1 00:00:01,520 --> 00:00:07,600 You're listening to Digging for meaning? Research from the Oxford School of Archaeology. 2 00:00:07,600 --> 00:00:17,020 My name is Chris Gholston, work in the School of Archaeology in the University of Oxford, and I'm going to talk about the history of magic. 3 00:00:17,020 --> 00:00:24,460 Once upon a time, many years ago now, I worked in a place in Papua New Guinea called New Islands. 4 00:00:24,460 --> 00:00:30,610 I was excavating a cave site which turned out to be 35000 years old. 5 00:00:30,610 --> 00:00:35,140 But also I was interested in the colonial history of the island. 6 00:00:35,140 --> 00:00:45,700 And I asked one day for people to come with me up to a series of old historic villages so I can map them and record them on the way back from art, 7 00:00:45,700 --> 00:00:53,650 a trip. We deviated through the rainforest a little bit because my friends said they wanted to show me something interesting. 8 00:00:53,650 --> 00:01:03,190 We got to a little glade in the rainforest and there lay a whole series of stones that looked a bit like stalactites lying in the grass. 9 00:01:03,190 --> 00:01:08,530 My friends said that on occasions these stones can move around and they have to 10 00:01:08,530 --> 00:01:13,070 be careful of them because they move very fast and they can break your leg. 11 00:01:13,070 --> 00:01:22,870 And they also said that people who know how can look at the motion of the Stones and the Stones will allow them to predict the future. 12 00:01:22,870 --> 00:01:31,430 I said, Oh, I'd love to see those stones move. My friends said they wouldn't do it if white people were around. 13 00:01:31,430 --> 00:01:41,960 This is one small instance of a whole series of magical forms that I've encountered over the years in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere. 14 00:01:41,960 --> 00:01:48,830 Papua New Guineans are extremely adaptable. They have traditional magical forms, traditional magical beliefs. 15 00:01:48,830 --> 00:01:56,120 But people also have developed magic to try and help them rob banks or to get their children into university. 16 00:01:56,120 --> 00:01:59,330 And they're really quite serious about the latter. 17 00:01:59,330 --> 00:02:11,450 Magic has been practised for many tens of thousands of years, and in all parts of the inhabited globe, there are instances of magic in all areas. 18 00:02:11,450 --> 00:02:17,570 So that, for instance, in the Bodleian Library, which is the University Library of the University of Oxford, 19 00:02:17,570 --> 00:02:28,910 there are 80000 records of astrological diagnoses from the late 16th century to the late 17th century. 20 00:02:28,910 --> 00:02:35,210 These were records kept by three astrologers in London and the home counties. 21 00:02:35,210 --> 00:02:44,210 And each one of them is recorded meticulously. So our client will come to the astrologer and ask them about a particular problem. 22 00:02:44,210 --> 00:02:51,950 Very often a health problem, but also to do with career, to do with lost objects, to do with people who are missing. 23 00:02:51,950 --> 00:02:59,630 And the astrologers made an astrological chart which shows the position of key planets and stars and so on, 24 00:02:59,630 --> 00:03:06,590 the moment in which people were interested. And they provided a diagnosis, the medical ailment, what it was about, 25 00:03:06,590 --> 00:03:11,810 the movements of the planets or the stars that was causing someone to be ill or what they might 26 00:03:11,810 --> 00:03:18,620 be able to say about their present and future on the basis of these cosmological movements. 27 00:03:18,620 --> 00:03:24,980 The three astrologers practised openly. This wasn't something that they did in a hidden way. 28 00:03:24,980 --> 00:03:32,090 There was a whole range of people came and consulted them from members of the aristocracy to Shakespeare's landlady. 29 00:03:32,090 --> 00:03:40,250 And there is every sign that they took their astrology seriously in notes along with these diagnoses. 30 00:03:40,250 --> 00:03:49,520 They compare between cases. They try and improve on our diagnosis that they made previously, try and refine it and make it a little bit better. 31 00:03:49,520 --> 00:03:55,580 And the people who came to them, there are eighty thousand observations, as I mentioned. 32 00:03:55,580 --> 00:04:00,530 Sixty thousand people. So a number of different people came more than once. 33 00:04:00,530 --> 00:04:03,050 Astrology is practised through to the present. 