The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Keith Thomas's magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (1971) marked the first serious attempt to formulate an academic history of magical beliefs and remains a mainstay of historiographical reviews on the early modern supernatural. Almost fifty years on, Michael Hunter's The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment makes a brave attempt to rethink Thomas's famous analysis of when and why skepticism about magic became widespread in English society. Hunter's book is not a scholarly endeavor on the same scale as Thomas's colossal tome, but it explores the titular theme in a degree of detail that contrasts with Thomas's broad-brush approach and does credit to progress in both knowledge and method over the last half-century.Hunter posits that educated culture in the eighteenth century dismissed or marginalized magical ideas. Thomas grounded the decline of magic in the Scientific Revolution, writing that the “triumph of the mechanical philosophy” marked “the end of the animistic conception of the universe which had constituted the basic rationale for magical thinking” (Thomas 1971: 644). Hunter, however, argues that the decline of magic cannot be attributed to the rise of science. The Royal Society, credited from the eighteenth century with undermining belief in witchcraft and related phenomena, in fact maintained a studied silence on the topic of the supernatural because there was no consensus among its members. It was humanist freethinkers who spearheaded a skeptical approach to magic, expressing their ideas primarily in oral form from the second half of the seventeenth century. Mistrust of this group's religious credentials delayed the wider acceptance of antimagical ideas, but they became broadly influential around the second quarter of the eighteenth century.Hunter suggests that skepticism about magic was a matter of personal conviction rather than hard evidence. Physicians explored medical explanations for supernatural phenomena but fell back on ancient physiological models that were no more scientific or modern in their evidentiary basis than magical beliefs. Arguments that notorious supernatural stories might be fraudulent, meanwhile, proved inconclusive. In an otherwise helpful preface, Hunter concludes the Enlightenment “did not reject magic for good reasons but for bad ones,” which “means that the validity of the phenomena involved remains as much an open question now as was the case in 1700” (vii). This latter statement seems curiously to discount the possibility of post-Enlightenment currents of intellectual change. However, the idea is not one that Hunter foregrounds beyond the preface. The core of his argument—that skepticism about the supernatural realm originated in deist and freethinking circles and owed relatively little to the rise of science—is explored more convincingly over the course of the book.Much of the book reworks earlier articles by Hunter, but it is useful to read them together, with common themes highlighted. Hunter's painstaking research is evident in both the detailed analysis of source material and the additional commentary provided in endnotes and appendices. Chapter 1 focuses on John Wagstaffe's 1669 The Question of Witchcraft Debated. Although an outlying work in that it appeared in print, it represents the kind of skepticism that Hunter suggests circulated more widely in oral culture. Wagstaffe attacked belief in witchcraft, attributing it to human ignorance and deceit. He also lambasted “priestcraft,” asserting that the Papal Inquisition had manufactured witch beliefs and criticizing “Heathen Priests” and early Christians for corruption and overzealousness. Hunter characterizes the work as “a bold and succinct statement of a sadducist position” (46) that brings us “as close as we are likely to get” (48) to Restoration free-thinking. Chapter 2 then moves forwards into the early eighteenth century, discussing a wider range of deists and freethinkers. Hunter uses the minister Francis Hutchinson, author of An Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft (1718), as a case study to explore how antimagical ideas began to infiltrate orthodox thinking. Concerned by the “disruptive enthusiasm” (66) exhibited by the French Prophets and others, Hutchinson negotiated a moderate position between skepticism and credulity.Chapter 3 examines the Royal Society. Hunter shows that the Society as a body had no official stance on magic. Witchcraft, astrology, and related phenomena were little discussed. While Society fellows Robert Boyle and Joseph Glanvill took a keen interest in reports of magical goings-on, skepticism won out for other members, including secretary Henry Oldenburg and curator of experiments Robert Hooke. Chapter 4 similarly explores the divisions in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century intellectual culture. It discusses the Drummer of Tedworth, a 1660s poltergeist story that was widely promoted by Glanvill. Hunter uses this case to show how debates on fraud were often inconclusive and suggests that “it was a predisposition to believe or to disbelieve, rather than any decisive piece of evidence” (120) that dictated people's reactions to stories of the supernatural.Chapter 5 moves forward in time, looking at skepticism about magic in the mid-eighteenth century. Hunter focuses especially on medical explanations for magical phenomena, which increasingly drew on Newtonian methodology. However, these “fashionable” theories were mere “window dressing,” with suggested treatments