Short answers, pulled from the story.
The English word magic traces back through Latin magus and Greek μάγος to the Old Persian maguš, which is connected to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to be able." The Persian term also appears to have influenced languages from ancient Semitic to Old Sinitic, and the Greek word for magic practitioners, magos, originally referred simply to a Persian tribe known for practicing religion.
Ancient Mesopotamian magic was performed by specialist practitioners called āšipu, a profession passed down through generations and held in extremely high regard as advisors to kings. Key rituals included the Maqlû, or "The Burning," in which an effigy of an accused sorcerer was put on trial and burned, and the Šurpu, another burning ritual used to transfer and purify unknown sins. The Sumerian god Enki was the patron of magical practitioners and was regarded as the source of all arcane knowledge.
Heka was the ancient Egyptian term for magic, also personified as a god. Unlike its later Coptic descendant, the pharaonic term heka carried no connotation of impiety or illegality and was considered morally neutral. The text Instructions for Merikare describes heka as a gift from the creator given to humanity as a weapon against misfortune.
Edward Tylor, in his 1871 book Primitive Culture, defined magic as beliefs based on "the error of mistaking ideal analogy for real analogy," calling it "one of the most pernicious delusions that ever vexed mankind." James G. Frazer built on Tylor, dividing sympathetic magic into homeopathic and contagious forms, and placing magic as the first stage of an evolutionary sequence followed by religion and then science, which he described as magic being "the bastard sister of science."
Aleister Crowley, who preferred the spelling "magick" to distinguish his practice from stage illusionism, defined it as "the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will." The scholar of religion Henrik Bogdan described this as "arguably the best known emic definition" of the term, and it influenced subsequent magicians including Dion Fortune and Anton LaVey.
By the 1990s, many scholars argued that the label magic drew arbitrary lines between similar beliefs and practices and imposed Western, Christian-rooted connotations onto non-Western cultures. Wouter Hanegraaff argued that the term had served as a "scientific" justification for colonial conversion efforts. Jonathan Z. Smith argued it had no utility as an analytical term for scholars. Michael D. Bailey noted that as of the early twenty-first century, few scholars sought grand definitions of magic and instead focused on what the term meant within specific cultural contexts.