Carl du Prel

Magic as Natural Science, Part Two: Magical Psychology

Web edition, version 1.0, 10 October 2026

Series C7T · 12 parts · 134,583 words · about 9 hr 45 min to read

The paper cover of the 1899 printing: Die Magie als Naturwissenschaft in decorative lettering with small stars, then in Fraktur von Dr. Carl du Prel, Zweiter Teil: Die magische Psychologie, the Heraclitus motto, the publisher’s device, and Jena, Hermann Costenoble, 1899 — The paper cover of the 1899 printing. New York Public Library, by way of the Internet Archive.

Title Page, Translator's Note, and Contents are free to read. The rest is for Club members: create a free account before January 1, 2027 and confirm your email, and you are a Charter Member, with every part, for good. Join the Club.

In the second part of Die Magie als Naturwissenschaft (Jena, 1899), Carl du Prel turns from the forces at work in magic to the soul that sets them going. He follows Reichenbach’s od into the life force, reads the stigma, maternal impressions and prophetic dreams as the work of a single idea that fills the mind, and proposes suggestion as the lever of an experimental magic; the book ends on the faith of the agent, the patient and the onlookers. This is its first English translation, as far as the press has been able to find.

The edition: Carl du Prel, Die Magie als Naturwissenschaft. Zweiter Teil: Die magische Psychologie. Jena: Hermann Costenoble, 1899. 340 pages.
The text: Translated from the page images of the New York Public Library’s copy, digitized by Google, by way of the Internet Archive. A few lines cut at the inner margin of the scan were read from what shows and from the sense. The French translation of 1907 has not been compared. See the scanned book.
Rights: Du Prel’s German text is in the public domain. The cover, the publisher’s device and Necker’s figure are reproduced from the New York Public Library’s copy, by way of the Internet Archive.
Copyright: Translation © 2026 B. C. P. Statema. The Thinking Press, Kenosha, Wisconsin. All rights reserved.
Scripture: Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Translator’s Note

This is the second part of Carl du Prel’s Die Magie als Naturwissenschaft, Die magische Psychologie, published at Jena by Hermann Costenoble in 1899 and dedicated to his friend Martin Greif. Where the first part, Die magische Physik, treats the forces du Prel believed to be at work in magic, this one turns to the soul that sets them going: the od of Reichenbach as the bearer of the life force, sensitive diagnosis and magnetic rapport, somnambulists as teachers, the stigma, maternal impressions and the dream oracle, suggestion as a key to an experimental magic, seeing at a distance, and the part played by the faith of the agent, the patient and the onlookers. It runs to 340 pages in eight chapters.

This translation is made from the page images of the New York Public Library’s copy, digitized by Google and kept on the Internet Archive. A few pages are cut at the inner margin or blotted at the edge in that scan; the words lost there are certain from what shows and from the sense, and each such page is recorded in the press’s working notes. A reader’s pencil marks and the library’s stamps in that copy are not part of the book and are left out. The scan’s machine-read text was used only to find places.

The English keeps du Prel’s eight chapters, with the subsections of the first, second, fifth and eighth, and his paragraphs as he printed them. Each heading is given in English and then as he printed it. His own footnotes stay beside the paragraph that carries them, numbered as he numbered them page by page; their titles are kept in the languages he cited them in. Words he set in spaced type are in italics. His Latin and French quotations are translated, with the original kept beside the English. Plain misprints are translated as meant; names are kept as printed. The publisher’s notice inside the cover, the title page and the dedication are translated in their places; the printer’s line is kept at the end; the publisher’s advertisements bound after the book are left out. The page numbers of 1899 are not reproduced.

The text is translated without modern commentary. A few notes, marked with a dagger and a roman numeral and gathered at the end, give the source of the motto and the wording of the Bible verses du Prel quotes or retells, in the King James and the Revised Standard Versions; each says where its information comes from.

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Passages from the parts that are for members, free to read:

Janet’s marked cards From the sixth chapter: the cards the waking somnambulist could not see, and the hand that wrote what her unconscious saw.
Mrs. Wilmot at sea From the sixth chapter: a wife’s dream of a storm-tossed ship in 1863, and what the man in the upper berth saw.
The daemon of Socrates From the seventh chapter: the inner voice that only ever held Socrates back, read as a vision at a distance that waking forgot.
The grave of the Abbé Paris From the last chapter: the Jansenist cures in Paris, and the sword that went in when faith failed.

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Revisions

1.0, 10 October 2026. First publication: the whole of the second part, with the publisher’s notice, title page, dedication and eight chapters.