Magic in the ancient world | Wikipedia audio article
Channel: wikipedia tts
Date: 2019-06-17

This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(supernatural)


00:03:35 1 Definition
00:08:43 2 Etymology, history and conceptual development
00:08:55 2.1 Ancient world
00:09:03 2.1.1 The Old Persian imaguš/i
00:11:40 2.1.2 In ancient Greece and Rome
00:14:11 2.2 Early Christianity and the Middle Ages
00:17:50 2.3 Early modern Europe
00:21:10 2.4 Colonialism and academia
00:25:45 2.5 Modern Western occultism
00:29:01 3 Academic definitions
00:31:27 3.1 Intellectualist approach
00:35:56 3.2 Functionalist approach
00:38:46 3.3 Emotionalist approach
00:43:06 4 Magicians
00:46:01 4.1 Suspicions and accusations of witchcraft



Listening is a more natural way of learning, when compared to reading. Written language only began at around 3200 BC, but spoken language has existed long ago.

Learning by listening is a great way to:
- increases imagination and understanding
- improves your listening skills
- improves your own spoken accent
- learn while on the move
- reduce eye strain

Now learn the vast amount of general knowledge available on Wikipedia through audio (audio article). You could even learn subconsciously by playing the audio while you are sleeping! If you are planning to listen a lot, you could try using a bone conduction headphone, or a standard speaker instead of an earphone.

Listen on Google Assistant through Extra Audio:
https://assistant.google.com/services/invoke/uid/0000001a130b3f91
Other Wikipedia audio articles at:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=wikipedia+tts
Upload your own Wikipedia articles through:
https://github.com/nodef/wikipedia-tts
Speaking Rate: 0.838942169690917
Voice name: en-AU-Wavenet-B


"I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think."
- Socrates


SUMMARY
=======
Magic is a category into which have been placed various beliefs and practices considered separate from both religion and science. Emerging within Western culture, the term has historically often had pejorative connotations, with things labelled magical perceived as being socially unacceptable, primitive, or foreign. The concept has been adopted by scholars in the humanities and social sciences, who have proposed various different—and often mutually exclusive—definitions of the term. Many contemporary scholars regard the concept to be so problematic that they reject it altogether.
The term magic derives 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 rites that were regarded as fraudulent, unconventional, and dangerous. This meaning of the term was then adopted by Latin in the first century BCE. Via Latin, the concept was incorporated into Christian theology during the first century CE, where magic was associated with demons and thus defined against (Christian) religion. This concept was pervasive throughout the Middle Ages, when Christian authors categorised a diverse range of practices—such as enchantment, witchcraft, incantations, divination, necromancy, and astrology—under the label magic. In early modern Europe, Protestants often claimed that Roman Catholicism was magic rather than religion, and as Christian Europeans began colonising other parts of the world in the sixteenth century they labelled the non-Christian beliefs they encountered magical. In that same period, Italian humanists reinterpreted the term in a positive sense to create the idea of natural magic. Both negative and positive understandings of the term recurred in Western culture over the following centuries.
Since the nineteenth century, academics in various disciplines have employed the term magic but have defined it in different ways and used it in reference to different things. One approach, associated with the anthropologists Edward Tylor and James G. Frazer, uses the term to describe beliefs in hidden sympathies between objects that allow one to influence the other. Defined in this way, magic is portrayed as the opposite to science. An alternative approach, associated with the sociologists Marcel Mauss and Émile Durkheim, employs the term to describe private rites and ceremonies and contrasts it with religion, which it defines as a communal and organised activity. By the 1990s, many scholars were rejecting the term's utility for scholarship. They argued that it drew arbitrary lines between similar beliefs and practices that were instead considered religious and that, being rooted in Western and Christian history, it was ethnocentric to apply it to other cultures.
Throughout Western history, there have been examples of individuals who engaged in practices that their societies called magic and who sometimes referred to themselves as magicians. Within modern occultism, which developed in the nineteenth century, there are ...