This volume demonstrates that the word magic was widely employed in late antique texts as part of polemical attacks on enemies - but at the simplest level it was merely a term used for other people's rituals. The study begins by analyzing Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman uses of the term in the first three centuries AD. The author then turns to a series of in-depth examples of magical practice - exorcisms, love rites, alchemy and the transformation of humans into divine beings, examining how such rituals were thought to work. The book ends with an exploration of issues of gender and magic,...