A General Theory of Magic

I first heard of Marcel Mauss while reading Daniel O'Keefe's *Stolen Lightning* and knew I wanted to learn more on Mauss, who is not that well known here in the United States. Mauss mentions sympathetic magic as being part of many cultures as does O'Keefe. Mauss might have been interested in Jung's concept of synchronicity as a form of sympathetic magic or even the concept of apophenia if he had lived when the word was created in the late 1950s. This book does not explain how magic works. Those looking for a how-to will be disappointed as another reviewer has pointed out.

This book, first published in 1902-1903, in co-authorship with H. Hubert, is one of the classics of Anthropology. Marcel Mauss, disciple and nephew of great French sociologist Emile Durkheim, strongly influenced generations of anthropologists, including Claude Lévi-Strauss. The book stablished a new pattern for understanding the magical and religious phenomena. Unfortunaly, the two previous reviewrs seems to have looking for something very different. It is not a how-to-do book, it is for people interested in the Social Sciences.