Graf's book is the best general treatment of “magic” on the market. It is wide-ranging and sophisticated. Unlike many earlier scholars, especially his fellow classicists, Grafhas acquainted himself thoroughly with the large body of theoretical literature on magic, ranging from Wittgenstein's reflections on Frazer's Golden Bough, through Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marcel Mauss, to Stanley Tambiah's thick essays on magic and metaphor. Beyond this, in his first chapter, he has chronicled the gradual emergence of magic from the dark caves where it lived for more than two millennia to the dim light of academic study in the early years of the 20th century among German scholars like Wilamowitz, Dieterich, Usener, Wünsch and Preisendanz. What I have called the dirty little secret of the classical world thus came to receive the attention that it obviously deserved, although, as Graf points out, it remained trapped in various evolutionary perspectives (especially under the influence of Frazer) that continued to relegate it to the category of the primitive and the superstitious.

Running throughout all of these discussions, and underlying Graf's first two chapters, is one fundamental theme–the relationship between “magic'and “religion.” Is “magic” humanity's first attempt to deal with the universe, an attempt characterized by mechanical manipulation? Is magic eventually superseded by religion and today by science, which in Frazer's scheme has much in common with magic. Or is “magic” what happens to religion when it begins to decay and dissolve? What is the relationship between magic and religion? Or better, how have these terms been used–by whom, of whom, when and why? If our analysis of these questions tells us that the term magic is a hopelessly loaded word, a word whose usage tells us more about those who use it than about what other people believe and do, then we have no option but to abandon it in our scholarly discourse. Conversely, if it retains some analytic value, we can clean it up, sanitize it and re-deploy it in our books and articles. As Graf puts it,“there are only two possible attitudes–