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.