Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

Over the last few centuries, magic has developed a bad reputation-thanks to the unsavory tactics of shady practitioners, and to a successful propaganda campaign on the part of religion and science, which denigrated magic as backward, irrational, and "primitive." In Magic, however, the Oxford professor of archaeology Chris Gosden restores magic to its essential place in the history of the world-revealing it to be an enduring element of human behavior that plays an important role for individu...