Used by Magic

For example, not all mentalism books have mental as a key word in their descriptions. Most of the used books for sale here are left over from assimilating my friend Phil Willmarth's library into mine. In some instances, the books came to Phil through assimilating the libraries of his friends.

The books are generally in very good condition. Serious condition issues will be noted in the description. If you have concerns about a particular book which interests you, feel free to contact me. This is not common and I try to note anything more than a signature or bookplate of the previous owner.

If you are looking for a particular book, search the author's name or the title of the book. If this occurs, the second person placing the order for the same item will be notified and the money refunded immediately. In the last 24 months, this has happened only twice. You do not have to check to see if the book is available. If you can see it on the website, then all my records indicate it is available. Please feel free to write with questions, but also be aware that the ordering process is automated. Books are still available to others until the order for those books is actually placed, paid for, and accepted.

If you choose to order outside of the standard website process e. For this reason, orders placed directly through the website are encouraged and have priority over all other orders. I included only the item's basic information as most of the people using this website are already familiar with most of the items listed. The prices on the used books are subject to change without notice.

In fact, I feel some of them changing in the short time you have been reading this so perhaps you should read faster. There is a wealth of material here including classics and hard-to-find gems, most at a fraction of what I paid for my first copy of the same item. Scroll down and enjoy! In early modern Europe , Italian humanists reinterpreted the term in a positive sense to create the idea of natural magic. Both negative and positive understandings of the term were retained in Western culture over the following centuries, with the former largely influencing early academic usages of the word.

Since the nineteenth century, academics in various disciplines have employed the term magic but have defined it in different ways and used it in reference to different things. One approach, associated with the anthropologists Edward Tylor and James G. Frazer , uses the term to describe beliefs in hidden sympathies between objects that allow one to influence the other. Defined in this way, magic is portrayed as the opposite to science. Many scholars of religion have rejected the utility of the term magic , arguing that it is arbitrary and ethnocentric; it has become increasingly unpopular within scholarship since the s.

Throughout Western history, there have been examples of individuals who engaged in practices that their societies called magic and who sometimes referred to themselves as magicians. Within modern occultism , there are many self-described magicians and people who practice ritual activities that they term magic. In this environment, the concept of magic has again changed, usually being defined as a technique for bringing about changes in the physical world through the force of one's will. This definition was pioneered largely by the influential British occultist Aleister Crowley.

Since the emergence of the study of religion and the social sciences , magic has been a "central theme in the theoretical literature" produced by scholars operating in these academic disciplines. Bailey describes it, "magic" represents "a deeply contested category and a very fraught label"; [6] the fellow historian Owen Davies stated that the word was "beyond simple definition". Many scholars have argued that the use of the term as an analytical tool within academic scholarship should be rejected altogether. Smith for example argued that it had no utility as an etic term that scholars should use.

The concept and term "magic" developed in European society and thus using it when discussing non-Western cultures or pre-modern forms of Western society raises problems, as it may impose Western categories that are alien to them. Within Western culture, the term "magic" has been linked to ideas of the Other , [8] foreignness, [19] and primitivism. The Magi are mentioned in both the Book of Jeremiah and the Behistun Inscription of Darius I , indicating that they had gained considerable power and influence by the middle of the first millennium BCE. For the storm lasted for three days; and at last the Magians, by using victims [cut up in pieces and offered to the manes ] and wizards' spells on the wind, and by sacrificing also to Thetis and the Nereids, did make it to cease on the fourth day.

The Magi travelled far beyond Mesopotamia and the Levant. Mair , they arrived in China at around this time. The term magic has its origins in Ancient Greece. This change in meaning was influenced by the military conflicts that the Greek city-states were then engaged in against the Persian Empire. In the first century BCE, the Greek concept of the magos was adopted into Latin and used by a number of ancient Roman writers as magus and magia. In the first century CE, early Christian authors absorbed the Greco-Roman idea of magic and incorporated it into their developing Christian theology.

Magic (supernatural)

For early Christian writers like Augustine of Hippo , magic did not merely constitute fraudulent and unsanctioned ritual practices, but was the very opposite of religion because it relied upon cooperation from demons , the henchmen of Satan. The model of the magician in Christian thought was provided by Simon Magus , or "Simon the Magician", a figure who opposed Saint Peter in both the Acts of the Apostles and the apocryphal yet influential Acts of Peter.

Bailey stated that in medieval Europe, "magic" was a "relatively broad and encompassing category". In early medieval Europe, magia was a term of condemnation. During the early modern period, the concept of magic underwent a more positive reassessment through the development of the concept of magia naturalis natural magic.

