Science of the Magical: From the Holy Grail to Love Potions to Superpowers, by Matt Kaplan
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Science of the Magical: From the Holy Grail to Love Potions to Superpowers, by Matt Kaplan
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Can migrations of birds foretell our future? Do phases of the moon hold sway over our lives? Are there sacred springs that cure the ill? What is the best way to brew a love potion? How do we create mutant humans who regenerate like Wolverine? In Science of the Magical, noted science journalist Matt Kaplan plumbs the rich, lively, and surprising history of the magical objects, places, and rituals that infuse ancient and contemporary myth. Like Ken Jennings and Mary Roach, Kaplan serves as a friendly armchair guide to the world of the supernatural. From the strengthening powers of Viking mead to the super soldiers in movies like Captain America, Kaplan ranges across cultures and time periods to point out that there is often much more to these enduring magical narratives than mere fantasy. Informative and entertaining, Science of the Magical explores our world through the compelling scope of natural and human history and cutting-edge science.
Science of the Magical: From the Holy Grail to Love Potions to Superpowers, by Matt Kaplan - Amazon Sales Rank: #4757238 in Books
- Published on: 2015-11-10
- Formats: Audiobook, CD, Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 5.30" h x 1.10" w x 6.40" l,
- Running time: 7 Hours
- Binding: Audio CD
Science of the Magical: From the Holy Grail to Love Potions to Superpowers, by Matt Kaplan Review "Absorbing and intellectually stimulating�" ---Library Journal Starred Review
About the Author Matt Kaplan, the author of The Science of Monsters, is a science correspondent with the Economist. He has also contributed to National Geographic, New Scientist, Nature, and the New York Times. In 2014, Matt was awarded a Knight Science Journalism fellowship, which he used to study the sciences at MIT and folklore at Harvard.Eric Michael Summerer is an AudioFile Earphones Award winner, voice actor, and producer who has narrated numerous audiobooks as well as countless instructional recordings and video games. He also earned an Audie Award nomination for Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Science of the Magical
INTRODUCTION
And some things that should not have been forgotten, were lost. History became legend and legend became myth. —GALADRIEL, THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING The Egyptian war chariots were fast approaching. With no weapons, few rations, and the scorching desert sun beating down upon them, the situation was looking dire for the fleeing Hebrews. Then things went from bad to worse as they found themselves at the edge of the Red Sea. Capture seemed inevitable. The chariots drew closer; all seemed lost; then it happened. Moses lifted up his staff and called upon God to aid the people in their time of need—and help them God did. The waters parted, the Hebrews ran to safety, and the Egyptians were drowned by the crashing waves as they tried to follow.1 Told over and over through the generations and depicted in countless works of art, the parting of the Red Sea in Exodus is one of the most gripping supernatural moments in Western mythology. It is also an event that, like the ten plagues, archaeologists, historians, and Bible scholars have relentlessly dissected as they have sought to determine if fragments of fact are nestled among the fiction. Might such a story contain descriptions of natural events like earthquakes, floods, or storms that our ancestors witnessed but could not understand? Yes, but we need not only look to our most ancient myths to find bits of recorded history. Several years after accidentally being exposed to a high dose of radiation while working at a nuclear power plant, engineer Norton McCoy fathers a son named Hank. As the boy grows, he develops inhumanly long limbs, incredible strength, and apelike hands and feet. Due to his unusual body, he comes to excel at numerous sports at school but quickly meets with discrimination from other students on account of his being different. Hank soon discovers that he carries mutant DNA on account of his father’s radiation exposure, and while he is not alone, he is a minority in a world filled with people who both hate and fear him.2 He soon changes his name to a more appropriate alias, Beast, and ultimately joins the X-Men to fight for mutant rights. There is little doubt about what realities the X-Men comics were recording when they were first written in 1963. The Civil Rights Act was only months away from being signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. The issue of discrimination was on everyone’s mind, and the persecution of mutants as a metaphor for this issue was ideal. Yet not just racial tensions were captured by this modern mythology. Science was recorded too. Mutants were initially called the “children of the atom” for a good reason. The Cuban Missile Crisis, which is depicted in the movie X-Men: First Class, took place just a year before the comics were written. Anxiety about the effects of radiation on human biology was at an all-time high and was preserved in the X-Men comic series. The Hulk is much the same, appearing in 1962 and described as the result of gamma radiation dramatically altering Bruce Banner’s body. Spider-Man, also created in 1962, similarly gains his powers after being bitten by an irradiated spider.3 It may seem