Low-Tech: Magic?

[panton41]

I would go with the comments about referring to the myriad of 3rd Ed. location books. Most historical magical systems were either religious in nature, pseudoscience or both and almost universally they were highly regional.

I'd also suggest the late Issac Bonewit's Authentic Thaumaturgy if you want to stick to SJ Games material, though he was one of the few, if only, people academically qualified to write on magic.

Having brought up Mr. Bonewits I'll add I would strong suggest avoiding a vast majority of "New Age" type books on "magic". Despite people drawing sincere religious and spiritual belief from them they are by and large works of fiction with little to no basis in historical fact. Many are so poorly researched that anyone with even a slight understanding of the subject can call out the B.S.

For example, I've seen books that call the Norse runic alphabet "Celtic" and my major beef with GURPS Thuamatology is using another totally inaccurate, openly and admittedly fictional work on runes as an authoritative factual source. A vast majority of books about Wicca refer to a historian's work that was universally discredited 70+ years ago and most draw from world traditions willy nilly so that their "Celtic ritual" might tell you to use Hebrew Kabbalist imagery and a Hellenist (Greek) view of Elements.

Just for full discourse, I consider myself a "Heathen" or a Norse Reconstruction Pagan and have read quite a few of the types of books I just mentioned. The main thing I've learned over the years of being a Pagan is to assume everything you read about it is false unless you (or the author) has an authoritative second source, which ideally would be a contemporary historical source or a well respected modern source.