Defining 'magic' is a maddening task. Over the last century numerous philosophers, anthropologists, historians, and theologians have attempted to pin down its essential meaning, sometimes analysing it in such complex and abstruse depth that it all but loses its sense altogether. For this reason, many people often shy away from providing a detailed definition, assuming it is generally understood as the human control of supernatural forces. 'Magic' continues to pervade the popular imagination and idiom. People feel comfortable with its contemporary multiple meanings, unaware of the controversy, conflict, and debate its definition has caused over two and a half millennia. In common usage today 'magic' is uttered in reference to the supernatural, superstition, illusion, trickery, religious miracles, fantasies, and as a simple superlative. The literary confection known as 'magical realism' has considerable appeal and many modern scientists have ironically incorporated the word into their vocabulary, with their 'magic acid', 'magic bullets' and 'magic angles'. Since the so-called European Enlightenment magic has often been seen as a marker of primitivism, of a benighted earlier stage of human development. Yet across the modern globalized world hundreds of millions continue to resort to magic - and also to fear it. Magic provides explanations and remedies for those living in extreme poverty and without access to alternatives. In the industrial West, with its state welfare systems, religious fundamentalists decry the continued moral threat posed by magic. Under the guise of neo-Paganism, its practice has become a religion in itself. Magic continues to be a truly global issue. This Very Short Introduction does not attempt to provide a concluding definition of magic: it is beyond simple definition. Instead it explores the many ways in which magic, as an idea and a practice, has been understood and employed over the millennia. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

This excellent little book is a wonderful introduction to the story of the trial of the witches of Pendle in 1612. In a very lively and readable style, Christine Goodier provides a who's who of the events, as well as an interesting angle on the trials themselves. She emphasises that the accused were merely flesh and blood, not demons, arguing that they were poor, uneducated people who were at worst misguided. Her inevitable conclusion is that a terrible injustice was done 400 years ago when they were famously convicted of witchcraft and hanged.

Most scholars dismiss research into the paranormal as pseudoscience, a frivolous pursuit for the paranoid or gullible. Even historians of religion, whose work naturally attends to events beyond the realm of empirical science, have shown scant interest in the subject. But the history of psychical phenomena, Jeffrey J. Kripal contends, is an untapped source of insight into the sacred and by tracing that history through the last two centuries of Western thought we can see its potential centrality to the critical study of religion.
Kripal grounds his study in the work of four major figures in the history of paranormal research: psychical researcher Frederic Myers; writer and humorist Charles Fort; astronomer, computer scientist, and ufologist Jacques Vallee; and philosopher and sociologist Bertrand Meheust. Through incisive analyses of these thinkers, Kripal ushers the reader into a beguiling world somewhere between fact, fiction, and fraud. The cultural history of telepathy, teleportation, and UFOs; a ghostly love story; the occult dimensions of science fiction; cold war psychic espionage; galactic colonialism; and the intimate relationship between consciousness and culture all come together in "Authors of the Impossible," a dazzling and profound look at how the paranormal bridges the sacred and the scientific.

In Obeah, Race and Racism, Eugenia O'Neal vividly discusses the tradition of African magic and witchcraft, traces its voyage across the Atlantic and its subsequent evolution on the plantations of the New World, and provides a detailed map of how English writers, poets and dramatists interpreted it for English audiences. The triangular trade in guns and baubles, enslaved Africans and gold, sugar and cotton was mirrored by a similar intellectual trade borne in the reports, accounts and stories that fed the perceptions and prejudices of everyone involved in the slave trade and no subject was more fascinating and disconcerting to Europeans than the religious beliefs of the people they had enslaved. Indeed, African magic made its own triangular voyage; starting from Africa, Obeah crossed the Atlantic to the Caribbean, then journeyed back across the ocean, in the form of traveller's narratives and plantation reports, to Great Britain where it was incorporated into the plots of scores of books and stories which went on to shape and form the world view of explorers and colonial officials in Britain's far-flung empire. O'Neal examines what British writers knew or thought they knew about Obeah and discusses how their perceptions of black people were shaped by their perceptions of Obeah. Translated or interpreted by racist writers as a devil-worshipping religion, Obeah came to symbolize the brutality, savagery and superstition in which blacks were thought to be immured by their very race. For many writers, black belief in Obeah proved black inferiority and justified both slavery and white colonial domination. The English reading public became generally convinced that Obeah was evil and that blacks were, at worst, devil worshippers or, at best, extremely stupid and credulous. And because books and stories on Obeah continued to promulgate either of the two prevailing perspectives, and sometimes both together until at least the 1950s, theories of black inferiority continue to hold sway in Great Britain today.

While the evolution of contemporary Witchcraft has produced many powerful variations, traditional Wicca can offer unique experiences for spiritual seekers. This book explores structured, coven-based styles of Wicca, in which the practitioners typically trace initiatory lineages back to Wicca s early founders. Exploring covens, initiations, lineages, practices, ethics, and more, Traditional Wicca shares tips and ideas on how to get the most from this profound approach to Witchcraft. Discover how to recognize healthy, reputable covens. Learn how to navigate the process of asking for training and succeeding in an outer court. This book also includes contributions from several practitioners, providing first-person perspectives on what it s like to be on the traditional Wiccan path.

Salem Story engages the story of the Salem witch trials through an analysis of the surviving primary documentation and juxtaposes that against the way in which our culture has mythologized the events of 1692. Salem Story examines a variety of individual motives that converged to precipitate the witch hunt. The book also examines subsequent mythologies that emerged from the events of 1692. Of the many assumptions about the Salem Witch Trials, the most persistent one remains that they were precipitated by a circle of hysterical girls. Through an analysis of what actually happened, through reading the primary material, the emerging story shows a different picture, one where "hysteria" inappropriately describes the events and where accusing males as well as females participated in strategies of accusation and confession that followed a logical, rational pattern.

After identifying its anthropological origins in ancient rituals performed by a shaman or wizard, this text traces the development of the Magus through pre-Christian religious and mystic philosophers, medieval sorcerers and alchemists and the 18th and 19th century occult revival.