Superstition

07 Apr 1997 16:07

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Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed, religion; not allowed, superstition.
--- Hobbes, Leviathan, I, vi

General character. History. Migration of superstitions, socially and geographically. Equivalent concepts outside Europe. And Plato. And the neo-Platonists. And the Church Fathers. And the Renaissance. And the Enlightenment. And Confucianism. And Taoism. And Sufism. Before and after WWI. And mass media. And advertising. And popular accounts of science. And technological change. And evolutionary psychology. And the history of science.

Particular forms: alchemy (important for the history of science); astrology (even more important for the history of science); demonology

Recommended:
• T. W. Adorno, "The Stars Down to Earth" [Analysis of the Los Angeles Times astrology column and its readers. Actually comprehensible, for a wonder. Translated in Telos in the early '70s, along with "Theses Against Occultism," which are gibberish. --- Now reprinted in a glossy trade paperback from Routledge checking in at just under \$20 at the nearest bookstore, the better to undermine commodity-fetishism and the domination of society by exchange-value.]
• Vaughan Bell, Venu Reddy, Peter Halligan, George Kirov and Hadyn Ellis, "Relative suppression of magical thinking: A transcranial magnetic stimulation study", Cortex forthcoming (2007) [PDF preprint via Dr. Bell; his weblog post on same]
• Burnham, How Superstition Won and Science Lost
• Frederick Crews, "The Consolations of Theosophy", parts I and II, New York Review of Books 19 September and 3 October 1996, respectively.
• Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France
• L. Sprague de Camp, Lost Contientss: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature
• Richard de Mille [The definitive exposures of the charlatan --- though de Mille is too polite to use the word: internal inconsistencies, sources and plagiarism, factual errors --- the essay in The Don Juan Papers about the Sonoran desert is particularly compelling: in short, everything.]
  • Castaneda's Journey: The Power and the Allegory
  • (ed.), The Don Juan Papers: Further Castaneda Controversies
• Michael Dummett, The Visconti-Sfroza Tarot Cards [Mostly color reproductions of one of the oldest surviving decks of Tarot cards, but the introduction contains a brief history of the cards, and explains how their use in fortune-telling was an invention of a cracked French nobleman of the late 18th century; cf. Darnton's book above.]
• Christopher Evans, Cults of Unreason
• Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough
• Martin Gardner
  • Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science
  • Science: Good, Bad and Bogus
  • The New Age: Notes of a Fringe-Watcher
• Gustav Jahoda, The Psychology of Superstition
• Donna Kossy
  • Kooks
  • Kooks Museum
• Titus Lucretius Carus, De Rerum Natura
• Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. II, History of Scientific Thought, chapter on "Pseudo-Sciences and the Sceptical Tradition"
• James "The Amazing" Randi
  • Flim-Flam!
  • An Ecyclopedia of Claims, Frauds and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural [Not too reliable, I'm afraid, east of the Indus, or perhaps even the Euphrates; but for Euro-American rubbish it's spot-on]
• Bertrand Russell
  • A History of Western Philosophy
  • "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" (in Unpopular Essays)
• Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century
• Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study of Intellectual Patterns [Includes little essays pointing out --- as must have been very necessary in Berkeley in 1972 --- that said sciences were crap, and were known to be so at the time, at least by those with their heads plugged in.]
• SIMPOS: Information about Social Problems and Occult Tendencies [Dutch website]
• John Sladek, The New Apocrypha: A Guide to Strange Science and Occult Beliefs
• Dan Sperber
  • "Apparently Irrational Beliefs" (or some title on that order) in On Anthropological Knowledge
  • Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach [Review: How to Catch Insanity from Your Kids (Among Others); or, Histoire naturelle de l'infame]
• Peter Washington, Madame Blavatsky's Baboon

To read:
• Susan Blackmore, In Search of the Light: The Adventures of a Parapsychologist
• E. M. Butler, The Myth of the Magus
• Simon Cox, The Subtle Body: A Genealogy
• L. S. and C. de Camp, Spirits, Stars and Spells
• Dodd, The Greeks and the Irrational
• Alireza Doostdar, The Iranian Metaphysicals: Explorations in Science, Islam, and the Uncanny
• Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth
• Helen Farley, Cultural History of Tarot: From Entertainment to Esotericism
• Valerie I. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Modern Europe
• Chris French, The Science of Weird Shit: Why Our Minds Conjure the Paranormal
• Christian Guidice, Occult Imperium: Arturo Reghini, Roman Traditionalism, and the Anti-Modern Reaction in Fascist Italy
• Chris Goto-Jones, Conjuring Asia: Magic, Orientalism, and the Making of the Modern World
• Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought
• Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages
• Jason A. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences
• Kunz, Curious Lore of Precious Stones
• Eric Kurlander, Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich
• Gary Lachman
  • The Dedalus Book of the Occult: The Dark Muse
  • Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump
• Luck, Arcana Mundi
• Dale B. Martin, Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians
• Marcel Mauss, A General theory of Magic
• Donald Meyer, The Positive Thinkers
• Paul Monod, Solomon's Secret Arts: The Occult in the Age of Enlightenment
• Moore, In Search of White Crows
• Emily Ogden, Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism
• Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern
• Sara Schechner-Genuth, Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology
• Reginald Scot, Discovery of Witchcraft
• Stuart A. Vyse, Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition
• Webb
  • The Occult Underground
  • The Occult Establishment
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• Johann Weyer, Witches, Devils and Doctors in the Renaissance = De præstigiis dæmonum
• Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition