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John Granrose, Ph.D., Director of Studies "E" at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zürich

A magician is… a person who can make things happen that wouldn't happen under the normal or familiar laws of nature. Something is transformed in a mysterious way, or disappears, or appears. We know also, if we reflect on our use of the word, that a "magician" could be an entertainer (a "conjuror" or "prestidigitator") or a "real" magician (something like a "witch doctor," "medicine man," or, perhaps, "sorcerer"). Still, both conjurors and "real" magicians are assumed to have the power to transform things and make them appear or disappear, whether playing cards and silk scarves or illnesses and spirits. And such transformations take place in a way which is, literally, extra-ordinary...........

Magic is all around us. Sometimes we have the eyes to see it; sometimes we do not. It is the core of what we label as "the numinous" and so it is bound up with our religious experiences as well.

Humans have had what might be called "magico-religious" impulses through all of recorded history and presumably before. For example, one of the earliest images of a human being is the so-called "Sorcerer" in the paleolithic cave of Les Trois Freres. We know that magicians flourished in ancient Egypt and Greece and the Middle East as well as in India and China.