Magic as a Category, and Why It Is Contested

The word magician carries a category that scholars of religion have argued over for more than a century. Frazer's distinction in The Golden Bough between magic, religion and science as successive stages has been abandoned; the definition of magic as coercive where religion is supplicatory does not survive contact with the evidence; and it is now widely held that magic has functioned chiefly as a term of othering, applied to the practices of outsiders, heretics and the socially marginal, while equivalent practices within one's own tradition are called religion.

The atlas records specific practices in their own terms for that reason, from Graeco-Egyptian ritual texts to Mesopotamian incantation, Renaissance natural magic and modern ceremonial orders, without treating magic as a single thing. The archetype's use of the word is a modern popular one and carries none of that history.