“heaped with various jewels” … “should provide a rich source of data for psychologists, anthropologists and psychical research”. Time & Tide, a general circulation weekly, said it was “a most interesting collection of facts concerning magical practices and their history”, with “an admirable bibliography” and also …. The religious periodical, Hibbert Journal, called it “fascinating and illuminating”, with “a great deal of interesting information”, and said that “the accounts of personal experience in the Sudan and Tibet were “especially … fascinating”. The Book Exchange, referring to its re-publication in 1968, said the book had “come to be regarded as essential reading for those concerned with research in the fields of human beliefs”.At the time of first publication, The Times Literary Supplement described it as containing a “wealth of illustrative material” for which the lay reader might be grateful. Oriental Magic has been in print for more than 50 years. The book in itself can be seen as providing a ground plan for future researchers, signalling useful directions their investigations might take, and specifying topics which might yield to further study. Oriental Magic seems also to have been a clearly stated invitation for magic in general to be investigated as any other subject in the West would be, with coolness, objectivity and scientific method. As a result, the secrecy and obfuscation around magical operations and practitioners was defused by the author’s informed, dispassionate approach to the array of arcane information he had assembled, some of it printed for the first time. His documented material came from archaeology, anthropology, history, religion, and psychology, as well as from artefacts, obscure manuscripts, and an impressive range of expert informants, who made (often unpublished) specialist material available to him.

Magic had long been considered outside the discipline of academic study, but Shah’s approach, which involved five years of study and field work, was – very unusually for the 1950s – multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

Oriental magic idries shah pdf