Kurt Seligmann makes brilliantly clear that since earliest recorded time, men and women have struggled to make magic - that most elusive and inexplicable of wonders. This book is an erudite yet immensely entertaining chronicle, outlining Western civilisation's battle to come to terms with its various demons - from those of remote Mesopotamia and those of an "enlightened" eighteenth century to those of our own modern culture.
Seligmann's text - which begins with the "forgetful gods" of the Tigris-Euphrates and ends with the pull of sorcery still casting its spell over the twentieth-century psyche - succeeds in putting into context the twentieth century's "rational" materialism in relation to its deceptively distant and "irrational" past. THE HISTORY OF MAGIC AND THE OCCULT examines the forces that have bewitched, bedeviled, or charmed the imagination and reveals the meaning behind magic's contemporary lure.