Despite the attempt to reclaim the term magia for use in a positive sense, it did not supplant traditional attitudes toward magic in the West, which remained largely negative. The Arabian cleric Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab —founder of Wahhabism —for instance condemned a range of customs and practices such as divination and the veneration of spirits as sihr , which he in turn claimed was a form of shirk , the sin of idolatry.

In the sixteenth century, European societies began to conquer and colonise other continents around the world, and as they did so they applied European concepts of "magic" and "witchcraft" to practices found among the peoples whom they encountered. In various cases, these imported European concepts and terms underwent new transformations as they merged with indigenous concepts.

When later Europeans encountered these West African societies, they wrongly believed that the fetiche was an indigenous African term rather than the result of earlier inter-continental encounters. By the nineteenth century, European intellectuals no longer saw the practice of magic through the framework of sin and instead regarded magical practices and beliefs as "an aberrational mode of thought antithetical to the dominant cultural logic - a sign of psychological impairment and marker of racial or cultural inferiority". This spread of European colonial power across the world influenced how academics would come to frame the concept of magic.

An example of this was the American journalist H. Mencken in his polemical work Treatise on the Gods ; he sought to critique religion by comparing it to magic, arguing that the division between the two was misplaced. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, folklorists examined rural communities across Europe in search of magical practices, which at the time they typically understood as survivals of ancient belief systems. The scholarly application of magic as a sui generis category that can be applied to any socio-cultural context was linked with the promotion of modernity to both Western and non-Western audiences.

The term magic has become pervasive in the popular imagination and idiom.

Categories

Modern Western magic has challenged widely-held preconceptions about contemporary religion and spirituality. The chaos magic movement emerged during the late 20th century, as an attempt to strip away the symbolic , ritualistic , theological or otherwise ornamental aspects of other occult traditions and distill magic down to a set of basic techniques.

These modern Western concepts of magic rely on a belief in correspondences connected to an unknown occult force that permeates the universe. The adoption of the term "magic" by modern occultists can in some instances be a deliberate attempt to champion those areas of Western society which have traditionally been marginalised as a means of subverting dominant systems of power. Magic is one of the most heavily theorized concepts in the study of religion, [82] and also played a key role in early theorising within anthropology.

The context in which scholars framed their discussions of magic was informed by the spread of European colonial power across the world in the modern period. Many different definitions of magic have been offered by scholars, although — according to Hanegraaff — these can be understood as variations of a small number of heavily influential theories.

Taurus Used Magic

The intellectualist approach to defining magic is associated with two prominent British anthropologists , Edward Tylor and James G. Tylor's understanding of magic was linked to his concept of animism. He thus attempted to discover, to foretell, and to cause events by means of processes which we can now see to have only an ideal significance".

Tylor's ideas were adopted and simplified by James Frazer. The former was the idea that "like produces like", or that the similarity between two objects could result in one influencing the other. The latter was based on the idea that contact between two objects allowed the two to continue to influence one another at a distance. Where Frazer differed from Taylor was in characterizing a belief in magic as a major stage in humanity's cultural development, describing it as part of a tripartite division in which "magic" came first, "religion" came second, and eventually "science" came third.

Sigil (magic)

For Frazer, magic "constrains or coerces" these spirits while religion focuses on "conciliating or propitiating them". Some scholars retained the evolutionary framework used by Frazer but changed the order of its stages; the German ethnologist Wilhelm Schmidt argued that religion —by which he meant monotheism —was the first stage of human belief, which later degenerated into both magic and polytheism.

Frazer's notion that magic had given way to religion as part of an evolutionary framework was later deconstructed by the folklorist and anthropologist Andrew Lang in his essay "Magic and Religion"; Lang did so by highlighting how Frazer's framework relied upon misrepresenting ethnographic accounts of beliefs and practiced among indigenous Australians to fit his concept of magic.

The functionalist approach to defining magic is associated with the French sociologists Marcel Mauss and Emile Durkheim. Mauss set forth his conception of "magic" in a essay, "A General Theory of Magic". Durkheim used magic to describe things that were inherently anti-social, existing in contrast to what he referred to as a "Church," the religious beliefs shared by a social group; in his words, "There is no Church of magic. Scholars have criticized the idea that magic and religion can be differentiated into two distinct, separate categories.

• Le Royaume-Uni aujourdhui (Les Fondamentaux) (French Edition).
• How to Use Magic - Wishbonix.
• A Life Is A Life, arent you luckeeeeee?.

Marett viewed magic as a response to stress.