魔術はいつの時代でも人々の興味をひく存在で、超自然的、迷信、単なる錯覚、宗教的な奇跡、創造の産物など、さまざまな見方をされてきました。数えきれない哲学者、人類学者、歴史家、神学者が、魔術の本質的な意味を突き止めようとしてきましたが、複雑で難解な理論に陥り、意味をなさないこともありました。本書は、魔術にまつわる論争や対立を振り返りながら、2000年以上にわたって人々を魅了し続ける魔術の定義と実際の行為の解明に挑戦する一冊です。
   

• Magic is a topic of constant fasciation and interest which can described in various ways - supernatural, superstition, simple illusion, religious miracles, and fantasies of the imagination
• Wide-ranging overview of how magic has been defined, understood, and practised
• Highlights the controversy, conflict, and debate it has caused over the last two millennia
• Considers how magic and science are intertwined
• Split into two main sections: theory and practice

 
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.