Books
Philip Pullman: why we believe in magic
The
world of magic defies rational explanation, but beware dismissing it as
nonsense. Like religious experience and poetry, it is a crucial aspect
of being human, writes the Dark Materials author Philip Pullman
Thu 6 Sep 2018 10.32
Illustration: Kai and Sunny
A new exhibition at the
Ashmolean Museum
in Oxford brings together a multitude of objects and artworks – there’s
a “poppet” or rag doll with a stiletto stuck through its face, an
amulet containing a human heart, a wisp of “ectoplasm” apparently
extruded by a medium in Wales, and too many others to count – from a
dark world of nonsense and superstition that we ought to have outgrown a
long time ago. At least, that’s how I imagine rationality would view
it. I find myself in an awkward position rationality-wise, because my
name is listed on the website of the
Rationalist Association
as a supporter, and at the same time I think this exhibition is full of
illuminating things, and the mental world it illustrates is an
important – no, an essential part of the life we live. I’d better try to
work out what I mean.
I’ll start with William James. In his book
The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902), James takes an interesting approach to his subject: he’s not
trying to persuade us of the truth of this religion or that, or to
unpack some complexities of dogma, or to interpret religious stories for
the new 20th century. The book is about what the title says: religious
experience – what it feels like to be converted, or to lose one’s faith,
or to be in a state of mystical ecstasy, or of existential doubt.
James’s examples are drawn from the testimonies of believers and
unbelievers alike, and the question of whether there is a God, and
whether Jesus Christ is his son, and so forth, is of little interest to
James’s main enquiry: only the effects of believing it matter here. For
example, we may doubt that the Virgin Mary actually, in fact, physically
appeared to Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes (we may doubt that there
ever was a Virgin Mary in the first place) but the vision, or whatever
it was, was clearly profoundly meaningful to Bernadette, and her account
of it was meaningful to many others, and it certainly had an effect on
her and the life she led.
Trying to understand superstition rationally is like trying to pick up something made of wood by using a magnet
And
of course she’s not alone. Countless thousands of thoughtful and
intelligent people have had experiences of a kind that they call
religious. James paid them the compliment of taking these experiences
seriously, and produced a classic of psychological insight. But could
there be a Varieties of Magical Experience? Could the mental universe
that produced witch bottles and sigil, and grimoires, and the whole idea
of magic itself, be rich enough to sustain an examination of that sort?
The universe of magic is a large place. It contains phenomena
ranging from simple good luck charms to complicated systems of belief
and practice such as astrology and alchemy, and it comes to us from
prehistory, and from every part of the world, and it still flourishes
today. The variety of ideas and objects it contains is almost limitless;
the one thing they have in common is that rationalism would scoff at
all of them as absurd, outdated, meaningless superstitions that aren’t
worth wasting time on.
A human heart in heart-shaped lead and silver case, found concealed in
the crypt beneath Christ’s Church, Cork, 12th or 13th century – and now
in the Spellbound exhibition. Photograph: © Pitt Rivers Museum,
University of Oxford
But rationalism doesn’t make the magical
universe go away. Possibly because I earn my living as a writer of
fiction, and possibly because it’s just the sensible thing to do, I like
to pay attention to everything I come across, including things that
evoke the uncanny or the mysterious. Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum
puto (I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me). My attitude to
magical things is very much like that attributed to the great physicist
Niels Bohr. Asked about the horseshoe that used to hang over the door
to his laboratory, he’s claimed to have said that he didn’t believe it
worked but he’d been told that it worked whether he believed in it or
not. When it comes to belief in lucky charms, or rings engraved with the
names of angels, or talismans with magic squares, it’s impossible to
defend it and absurd to attack it on rational grounds because it’s not
the kind of material on which reason operates. Reason is the wrong tool.
Trying to understand superstition rationally is like trying to pick up
something made of wood by using a magnet.
I
have plenty of superstitions, which are my own and no one else’s (I
don’t believe that anyone else would feel more able to write a novel,
for example, if they used the only kind of pen and paper that works for
me) but one of the interesting things about Spellbound, the Ashmolean
exhibition, is that it illustrates beliefs that many people in many
places and during many centuries have held in common. Belief in witches,
for one thing, is more or less worldwide. In Christian countries it
reached a pitch of hysterical panic between the 15th and the late 18th
centuries, at a time when tensions between Protestant and Catholic
powers were at their highest, and when the medieval world of faith was
being challenged by the new thinking of the Enlightenment. Among other
things, it was a systematic exercise of cruelty and horror: during this
period, writes Malcolm Gaskill in the exhibition catalogue, “there were
around 10,000 trials for witchcraft in continental Europe, the British
Isles and North American colonies”.