remaining “almost entirely traditional” (131). He goes on to show that physicians' skepticism influenced many orthodox churchmen, but overall, a range of viewpoints on magical phenomena co-existed within the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment.Finally, chapter 6 explores Scottish second sight. Hunter discusses the various educated men who took an interest in the phenomenon from the late seventeenth century. Championed by Robert Boyle and others as a means of demonstrating the reality of a world of spirits, second sight was later reevaluated in the light of the “Newtonian ethos” (161). By foregrounding principles and axioms, this mathematical mode of enquiry “reduced the stress on the value of serendipitous experiments and observations” (161–62), making it possible to dismiss second sight out of hand as incompatible with the laws of nature. In the conclusion to the book, Hunter underlines again that this did not entail any “evaluation or adjudication of the evidence involved” (172); accounts of supernatural phenomena were rejected because they were unfashionable, not because they had been disproven. Hunter ends chapter 6 by acknowledging that while second sight was generally viewed skeptically by 1800, it became a popular subject within Romantic writing.Hunter avoids overly simplistic characterizations of decline, resulting in an interpretation that is more nuanced and more compelling than Keith Thomas's. On the popular level, he allows, magical beliefs “continued to be prevalent throughout this period and beyond” (178). And while there was growing skepticism about magic, accounts of the supernatural remained important to eighteenth-century culture. Hunter recognizes that there was a continued tradition of printing salacious stories, incorporating writers like Daniel Defoe—though he suggests, debatably, that this corpus of literature was marked by a lack of “intellectual seriousness” (169). He notes how imaginative (often literary) explorations of magic took on new cultural significance and acknowledges the late eighteenth-century revival of occult studies that fed into the Victorian Spiritualist movement. In a commendable effort to make sense of these varied developments, Hunter suggests that British society from the late eighteenth century was marked by a “balance of Antagonisms” (179). This memorable phrase, borrowed from the nineteenth-century historian Thomas Carlyle, alludes to the co-existence of contradictory cultural trends. Enlightenment culture birthed a pluralism that has persisted since, allowing for a diversity of views on magic. Yet in closing, Hunter returns to the importance of the rise of skepticism, reiterating that the main aim of the book is to cast light on “the complex means by which skeptical attitudes … came to the fore” (180).What were these complex means? Hunter refers to a “kind of cultural osmosis” (vi), whereby unorthodox ideas gradually filtered into mainstream culture. Debate took place, but it was characterized more by individuals reacting against stereotypes or straw men than by reasoned consideration of arguments and evidence. People believed what they wanted to believe, and what they wanted to believe changed according to fashion. This is a bold and thought-provoking conclusion. But it is regrettable that Hunter says so little on why antimagical ideas became prominent at this particular point in time. Chapter 2 is helpful on the intellectual context, and the conclusion briefly wonders about the wider cultural trends that bolstered antimagical ideas. In the single paragraph on the issue, Hunter points to “a growth of assurance—of confidence in a serene and stable world in which the disruptiveness of magic no longer seemed to have a place,” citing political stability and “the pursuit of an essentially civil religion” (175). This is reminiscent of Thomas's thesis that improved living conditions, coupled with human endeavors to reduce misfortune such as the development of insurance, went hand-in-hand with the decline of magic, but Hunter might have said more on the specifics of his own argument.Other potential explanatory frameworks receive little attention. Hunter is wary of political accounts of the decline of magic, describing as “seriously problematic” Ian Bostridge's attempt to explain the changing fortunes of witchcraft in party-political terms (173). Since Hunter highlights the importance of the witty discourse that characterized coffeehouse and periodical culture, we might surmise that the spread of these modes of communication facilitated the rise of skepticism, but Hunter does not state as much, or offer any other discussion on the nature and impact of the nascent “public sphere.” He also says relatively little on the impact of Protestantism, a theme emphasized by Thomas, as well as by Max Weber's famous theory of disenchantment (a term that appears in the first sentence of Hunter's book and never again). He does discuss the significance of the Reformation in the introduction, but rarely returns to it thereafter, and the terms “disenchantment,” “Reformation,” and “Protestantism” do not appear in the index. The book as a whole is insightful on the issue of how magic declined, but it might have said more about why this happened.Overall, Hunter's book will not mark the final word on this debate, but it does represent an important intervention. Notable for the clarity, perceptiveness, and assurance of the argument, as well as for the expert analysis and effective synthesis of a range of source material, it is a work that deserves to be widely read and discussed.