Magic or sorcery is the use of rituals, symbols, actions, gestures, and language with the aim of exploiting supernatural forces. The term magic has a variety of meanings, and there is no widely agreed upon definition of what it is or how it can be used.
Religious scholars have defined magic in many different ways. One approach, associated with the anthropologists Edward Tylor and James G. Frazer, has magic and science be opposites. An alternative approach, associated with the sociologists Marcel Mauss and Emile Durkheim, pits magic in antipathy to religion, arguing that the former takes place in private, while the latter is a communal and organized activity. Many scholars of religion have rejected the utility of the term magic, which has become less popular within scholarship since the 1990s.
The term magic comes from the Old Persian magu, a word that applied to a form of religious functionary about which little is known. During the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE, this term was adopted into Ancient Greek, where it was used with negative connotations, to apply to religious rites that were regarded as fraudulent, unconventional, and dangerous. This meaning of the term was then adopted by Latin in the first century BCE. The concept was then incorporated into Christian theology during the first century CE, where magic was associated with demons and thus defined against religion. This concept was pervasive throughout the Middle Ages, although in the early modern period Italian humanists reinterpreted the term in a positive sense to establish the idea of natural magic. Both negative and positive understandings of the term were retained in Western culture over the following centuries, with the former largely influencing early academic usages of the word.
Throughout Western history, there have been examples of individuals claiming to be practitioners of magic and referring to themselves as magicians. This trend has proliferated in the modern period, with a growing number of magicians appearing within the esoteric milieu. Following British esotericist Aleister Crowley, these modern magicians typically perceived magic to be a force that can bring about changes in the physical universe through the application of the willpower of the magician.