Science of the Magical: From the Holy Grail to Love Potions to Superpowers- Matt Kaplan

Healing potions.

Magical creatures.

Divination.

Love enchantments.

Death-defying spells.

If there’s anything that the Harry Potter series has revealed about our generation, it’s our utter fascination with the world of magic. In our imaginations, magic holds a prominent space of liminality, blurring the line between fact and fiction, the natural and supernatural, reality and possibility. The history of magic has similarly held the fascination of laypeople and scholars alike, as a litany of books has been written regarding the utilization of magical practices throughout the world. The history of magic holds a special place in my heart as well, as I spent the bulk of my graduate career at Harvard researching the intersections between religion, magic, psychology, and medicine. If there’s anything, however, that detractors of this field often levee against scholars, it’s that the category of magic is wholly divorced from science. As with religion, the common assumption is that magic and science as opposites, acting as diametrically opposed foes that are inversely correlated. According to Enlightenment thought, as belief in science increases, belief in magic/religion declines as we march forward in the inevitability of rationalist progress.

There are scholars, however, (myself included) who insist that the link between magic and science is not so distant after all. Entering into the foray of the debate, The Economist science writer Matt Kaplan argues that the magic we see in world mythology might actually have a basis in science. When I saw that one of my beloved folklore professors from Harvard had written an endorsement of this book, I was immediately on board to see what Kaplan had to say. Yet, while the premise of his 2015 book, Science of the Magical: From the Holy Grail to Love Potions to Superpowers, is indeed interesting, it tends to fall short in providing a convincing argument.

Overview:

Kaplan, throughout the following chapters, sets out to investigate various magical phenomena in world mythology as he attempts to discover whether they have any basis in science. Written in a style reminiscent of a Discovery Channel series, the book seeks to offer rational explanations for historical artifacts and events that blur the line between history and myth. Spanning the centuries across the world, Kaplan’s content is far-reaching as he tackles magical topics such as healing (intercessory prayers, sacred springs, regenerative limbs), transformation (berserkers, shapeshifting, “gender-bending), immortality (elixirs of life, the Holy Grail), supernatural weather (Icelandic sunstones, rain dances, the Biblical Exodus), animal and plant guides (Odin’s Ravens, sixth sense, omens), prophecy (mind-reading, oracles, and high priestesses), near-death experiences (guardians of the dead, supernatural caves), enchantment (love/sleeping potions, magic mushrooms, blood magic), and superhuman abilities (savants, sword-swallowers, stage magicians). This is such a wide range of phenomena, and Kaplan attempts to give various scientific possibilities as explanations for their existence in world mythology.

For example, in the first chapter on healing, Kaplan brings up the fact that, in ancient Egypt, the worshipers of Horus would emulate his appearance and apply heavy makeup around their eyes as a sign of devotion. Horus’s rival, Set, has partially blinded him in combat, but the other gods repaired Horus’s eye. Although the eye of Horus became a symbol of healing, Kaplan notes how, when jars of this makeup were discovered in Egyptian tombs, toxic lead chlorides such as laurionite and phosgenite (PbCl(OH) and (PbCl)₂CO₃, respectively) were found in them. While this may seem counterintuitive to be beneficial to human health, Kaplan uses a series of experiments to determine the bacteria-destroying effects of these compounds, which could ward off a wide variety of eye infections. Ultimately, he argues that far from being a simple act of devotion, the makeup may have had eye-protecting properties that were interpreted as signs of divine blessing. Most of the chapters follow this general guideline: Kaplan introduces a piece of mythology (in all of its strangeness), briefly describes the chemical makeup of the various spells/potions/artifacts used in the magical rituals that are described, and then attempts to draw parallels to modern-day scientific research (especially in regards to pharmaceuticals and neuroscience).

Positives:

One of the strongest aspects of Kaplan’s work is its breadth of research. This is an incredibly well-researched book, as Kaplan utilizes both primary sources, scientific journals, and his anecdotes/professional connections to paint a compelling narrative. Primarily educated as a paleontologist, Kaplan deftly navigates through different magical phenomena across a wide expanse of time in an accessible and entertaining manner. Kaplan is clearly up-to-date in current science and is willing to test some of his theories as he seeks to provide answers for these various tales of magical encounters. Kaplan balances his work by quickly retelling various mythological accounts and then explaining how modern day scientific studies might be relevant to these tales.

