In this splendid, daunting, almost wicked book, Daniel O'Keefe gives us a work of unmatched scope and highly animated
scholarship about how magic operates in human societies and how it has colored history and culture from the Stone Age to the present. Drawing on
an enormous body of knowledge-sociology, anthropology, philosophy, religion, history, psychologyhe explains how magic works; describes the different categories
(medical, black, ceremonial, religious, occult, paranormal, and magical cults and sects); and demonstrates the way in which all magic, whether it be Egyptian theurgy,
Zande witchcraft, Western astrology, or the current rash of cults, is a means of the individual's defense against social pressures: against the socializing force of religion,
against collective morality-a challenge, through history, to all official versions of reality.