What is "magic"? This question has occupied not only religious scholars of the last two centuries but also ancient poets and philosophers, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim authors, early modern humanists, Enlightenment thinkers, romantics, and individuals who have identified and understood themselves as "magicians" from late antiquity to the present day. To address the diversity of their opinions, Bernd-Christian Otto presents, for the first time, a coherent account of the approximately 2500-year history of the concept of magic. Otto's consistent historicization of the concept of magic represents a methodological response to the long-stagnant academic debate on magic. Consequently, the study does not culminate in the identification of an essential core or a new definition of magic but establishes philological-historiographical magic research as a new field of study.