The Book of Magic

the long version

This book is a collection of texts that describe and debate magic in various aspects. The texts are arranged historically in eleven sections, starting with the wizardry of Moses in the Hebrew Bible and ending with a letter from Leibniz. Each section is introduced by a few pages of comment on the texts selected; these remarks are thematic, however, not chronological. Within each section, the texts themselves are in chronological order, more or less, if the chronology is known. A cursory headnote precedes each text. Cross-references in the headnotes point to other parts of the book.