... [an] enlightening history ... Rather than forming successive trends of increasing rationality, Gosden persuasively argues that magic, religion, and science have always existed in tandem ... In light of the current climate crisis, and inspired by the discoveries of quantum physics, Gosden furthermore makes a compelling case for a return to the kind of interconnected perspective central to most magical traditions ... A fascinating exploration of magic’s hold on the human imagination.

The contents of Mr. Gosden’s cauldron are almost as eclectic as the ingredients that Macbeth’s hags favored. There are delightfully entertaining passages, especially on picturesque spells ... Mr. Gosden’s triple helix unwinds, however, as he insists on distinctions that disrupt his claims of continuity between religion and magic ... Much of the book is irrelevant: Sometimes Mr. Gosden can find no evidence of magic in the places or times traversed, as, like eye of newt or toe of frog, he swivels and leaps around the world. He wastes pages on elementary background information ... Mr. Gosden celebrates the survival of magic but doesn’t seem to realize that the more complexity science discloses, the more bafflement it causes, driving the perplexed into wild surmise ... Magic: A History will raise readers’ doubts about whether he, too, intends to mock or amuse us. Is it trick or treat?

His book is breathtaking in scope ... It should be said at once that this is not a book for everyone. For many readers its pages will be full of fascinating discoveries. For others, the same pages will be full of meticulously catalogued nonsense ... If you agree...that it is not irrational to believe all misfortune and death to be caused by magic and witchcraft, then this book is for you. If you disagree, it is probably not, unless you can suspend disbelief completely while you read ... He is convinced, too, that early humans did not think of humans and animals as different species, and he points, as evidence for this, to the mixture of animal and human remains in many prehistoric graves. Such evidence is, though, disputable ... Gosden’s depiction of magic as a set of sensitive, benevolent beliefs is also contestable ... Whether he himself really believes in magic is not clear. He certainly writes as if he does. But can he truly believe, for example, that Chinese magic could 'shift the cosmos,' or that Egyptian magic could enable a dead husband to beget a child on his still-living wife—both of which he reports with no suggestion that they are nonsense?

Gosden treats readers to a history of humanity through the lens of magic ... In this beautifully illustrated and written book, Gosden offers an encyclopedic compendium of magical practices across the globe and throughout history. Readers will gain much from the transhistorical perspective Gosden offers ... The global and historical reach of Gosden’s knowledge is astonishing and makes this book an essential reference work. But Gosden has another compelling trick up his sleeve. The book’s humane, urgent conclusion suggests that magic may even offer some clues for surviving our current global climate crisis. Many of the magical rituals and practices discussed here rely on the notion of an animate and sentient natural world. 'To be human is to be connected,' Gosden argues. If we can reawaken our sense of connection to the natural world—to trees and animals and oceans—we may be able to encourage more humans to practice living lightly and harmoniously with the world around us.

This contention, which undergirds most of his book, is entirely true: any strand of behavior that’s lasted throughout the whole length of human history is eminently worth serious study. And for the bulk of Magic, a History, that’s just what Gosden does. His inquiry looks back to prehistoric times and ranges across the whole breadth of the world, from ancient China to the Eurasian steppes to the long Middle Ages in Europe. His endeavor is to understand the role of magic in human societies over the sprawl of 40,000 years, and although that’s a mind-bogglingly enormous goal, the book pulls in a fascinating array of cultures and aspects of magic rites and rituals. The book’s central weakness is, unfortunately, its central tenet: 'Magical fictions are underpinned by magical fact.' There is no such thing as 'magical fact' ... Magic, a History is never less than fascinating, but readers should have their eye of newt handy for some of its more outlandish credulity.

[A] bold, gripping and arrestingly readable universal history of magic ... This is a path-breaking study of a pervasive and strangely neglected phenomenon ... The great strength of Gosden’s book is its rejection of the primitive evolutionist ideology that dominated the study of magic in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Its weakness is his failure to examine how science became a channel for magical thinking ... Gosden begins by rejecting the evolutionist model, and throughout the book repeats that all three strands of human culture are equally important. But his typology is too simple to capture their complex interactions ... Gosden’s over-simple understanding of religion has another and larger defect: it cannot properly acknowledge secular religions ... The weakness of Gosden’s analysis is shown in his account of magic in the 19th and 20th centuries ... Although Gosden insists that magic remains a powerful force in society, he effectively confines its recent manifestations to the cultural margins. Gosden also misses how science has been deployed as a tool of magical thinking ... At the end of the book Gosden mounts an extended defence of magic as a benign force. The belief that we inhabit a sentient universe may help us deal with the environmental crisis, he suggests. But as he says himself, magic is nothing if not practical, and the sad truth is that it doesn’t work.

... not for the faint of heart. Not that it’s frightening or infused with the supernatural. Rather, it is a dense, exhaustive tome designed less for the uninitiated than for those with an already deep interest in the topic and experience with the subject at hand ... Gosden is clearly in the latter camp. An archaeologist and professor at the University of Oxford, he is well versed in the interconnectedness of the material and spiritual worlds, and Magic reveals the expertise of a long career. If you’re willing to settle in to read Magic, you’ll be greeted with the vast detail and information the author provides ... For serious students of the topic, Magic provides bountiful information in the form of charts, timelines, and other data that wouldn’t be out of place in a textbook. But such an encyclopedic scope may overwhelm casual readers. Indeed, at times, I imagined swaths of the text being recited by a droning docent in a darkened museum. Unfortunately, the weight of its endless minutiae crushes some of the book’s, well, magic.

At times the book’s ambition is more hindrance than help, as Gosden bewilderingly dedicates a single chapter to three continents while electing not to discuss South Asian magic at all. Despite such gaps in the story, Magic is an authoritative history of humanity’s engagement with the supernatural.

... sophisticated and wide-ranging study of the role of magic in human history ... Though dense and scholarly, Gosden’s meticulous account offers many intriguing glimpses of early human societies. Readers with a deep interest in human belief systems will be captivated.