Superstition
07 Apr 1997 16:07
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.
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.]
- 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 Contients
- 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
- 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)
- 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
- Dan Sperber
- Peter Washington, Madame Blavatsky's Baboon
To read:
- 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]
- Susan Blackmore, In Search of the Light: The Adventures of a
Parapsychologist
- E. M. Butler, The Myth of the Magus [blurb]
- L. S. and C. de Camp, Spirits, Stars and Spells
- Dodd, The Greeks and the Irrational
- Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth
- Valerie I. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Modern Europe
- Charles Fort
- Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages
- Kunz, Curious Lore of Precious Stones
- Gary Lachman, The Dedalus Book of the Occult: The Dark Muse
- Luck, Arcana Mundi
- Dale B. Martin, Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics
to the Christians
[Blurb]
- Marcel Mauss, A General theory of Magic
- Donald Meyer, The Positive Thinkers
- Moore, In Search of White Crows
- Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and
the Culture of the Modern [Blurb]
- 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 [Blurb]
- Webb
- The Occult Underground
- The Occult Establishment
- Johann Weyer, Witches, Devils and Doctors in the
Renaissance = De præstigiis dæmonum
- Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