jarring to throw comic-book superpowers into the same bin as the magical events of Exodus. From an early age most of us are taught to see magical acts performed by gods as somehow different from magical acts performed by mortals. But are they really all that different? Whether we call it divine intervention, a miracle, the supernatural, sorcery, or mutation, all of these things share a core similarity. They present the impossible as real while simultaneously recording information about what people were experiencing at the time these stories were created. FANTASY FOSSILIZED We have an insatiable appetite for comprehending the world around us. When we see things that we do not understand, our brains immediately get to work trying to make sense of them. These can be minor matters, such as noticing that you sleep less well at the time of the full moon than you do when it is a crescent. They can also be monumental, such as a nonbreathing and pulseless patient suddenly coming back to life after five minutes of effectively lying dead on the surgery table. Fascinated and baffled, we find ourselves wondering. Is it really the full moon that is making me sleep so poorly,I or is it something that I’m doing at that time that is causing me so much trouble? Was there enough glucose and oxygen stored in that patient’s capillaries to keep the brain from suffering permanent damage during those five minutes? Was the person in some sort of deep hibernation and not actually dead? When none of these explanations seem acceptable, we turn to the supernatural. The moon casts a spell upon us. An angel stepped in and guided the departing spirit back to the living world. One of the most dramatic, and tragic, examples of this phenomenon comes from the world’s recent struggle with Ebola. Patient Zero, the first person during the 2013–2014 epidemic to catch the disease, was a little boy named Emile living in the rural village of Meliandou, Guinea. He quickly developed a high fever with vomiting and bloody stools and died. A few days later, his sister caught the disease and passed away as well. Shortly thereafter, Emile’s pregnant mother fell ill and started bleeding heavily. Late in the night she suffered a miscarriage and died. Three women from the village came to clean up the mother’s blood, and they too perished. Only Emile’s father survived. Regional medical clinics were baffled. Locals were terrified. In the wake of all the fear and uncertainty, the people of the village—including the ill—came together to perform rituals that they believed would protect them against the black magic of the curse that had struck their community. These magical rituals were a terrible mistake. Multiple new cases followed the ceremony, and the disease spread like wildfire from there.4 The situation for our ancestors was much the same. While many of us today look at the fiercest of thunderstorms and explain the chaos as the result of pressure systems and temperature changes, our ancestors were not equipped with such information. They looked at the lightning bolts, deafening thunder, and devastating hail and came to the only conclusion that they reasonably could: Thor, Baal, or Zeus was angry. Similarly, when our ancestors found the bones of fish and the shells of clams stuck in the rocks of mountains thousands of feet above sea level, it would have been reasonable for them to speculate that there had once been a great flood. Yet it would be wrong to always portray people who lived long ago as the clueless ones. Things have sometimes worked in reverse, with our ancestors understanding the world in a remarkable way that has been lost, or very nearly lost, to the ravages of time. Legend tells of the Vikings possessing an artifact called the sunstone, which allowed them to successfully navigate the Atlantic Ocean centuries before the invention of the magnetic compass. For decades, historians dismissed the sunstone as mere fantasy, but evidence is now emerging from the fields of physics, mineralogy, and archaeology that this object actually existed.5 Similarly, stories in The Odyssey portray the Greeks as aware of plants with powerful medicinal properties. They considered them to be magical herbs and often connected them to fantastic stories of the gods. For centuries such tales were disregarded as nothing more than fictions, but recently a number of scientists and historians have started to think that the Greeks were onto something.6 As these examples and the many others in this book suggest, magic can function a bit like a fossil. Just as we can look at the bones of animals that lived long ago and use the evidence to deduce what the past was like, we can look at the magic of our ancestors to hypothesize about what they may have dreamed of and what they might have seen in the world around them. In a sense, Galadriel’s words were accurate: history can become legend and legend can become myth.7 Nevertheless, it would be wrong to suggest that all magic arises from our struggle to comprehend the complexities of the surrounding world. Sometimes we just imagine amazing things and then try to make them real. PRACTICAL MAGIC Guided by beliefs and dreams, we have a natural tendency to try to make magical things happen. I didn’t try parting any bodies of water as a child, but on a fair few boring afternoons in elementary school, as a Star Wars junkie, I tried to use the Force to move a pencil on my desk just a few inches closer. . . . It never worked. On a more somber note, I vividly remember sitting at my grandmother’s grave shortly