just from a few pages, it is pretty clear that this book was made for mass production.

it's clear this was written with the mindset of being accessible to the general public. and you can tell. matyszak shares pretty basic information about magic and uses sources from greece, rome, christianity and germanic sources as evidence. where was that in the title?

for a piece of work littered with ancient historical anecdotes and referenced, I am surprised it isn't littered with footnotes. there are a few, but they mainly exist to provide context to the images of artifacts.

he references Fasti by Ovid, at one point. this is viewed as an "unreliable source for Roman cultic practice and belief" according to Carol Newmans in Playing With Time: Ovid and the Fasti. yeah.

it continues. in chapter two, when he is referring to witchcraft, what he is actually referring to is closer to alchemy. here are a couple of examples.

overall, i wanted to read this to dip my toes into nonfiction books however, I found it lighthearted and brief and the title to be misleading. initially, the long winded analogies were funny, but I soon grew bored of the same chunk of text trying to describe a very general statement about witchcraft and magic to some menial task we do everyday. this lighthearted nonfiction book is perfect for fans who want some light reading, who are complete beginners to history.