Michael Hunter (1) (1949–)

A great academic read, The Decline of Magic examines the decline of orthodoxy, and magic through the eyes of late 17th c. and 18th c. thinkers.

We're first introduced to John Wagstaffe, who is often overlooked in favor of Reginald Scot, but Wagstaffe's "The Question of Witchcraft Debated" (1669) is much more critical of superstition. Describing witchcraft as "ridiculous lies and fancies", it was shocking to Wagsteffe that so many women died to "absurd error." But to many, to doubt the Devil's powers was akin to atheism. The term, the author explains, emerges in this period, as a personal attack, often against free thinkers, or used in religious debate. However, to be irreligious isn't the same as being atheist.

Hunter then examines the Deists, with Anthony Collins and John Toland at the forefront. Deism, in short, "is the belief in the existence of a supreme creator being, who does not intervene in the universe." But according to Hunter, Deists, in their eagerness to combine "priestcraft" and magic, never really debate witchcraft separately. The opinions of Robert Boyle and Francis Hutchinson are reviewed as well. The former, a brilliant scientist but private believer in the supernatural, and the latter an Anglican minister but fervently against the belief in witchcraft. It's not an easy line to trace.

Hunter also busts the myth that the Royal Society had everything to do with the decline of magic. The works of Joseph Glanvill, John Webster and John Goad are put up for examination, but the truth is the Royal Society avoided an opinion. You'd think that the Society would've studied the Poltergeist of Tedworth or the Scottish Second Sight (studied privately by Boyle), popular topics at this time. In the end, the demonstration of fraud of the Tedworth case would be a bigger nail in magic's coffin than any Deist or skeptic. True, Enlightenment thinkers had as much trouble defining magic as they had defining their own beliefs.… (meer)

Robert Boyle is known to most chemists solely for his Law relating the pressure and volume of a gas, but this privileged son of the Earl of Cork was not as interested in discovering an equation as he was in determining what his experiments could tell him about his own relationship to God. Both Boyle and his contemporary, Isaac Newton, had strong spiritual inclinations, including both Christianity and alchemy. Newton was more willing to work through mathematics in search of eternal truths. For Boyle, his Christian faith permeates almost all of his writing (except for most of The Skeptical Chemist) and led to his endowment of an Oxford lectureship to preserve and defend the faith against the onslaught of "notorious infidels" such as "Jews and Mohametans", and funding for the translation of the New Testament into Irish and Algonquin. Michael Hunter is the world's expert on Boyle, and he has distilled seemingly every available historical artifact into this impressive book. Reading it makes you feel as if you have met Boyle himself.… (meer)