It's often forgotten that belief in the supernatural lasted untill very recently in government circles. Even Air Marshal Dowding, victor of the Battle of Britain (and played by Sir Laurence Olivier in a film of the same name) believed in Fairies and wrote an article about how their presence was a boon to ones garden. An who can imagine Shakespeare without the supernatural. The likes of Hamlets ghost and Oberon were not entirely fantasy characters. They were realistic to audience members of the time. Superb, absolutely superb topic and video.
Yes! Magical belief was much more widespread than we tend to think. Belief in witches for example was the orthodox position. Even skeptics conceded that there were probably some real witches! Glad you enjoyed the video!
Love this. History and philosophy of science, political philosophy, etc. should have a stronger affinity to history of magic than what is currently shown.
That would be good! Academic publishing is a strange market. I tend to think it would be better for us to write for more general audiences; the conventions of our discipline can make a lot of the work pretty inaccessible.
In an amateur who is trying to reconstruct western European perspectives on magic in middle ages and early modern period. Its an eccentric religious project of mine. I just added this to my wish list ❤
Wonderfull. As a non academic human with an intrest in history of science and the ocult would love to hear a bit more on the book and your conclussions. I also noticed that the blazing world truely sounds like a psychedelic trip. For instance terrence mckennas machine elves. Magic and the use of psychedelics are very intertwined.
I came across this same problem when attempting to do something similar. My solution was to tease apart the different definitions & uses of “magic” with superscript magic¹ magic² etc. A lot like a dictionary does. Never really resolved the etymology of the word/s though and I don’t think many were using a dictionary so it felt futile & just my own inference & bias being projected onto the past & most of the time the word “magic” refers to itself. Recursively or as circular reasoning. There’s certainly some gems & best case uses of the word but there’s always another better word. It’s almost like the word stands in as a placeholder more than anything.
