Magic in Ancient Greece: The History and Legacy of the Religious Rituals Practiced by the Greeks

Magic today is the stuff of fairy tales and illusionists, something to titillate and perplex perhaps. But the prospect of taking magic seriously - despite the best efforts of occult movements in recent years, from the O.T.O. to the Chaos magicians in the 1980s - is still a very difficult pill for most people to swallow in the 21st century. This is not to disparage nor denigrate the efforts made by illusionists such as Penn & Teller or Derren Brown, who openly declare that what they do is to perform tricks, utilizing psychology and misdirection in order to entertain a willing crowd. These "magical practitioners" are artists well deserving of the name. In this case, taking magic seriously meant to actually believe in magic and take it at its word, outlined best in Owen Davies' summary of the anthropologist Max Weber's thoughts on the matter: "[Magic] promised to give humans control over a natural world governed by spirits." This view of Weber's could be (and has been) seen as some ki