Kaplan also has a mastery of narrative flow, as he weaves these accounts together in a loose collection of comparative relevance. The narrative is also rather personal, as he recounts how he and his friends would visit the various historical sites of these mythological stories, or how he personally examined dissected pig livers and tested whether the toxic effects of arsenic are negated by the chemical structures of wine. Kaplan also integrates a wide range of nerd pop-culture references, from the super soldier powers of Captain America (which he relates to Scandinavian berserkers) to the regenerative powers and mind-reading capabilities of various X-Men characters. These small quips are often expounded upon in footnotes, and it is here that we run into some issues with Kaplan’s work.

Criticism:

While Kaplan certainly possesses a self-deprecating sense of humor throughout this work, the tone of the book comes off as a bit too informal and silly at times. While his lack of technical jargon is useful in terms of overall readability, his constant digressions and attempts to make jokes throughout the work tend to distract from the overall argument that he’s trying to make. Indeed, most of the footnotes throughout the work, rather than adding supplemental information or resources, tend to primarily serve as a space to deliver punchlines, which more often miss the mark (for example, one footnote joke is centered around the stereotype of how many calories of ice cream he thinks pregnant women consume, another is about how he was once embarrassed that he was forced to wear a Speedo on vacation, while several others are merely digressions about how “cool” his Avian Biology course was). This may be a small point, but it highlights one of the central problems with this book: in its attempt to explain so much, it ultimately says very little.

Many of Kaplan’s connections between magic and science are either blatantly obvious, tenuous at best, or rely on theories that have been debunked by folklorists/religious studies scholars. I found myself, more often than not, disappointed by the lack of depth of some of his explanations and his attempt to connect magical thinking with scientific discoveries. For example, in a section on The Garden of Eden, Kaplan posits that the fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil could have been mind-expanding magic mushrooms, echoing a thoroughly debunked theory originally set forth by John M. Allegro’s 1970 book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. Kaplan sets up this theory as novel, as he traces his thought process and his “discovery” of the possible connection between magic mushrooms and the fruit in the Garden. I’m not at all saying that two people cannot have the same thought process, but it seems highly suspect that, in all of his research, he never even mentions Allegro’s work on this topic. These sorts of episodes happen frequently throughout the book, which put many of his other “discoveries” into question for me. This trend continues as he fully embraces half-baked theories, including one regarding the Exodus (and Moses “the Magician”), arguing for natural explanations for the plagues and the crossing of the Red Sea (which again, is nothing new). These ultimately miss the point of what the text is about, pushing a literalistic reading of the account, about which most Biblical scholars disagree. Ultimately, these tenuous connections lead to a fundamental problem. Almost all of the stories in Kaplan’s book ends with the same conclusion: “did X group know about Y? We’ll probably never know, but isn’t it interesting?” The book skirts around any sort of concrete answer or definitive evidence, leaving the reader more often than not hanging with nothing more than an interesting piece of trivia. This leads me into my core issue with this work: its unstable definition of what exactly constitutes “magic.”

To be sure, providing a clear definition of magic is an incredibly fraught enterprise. Language is, by nature, incredibly slippery, and much of the current scholarship on magic is riddled with taxonomic complexities, leading Olof Pettersson to claim that any attempt to define magic should be given “a decent burial.” Even so, Kaplan’s loose definition of magic reveals much about how his argument could benefit from an engagement with other scholarly works on magic. Throughout the book, Kaplan primarily argues for two interpretations of magic: 1) seemingly supernatural events that were used to describe what our ancestors couldn’t understand and 2) illusionary theatrics that “present the seemingly impossible as if it were real” (212). There’s no grappling with the ways that direct magic (spells, incantations, etc that originate from an individual) might differ from indirect forms of magic that are mediated through another deity or intermediary supernatural being. Charms and potions are slightly distinct from these forms of magic and are more closely intertwined with botany and folklore than with metaphysical claims. Also, some of the phenomena described, such as the Norse sunstone or the metaphysical connections of Norse Gods to animals such as ravens and wolves, are not necessarily magical, and never claimed themselves to be such.

