Introductory remarks



According to a traditional standard narrative, the ‘decline of magic’ in western intellectual elites since the Enlightenment was the direct and inevitable consequence of advances in science and medicine, which rendered belief in ‘occult’ principles obsolete. Probably the best currently available survey of historical studies casting considerable doubt on this popular view is Roy Porter’s “Witchcraft and magic in Enlightenment, Romantic and liberal thought”, which was published in the edited volume Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Volume 5. The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).

Porter (1946-2002), director of the now sadly defunct Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Psychiatrists, was well known as an authority on Enlightenment science and medicine. His comprehensive and accessibly written survey of contemporary historical scholarship on the decline of magic is long enough to probably have warranted publication as a separate book, and is still an indispensable text for those who wish to study the occult entanglements of modern science and medicine. Bengt Ankarloo and Clark Stuart, the editors of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, have provided a useful summary of some of Porter’s main points in their introduction to the book, from which I extract it below.

Synopsis of Porter on the decline of magic and witchcraft, by B. Ankarloo and C. Stuart

Certainly, the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed an intellectual rejection in the name of reason and progress of the beliefs and values of witch-hunting Europe. What was perceived as the modernising of science and theology made them seem irrelevant and dangerous, the product of ignorance, ‘enthusiasm’ [a commonly used term to deride religious fanaticism along with private mysticism; A.S], and fear, not of real knowledge or confidence. In this climate of elite opinion, magic became (in Voltaire’s words) ‘an impossible thing’ and witchcraft a crime of deception – precisely the sort of crime that was more troublesome to increasingly commercialised societies. In the new knowledge systems of the period the sorts of things previously ascribed to witches and devils became impossible in nature, improbable and superstitious (like many ‘miracles’) in religion, and better explained in terms of medical and other pathologies. Doctrinal ‘cleansing’ in particular, says Porter, brought the latitudinarian, optimistic, even utilitarian theology of the early eighteenth century into direct conflict with the demonology of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

The whole mental world associated with the witch trials was thus discredited and attempts were made to suppress it; more devastating still, it was fictionalized and ridiculed. It became à la mode in the eighteenth century to tell witchcraft stories only to laugh at them. The pace and timing of disenchantment was different in the various fields of intellectual life – and different again, as we have seen, from that in jurisprudence and legal practice. But it was proposed on a widespread scale.

On the other hand, we should not be misled by the language used by the Enlightenment crusaders against witchcraft and magic. The battles of the ‘witchcraft wars’ were remarkably long drawn-out, lasting in the case of England throughout the period of the Restoration and down to the repeal of the witchcraft statute in 1736. To believe too much in witchcraft might have become credulous superstition; but to believe too little in it could still carry the risks of atheism.

Porter shows how the European elites continued to mix what were proclaimed to be incompatible beliefs. The occult and the supernatural also had a posthumous life in the art and literature of this period. Suppressed, they returned, migrating into the world of the Gothic and into Romanticism where the supernatural could be made sublime and its terrors enjoyed without risk. From now on, explains Porter, they became the territory of writers and artists.

More than anything else, however, it is the presence in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European high culture of new forms of occult science – labelled ‘pseudo’ sciences by the dominant Newtonianism – that complicates any simple history of the decline of magic. Alchemy and astrology continued to appeal, alongside new studies (or new versions of old studies) like animal magnetism, physiognomy and phrenology. It seems that repudiation of the older sciences and forms of supernaturalism often led to their replacement by look-alikes.

© Bengt Ankarloo & Clark Stuart

From: Ankarloo, Bengt, and Stuart Clark, eds. Witchcraft and Magic in Europe. Volume 5. The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999 (pp. x-xi).

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