Francis Gooding

Most​ people in most places, past and present, have seen magic as a part of life: potentially dangerous but certainly efficacious, an essential, everyday means of getting things done. A good-luck charm, a visit to the shaman, a love spell, a holy talisman, a lock of hair, a photograph of someone you love: who truly believes such things are without meaning? But does any of it really work?

A...

Half​ acrobat, half can-can dancer, Picasso’s Salome kicks her leg up as Herod Antipas, corpulent and sagging, takes in the spectacle, flanked by his bride, dark-eyed Herodias. The king’s rheumy gaze is fixed on his stepdaughter’s nakedness. In the corner, a kneeling servant proffers Salome’s reward, chosen at her mother’s behest: the severed head of John the...

Maurice Godelier’​s Forbidden Fruit is a small book about a big subject. It can afford to be short because, despite all the ink spilled and pencils chewed, what is known about incest and its prohibition can be summarised quite succinctly. The origin of the incest taboo is still a mystery, and though many theories have been proposed, few universal conclusions can safely be drawn; like...

Culebras, or ‘snakes’, come in a twist of three, tightly plaited and bound by ribbon. Their history is obscure: perhaps the style arose because parsimonious cigar-factory bosses wanted to restrict the cigar-rolling torcedores to an allotment of three cigars a day; perhaps it was an innovation from the tobacco plantations of the Philippines, intended to yield a...