Fostering magical consciousness

kw: book reviews, short biographies, spiritualism

I have read the introduction and a few chapters of The Secret Life of Genius: How 24 Great Men and Women Were Touched by Spiritual Worlds by John Chambers. I won't be completing the book. The author presents 24 short biographies that focus on supernatural and spiritualistic experiences. Persons discussed include Ben Jonson, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, Harry Houdini and Winston Churchill.

The introduction poses a question of what would have resulted if the sack of Prague in 1620 had been forestalled by a victory of Frederick V of Bohemia. Prague was a center of investigation into "alternate realities", a welter of alchemical, astrological, cabalistic and other occultist practices. In this and the mini-biographies, the author writes with the credulity of a true believer about the possibility that the modern world could have been a product, not of science and technology, but a "technology of magic".

There is no doubt that some of the people limned here reported extraordinary experiences. But none produced a new technology that has not been superseded by the products of the scientific method. As Churchill once wrote, "Even a fool is right once in a while." The phlogiston theory, for example, did explain many aspects of combustion, but it could not fully account for everything, while a proper chemical understanding of oxidation-reduction reactions shows that phlogiston was simply wrong.

It has been well known since I was small that Isaac Newton wrote in greater volume about Bible interpretation and alchemy than he did about science (which he called "natural philosophy"). Chambers pretends that this is some new discovery, and heavily freights his narrative with Newton's struggles to reconcile his supernatural and spiritual beliefs with the scientific method he was busily inventing, as though Newton expected some synthesis of alchemy and chemistry or astrology and physics. It is no surprise that Newton never achieved this reconciliation. Many today have yet to do so. Astrology may be nonsense, but it is charming nonsense, and the daily newspaper horoscope remains as popular as ever, in spite of the fact that there are many more personality types than astrology can account for!

I keep a pretty cluttered mental attic, but the spiritualist proclivities of sundry geniuses get the heave-ho.