34 00:04:03,050 --> 00:04:09,560 There are now a great range of apps you can get to tell you about the influence of heavenly bodies on your life. 35 00:04:09,560 --> 00:04:19,280 And we know that astrology, through historical records and archaeology, goes back to ancient Mesopotamia over five and a half thousand years ago. 36 00:04:19,280 --> 00:04:26,660 And there are archaeological instances which might indicate that people were recording things like the phases of the moon. 37 00:04:26,660 --> 00:04:39,470 Up to 40000 years ago, these two instances, the movement of the stones and astrology, can stand for many, many magical practises around the world. 38 00:04:39,470 --> 00:04:45,560 And magic forms an extremely important part of human life, past and present. 39 00:04:45,560 --> 00:04:50,510 But it has been relatively ignored. My definition of magic. 40 00:04:50,510 --> 00:04:53,840 One of the first things that people ask about magic is what is it? 41 00:04:53,840 --> 00:04:59,900 My definition of human magic is that it's human participation in the universe. 42 00:04:59,900 --> 00:05:04,740 People feel that they are open to the universe either through the astrological 43 00:05:04,740 --> 00:05:10,430 bodies influencing them or they are able to read the world in various ways, 44 00:05:10,430 --> 00:05:20,870 as in the motion of the Stones in Papua New Guinea. Magic coexists and has done for a very long time with both religion and science. 45 00:05:20,870 --> 00:05:25,580 Religion is obviously a belief in a single God or more often. 46 00:05:25,580 --> 00:05:29,120 Many gods and science is slightly more recent, 47 00:05:29,120 --> 00:05:36,530 but encourages us to stand back from the universe to take a more objective view of the universe and its forces, 48 00:05:36,530 --> 00:05:45,420 to understand it in an abstract way, often in order to be able to influence or alter the shape of the world. 49 00:05:45,420 --> 00:05:50,670 Each of these three practises magic, religion and science, I would argue, 50 00:05:50,670 --> 00:05:56,240 form what can be seen as a triple helix along the lines of the genetic double helix. 51 00:05:56,240 --> 00:06:01,500 Are three strands of human behaviour which are interlinked and interlocked. 52 00:06:01,500 --> 00:06:05,370 And each important aspect of human life. 53 00:06:05,370 --> 00:06:15,240 And whereas the histories of religion and the histories of science have been extremely well explored, the history of magic has been much less so. 54 00:06:15,240 --> 00:06:20,610 People tend to think of magic as something that is or should be dying out. 55 00:06:20,610 --> 00:06:30,120 That's only practised by the Yale educated, the ignorant people in parts of the world where they are cut off from the mainstream of human history. 56 00:06:30,120 --> 00:06:36,030 I think all those notions are both objectionable and wrong. People in the present in the Western world, 57 00:06:36,030 --> 00:06:43,980 over 75 percent of people surveyed in places like Europe and the states say that they have some form of magical belief. 58 00:06:43,980 --> 00:06:51,090 And of course, many of us believe in religion and pretty well everyone in various ways believes in science. 59 00:06:51,090 --> 00:06:56,470 So it's not a question that you have to choose one of these beliefs and practises over the other two, 60 00:06:56,470 --> 00:07:01,470 that they all coexist and that each does rather different things. 61 00:07:01,470 --> 00:07:06,470 Magic gives us a sense of kinship and oneness with the universe, 62 00:07:06,470 --> 00:07:13,540 religion and sense of transcendence and all through belief and some sort of superior being or beings. 63 00:07:13,540 --> 00:07:23,250 And science emphasises the importance of reason and our ability to understand the world in an abstract and theoretical manner. 64 00:07:23,250 --> 00:07:32,340 What I've tried to do in a recent book, which I've called The History of Magic, is explore these various different histories. 65 00:07:32,340 --> 00:07:39,030 And just as science and religion are culturally and historically embedded, so is magic. 66 00:07:39,030 --> 00:07:50,730 So there are many, many forms of magic around my central definition of participation and magic is being constantly invented and then reinvented. 67 00:07:50,730 --> 00:07:57,690 What I've attempted to do in the book is to survey the last 40000 years or so looking at various 68 00:07:57,690 --> 00:08:03,630 different magical instances and something of the cultural background from which they came. 69 00:08:03,630 --> 00:08:10,020 The earliest object that I talk about is the so-called lion man from state or cave in Germany, 70 00:08:10,020 --> 00:08:16,290 which is a little ivory figures made from mammoth ivory, not from elephant ivory. 