This chapter explores whether magic is an appropriate or useful term for scholars to use in the context of ancient Egypt. It provides a historical overview of the development of Egyptian magic from the third millennium BC until the end of paganism during the first centuries AD. The origins of magic in the creation and its preservation in medical papyri further associate Egyptian magic with learnedness. The earliest period of Egyptian history from which texts have survived is the Old Kingdom. Several types of material related to magic are attested from the Middle Kingdom. The close association between Egyptian magic and medicine becomes explicitly clear in the famous Edwin Smith Papyrus of about 1550 BC. The Egyptians were well aware of the dangers of black magic. Just as in the earlier periods, there are also extant in the Graeco-Roman epoch manuscripts of narratives on magicians.

This chapter focuses on Spain's encounter with Mexico, the jewel added in 1521 to the crown of the newly elected Emperor Charles V, Ferdinand and Isabella's young Habsburg grandson. It introduces Mexican 'magic' by discussing the divinatory calendar. The chapter examines the extent to which a domain of malefice or black magic existed in indigenous conceptions of magical practitioners and considers how European observers imposed their notions of witchcraft and the demonic pact on these darker figures. The idolatry, witchcraft, and magic that Spaniards associated with indigenous Mesoamericans served the same ideological function that tropes of savagery or racial inferiority did for later colonial projects: keeping the colonized perpetually in a condition of otherness and subjection. The chapter discusses unsanctioned native religion with a brief look at indigenized Christianity, especially the cult of the saints. Mesoamerican healers supplemented their magic with an immense herbal pharmacopeia.