Defining Magic

Magic has been an important term in Western history and continues to be an essential topic in the modern academic study of religion anthropology sociology and cultural history. 'Defining Magic' is the first volume to assemble key texts that aim at determining the nature of magic establish its boundaries and key features and explain its working. The reader brings together seminal writings from antiquity to today. The texts have been selected on the strength of their success in defining magic as a category their impact on future scholarship and their originality. The writings are divided into chronological sections and each essay is separately introduced for student readers. Together these texts - from Philosophy Theology Religious Studies and Anthropology - reveal the breadth of critical approaches and responses to defining what is magic. CONTRIBUTORS: Aquinas Augustine Helena Petrovna Blavatsky Dennis Diderot Emile Durkheim Edward Evans-Pritchard James Frazer Susan Greenwood Robin Horton Edmund Leach Gerardus van der Leeuw Christopher Lehrich Bronislaw Malinowski Marcel Mauss Agrippa von Nettesheim Plato Pliny Plotin Isidore of Sevilla Jesper Sorensen Kimberley Stratton Randall Styers Edward Tylor