71 00:08:16,290 --> 00:08:27,180 And this ivory tusk was carved into the form of a human figure with recognisable arms and male genitalia, but also the head of a lion. 72 00:08:27,180 --> 00:08:31,980 Now it's hard to know, impossible to know what people were doing forty thousand years ago. 73 00:08:31,980 --> 00:08:39,090 But one possibility is that this object was seen to combine the capacities of humans, 74 00:08:39,090 --> 00:08:48,450 lions and mammoth soul and the one object and could be used to mobilise some of the physical power of the lion and the mammoth, 75 00:08:48,450 --> 00:08:51,920 as well as some of the attributes of the human being. 76 00:08:51,920 --> 00:09:00,690 And one of the great things about magic is that it tends to break down what we might otherwise see as divisions between species. 77 00:09:00,690 --> 00:09:03,330 So it's a non-linear in view of the world. 78 00:09:03,330 --> 00:09:13,230 So rather later instance recovered from archaeology is at the site of Star Car in Yorkshire, in the United Kingdom, at the edge of a lake. 79 00:09:13,230 --> 00:09:19,530 There were people living there in the so-called Mesolithic period, the period before farming had started, 80 00:09:19,530 --> 00:09:26,490 and they left behind a whole series of traces of structures and stone tools and animal bones and so on. 81 00:09:26,490 --> 00:09:34,680 But including in these are a series of deer, Frontalot, the front part of a deer skull together with the horns. 82 00:09:34,680 --> 00:09:37,230 And these had holes bored in them. 83 00:09:37,230 --> 00:09:47,070 And it appears that people wore them on their own heads, possibly breaking down the distinctions that we might normally see between people and deer. 84 00:09:47,070 --> 00:09:55,860 And it's been said, for instance, that maybe this was part of a hunting magic where people imitated deer and were able to get control over them. 85 00:09:55,860 --> 00:10:01,080 But it might be that deer were in some way totemic or important to the group as a whole. 86 00:10:01,080 --> 00:10:09,150 And by putting these deer Frontalot on their heads. People weren't imitating deer, but in some way they were becoming deer. 87 00:10:09,150 --> 00:10:18,180 And we definitely know that from Siberia, present day eastern Russia, that there are a whole series of shamanistic practises, 88 00:10:18,180 --> 00:10:23,700 practises by shamans which have been going on for the last several thousand years. 89 00:10:23,700 --> 00:10:27,600 And from historical records, ethnographic records of Shaiman. 90 00:10:27,600 --> 00:10:38,260 We know that in these cases, at least, Chaiman can become animals, often powerful animals like bear and by inhabiting the soul of a bear. 91 00:10:38,260 --> 00:10:43,680 And they are also able to travel into the spirit world. And there in the spirit world. 92 00:10:43,680 --> 00:10:49,020 All the powers of. Universe played out so that the good things that happen to people, 93 00:10:49,020 --> 00:10:56,700 but more particularly the bad things that happen to people disease, disease to reindeer, an animal from which people live, 94 00:10:56,700 --> 00:11:01,920 the incursion of outsiders such as Russian settlers taking their land, 95 00:11:01,920 --> 00:11:11,040 all of these things to indigenous Siberian groups are seen to have some sort of spiritual basis, some sort of spiritual origin. 96 00:11:11,040 --> 00:11:15,240 And therefore, to make people well, again, to make the reindeer well again. 97 00:11:15,240 --> 00:11:23,550 It's necessary to travel to the spirit world, to negotiate, to intercede with the spirits in order to try and put things right. 98 00:11:23,550 --> 00:11:27,900 And this is an extraordinarily risky procedure. Not everyone. 99 00:11:27,900 --> 00:11:32,970 Only people with the right personal characteristics and training can think about doing that. 100 00:11:32,970 --> 00:11:39,600 And occasionally, of course, people who enter the spirit world get stuck there and are unable to come back again. 101 00:11:39,600 --> 00:11:43,440 And in our terms, they would then die or possibly go mad. 102 00:11:43,440 --> 00:11:50,970 Whereas an effective Chaiman has the power to enter that world, but also then to come back relatively unscathed. 103 00:11:50,970 --> 00:11:58,860 So in these shamanistic practises, people are again blurring the boundaries between human and non-human spirits. 104 00:11:58,860 --> 00:12:06,660 The world in which we inhabit now the world beyond the world of the spirits, which in some ways more powerful. 