 Throughout history there have been individuals who engaged in practices that their societies called magic and who sometimes referred to themselves as magicians or witches.Magic has been an important part of human culture for most of recorded history, variously having positive, ambivalent and negative connotations, and "continues to have
an important religious and medicinal role in many cultures today".Within Western culture, the term "magic" has been linked to ideas of the Other, foreignness, and primitivism.