after her death and desperately wishing I could speak with her one last time. Of course, I am hardly alone. Every year at Halloween hundreds of people gather at Harry Houdini’s former house expecting him to one day find a way to escape death. Hundreds of thousands carry around “lucky” rabbit’s feet,II countless millions pray for God to intervene in their lives, and newspapers around the globe still print astrology sections that many take seriously. None of these behaviors are new. Long ago, people put requests for the gods on lead tablets and tossed these messages into sacred pools, put wax dolls resembling real people into sexually explicit positions to create feelings of lust in targeted individuals, or, my personal favorite, put nails through the hearts of chickens stuffed with hairs from the heads of enemies and left these abominations on doorsteps to cast curses.8 Sounds about as divorced from science as you could possibly imagine, and in many cases this stuff was utter nonsense . . . but not always. Healing rituals in ancient temples involved some techniques that we now know yield health benefits; drinking out of holy grails crafted from specific rocks found in the caves where saints lived may truly have granted a longer life under certain circumstances; and the search for the stone of ever-lasting life, known as the philosopher’s stone, led to major findings in what would eventually become chemistry.9 To this day, illusions drawn by artists such as Maurits Cornelis (M. C.) Escher and stage performances by modern magicians are helping to guide neuroscientists as they figure out how the human brain makes sense of the complicated world that we live in.10 So while much magic tiptoes its way into the world of science, a lot of science pushes—or, dare I say it, bulldozes—its way into the world of magic. Seeing in the dark was once an ability that only cats and sorcerers could wield; now anyone with the right set of goggles can manage it. Reading minds was once the territory of oracles and Charles Xavier, but technology is on the verge of granting us the ability to detect what completely paralyzed patients who have lost motor control of their mouths are thinking. In days long gone, the idea of flying on a carpet or broom was strictly the stuff of fantasy. Now we have individuals, such as Yves Rossy of Switzerland, who dart through the skies via jet-propelled devices similar to the flight system used by Tony Stark in Iron Man. Such developments are not limited merely to the world of engineering. While love potions were once only found in Shakespearean plays and the workshops of witches, we now have a veritable cornucopia of pharmaceuticals that can do everything from messing with sexual arousal to making two people more likely to become friends during an initial encounter. On a more frightening level, while it was once the remit of the Viking god Odin to possess the minds of his followers on the field of battle and transform them into the raging berserker warriors of legend, we are now starting to understand which compounds these men were consuming and have the potential to use them to create biochemically altered soldiers who feel neither pain nor fear. Many ethical issues arise here for sure, but all of these magical transitions into reality raise a much larger question about the nature of magic itself. Does knowing how something magical works make it into something other than magic? I had no idea when I set out to write this book. I had a long love of all things magical found in our mythology, but as a paleontologist by training and a science journalist by profession, I also had a passion for understanding the realities underlying complex systems. After spending two years poring over the myths, beliefs, and rituals of our ancestors, I was still unsure. The question itself proved cloaked in illusion. If I considered just one or two isolated examples, it seemed deceptively simple to answer. However, the more I pondered the matter, the harder it became to grapple with. Long ago, when faced with perplexing questions, our ancestors trekked for hundreds of miles to gain wisdom from the great oracle at Delphi. When the FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign illuminated on my flight from London to Las Vegas, I realized that I was on a similar pilgrimage. To truly understand how knowing shaped magic, I needed the help of a magician. Onstage, Teller may be the silent half of the magic and comedy duo Penn & Teller, but he is hardly silent behind the scenes. He has a sharp philosophical mind, and while he speaks quietly compared to his towering companion, his every word is valuable. As I asked him about the relationship between knowing and magic, he quoted his magician friend Mike Close as saying, “Magic is the gift of a stone in your shoe. You leave with something that you can’t quite figure out and just can’t stop thinking about.” That seemed to fit perfectly with what I knew of modern stage magicians. Keeping audiences guessing was pivotal to their profession. However, just moments later, Teller added, “To any enlightened dweller of our century, knowing increases wonder. I don’t just think this, I know it. If you believe, you oversimplify in the way a child might initially believe there is no complex evolution of life. That simplification in no way increases your sense of wonder. If, however, you know how life came to be on our planet, the wonder is immense!” His answers were a riddle worthy of the oracle herself. If magic depended upon a viewer’s not knowing how the