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If you want to begin with the assumption that “religion” is a genuine, legitimate phenomenon in the world, and it is not entirely dependent on such Judeo-Christian notions as “faith,” then you have a phenomenon that can be studied scientifically but which cannot be falsified. This is extremely important. To whatever extent “religion” makes falsifiable claims, they must be presumed incidental to what the system provides its adherents. As Émile Durkheim put it, “No human institution can rest on error or falsehood, or it could not endure.”

They do not effectively describe most religious phenomena in human history, and they take as normative a set of Christian theological notions, largely arising from the Protestant Reformation. The proposed situation requires three distinct spheres, none fully comprehended in either sense of the word by the others, individually or in tandem.

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Magic was once seen as equal to science and religion – a bit of magical thinking could help the world now

Chris Gosden receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust and has previously received funding from the ERC, AHRC and ESRC, as well as a previous grant from Leverhulme. He is affiliated with the Green Party.

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University of Oxford provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

On April 16 1872, a group of men sat drinking in the Barley Mow pub near Wellington in Somerset in the UK’s south-west. A gust of wind in the chimney dislodged four onions with paper attached to them with pins. On each piece of paper, a name was written. This turned out to be an instance of 19th-century magic. The onions were placed there by a “wizard”, who hoped that as the vegetables shrivelled in the smoke, the people whose names were attached to them would also diminish and suffer harm.

One onion has ended up in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. The person named on it is Joseph Hoyland Fox, a local temperance campaigner who had been trying to close the Barley Mow in 1871 to combat the evils of alcohol. The landlord, Samuel Porter, had a local reputation as a “wizard” and none doubted he was engaged in a magical campaign against those trying to damage his business.

E.B. Tylor, who wrote Primitive Culture, a foundational work of 19th-century anthropology, lived in Wellington. The onion came to him and thence to the Pitt Rivers Museum of which he was curator from 1883. Tylor was shocked by the onions, which he himself saw as magical. Tylor’s intellectual history regarded human development as moving from magic to religion to science, each more rational and institutionally based than its predecessor. To find evidence of magic on his doorstep in the supposedly rational, scientific Britain of the late 19th century ran totally counter to such an idea.

Onion from the Barley Mow with Joseph Hoyland Fox’s name on the paper pinned to it. Pitt Rivers Museum, PRM 1917.53.776 , Author provided

Rumours of the death of magic have frequently been exaggerated. For tens of thousands of years – in all parts of the inhabited world – magic has been practised and has coexisted with religion and science, sometimes happily, at other times uneasily. Magic, religion and science form a triple helix running through human culture. While the histories of science and religion have been consistently explored, that of magic has not. Any element of human life so pervasive and long-lasting must have an important role to play, requiring more thought and research than it has often received.

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