However, with this broadening of the scope of the work, it has been the fixed purpose not to attempt any general study of magic; this would have been but to confuse my work and cloud my results. With a single eye, the facts of the texts have been illustrated in as objective a way as possible from the phenomena of locally inherited and contemporaneous magic, with the intent of establishing the immediate bonds of connec tion. My work would be a contribution from a very small and limited field to the study of magical thought and practice within a definite age and region. At least there has come to the writer the satisfaction of finding a place for the membra disjecta of these out-of — the — way texts in the huge colossus of that system of magic which was once almost the actual religion of our western civilization.