magic happened, and if knowing was directly tied to a sense of wonder, was Teller saying that being duped by a trick was not as wondrous as knowing how the trick was done? That couldn’t be right. Could it? What the answer is, or whether there even is one, will, I hope, become clear as we embark on this exploration of the ways in which magic through the ages has been wielded, crept into our stories, guided our research, and in many cases come to be much more than myth. I. Just in case you were wondering, it is the full moon and not that shot of espresso you had before dinner. Well, the shot wouldn’t help, but the moon does seem to mess with our sleep patterns. More on that later, though. II. Incidentally, the ever-vigilant gaze of the rabbit was thought to provide protection against the “evil eye.” However, rabbit eyeballs don’t do too well after a few days on the end of a key chain. In contrast, fluffy feet hold up for years and have the added benefit of retaining cheap pink dyes rather nicely.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful. Solid but a bit light, engaging voice keeps you interested By B. Capossere I was wholly intrigued by the idea behind Matt Kaplan’s Science of the Magical — an attempt to life the thick veil of myth and see if any of its typical magical elements (elixirs of immortality, love potions, oracles, etc.) might have any basis in reality. To be honest, I ended up a bit disappointed, finding the premise stronger than the execution, but Kaplan’s charmingly breezy voice and his willingness to dive right into his exploration went a good way to ameliorate my disappointment in the substance.The content ranges pretty wide, with Kaplan delving into the magical realms of healing (including prayers, healing water), transformation (berserkers, shifts into animal form), longevity/immortality (philosopher’s stone, bezoars), weather and sky (navigation via sunstone, rain dances), prognostication (entrails reading, the oracle at Delphi), death and near-death experiences, enchantments (love potions, magic mushrooms), and extraordinary human abilities (sword swallowers, firewalkers).A paleontologist by training, Kaplan is a science correspondent with The Economist, and has contributed as well to publications such as National Geographic, New Scientist, and Nature. His journalistic training is well in evidence through the clarity and fluidity of the book as he moves seamlessly back and forth between quickly and efficiently retelling or summarizing myths and folktales and clearly explaining modern day research/scientific studies. And example would be how he shifts from tales of berserker warriors to an exploration of possible plants they could have used to engender such effects to further exploration through interviews and references to drug studies in order to find out what sort of modern chemical cocktails we might give to our soldiers to turn them into “super-soldiers” (a la Steve Rogers, one of the many comic book references he makes). Another example is his story of the Chinese emperor who sought immortality. Kaplan runs through the various methods of the time to extend one’s life, such as eating crane’s eggs, tortoise shell broth, or certain animals’ urine/dung (one has to wonder if an extra few years is worth it for that last one); goes into somewhat more depth with regard to the chemical makeup of the mercury compound the emperor imbibed and mercury’s potential effects; and then shifts into discussion of modern day research into several lifespan-increasing techniques, including drugs and calorie-restrictions.Throughout each retold tale, summarized science study, or interview with an expert, one never feels at a loss in either the stories or the science. And each section ends with a clear signpost directing us on to the next; it’s all laid out for us in nice, neat fashion.The voice, as mentioned, is light and breezy and frequently personal, as Kaplan throws himself into his task wholeheartedly, visiting a butcher to cut open and examine pig livers, sailing with a friend to see if he could use a Viking sunstone, chasing ravens to see if they’ll lead him to wolves, and in one of my favorites sections, procuring some arsenic to see if he and another scientist friend can figure out how to negate its effects when poured into wine (they didn’t test it on themselves). He has a good self-deprecating sense of humor, acknowledging that some of the questions he asked his experts are more than a little “whacky.” That humor runs throughout the book and even on into the footnotes (these actually contain the funniest lines). At times, albeit rarely, I’d say he slips a little too far into lightness; “crap” was an unfortunate choice of words at one for instance, but for the most part his writing style makes for a fast, enjoyable read.I also appreciated the respect Kaplan offers for our forebears. As he puts it in his introduction:It would be wrong to always portray people who lived long ago as the clueless ones. Things have sometimes gone the other way. In some cases our ancestors understood the world in remarkable ways that have been lost, or very nearly lost, to the ravages of time.He then offers up as an example of one lost-for-a-while bit of knowledge the aforementioned sunstone, which was long thought to be a fictional “magic” tool to help them navigate the seas but which has recently turned out to have actually existed.Where I found myself a little too often disappointed was in the depth of some of his explorations and the solidity of some of his connections. Several