Quote:
Originally Posted by VIVIT
Oftentimes the explanations of a particular thaumaturgical practice, and the terms and categories used to characterize it, are contentious even within their native cultural context. Is she a vile witch, or just a harmless cunning-woman? This even applies to the miracles of Jesus, with the 2nd-century philosopher Celsus polemically accusing Jesus of having practiced mageia—an obvious cognate of magic, but one that has exotic, sinister connotations analogous to the lowercase-v version of the term voodoo. |
On the flipside of that, even by his definition of the intervention of outside powers, Abrahamic faiths absolutely do not forbid the practice of magic - what else is a prayer after all? Or the intervention of saints.
It's definitely not a well defined term in modern English, and I'm not convinced the root word specifies all that closely either. It's originally a title of a class of Zoroastrian priests, so it [probably] involved appeals to the devas, but maybe not always, and by the time it's borrowed into koine Greek it [definitely] includes stuff that's not clearly spiritual, or from our point of view even supernatural - things like astronomical predictions and herbal "alchemy".