Unlike many human failings,
this was not entirely the result of stupidity. Many intelligent people
believed that witchcraft existed, and that it was right and proper to
stamp it out by killing those who practised it. Nor is that cast of mind
safely buried in the past. Until quite recently, people known to be
intelligent have felt it was acceptable to put their names to arguments
like this: “If we really thought that there were people going about who
had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from
him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or
drive them mad or bring bad weather – surely we would all agree that if
anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did?”
That was CS Lewis, in Mere Christianity, 1952.
A ‘poppet’ of stuffed fabric in Edwardian-style black dress with
stiletto through face, from 1909–13. Photograph: © The Museum of
Wtchcraft and Magic, Boscastle
Whether witches were “filthy
quislings” or harmless village healers, they and those who believed in
witchcraft and magic existed in a shared mental framework of hidden
influences and meanings, of significances and correspondences, whether
angelic, diabolic, or natural. Everything in the exhibition testifies to
a near-universal belief in the existence of an invisible, imaginary
world that could affect human life and be affected in turn by those who
knew how to do it; and so do millions of other objects of similar kinds
collected, exhibited, studied, or uncollected, unknown, lost, throughout
the world and every period of history. As do legends, and ghost
stories, and folk tales. If anything is a permanent fact of human
nature, this is.
I find it endlessly fascinating, and I call
that world “imaginary” not to disparage or belittle it. Imagination is
one of our highest faculties, and wherever it appears, however it
“bodies forth / The forms of things unknown” (Theseus in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream), I want to treat it with respect. At its most intense it
becomes a kind of perception, as in William Blake’s notion of “Twofold
Vision”, by which he means what we see when we look “not with but
through the eye”: the state of mind in which we can “see a World in a
Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower”. Other poets describe
something similar: in Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality
from Recollections of Early Childhood” he recalls a time “when meadow,
grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem
/ Apparelled in celestial light, / The glory and the freshness of a
dream.” Thomas Traherne’s vision of “orient and immortal wheat” in the
everyday corn comes from the same apprehension.
I’m relying on
poetry to make this point because I think that poetry itself is a kind
of enchantment. The effect that certain lines and images can have on us
can’t be explained by translating them into simple modern English. The
very form is part of the meaning, and the sound the poem makes works
like a spell on our senses and not only on our minds. But it’s not just
true of poetry. Everything that touches human life is surrounded by a
penumbra of associations, memories, echoes and correspondences that
extend far into the unknown. In this way of seeing things, the world is
full of tenuous filaments of meaning, and the very worst way of trying
to see these shadowy existences is to shine a light on them.
The Witch and the Mandrake (1812) by Henry Fuseli. Photograph: © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford
This
shadow world – the state that Keats called “Negative Capability, that
is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts,
without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” – is where the
imagination is at home, and so are ghosts and dreams and gods and devils
and witches. There, possibilities are unlimited, and nothing is
forbidden.
But we have to be clear about what our imagination
is. What it isn’t is just a fanciful way of telling a story that isn’t
true, or a pretty decoration that we apply to something else to make it
attractive, and that isn’t fundamentally important itself. I have a high
regard for the scientific writing of
Richard Dawkins,
but I think that sometimes he expresses a view of the imagination that I
simply can’t agree with: “We don’t have to invent wildly implausible
stories: we have the joy and excitement of real, scientific
investigation and discovery to keep our imaginations in line.” (The
Magic of Reality, 2011: my italics). If we have to keep our imaginations
in line, it’s because we don’t trust them not to misbehave. What’s
more, only scientific investigation can disclose what’s real.
… and a witch trapped in a bottle England, c1850. Photograph: © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford
On
the contrary, I’d rather say that there are times when we have to keep
our reason in line. I daresay that the state of Negative Capability,
where imagination rules, is in fact where a good deal of scientific
discovery begins. In the old expression, reason is a good servant but a
bad master, and its powers are limited: no work of art was ever reasoned
into existence, for example.
David Hume
was right: reason is (and should be) the slave of the passions, not
their governor. Or as William James put it: “In the metaphysical and
religious sphere, articulate reasons are cogent for us only when our
inarticulate feelings of reality have already been impressed in favour
of the same conclusion.”
The important thing is to be aware of
both. Imagination can give us an empathetic understanding of the world
of magic; reason reminds us that the cast of mind that persecuted
witches is still alive. The Home Office’s ‘hostile environment’ policy
appeals to the same dark instinct. The Varieties of Magical Experience
still has to be written, as far as I know; and it will only be done
successfully by someone who engages the subject with both reason and
imagination. Spellbound would be a very good place to start.
Spellbound is at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, until 6 January. See
ashmolean.org/spellbound for details.
The
world of magic defies rational explanation, but beware dismissing it as
nonsense. Like religious experience and poetry, it is a crucial aspect
of being human, writes the Dark Materials author
Philip Pullman .org/spellbound for details.