of his attempts to connect magical thinking to actual science seemed either a bit obvious on the one hand or a bit of a stretch on the other, and I would have like to have seen more references to studies, especially those that might conflict or throw into question some of the ones he does cite. Those tenuous connections also lead to a lot of “Could this be . . . ? or “Is it possible . . . “ or “It is conceivable . . . “ But lots of things are “conceivable” that also aren’t true or even likely, and I wanted some of those links to be more concrete in several spots.That said, there’s more than enough here to cast a different light on the old stories and perhaps move us away from so casually and condescendingly dismissing the storytellers as “those silly stupid folks who thought lightning was Zeus being angry.” And he did enough to have me interested in picking up his similar look at mythical creatures, The Science of Monsters. If you go in thinking of this more as one of those “Physics for Poets” university survey courses rather than Physics 303, then I think you’ll find the content, even if not quite as strong as what I was hoping for, combined with the charmingly engaging voice, make Science of the Magical almost always fun and often-enough informative.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. Informative and funny By Laurie A. Brown “The Science of the Magical” is exactly what the title sounds like: explanations for things people have called ‘magic’, both in the past and present. The book ranges widely; he covers transforming into animals, healing pools, oracles, animals with uncanny behaviors, berserker warriors, near death experiences, Captain America, things from ancient history to modern days.Kaplan is a science writer, and as such has a lot of contacts in all areas of science, which helped a lot in his investigations. Some things are fairly easy; hot springs made people feel better simply by being warm in areas and times that were really hard to stay warm enough in. Hot water helps many cases of sore, aching joints. No real mystery there. Predicting the future by watching the movements of birds was a little harder, but he makes a good case for birds being able to sense which way the winds are prevailing. It turns out that shifting currents can mean a winter either colder or warmer than usual, depending on which way it’s moving, much as El Nino/La Nina means for us in the Pacific Northwest. The birds are just following the winds. The Oracle at Delphi has been pretty well explained before; the cave she did her prognosticating in had a crack in the floor that exhaled toxic fumes that caused oxygen starvation in the brain. Super soldiers close to existing, between amphetamines to keep soldiers awake and provide focus, steroids to enhance strength, and drugs that increase red blood cell count and thus the amount of oxygen present in the blood- shades of Lance Armstrong there!The author writes in a clear, accessible style. He always stays respectful of the culture from which the magical belief comes from. He’s very witty as well as well educated. The book reads like what you’d get if Terry Pratchett actually wrote a science book (instead of teaming up with science writers)- especially in the footnotes. Fast and fun to read.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. An intriguing look at the science and origins behind magic and myths! By Jordan Have you ever found yourself wondering about the Philosopher's Stone and the myth of its 'powers'? What about love potions and sleeping draughts? The effect of moon phases? Look no further, because Science of the Magical explores all of that!Science of the Magical is by far one of the most entertaining and enjoyable nonfiction books I have read all year. Matt Kaplan is truly a master at creating a lively and engaging narrative that combines science with ancient history, mythology, and folklore. Kaplan's purpose is to describe the scientific accuracy and origins of these myths. What I really appreciated about his writing was that he didn't try exceptionally hard to make the scientific aspect fit, and he also didn't poke fun at the origins of some of these ideas, whether they seem silly or not.The information presented throughout this book is the kind that makes you turn to the nearest human in your vicinity (or move to a location where there is a human in the area) and say, "Hey, did you know?" or "Wow, listen to this..." My poor mother said she didn't mind, but after you've done it for the twentieth or so time, you start to wonder if she really means that. Kaplan introduces such a wide variety of magic and myths that the book easily flows from one topic to the next. Almost all of these supernatural ideas have a natural or almost scientific origin that led to their creation, and it is extremely fascinating to discover this backstory.Overall, Science of the Magical will be receiving four-and-a-half stars. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who's even slightly curious about magical and mythical things. Similarly, you're looking for something funny and informative at the same time, here you go! This would be perfect for anyone who just needs a good book to read and enjoy, because Kaplan will definitely give you that.
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Science of the Magical: From the Holy Grail to Love Potions to Superpowers, by Matt Kaplan
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Science of the Magical: From the Holy Grail to Love Potions to Superpowers, by Matt Kaplan