In Kaplan’s work, not only are all supernatural events subsumed into the category of magic, but the myths that we create today (via comics and cinema) are included within the realm of magic as well, which, according to Kaplan, transforms magic into nothing more than wish-fulfillment, pushing us to accomplish the seemingly impossible. This implies a problem for Kaplan’s thesis: either our ancestors sincerely believed in these magical phenomena or they were aware that they were writing fiction to explain the unexplainable or project their desires. In equating the myths of Odin with the X-Men comics and Harry Potter, Kaplan tends to equate sincere religious belief with the wish-fulfillment aspect of fan fiction. At the same time, Kaplan creates yet another inconsistency in his conclusion: according to Kaplan, science and magic have always been more connected than we would think, yet our ancestors were completely ignorant of the natural factors of magical phenomena, as they “could never leave the magic behind” (212). Here, while advocating for the connection of the two fields, Kaplan simultaneously sets up an inherent opposing dichotomy between magic and science. To reconcile these perspectives, Kaplan must offer an overly simplistic definition of magic. In the conclusion, Kaplan seems to equate magic with any event that inspires awe and wonder within an individual. Such a wide expanse of phenomena makes creating a clear taxonomy of magic nearly impossible for Kaplan.

Granted, Kaplan does well in the introduction to not cast our ancestors as ignorant, as he writes, “It would be wrong to always portray people who lived long ago as the clueless ones. Things have sometimes gone the other way. In some cases, our ancestors understood the world in remarkable ways that have been lost, or very nearly lost, to the ravages of time” (4). Yet, by the time we get to the conclusion, Kaplan turns around and tells us that magic was simply “used to fill the gap and make sense of otherwise confusing things. Magic was used to explain the seemingly impossible” (211). Ultimately, Kaplan boils magic down to a kind of “God of the gaps,” utilized by people who may have been sincere, but were otherwise trapped in their magical worldview. In adopting this view, Kaplan completely ignores how magic continues to be practiced by neopagan spiritual communities around the world today. He does not attempt to converse with people who claim to practice magic today, regulating modern magical practices to merely theatrical productions, such as those by David Copperfield and Penn and Teller. This is a key distinction that many neo-pagans have fought so long to establish (ex. using the word magick to denote modern spiritual practices as opposed to theatrical stage magic), and it seems rather shortsighted and incomplete to completely ignore the ways in which magical practices of the past continue to thrive through various neopagan communities. Through the frequent use of flippant jokes, Kaplan continuously refers to oracles, diviners, and others magical practitioners as strange and exotic, while his section on hermaphrodites and transgender individuals leaves much to be desired, as he exclusively consults experts about these groups and never individuals who identify themselves within these categories.

Finally, Kaplan assumes that these societies who wrote about magic saw these systems as wholly rational and non-mysterious. Kaplan writes that “true believers never doubt that the gods or sorcery are behind the inexplicable things they are seeing. For people suspending their disbelief, this is not the case” (213). Kaplan implies that while unbelievers can appreciate the “puzzles” of magic, those stuck in magical worldviews are blind to science. By portraying the practitioners of magical/religious rituals as rational, but deluded in their supernatural worldviews, Kaplan fails to realize a key insight in the development of ritual: sometimes, myths and rituals persist exactly because they are a mystery to themselves. By offering an overly-simplistic view of magic, Kaplan reduced magic to a rational, yet false, system of explaining natural phenomena. All of these issues illustrate that Kaplan is primarily a science writer (and a strong one at that), yet doesn’t seem to deeply understand the object of his inquiry, namely mythology and religion.

Conclusion

Overall, while I was wholly intrigued by Kaplan’s premise- to investigate mythology to see if magical elements have any basis in science,- I was ultimately disappointed with his execution and argument. While it is an incredibly well-researched book, much of the research ends up in dead-end speculation, which leaves the work as a whole rather unsatisfying. While it is interesting to speculate regarding why certain cultures have specific beliefs and rituals, without a deep understanding of how belief and ritual interact, we are left with little more than thin threads vaguely connecting the fields of mythology and science. As a cursory introduction to how science and mythology interact, this book could serve as a useful starting point due to its ease of reading, informative breadth, and entertaining voice. Yet, if you’re expecting this book to go deeper into any of the subjects that it brings up, looking for a highly contextualized and nuanced take on the complex interaction between the history of science, folk medicine, and magic, then you’re likely to be disappointed.

While it’s an easy book to pick up and put down again, due to the disparate nature of the material and its lack of depth, the book more often than not reads like a collection of interesting facts and personal anecdotes rather than a thorough, well-argued thesis. Ultimately, this book gives us the perspective of a scientist with a fascination with folklore, rather than a religious studies scholar with an affinity for science. And that’s more than okay. None of us are experts in everything. Nor can we contextualize everything we write in the space of a small volume. For those of us so immersed in this field, this book may come off as a simple rehashing of what we all already know, sacrificing scholarly depth for popular mythology and science. However, if you are new to the field, or looking for an interesting, surface-level introduction into the strange ways in which science and magic interact within history and mythology, then this might just be the starting point that you’re looking for.