Wittgenstein is one of those philosophers who spoke loudest from the grave. Save for the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a children’s dictionary and grammar dating from his stint as a schoolmaster in Austria, and a coolly dismissive review of a scholastic primer on logic written not long after his arrival at Cambridge, he published nothing during his lifetime. One of the most remarkable things to have appeared since his death is the fragment published as "Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough," a collection of jottings Wittgenstein made in a notebook while reading the great 12-volume study of culture and magic, a work to which he found himself returning frequently.
In The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer argued that there were certain universal principles that undergirded the practice of magic throughout human history. The laws of similarity and contagion, the loathing of the taboo, the sacrifice of the Year King: whatever the ostensible beliefs of the priests at Nemi, the subjects of Josiah, the Kikuyu of what was then British East Africa, the Orkney Islanders who splashed the bath water of the diseased over a threshold "in the belief that the sickness will leave the patient and pass to the first person who passes through the gate," every man who confesses that Christ, a mere anti-type of Adonis, rose again on the third day in accordance with the scriptures—all of them were simply acting on primeval urges that Frazer, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, in the last years of the reign of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, had identified, analyzed, collated, and, tacitly of course, banished.
Wittgenstein, a fellow Trinity man, would have none of this. "Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory: it makes these views look like errors," he wrote. "Was Augustine in error, then, when he called upon God on every page of the Confessions?" He accused Frazer of being "much more savage than most of these savages" and, in a canceled passage preserved by the editors of Philosophical Occasions, went even further: "The elimination of magic has itself the character of magic."
This is the crucial point. If these atavistic impulses—the taking of signs for wonders and the longing after whispers to comfort us out of the dark—are such a marked and omnipresent feature of human behavior, on what grounds are we able to say that Frazer escaped them? On the contrary, we have every reason to believe that there is no way out, that everything we chant aloud together, the slogans of liberal improvement every bit as much as the songs of the Australian aborigines kindling night-fires with the smoldering bark of the Banksia tree, is folly. To call, like Prospero, for an end to our revels is to admit one has been conjuring.
In the introduction to his wonderful new anthology of magical texts, Brian Copenhaver does not mention Wittgenstein or even Frazer, but he goes out of his way to sidestep Weber, whose crude instrumentalization of the Reformation in his Sociology of Religion makes Frazer’s volumes read like an acolyte’s commentary on the Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus.
Copenhaver aligns himself instead with the disinterestedness of E.E. Evans-Pritchard, whose invaluable Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande treated its subject matter on its own terms, without condescension. Such is the way to proceed with a book like this, even if, unlike either Frazer or Evans-Pritchard, Copenhaver is dealing not with folk practices or traditions—the selections are all from primary texts, and no field research is cited—but with what we might think of as "educated" magicians and their observers and critics in the Western classical and Christian traditions.
The Book of Magic is divided into 11 more or less chronological sections. The first 80 pages of the book are wasted on extracts—translated by Copenhaver himself—from the Bible that will be at the fingertips of all the book’s likely readers. Everything else is valuable. After the two biblical chapters—one each for the Old and New Testaments—Copenhaver begins with Greek mystery religions and Zoroastrianism, continuing into the Roman world of ghosts, divination, love charms (Apuleius, accused of using one of these to coerce an older widow into marriage, argues that even "the greatest magus in the world" would not have bothered to bewitch his wife), and poison. In Plautus, we find one of the first recognizable haunted houses in Western literature, complete with knockings at the door and the spirit of a murdered former inhabitant.
After introducing us to the pagan Hermetic tradition of sympathetic magic in late antiquity, which would be recovered along with so much else during the Renaissance, Copenhaver shows how the occult was handled by the early and medieval Church. We see a controversy between Origen and Eustathius of Antioch over the correct interpretation of 1 Samuel 28—the latter maintains that Saul did not appear at all and that what the king saw was an illusion vomited from the belly of the witch—as well as Augustine’s famous discussion of "woodland gods and Pans, called incubi by the common people" and the rapes committed by "the demons called Dusii by the Gauls." Later St. Thomas will argue in his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences that those who deny the existence of witchcraft are guilty of a "failure of faith."
The book ends with selections from the end of the Renaissance. Here we see fictional texts—Merlin’s enchantment of the sword Morddure in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, scenes from Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Molière—beginning to predominate, including some in which magic is played for laughs. In the book’s final extract, Leibniz writes to Samuel Clarke to suggest that Newton’s theory of gravity is dangerous: "If it is not miraculous, it is false. ’Tis a chimerical thing, a scholastick occult quality."
This is an absorbing book, one that can be read straight through or dipped into at intervals. Readers with no prior interest in sorcery will be able to open to any page and find something—perhaps one of the gruesome plates illustrating Satan or the Many-Breasted Artemis of astrology—to marvel at. Copenhaver’s minimalist editorial voice allows the authors of the various extracts to speak for themselves. Instead of ordering our understanding of a debate like the one over the philosophical basis for magic conducted at the end of the 17th century, he clarifies and provides context, allowing us to take everything, including the skeptical voices we see throughout—from Hippocrates to Francis Bacon—at face value.
This is the humblest approach. As Wittgenstein put it in his notebook, "it will never be plausible to say that mankind does all that out of sheer stupidity."