Hi, I'm Anna Marie Cox. Welcome to With Friends Like These.

This episode is about magic.

And for our first trick, we're going to make the election disappear.

Are you listening closely? Here we go.

And that's it. You will hear nothing else about that thing for the rest of the show.

Perhaps that trick alone will put you in the mood to suspend some doubt about the existence of

magic in the world. Certainly, that is the best state of mind to be in to hear the argument of

Chris Gossden, author of Magic, a history, from alchemy to witchcraft from the ice age to the present.

Gossden is interested in magic as a legitimate way of thinking about the world,

rather than as a quirky belief or a backwards attitude. He thinks we need more magical thinking

in the world, not less. And he's no flake. He's a professor of anthropology at Oxford University

and has come to this belief after decades of study. So if you think we'd all be better off,

if we stopped believing in the supernatural or the numinous, take a seat. We'll start

sawing that argument in half. Chris, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. It's a real pleasure to

be here. Well, it's a pleasure to talk to you. I have a side interest in magic myself, magical thinking.

It's funny. It's one of the things that's sort of been a constant in my life, like a little bit

of believing in ghosts and maybe going to a terror reader. I don't know. I believe in you.

Lots of people do. Maybe this is a good way to get into perhaps the first question someone

might have in looking at a history of magic, which is how do you define magic for the purposes of

your history? Definitions are vital, but tricky. So my definition is that magic is human participation

in the universe. So that if we believe that we can participate in the universe, we feel that our

actions are words, deeds can affect change in the world, but also reciprocally that the world

...