105 00:12:06,660 --> 00:12:12,030 In many cultural instances, the ancestors are extraordinarily important. 106 00:12:12,030 --> 00:12:21,990 So we know from Shang Dynasty, China, Bronze Age, China, roughly between around sixteen hundred and a thousand B.C. 107 00:12:21,990 --> 00:12:29,730 We know in Shang Dynasty, China, that people attempted divination in order to speak to their ancestors. 108 00:12:29,730 --> 00:12:32,040 And from the Shang onwards, 109 00:12:32,040 --> 00:12:42,330 people developed extremely sophisticated forms of divination by which you take either the shoulder blade of an ox or the under shell of a turtle. 110 00:12:42,330 --> 00:12:47,180 And on that, you would write a question which could receive a yes or no answer. 111 00:12:47,180 --> 00:12:52,260 Will the queen give birth to a boy? Will we beat a particular set of enemies? 112 00:12:52,260 --> 00:13:01,680 Will the harvest be good? And then the Divino would apply the Bronze Age equivalent of a red hot poker to the scapula or shell. 113 00:13:01,680 --> 00:13:08,700 And it would crack. And the sound that made a boo sound would be the sound, the voice of the ancestor coming through. 114 00:13:08,700 --> 00:13:13,620 And the shape of the crack would tell you the answer to your question, either yes or no. 115 00:13:13,620 --> 00:13:21,030 The queen will have a boy. Yes. So people expended a lot of effort in interceding with the ancestors. 116 00:13:21,030 --> 00:13:26,330 And we know from Preservation Shang Tombs. We know of particular ancestors. 117 00:13:26,330 --> 00:13:32,190 So there is a queen of the Shan called Fu Hao, whose tomb was excavated intact. 118 00:13:32,190 --> 00:13:41,460 And she had a whole series of bronze ritual vessels in her too, as well as the bodies of her attendants who'd attended her in life. 119 00:13:41,460 --> 00:13:48,780 People in the then living worlds communicated with FU how in her spirit world after she died. 120 00:13:48,780 --> 00:13:59,940 But she, in turn in the spirit world, was set up to feast her ancestors so that she would attempt to intercede with earlier generations of ancestors. 121 00:13:59,940 --> 00:14:09,070 And we can think of a whole sort of stratigraphy of ancestral connexions with previous generations talking to even earlier generations. 122 00:14:09,070 --> 00:14:15,930 And once again, the spirits, the ancestors were able to influence and effect the lives of the living. 123 00:14:15,930 --> 00:14:23,370 And in turn, the prestige of the ancestors. How well they were thought of depends on how well they were able to intercede with 124 00:14:23,370 --> 00:14:29,580 even older ancestral powers and maintain the well-being of their living descendants. 125 00:14:29,580 --> 00:14:35,910 And in many parts of Africa, ancestral spirits of various kinds are extremely important. 126 00:14:35,910 --> 00:14:45,950 And people were question spirits through divination. They will set up statues, which to us might seem representations of their ancestors. 127 00:14:45,950 --> 00:14:49,740 But to them was a real instantiation of the ancestor. 128 00:14:49,740 --> 00:14:51,360 It was the ancestor. 129 00:14:51,360 --> 00:14:59,340 And they would ask questions, give offerings, sometimes slightly unusually to us, with what Westerners have come to call Nayo fetishise. 130 00:14:59,340 --> 00:15:03,890 You would bang a nail into the carving at the end, sister, and ask your question. 131 00:15:03,890 --> 00:15:11,640 And maybe the power of this act then required an answer from the ancestor Aboriginal people in Australia. 132 00:15:11,640 --> 00:15:16,170 Famous for having extraordinarily close relationships with the land. 133 00:15:16,170 --> 00:15:23,520 So in terms of my definition of participation, they are strong participants in the landscapes in which they live. 134 00:15:23,520 --> 00:15:31,830 And in those landscapes, desert or more temperate landscapes lie the actions and the power of ancestral figures. 135 00:15:31,830 --> 00:15:42,030 And people feel that their songs and stories and genealogies are not so much about the land, but derive from the land that people are talking. 136 00:15:42,030 --> 00:15:50,880 The land people are singing the land and. Famously, there are these what are often now known as song lines, which cross the concern often go in many, 137 00:15:50,880 --> 00:15:56,460 many thousands of kilometres and people can sing not only their own country. 138 00:15:56,460 --> 00:16:01,800 And it's thought that the rhythm of the song evokes the topography of the country in which they live. 139 00:16:01,800 --> 00:16:06,840 They can evoke and sing their own country, but they can also evoke a country. 