion of the world that they could entertain. : In truth, our first knowledge of the conceptions of the universe formed by early man comes very late in his history; the few thousand years of which we have any record bear but a small proportion to the æons which have passed since the first glimmerings of reason were developed in our race, while the present-day conceptions of savage and so-called primitive peoples have been subjected to as long a process of natural revision and adaptation to circumstance as our own. We have no means of knowing how long it took for certain habits of thought to pass into the state of axioms, for men to link instinctively cause with effect, to observe similarities, to expect similar effects from similar causes, to recognise a regularity in natural phenomena, and at last to believe in the reign of law as normal, subject only to the incidence of chance and such exceptions as are still allowed by the popular notions of the efficacy of prayer. It was in this confused mass of general ideas that magic, as we have said, took its origin; and, except as a part of the history of religious and scientific ideas, its study is of very little interest. It is because we see in it a clue to the origin and growth of religion that so much attention has been paid to it recently by anthropologists, and that careful studies of existing beliefs, like 'Bantu Magic,' are of value. Science is, in its turn, beginning to take stock of its origins, and here, too, we are driven back to a study of magic. Putting aside for the time the connexion of religion and magic, which has been sufficiently explored elsewhere, we may say that the whole field of external nature, so far as men were aware of it, was explained to them by science and-to use Sir James Frazer's phrase -its bastard sister, magic; and that science was always attempting to enlarge its domain at the expense of magic. Man in his small province of known facts was surrounded by a universe of the unknown, of which from time to time a small tract was conquered and brought into the domain of science, of medicine, or astronomy or physics, or of the useful arts. Bordering these was the debatable ground where ill-understood methods gave uncertain and unpredictable results, a region of speculative explanations of assumed facts by assumed analogies-the domain of the occult. The history of the attempts to enlarge the borders of exact knowledge and to lessen the number of vague forces around us is the history of science: it is composed of more failures than successes, of more mistaken assumptions than verified hypotheses. It is for this reason that no history of magic can be written: apart from pseudo sciences like alchemy and astrology no general idea of the occult is conceivable, it is the residue of beliefs after all systematisable matter had been withdrawn. The influence of a planet, the effect of a spell, the magical properties of a gem, accepted on the authority of ageold tradition and assumed experience, had behind them no fundamental reason. Two periods in the history of thought have been especially fruitful in the growth of scientific ideas: the great centuries which include the appearance of the Ionian School in the sixth century B.C. and its successor to the time of Aristotle, and the period of scientific renaissance which began with Copernicus and his contemporaries, and had its roots in the Middle Ages. It is among the philosophers of the Ionian School that we find the first attempts to give an explanation of the phenomena of nature which should be of universal validity, but though we can form a clear idea of their theories and of the reasoning on which they were based, we know nothing of the past which made these theories possible and necessary, nothing of their beliefs as to the causes of every-day happenings, of their explanations of astronomical observations, of the processes of life, in short, of all the changes which are now the subjects of scientific explanation. We do know, however, how strong and widespread the ancient belief in magic, now an enormous mass of assumed experiences, was. Classical antiquity attributed its origin to Persia, but we find it predominant in Sumerian texts, in China, in ancient Egypt, and we are only beginning to suspect the extent to which it entered into the daily life of classical Greece. As Dr Thorndike points out, nearly all Greek literature has passed through so many hands-of Alexandrian free-thinkers and Christian bigots-that we cannot even guess of what it has been shorn, but when we remember, for example, that Sophocles was the family chaplain of a snake, and that the greater part of the original Greek manuscripts we possess are magical, we are less disposed to rhapsodise over the limpid Hellenic genius' than our forefathers were, and more prepared to see in Hellenic religion, literature, and history the clear traces of magic they present. Even in the case of the greater Greek |