I have to admit that I have a materialist-apologist streak; it’s a common trait among those of us who took the rationalist entry into the occult through the books of Robert Anton Wilson. If you ask someone like Alan Moore or Lon Milo Duquette the question: “Does this magic stuff actually work?” everything suddenly gets very Monty Python and the answer you’ll get boils down to: “Isn’t everything magic?” or “Magic is just an artistic way of describing the world, a framework as valid as any other.” While these explanations are technically true, and more importantly prevent you from coming across as completely insane by leaving the door open for agnosticism, there’s something disingenuous about these answers in that they only reveal half of the truth.

The other half of the truth is summarised in Dean Radin’s new book, Real Magic: magic does work, its effects have been measured in the laboratory, the results have been published in peer-reviewed journals and replicated so often as to be, statistically speaking, beyond reasonable doubt. Given that up to 80% of modern medicine hasn’t even been subjected to a double-blind test, the reality of magic should be of major interest to anyone claiming the importance of scientific rigour.

As Dean admits, he has been investigating magic for 40 years and for 39 of those he would never dream of calling it magic. Real Magic represents an important overlap in the worlds of the occult in parapsychology, before now the former was severely lacking in ‘objective’ evidence while the latter lacked historical context. The chapter on the history of magic is (as you’d expect from someone who has been interested in the subject for just a year) necessarily incomplete, focussing on the likes of big enlightenment players like Bruno and Newton. Then again, it’s important to remember that the target audience is not the magical community, but rather those within the scientific community who are willing to brave the wrath of the inquisition long enough to show some curiosity in the subject.

Real Magic may well turn out to be one of the most important books on magic in decades, and one of the reasons for that is the book is written, perhaps begrudgingly, by an accomplished scientist rather than an eye-liner enthusiast. There hasn’t been a serious attempt to combine magic and science like this since Peter Carroll’s early books.

The chapter on the practice of magic is a doozy, and although it only covers affirmations and sigils, I’d certainly recommend it as the first thing a fledgling magician should read. What Radin and Carroll have both emphasised, and what has been missed ever since, is that the effects of magic are small and very subtle. Magic is not shooting fireballs out of your hands, but neither is it manifesting a million-dollar record deal out of the blue within a 24-hour period. There’s evidence to suggest that the present moment is pulled into the future by the gravity of future events – magic can make small yet measurable warps in probabilistic outcomes that bring you closer to an imagined future. As Radin demonstrates, divination might work by feedback from a probabilistic timeline rather than ‘seeing’ a pre-determined future. Even seasoned and effective practitioners could benefit from these insights. Magicians, it seems, have a lot to learn from bookmakers, and getting good at magic might be analogous to getting good at poker.

As uncle Al used to say, magic is a science and art, and perhaps we can go too far in our statistical analysis. Radin is quick to point out that one of the reasons that the measured effects are so small is because of the dry atmosphere of the lab where experimenters don white coats instead of black robes. All that stuff about magic being a matter of perspective is equally true, but it’s oh so refreshing to be reminded every once in a while, that science is on our side.