The History of Witchcraft
by Lois Martin
Pocket Essentials 2007, £9.99, ISBN 1-904048-77-3

There is no solid evidence that real organised witch cults ever existed. Martin shows how elements of pagan religions and folk beliefs lingered and were framed as witchcraft by the Church – a rival to be stamped out. She takes a chronological approach, showing how a new concept of the Devil emerged in the Middle Ages, along with the idea that magic could be performed only through demonic agency.
The idea of magic as a legitimate natural science was replaced by ideas of servile and heretical pacts with the Devil. Academic necromancers controlled demons while witches served them (conveniently, necromancers were mostly wealthy, well-connected men).
The idea of the coven didn’t appear until the 17th century but the Sabbat’s origins were in Roman accusations against Christians of cannibal orgies.
The magical broomstickflight to the Sabbat emerged in the 11th century, from the night ride where women rode with the goddess, generally doing good deeds.
Trials also came out of the 11th century but took a while to develop into organized seek and destroy missions with an instruction manual. Different countries framed witchcraft differently, in some it was a secular matter while in others it was tried in religious courts and, from the 13th century, by the Inquisition – which, Martin shows, used torture far less than its secular counterparts. Scotland executed three times more witches than England, for example, preferring Continental-style burning to English hanging. In more recent times, after Reason prevailed and witch hunting died out, the witch became a romanticized figure, a force of nature rebelling against the male establishment, adopted by some early feminists as an icon of female power and knowledge. Modern Wicca beliefs have little in common with Mediaeval witchcraft in which there was no white magic, only evil. There is a lot packed into this short book. It is scholarly and readable, neatly summing up the main points without skimping on detail; some of the examples of trials, accusations and significant events almost defy belief.

Tessa Kendall

How to Start Your Own Secret Society
by Nick Harding
Oldcastle, £6.99, ISBN 1-904048-84-6

The title is enough of a hint that this is hardly likely to be a serious academic study. Can it be a manual? Can there be a market out there of people desperate to know how to form secret societies? Is it a satirical work? This is about as useless a book as can be imagined, and as if that were not bad enough, it is one of the worst-written texts outside of school classrooms. This has all the linguistic flair of Mrs Malaprop with the wit of Mr Pooter from The Diary of a Nobody. The pages are littered with gems like these: “Many are desperate to join but they have, perhaps in the past, somewhat sullied their reputations and copybooks or more likely, and this is often the case, their ‘faces do not fit’.” (p. 12) “It will be without question something of a new start, a resurrection, a turning point, and a breath of fresh air to an otherwise (possibly) stale and bland existence.” (p. 33) “Ruins and spurious points of interest on the landscape, if you are able, and this can often be seen as a real tour de force, can be linked up to form some meaningful pattern loaded with symbolism.” (p. 39) “It is worth noting that you must remember to avoid paranoia as this can lead to no end of problematic trouble.” (p. 59) “The Fuhrer was venerated with deference.” (p. 141) “To advertise your existence do not take the direct route, although you can do this of course.” (p. 175) If only Harding had kept his book a secret from society.

Laury Plato

Paranormal Claims: A Critical Analysis
by Bryan Farha
University Press of America, £18.99, ISBN 0-7618-3772-8

An anthology of skeptical writings that includes contributions by James Randi, Michael Shermer and Carl Sagan is not likely to go far wrong, but that last name will alert skeptics to the fact that some of these texts are far from recent. In fact, nearly everything in the book is reprinted from The Skeptical Inquirer, or [the other] Skeptic. Some are taken from the excellent quackwatch.org website.
Among other chapters, Shermer asks “Why Smart People Believe Weird Things”, Ray Hyman explains cold reading, Susan Blackmore delves into near-death experiences, Randi recounts his experiences with his demolition of homeopathy on BBC TV’s Horizon, and Geoffrey Dean astutely reviews the sorry state of astrology. It is very pleasing to read a paper from the Journal of the American Medical Association, co-authored by Emily Rosa, who devised a test when she was only nine years old that ruined the case for “therapeutic touch”.
There are 18 articles altogether. Naturally, the more such analyses are disseminated and read, the better, and subscribers to the above journals will no doubt be glad to re-read these articles in book form. Reluctantly, then, I venture a quibble or two. Professor Farha calls this a critical analysis, which is fair enough, as it instructively and often amusingly leads us around the usual fairground of irrationalities, but it doesn’t seem quite right for the publisher to call it an academic text: one of Farha’s own efforts is a jokey piece about numerology, and Randi’s account of his invaluable TV show is hardly the stuff of learned journals. It may then be better targeted at what used to be called “the intelligent layman”, or, more urgently, at young people in need of a handy antidote to the effluents of New Age whimsy. If so, it’s a shame that this 167-page book is both far too big and far too expensive for the average pocket.

