Richard Noakes, author of the seminal Physics and Psychics (Cambridge University Press, 2019), is thinning out his personal library and just put two volumes of the Victorian spiritualist journal Borderland on eBay. Edited by the famous journalist William T. Stead (who died on the sinking Titanic in 1912), Borderland was one of the most prominent … Read more
Thanks to the generosity of Dr. Clare Mingins, I’m pleased to offer not one but three (!) copies of a fascinating book as a prize for the latest draw, into which all current and new supporters on Patreon (at the “Galileo” level and above) will be entered. Franz Anton Mesmer, the Discoverer of Animal Magnetism … Read more
Kristof Smeyers is a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century religion and folklore, currently focusing on so-called supernatural phenomena within European Christianity. He is writing a PhD on stigmata in Britain and Ireland as member of the Religious Bodies research team at the University of Antwerp. He previously worked as a research assistant in the Archaeology of … Read more
Eric Robertson Dodds (1893-1979). Image credit: Hugh Lloyd-Jones/Verlag C.H. Beck. If you enjoyed my video plug for the reading group and are keen on additional background readings about Oxford classicist Eric R. Dodds, I got you sorted: you can now download a free PDF of Dodds’s article “Why I do not believe in survival” (1934) … Read more
I’m very excited to introduce a brand-new feature to you: The Forbidden Histories Reading Group (https://www.reddit.com/r/ScienceMagicReadings). The first reading will be E.R. Dodds’s The Greeks and the Irrational. For a schedule and further information watch this video. Reading groups are not your thing? You may still enjoy the video, which addresses a possible link between … Read more
Legendary science popularizer Carl Sagan quoted Francis Bacon, a key figure of the Scientific Revolution, as an enemy of superstition, and suggested he was an early advocate of modern scientific naturalism. Never mind Bacon was a firm believer in occult phenomena and proposed experiments to test them – only to advise against such research in … Read more
The third and final video in our series on poltergeist phenomena and hauntings in the history of science (and this time also medicine) has just gone live. This episode is on the longer side, as we will dwell quite a bit on twentieth-century continental Europe. Once again, you are going to encounter several figures not … Read more
Readers interested in the history of alchemy will be pleased to hear that Jenny Rampling’s long-awaited “The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300-1700” (University of Chicago Press) has now been published. Offering plenty of new original insights into the alchemical practices of figures such as John Dee (and fellow spirit conjuror, Edward Kelley), the book … Read more
At long last, I just uploaded the second part of “Poltergeist Phenomena and the History of Science” to our Youtube channel. After part one was concerned with early modern responses to “things that go bump in the night” by Robert Boyle and colleagues at the Royal Society, and looked at the decline of empirical approaches … Read more
About every other Christmas I go into full geek mode and binge-watch the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings movies. In the concluding part, ‘The Return of the King’, there’s a scene where Aragorn, finally having come to terms with his kingship, lays his hands on the wounded with the intent to restore … Read more