140 00:16:06,840 --> 00:16:15,030 They've heard about but never actually been to or seen. So the sung lines are forms of landscape, forms of ancestry, 141 00:16:15,030 --> 00:16:23,820 which stretch out from where people are in the here and now right across the continent in ways that we as Westerners find quite confronting. 142 00:16:23,820 --> 00:16:27,960 Difficult to understand, but extraordinarily interesting. 143 00:16:27,960 --> 00:16:36,570 As I said at the beginning, with the instance of things like astrology in the West, right through to the present, people practise magic. 144 00:16:36,570 --> 00:16:45,840 And there are some extremely interesting hybrid figures. So Isaac Newton, one of the most famous of the early earlyish scientists, 145 00:16:45,840 --> 00:16:53,580 was described by the economist John Maynard Keynes as not the first of the scientists, but the last of the magicians. 146 00:16:53,580 --> 00:17:02,490 And this is because New not only was interested in what we would now call physics light, gravity motion, a whole range of things, 147 00:17:02,490 --> 00:17:06,420 but also he put an enormous amount of effort into alchemy, 148 00:17:06,420 --> 00:17:13,740 turning base metals into gold or are trying to do that biblical prophecy and also, to some degree, astrology. 149 00:17:13,740 --> 00:17:22,650 And for Newton, it wasn't as if he did his day job, which was science, and then went off in these slightly eccentric pursuits, which was magic. 150 00:17:22,650 --> 00:17:26,490 He possibly was searching for grand theory of everything, 151 00:17:26,490 --> 00:17:33,450 much as physicists saw today and saw these various different attempts, definition of physical laws, 152 00:17:33,450 --> 00:17:39,870 but also alchemy, astrology and the use of the Bible was all part of one and the same means of 153 00:17:39,870 --> 00:17:45,930 investigating the universe and giving oneself the power to alter the universe. 154 00:17:45,930 --> 00:17:51,960 So rather than magic, having died out a long time ago and rather than magic needing to die out, 155 00:17:51,960 --> 00:17:59,940 I think we can acknowledge not just the rich and varied histories of magic, but also the power of magic in the presence. 156 00:17:59,940 --> 00:18:05,160 I think most of us would admit at the moment we're in a time of some crisis. 157 00:18:05,160 --> 00:18:12,450 The ecology of the planet is breaking down through human action on it, particularly over the last few hundred years. 158 00:18:12,450 --> 00:18:19,260 And there's vast human inequalities, some extremely rich people, many, many extremely poor people. 159 00:18:19,260 --> 00:18:26,790 And we definitely need new ways of approaching our lives, new ways of approaching our relationship with the world. 160 00:18:26,790 --> 00:18:35,010 And one possibility is to reinvigorate magic in new ways, not to go back to some older form of magic, 161 00:18:35,010 --> 00:18:43,680 but to think about the participatory qualities of magic, the fact that magic gives us a sense of kinship with the world, 162 00:18:43,680 --> 00:18:50,770 a sense of kinship with the universe often which can be seen as send humans as living even bits of it, 163 00:18:50,770 --> 00:18:55,020 not the rocks and so on, that we might not normally think of this sentiment. 164 00:18:55,020 --> 00:19:02,220 If we understand the world as a series of living entities, then we may feel a duty of care towards it. 165 00:19:02,220 --> 00:19:09,630 And just as we care for our family and close friends, then we might think that we need to care for the world. 166 00:19:09,630 --> 00:19:14,610 So rather than asking what can we take from the world and how can we take it? 167 00:19:14,610 --> 00:19:24,630 Maybe we need to think about. To what extent and in what ways we are custodians of the world, how we as ancestors of generations to come, 168 00:19:24,630 --> 00:19:30,810 can pass the world on in a good state to those that will come and those that should be able 169 00:19:30,810 --> 00:19:36,900 to enjoy the world in the way that we've been lucky enough to over the last few centuries. 170 00:19:36,900 --> 00:19:41,400 So my argument about magic is not a purely historical one, 171 00:19:41,400 --> 00:19:48,450 but is one that allows us to explore our relationships, present and future with the world around us. 172 00:19:48,450 --> 00:19:55,320 Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to Digging for meaning for more information about this topic, 173 00:19:55,320 --> 00:20:10,649 offer any of our other episodes, please go to our Web site at a r c h dot o x dot, ac dot.