Volume 45, Number 15 · October 8, 1998
Chopping Off the Golden Bough
By Jasper Griffin
Magic in the Ancient World
by Fritz Graf, translated by Franklin Philip
Harvard University Press, 313 pp., $35.00
The Great God Pan: The Survival of an Image
by John Boardman
Thames and Hudson, 48 pp., $16.95
The theme of magic is one which the modern mind finds surprisingly attractive. In the West it might seem that science has achieved a definitive ascendancy; the old assumption that the real causes of events were to be sought on the religious plane is visibly fading away. Nowadays few churches dare point to sin as the cause of AIDS, or to denial of a creed as the reason for a person's death, or to rejection of a God as the explanation of a famine. And yet we need look no further than the magazines that are sold at the supermarket checkout to see that the supernatural, in its most unregenerate forms, is alive and interesting, and that the will to believe in magic is very far from being extinct.
Review, 5285 words
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