Paul Taylor

Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates
by David Wootton
Oxford University Press, £9.99 (pb), ISBN 978-0-19-921279-8

The main theme of this book is that, until the modern period, beginning in the middle of the 19th century, professional medicine did, on balance, more harm than good. A subsidiary theme is that very often, even when the knowledge which might improve things was available, it was neglected for long periods. Real change was dependent in particular on, first, the use of controlled experiments and statistical comparison, and second, the germ theory of disease. Two especially significant points were, respectively, John Snow’s systematic analysis of the incidence of cholera in the 1850s, narrowing the causes down to the water supply, and Joseph Lister’s introduction of antiseptics from 1865. Before this, medicine derived largely from the Hippocratic tradition that diseases were not entities in themselves, but mainly or wholly due to imbalances in the individual (originally, in the ‘humours’). The main methods were bleeding, purges and emetics, especially the first, which was also particularly harmful. One might note, however, that current thinking is reinstating the individual, for example in variations in genetic susceptibility to illnesses, and the effects of life-style, e.g. obesity.
To explain the lack of progress, Wootton offers a combination of factors, including vested interests, difficulties of communication, mere accident, etc. He mentions, but could have developed further, the whole question of professionalism, which can raise standards but can also produce stagnation and self-interest. Another large question is the relationship of medicine, magic and religion, but one book cannot deal with everything. Wootton also criticizes other historians of medicine, though, oddly, usually not naming them. He objects both to a Whig view of natural, if not steady, progress and a relativist view that the past must be judged by its own criteria. He rightly warns against assuming that the ‘medicine’ of past times was essentially the same thing as we mean by the word, or at least an early attempt at it. He seems to be aiming at both a general and a specialist readership, and the writing is certainly clear and always interesting. Curiously, there is no bibliography, only “further reading”. There is also a website, www.badmedicine.co.uk.

John Radford

Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century
by Marina Warner
Oxford University Press, £18.99, ISBN 978-0-19-929994-2

Marina Warner has produced an extremely corporeal book, nearly 500 pages long, exploring the intangible: our relationship to concepts of the soul and the ethereal, and the way that relationship has been expressed in metaphor (‘the symbolic imagination’), in the context of science, religion and art, from the Enlightenment to the present. She does so in an erudite and scholarly cultural history (perhaps too much so for the general but interested reader) that rummages through obscure byways to find associations between seemingly disparate manifestations of a vitalistic conception of human existence. By its nature, such a wideranging study has to rely heavily on other sources and some have been digested better than others. Warner is clearly on familiar territory for example when discussing Renaissance science, Roman Catholic arcana or photography, less so when tackling the complexities of cinema history or nineteenth- century psychical research (and this partial list itself gives an idea of her eclecticism). Whatever she turns her hand to always elicits interesting insights. Inevitably, however, where there is an emphasis on breadth, depth tends to suffer.
The language is at times elliptical and the prose dense and allusive. Links can be difficult to follow as she lays out topics in a bricolage, often leaving the reader desperate for connective tissue and more sense of an overarching thesis, rather than a juxtaposition of fascinating snippets with too little to synthesize them. The result is a sense of breathlessness giving rise to a frequent feeling of puzzlement over what seems a collection of arbitrary – if fascinating – ingredients stirred into the mix.
Where the book really comes alive is when Warner foregrounds her own experiences, such as an uncanny moment in the shrine of Santa Caterina de’ Vigri in Bologna, or weighing a sample of ‘ectoplasm’ at Cambridge. In the end perhaps she is a poet rather than a historian, yet her effort to clothe the immaterial has given us a rich pudding to pull apart and examine in further detail.

Tom Ruffles

How to Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic
by Madsen Pirie
Continuum, £8.99 (pb), ISBN 878-0-8264-9894-6

A catalogue of those hardy perennials of human reasoning, fallacies, might seem like something for the specialist only, but this lively, even breezy, guide is a highly readable handbook, running alphabetically from abusive analogy to wishful thinking. Along the way we find, of course, the classic fallacies of affirming the consequent, the undistributed middle and argumentum ad hominem. Alongside them are perhaps less well-known types such as poisoning the well, the runaway train and Thatcher’s blame, the latter two, at least, not so often mentioned by Aristotle and his colleagues.

Each of the 80-odd entries is a clear and careful explanation of a fallacy, but what distinguishes this book from other books on logic and argumentation is a Machiavellian coda in each case, suggesting how an unscrupulous reader might make skillful use of the fallacy in order to beat an opponent. Naturally, the fair-minded, noble, truth-seeking readers of this journal would never dream of deliberately using invalid arguments to help demolish the cherished, time-honoured and universally popular theories and stories of life-threatening charlatans and psychic crooks. Would they?

Paul Taylor

Quirkology: The Curious Science of Everyday Lives
by Richard Wiseman
Pan Macmillan, £9.99, ISBN 978-0-230-70215-8

In this eminently readable survey, Wiseman introduces the general reader to a range of intriguing findings in psychology by outlining his own diverse areas of research. The difference between this and most psychology books is explained in the introduction: “unlike the vast majority of psychological research, these studies have something quirky about them. Some use mainstream methods to investigate unusual topics. Others use unusual methods to investigate mainstream topics.”
The first chapter counters the fatuities of astrology with the new science of chronopsychology: “What does your date of birth really say about you?” In a chapter focussing on superstition, Wiseman emphasizes that “superstitious beliefs are not just about the harmless touching of wood or crossing of fingers. Instead, beliefs can affect house prices, the number of people injured and killed in road accidents, abortion rates, and monthly death statistics, and can even force hospitals to waste significant amounts of funding on unnecessary patient care.”
The late Vic Tandy once gave a fascinating talk to Skeptics in the Pub about the role of infrasound in provoking unusual experiences which are then given supernatural interpretations. Wiseman has pursued this line of research by means of an experimental concert with an infrasound component, and he is not the only one to think there’s something in this. Another team’s research into sacred experiences “suggests that people who experience a sense of spirituality in church may be reacting to the extreme bass sound produced by the [organ] pipes.”
There are also chapters on deception, decision-making, humour and altruism. The epilogue provides antidotes to boring dinner parties, in the form of a list of factoids from the book, selected by guests at experimental dinner parties organized by the author. The top factoid is a quirkology classic: “People would rather wear a sweater that has been dropped in dog faeces and not washed, than one that has been dry-cleaned but used to belong to a mass-murderer.” Nowt so queer as folk.