Monday, July 23, 2007

Do you believe in magic?

I don't ordinarily read every essay in each issue of the journals to which I subscribe, but when you're on vacation you do things like that. So it was with pleasure that I devoured issue 26 of the Brooklyn-based journal Cabinet, over the weekend. The theme of the issue is "Magic," and it includes excellent essays on, among other things: "Deceptionists at War," "The beguiling stagecraft of American politics," "Black Herman's African American Magical Synthesis," "Secular magic and the modern cultural imagination," "A brief history of magic's most famous illusion," and "Indian magic's new superstar."

Cabinet's timing is perfect. I've also been reading "The Occult Mind: Magic in Theory and Practice," a fascinating new book from Cornell University Press that examines ley lines, the Tarot, the Corpus Hermeticum, writing and ritual in magic practice, and early attempts to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. The author, Christopher Lehrich, a visiting assistant professor in Religion and Writing at BU, argues that magic is, in fact, a mode of theory that is "intrinsically subversive of normative conceptions of reason and truth" -- that is to say, magic is deconstructionist avant la lettre. I particularly appreciate Lehrich's successful attempt to write a work of interdisciplinary scholarship in an engaging fashion; books by tenure-track academics are normally all but unreadable.

Lehrich's book kicks off with a chapter on the Hermetic corpus -- a collection of Neoplatonic dialogues (conversations between Hermes Trismegistus, supposedly an Egyptian priest roughly contemporary with Moses, and various interlocutors) composed in Alexandria during the first centuries of the Common Era. These writings were highly influential during the Renaissance, among thinkers who believed that they contained clues to knowledge (about the revelatory character of nature, for example) that had been lost to humankind at some distant point in the past. So this is an opportune moment to recommend another new book I've been reading: "The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus" (Cornell), by Florian Ebelling, a lecturer at the University of Heidelberg. Ebelling strips away the mumbo-jumbo surrounding the figure of Hermes Trismegistus amd the writings attributed to him, and offers an overview of the current scholarly understanding of Hermeticism. Not always easy to follow, but very useful, indeed.

PS: The following essays from the current issue of Cabinet are also well worth reading:

* The Barber Trial: an account -- by Thomas Keenan & Eyal Weizman -- of the 2006 French trial Sivan vs. Finkielkraut, in which the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut was sued for libel by the French-Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan, because Finkielkraut called Sivan's documentary "Route 181" (about the 1947-48 expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians from the territory that would become the state of Israel) an example of "Jewish anti-Semitism" and an incitement to violence against Israelis.

* Sivan vs. Finkielkraut, a translation of the trial transcript.

* Joshua Foer's history of "aquatic ambulism," or water-walking, from Jesus and Saint Peter to the 2006 London gallery exhibit "Bridge."

* "The Real Thing," in which yours truly draws the reader's attention to curious parallels between the argument made in Van Wyck Brooks's 1915 book "America's Coming-of-Age" and the discovery-invention of the 1915 curved Coke bottle.

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 03:10 PM

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